Autopsie

In 2025, the United Nations verified the recruitment of 892 children by Haitian gangs, nearly three times the previous year’s figure. This column takes seriously a word used in the BINUH report, “promoted,” and shows what the gun really sells a teenager: a place, a name, a showcase open day and night, while honest success is lived behind closed doors.

Since mid-September, engines have been breaking down after a full tank of gasoline. This column follows the fuel from ship to pump and shows where responsibility dissolves: four links, four alibis, not a single sample kept. The state has a laboratory that checks liters very well and what they contain not at all. Eight measures, only one of which really counts: sending the bill back to whoever is able to avoid it.

For two days, a video of torture has been circulating, and the woman who ordered it has thousands of followers on TikTok. This column leaves the map of lost territory for the one no one draws: what six years of violence have planted in people’s minds, the children who now make up between 30 and 50% of gang members, and the second war that will begin on the day the first is won.

Between December and June, the state went into Bel-Air, downtown, Martissant, and Village de Dieu. In August, the toll in Kenscoff stood at forty-seven dead. This column rereads six months of operations with a single question in mind: who holds the ground the next day. It identifies three bottlenecks, sets them against the experience of Colombia, Rio, and Mosul, and proposes five decisions, none of which requires one more armored vehicle.

An economic and financial reading of seismic risk: potential losses, fiscal capacity, the concentration of credit in the Ouest, and the pre-disaster financing gap. The analysis puts the orders of magnitude on a single scale without presenting any scenario as a forecast.

A letter calls for a truce in the name of “rebels.” Three days later, Kenscoff is attacked: forty-seven dead, more than fifty people abducted, then a video threatening to execute them. These acts contradict one another only if they are taken separately. This column reads them as parts of a single negotiation by coercion, and examines what the state can do about the hostages with less than four months to go before the election.

On 27 July, more than 350,000 Haitians lost their authorization to work in the United States with the end of Temporary Protected Status. Diaspora remittances do more than feed families: they supply the country with the foreign currency on which its imports depend. This column puts the Haitian economy through a stress test and measures what the cut would cost.

A truck leaves Port-au-Prince; the driver knows he will pay, but not where. This column shows that the armed groups’ levy no longer needs a visible barrier to be collected, and that destroying the toll checkpoints will therefore not break the economy of Viv Ansanm (“living together” in Creole).

Hong Wang received the Fields Medal on 23 July for work that led, with Joshua Zahl, to the resolution of the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. Beneath its puzzle-like appearance, the result carries an idea aimed squarely at small economies: you can compress the size of a system, never its structure.

Seventeen thousand eight hundred eighty applicants in March 2026 for twelve hundred places at the National Police Academy. This column shows that the filter is not merely faulty but inverted: its very structure preferentially selects those it ought to exclude.

There is a Haitian ritual older than the constitutions: the permanent trial, in which every sector takes its turn in the dock and on the bench. This column looks for the point at which keeping up this ritual will cost more than giving it up.

A budget can finance a necessary war and, through the way it pays for it, weaken the very people it claims to defend. The amended budget of 2 June puts the bulk of the effort into security. This column does not question the spending: it questions how that spending is financed.

Some collective celebrations carry an intensity that exceeds the very thing they celebrate. This piece examines the moment when visibility takes the place of evaluation, and support is measured by noise rather than by results.

What is striking in Haiti is not the absence of a society, which would be absurd, but the country’s difficulty in naming itself as one. This column shifts the usual diagnosis: the problem is not division, it is isolation.

Part of Haiti’s inequality is passed on before any individual has made a single decision: it is inherited. This column puts a figure on its scale and looks at what this fixed share makes possible, or impossible, for public policy.

Port-au-Prince is holding its breath: the sound of gunfire has changed its tone. This piece warns against the Mexican syndrome, the atomization of armed groups after decapitation, which is more dangerous than their concentration if the state does not build the peace.

