The Miami shipper’s list of 134 items headed for the Caribbean looked pretty tame: tires, bicycles, refrigerators and mattresses.

But buried inside the container were a military-grade Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle with silencer and an Uzi machine gun, along with dozens of other high-powered weapons and tens of thousands of bullets of different calibers.

The shipment, which left the Miami River on Feb. 13 and was seized last week at the Haina Oriental Port just outside of Santo Domingo, wasn’t destined for the delivery in the Dominican Republic. It was “in transit to Haiti,” according to shipping documents obtained by the Miami Herald.

As Haiti’s powerful criminal gangs expand their influence and carry out some of the worst massacres in recent memory, they are increasingly tapping into supply lines of military-grade and higher-caliber weapons provided by smugglers in Florida and other states who charge significant markups for their illicit overseas sales. The traffickers are purchasing thousands of illegal firearms in the United States, while employing alternative smuggling routes and export tactics, including hiding weapons and ammunition in fuel canisters and air compressors to sneak them out of U.S. ports in violation of both a U.S. and United Nations arms embargo on Haiti.

The smugglers’ shipping destinations and firearms customers may ultimately be in Haiti, but they have shifted their focus from exporting to the embattled capital of Port-au-Prince to more remote locations in the country and to the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares a porous 243-mile border on the island of Hispaniola.

“As the gangs have gotten a lot of control over border areas, I am not surprised to see that weapons are coming through those places,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and security expert who follows Haiti. “All traffickers want to have as diverse routes as possible, and they are very adaptive in responding to particular routes or particular smuggling methods being suppressed.”

William O’Neill, the United Nations independent human rights expert on Haiti, said that the fastest, quickest way to dismantle the gangs in Haiti would be to stop the flow of weapons, especially ammunition.

“There’s not a gun or bullet manufactured in Haiti,” he said as he addressed the spiraling security crisis this week during a press conference. “Haitians obviously need to do more on their side. The Dominicans need to do more on their side.

“And we in the United States need to do much more, because a lot of the guns that are coming via or through the Dominican Republic originate in Florida or elsewhere in the United States.”

Statistics bear that out. According to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which regulates weapons exports from the U.S. to foreign countries, about half of all firearms-export investigations have been concentrated in the Caribbean region since 2000. And, more than half of the weapons recovered from crimes in the Caribbean between 2017 and 2021 were originally purchased from federally licensed firearms dealers in Florida, according to a 2024 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Dominican seizures

Twice in the last three months, authorities in the Dominican Republic have made seizures of illicit firearms at the Haina port, south of Santo Domingo and popular among freight consolidation companies that combine smaller shipments from multiple people in the diaspora sending goods to their families, and delivering them “door-to-door.”

The seizures have come to underscore, not just how Dominicans are cracking down on illicit arms, but how the popular tourist destination is being used not only to dodge Haitian customs duties on the other side of the border but to traffic Haiti-bound weapons.

In January, the Directorate General of Customs discovered a cache of 85 firearms including AK-47s and Glock pistols; 83 firearm parts and eight firearms accessories hidden in sealed compressor tanks that were shipped from Brooklyn, New York, a senior Dominican customs official confirmed to the Herald on Wednesday. All of them were imported via this “shipping’ method,” the official said.

According to other sources, the weapons were headed to Belladère, a border town in Haiti’s Central Plateau that is quickly emerging as a hub for illegal weapons imports.

Last week, another lethal arsenal supply was discovered when X-ray scanners revealed discrepancies in the images and a physical inspection was then conducted. Along with military-grade rifles capable of piercing through armored vehicles and airplanes, Dominican authorities found 22 other firearms, including Glock pistols, and 36,000 bullets of various calibers. There were also rifle magazines, 9 mm magazines and a .50 caliber rifle magazine.

The discoveries were made as several court cases in Florida show that traffickers are using all kinds of methods to move guns through the Dominican Republic and seaports outside of Port-au-Prince, where gangs are now in control of up to 90% of the capital. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledges that despite the presence of an armed international force in Haiti and the global arms embargo that were extended last year, Haitian gangs are still being heavily armed.

