Society

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.