Institutions & the State

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.