“Despite the reinforcement of the arms embargo, weapons and ammunition trafficking continue to flow into Haiti and into the hands of gangs,” Ghada Waly, the head of the U.N. drug office, told the Security Council in January, the same day that Dominican customs made the discovery of the Brooklyn shipment during a routine inspection.

Waly said reports suggest that not only are Haitian gangs acquiring high-caliber firearms and ammunition, but they now possess multiple high-powered, long-range Barrett M82A1 .50 caliber sniper rifles, used in war. Weapons trafficking routes to Haiti have also been shifting at both the source and destination, she said.

Between October and January, the U.N. drug office found that firearms seizures in the U.S. linked to Haiti were primarily reported in Port Everglades, and not Miami. And in Haiti, most seizures were reported in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien, and not Port-au-Prince.

“This may suggest that successful interdiction efforts have caused traffickers to explore other routes,” Waly said.

Dominican customs officials say since 2021 they’ve routinely been using high-tech, non-intrusive X-rays at the Haina port to crackdown on illicit goods. Haiti doesn’t have the technology, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which declined to comment on the ongoing investigation, only uses the scanner when they have suspicions or tips that shipments may have illicit items.

Beefed up Dominican surveillance

The recent seizures, the Dominican official said, “reflect an unprecedented strengthening of customs surveillance and controls in the Dominican Republic.”

“Over the past four years, the Directorate General of Customs, DGA, has undergone a historic transformation, achieving record numbers in the fight against smuggling and organized crime,” he said. “Firearms and ammunition smuggling poses a serious national security threat. Therefore, Dominican customs have intensified their collaboration with national and international agencies, raising control and detection standards to combat this crime more effectively.

“These constant and strategic efforts have positioned the Dominican Republic as a regional leader in the fight against illicit trade while ensuring legitimate commerce, making the country not only a logistics hub but also a secure hub.”

Two days after the latest discovery at the port in Haina, Dominican authorities arrested Urbano Eugenio García and Máximo Pérez Berigüete, in connection with the seized arsenal that included 17 high-caliber guns. The men, owners of a transport company, have been automatically detained for one year in a lock-up while prosecutors continued to investigate the case.

According to Diario Libre, the two defendants’ attorney, Luis Matos, questioned the court’s decision. His clients, he argued, were “useful fools” who operating a transport company. “It’s very unlikely that they knew what was inside the container,” Matos is quoted as saying.

García’s Miami-based company, Eugenio Trading, is listed on documents as the shipper. Berigüete, according to Dominican media, is the one who received the containers in the Dominican Republic in order to send them to Haiti. Both men reportedly live in the south of the Dominican Republic near Belladère in Haiti, where last week’s shipment and the one from January were headed.

Late Thursday, Belladère resident Guitho Senat, who is listed on the shipping documents as the receiver of the cargo in Haiti, was arrested in the nearby city of Hinche for arms trafficking, Lional Lazarre, said a spokesman for the Haiti National Police. A Haitian woman and business owner in her 50s, is also wanted in connection with the illicit shipment.

“Our message is clear: the Dominican Republic is not and will not be a channel for arms trafficking,” the Dominican customs official said. “We will continue leading this fight with determination to ensure safe trade.”

Emerging contraband route

On the surface, the Haina port incidents appear to be a run of the mill arms-trafficking effort. But in Haiti, where some have been increasingly alarmed by an uptick in contraband flowing into the country across the land border with the Dominican Republic, it’s anything but usual.

It is part of an emerging trend, Haitians say: merchandise is arriving in transit in the Dominican Republic and then transferred from shipping containers onto trucks that are then driven across the border to Haiti, where they are sometimes escorted by Haitian police. The practice not only allows importers to avoid paying customs duties on goods as they cross the poorly patrolled border, but it allows weapons smugglers to move firearms, several individuals aware of the practice say.

A Haitian official, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely about the practice, cited a flash point at Port-au-Prince’s government seaport in July of 2022 when Haitian customs officers seized a cache of weapons hidden in containers marked for the Episcopal Church of Haiti that had left from Port Everglades. Several Church officials were arrested and the incident led to more scrutiny at the Port-au-Prince port, which the official said pushed traffickers to use remote ports to smuggle weapons.