How a criminal organization should be fought depends on the age it has reached: with force when it is predatory, with pressure when it is parasitic. This column examines the instrument that broke the Italian Mafia and asks whether it can be transplanted.

Seven children killed and 176 wounded in Cité Soleil between 10 and 13 May 2026, a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital urgently evacuated, more than 5,000 people displaced. The column works through the arithmetic of these figures and of what they imply.

For years, the health of Haiti’s economy was read in the price of the dollar posted by the money changers, rather than in the public accounts or the production statistics. This column explains what the recent stability of that price means, and why the barometer is now unplugged.

Haiti’s extractive elites are not a moral anomaly but the product of an institutional order that selects, shapes, and rewards them. This column pushes the argument further: what is mistaken for a collapse is a condition held in place, sustained by the loop between that system and those it produces.

Walls ripped open, roofs torn off, buildings reduced to their concrete skeletons: it looks like an earthquake. Except that an earthquake does not discriminate. This column reads the methodical destruction as a distinct phase, one that begins where the looting ends.

The police offensive has retaken positions long held by the coalition. This column describes the transition from broker to godfather: what changes in the nature of a criminal organization when it passes from one age to the next, and what that demands of anyone who sets out to fight it.

A follow-up to “Inflationary Autarky”: ninety-two percent of the monthly pace of Haitian food inflation escapes the three external channels that the literature treats as decisive. This column draws the practical consequence for public decision-making.

Announcements about residents returning to Solino multiplied in the spring of 2026, reaching as high as the Prime Minister’s Office. This column does not question the intention: it notes that no method underpins it, and says which method is missing.

On the night of 13 to 14 April 2026, the attack on Séguin, in the Sud-Est department, left at least seven dead, burned down the police station, and destroyed two police vehicles. This column shows that the advance could be read on a map long before it turned deadly.

Since May 2025, the report of the Superior Council on Wages has been sitting on the executive’s desk. The women who work in the textile factories, whose pay scale has moved only once since February 2022, are waiting too. This column reopens the case against the minimum wage and shows where it misses the mark.

For thirty-three months, from July 2023 to March 2026, the official price of a gallon of gasoline stayed frozen at 560 gourdes while Brent crude fell fifteen percent. The column shows, with data and regressions to back it up, that Haitian food inflation can now barely be explained by its usual external channels.

Boredom is disappearing without anyone ever having decided it should: the hand that reaches for the phone while waiting in line, the screen that lights up the moment a second comes free. The column argues that this empty second was productive, and that we do not measure what we are losing.

“Adaptation” recurs in every grammar of military intervention: mandates, budgets, speeches at the Security Council. Then the troops arrive. The column sets the Sahel experience against the urban geometry of Port-au-Prince, which bears no resemblance to it.

On 1 April 2026, the first Chadian contingent of the Gang Suppression Force set foot in Port-au-Prince in front of the cameras. At the same moment, in the lower Artibonite, the country’s granary was burning. The column sets the two images side by side and runs the numbers.

At the top of Haiti’s social pyramid, the Titanic illusion persists: the belief that one can survive in first class while the hull is torn open. This column puts a price on that illusion and proposes a war tax, paid jointly by the private sector and the public authorities.

A national opinion survey conducted in early 2025 by the Aksyon Sitwayen Angaje consortium with ProEco Haïti measured what Haitians think about their security. This column draws three blind spots from it: three things that public debate stubbornly refuses to look at.

A report by the French Legation dated 1896 already observed that every sufficiently educated Haitian believed himself destined for the highest office in the land. One hundred thirty years later, this column treats the abundance of candidates for national salvation as what it is: a market, with its supply, its demand, and its prices.

Financial literacy campaigns are multiplying, all the way up to the top of the central bank: patience, accumulation, the virtue of the long term. Meanwhile, games of chance thrive without meeting any obstacle. The column questions this public contradiction.