“They realized that it was going to be difficult for them to enter with guns and ammunition,” said the official. ‘“When they realized they would get arrested, they then went to Cap-Haïtien.”

But then Haitian authorities began making seizures at that port, and even arrested a customs supervisor after they found more than two dozen handguns and assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition hidden in boxes in a April 2024 shipment arriving from Port Everglades. Amid a crackdown by customs and anti-drug trafficking police at the Cap-Haïtien seaport, protests broke out and Haiti’s customs office temporarily halted operations there.

“They finally relaxed,” the official said about traffickers who, after no longer being able to hold on, “then started to use the ‘in transit’ option through the frontier.”

The increased use of that option, the official noted, coincided with last year’s kidnapping of two Filipino crew members off a cargo ship and string of brazen gangs attacks targeting ships calling on the government port in Port-au-Prince. In response, several maritime lines canceled or paused shipments into Haiti while others rerouted cargo to the Dominican Republic where the goods were later transported by road into Haiti.

“You will see that it’s a very well organized network,” the official said. “For me, they planned that well so they could force open the route.”

Haiti’s porous border lacks scanners, drones

Haitian officials say they do not have an accounting of how much the government is being defrauded by goods moving through the frontier, much less how much of it may also include stashes of illegal weapons. But they estimate “it’s a lot” of contraband, at the very least, after stopping several vehicles with cargo, including a recent seizure of a 40-foot container with contraband that crossed the Haiti-Dominican land border and was being escorted by Haitian police officers into Port-au-Prince.

Last year, Haiti’s customs office asked the then-Finance Minister Ketleen Florestal to shut down the “transit route” by issuing an interdiction against products disembarking in the Dominican Republic. But the measure wasn’t taken. Florestal, who was moved to the planning ministry in the cabinet shakeup last fall, acknowledged in an interview Thursday on Port-au-Prince’s Magik9 radio station that illicit trafficking is a huge problem and said she had taken steps to mount a task force to address the contraband crossing the border before leaving the ministry.

O’Neill, the U.N. independent human rights expert on Haiti, said Haiti’s unguarded borders are a huge problem. There are only 300 Haitian police officers, for example, assigned to frontier and they lack everything from bodies to equipment.

“They’re begging for scanners. They need more drones so they could at least do surveillance,” said O’Neill, who raised concerns about the border during his visit to Haiti last week. “The Haitian state is losing billions of dollars in revenue, because there’s a lot of contraband coming into the country that’s never paying any duties or taxes, and because they often use the unofficial crossings.

“How can you have a safe country if you’re not sure what’s coming in or out? Same thing by sea, a lot of little boats are coming in and out of Haiti, and also little airplanes that land, and that’s been for years,” he said.

Florida connections in weapons flow

In the past year, the United States has poured more than $600 million into an international armed force in Haiti to help the fight against surging gangs. The money has gone into the deployment of about 1,000 foreign police and some military personnel, armored vehicles and night goggles.

But despite the heightened crackdown, gangs continue to sow chaos as they tightened their grip on the capital and parts of the neighboring Artibonite region, also located next door to the Central Plateau.

Their access to powerful weapons and ammunition plays a major part in their dominant status. Recent online postings by gang leaders show them brandishing the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle and bragging about arming members with recently acquired weapons.

Also striking: several court cases in Florida highlight the extent to which criminal networks operate to funnel weapons to Haiti and its menacing gangs.

On Tuesday, a Guatemalan who had been illegally living in the U.S. under a fake identity was sentenced to 14 years in prison in Tampa federal court after pleading guilty to international firearms trafficking charges. Over the past two years, Ricardo Fermin Sune-Giron, 34, and his co-conspirators smuggled “thousands” of firearms to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, according to prosecutors.

Sune-Giron obtained the weapons by recruiting straw purchasers to illegally buy firearms — including Glocks, rifles and AK-47s — from federally licensed firearms stores across Central Florida and from private dealers, according to the facts spelled out in his plea agreement. He then sold the weapons to others on the black market.

“Those individuals were the persons who would primarily package the firearms and have them sent abroad,” Sune-Giron’s lawyer admitted in court papers, while seeking a lower sentence for his client. “He was aware the destination of these firearms was primarily to be the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Eight of the firearms trafficked by his network were later recovered at crime scenes in the Dominican Republic, prosecutors said.

Another case shows the ability of firearms traffickers to infiltrate law enforcement: St. Cloud police officer Michael Adrian Nieto, 31, is facing a maximum of five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to dealing in firearms without a license.

According to a plea agreement, Nieto repeatedly purchased and resold firearms to traffickers. Among others, Nieto supplied an Orlando group that smuggled hundreds of weapons and Chinese-made machine gun-conversion devices to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Haiti, according to prosecutors in Tampa.

The group’s leader, Ernesto Vazquez, 23, also purchased weapons from an unlicensed supplier, Derick Yamir Perez Diaz, 22, and a federally licensed dealer, Matthew Easton, 35. All three have pleaded guilty. Perez Diaz was sentenced last month to 11 years in prison; the others await sentencing.

Guns hidden in air compressors

In South Florida, a former Haitian national police officer was recently accused of playing a leading role in a Florida-Haiti weapons trafficking operation. Jean Robert Casimir, 52, who once served on the security team of a former Haiti National Police chief, was arrested in December after U.S. investigators traced two semi-automatic AR-15 assault weapons back to him.

Casimir, who is being held in a federal lock-up, pleaded not guilty to a conspiracy defrauding the United States, export violations and weapons smuggling in February and awaits trial.

In the same case, it was also disclosed by prosecutors in a court filing that they were probing allegations that Casimir schemed to make money for himself and the People’s Republic of China “through the unlawful taking of information from the Federal Reserve Board in the United States.”

His defense attorney, Alfred Guillaume, declined to comment on Thursday.

The investigation into Casimir took off after he was detained last August at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International upon a return trip from Haiti, court records show.

Customs and Border Protection agents questioned Casimir about his weapons exports, and he admitted to smuggling firearms to Haiti by packing them in boxes and delivering them to the crew of a boat that disembarked in a port in Miragoâne, south of Port-au-Prince, according to a criminal complaint and affidavit by Homeland Security Investigations.

But he lied about the frequency of his trafficking activities, low balling the number of firearms that he smuggled, the affidavit says.

Agents seized both his Apple iPhones and “uncovered significant numbers of photos, videos, audio recordings, and text messages relating to the purchase of firearms in the U.S. and the sale of firearms in Haiti,“ the affidavit says.

“The records show the purchase of at least 87 firearms over the course of at least 30 separate transactions, of the type that generally match the firearms in the photographs law enforcement has viewed of the weapons in Haiti.”

Casimir denied selling firearms to gang members but provided an explanation about how some of his firearms ended up with Haiti street gangs. He claimed that “an employee of his was attacked by a gang while transporting firearms and several firearms were stolen by the gang during this robbery.”

The affidavit not only shows Casimir evading scrutiny of his weapons shipments into Haiti by sending them to a port outside of the capital, but in order to conceal the guns he hid them in air tanks of two large air compressors, according to iPhone videos he sent showing crews cutting them open.

“The series of videos appears to show that an angle grinder was used to cut the tanks in half,” the affidavit says. “Inside the tanks were duct tape-wrapped packages in the shape of firearms and firearm magazines. The tanks also contained boxes that could contain firearms, ammunition, magazines, or firearms parts.”

In fact, Casimir shipped multiple weapons to Haiti this way, agents said. In one instance, a shipper sent him a voice message in English and Creole complaining that he shipped compressors all the time and his tanks were unusually “heavy.”

“Let me know what else is in the boxes ... how I have to deal with this shit?” the shipper said, asking if he needed to “use discretion and hide things.”

Minutes later, Casimir responded with a voice message in Haitian Creole: “the air compressors have custom motor conversions and are destined for a ‘project’ in Haiti for a group who repairs tires.”

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