Police corruption stops being a question of morality as soon as it is framed as an equation: what breaking the rule pays, what keeping it costs. Framed that way, it admits of solutions.

Eight hundred forty-three people killed in December 2024, in a single month. A figure like that suggests chaos, something beyond comprehension. This column shows that it follows a regular pattern, and that the pattern can be described.

Three classic location models are enough to explain why street vendors always come back to the same spot. Urban evictions fail time after time because they go after people when what needs undoing is an equilibrium.

The price of the dollar serves as the thermometer for the entire Haitian economy. The column shows what this indicator really measures, what it conceals, and why reading it on its own leads to false diagnoses.

The story of a Haiti beyond remedy holds up poorly against the country’s own statistical series. The column seeks them out where they exist and confronts what they say with the discourse of fatalism.

Rio, Kingston, Ciudad Juárez: three cities that had their moment of reconquest, and then the aftermath. The column examines what follows the euphoria of a security victory, and why the sequence repeats itself from one continent to another.

Haiti’s economic collapse and the explosion of violence are not two parallel crises: they are linked. What remains is to establish what the figures actually demonstrate about that link, and what they do not allow us to conclude.

A civilian force designed for mediation finds itself fighting an urban war. This column argues for strict oversight of this de facto militarization, and for a doctrine of legitimate force that protects the Republic as much as the territory.

Twenty billion dollars between 1995 and 2024. This column sets that sum against the gains actually achieved on the ground, and puts a figure on what divisions at the top of the state have cost the country.

In Le Jeune Agronome, Maurice Sixto is not just being funny: he diagnoses a market failure. This column revisits the scene of the German-trained engineer facing the peasant farmers and reads in it what theory calls information asymmetry.

From January 2023 to December 2025, the national total of violent incidents appears stable. Drawing on ACLED data, this column shows that the stability is deceptive: violence is not falling, it is moving, and that movement can be read.

When they left Haiti on 15 October 2017, the UN peacekeepers took thirteen years of strategic memory with them: crime mapping updated every week, files on gang leaders, analyses of financial flows, doctrines tested in the field. Nothing was handed over, not because it was withheld, but because there was no institution in a position to receive it.

There is an invisible border in Port-au-Prince that no one draws on the official maps. This piece reads the 2023 Tax Code in the light of Baghdad, Medellín, and San Salvador, and shows the trap it sets for a state that no longer controls its territory.

On 18 October 2025, a video showed what development economists would delicately call a disruption of agricultural production systems. This column builds a scenario in which rice production in the Artibonite collapses, and puts figures on the consequences.

In February 2024, the G9 and the G-Pèp, long-standing rivals, merged. This column describes the shift that this alliance has brought about in Haiti’s political economy: public attention becomes a resource, and territorial control a currency.

The alliance born in 2024 from the union of the G9 and G-Pèp ended a war of attrition between gangs in order to maximize criminal excess profits and coordinate its offensives against the state. The Shapley value, a game-theory tool designed to divide up a coalition’s gains, offers a way to read this architecture and to pinpoint what makes it fragile.

In 2024, the Haitian state raised only 5.2% of GDP in tax revenue, down from 6.3% a year earlier and far below the 13 to 15% threshold considered critical. This piece shows how some of the highest tax rates in the world produce one of the lowest tax takes.

Translating a human tragedy into economic terms sometimes conveys what emotion alone does not. Applying human capital valuation methods to the Haitian case, this column puts what armed violence destroyed in 2024 at between $400 million and $900 million.

Haiti’s tax revenue fell to 5.2% of GDP in 2024, from 6.3% a year earlier, one of the lowest ratios in the world. This column reads that collapse through the Laffer curve and shows that the state and the armed groups now draw on the same tax base.

Every year Haiti imports more than a million tonnes of cement while its mineral resources lie untapped. This piece reads that contradiction not as a geological fate but as the product of institutional failure.