Articles

Le secteur privé haïtien a‑t‑il choisi son candidat ?

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  Has Haiti’s Private Sector Picked Its Candidate? By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson* (Le Français suit) Port‑au‑Prince — In a country where politics often feels like a carousel of crises, one name has begun to circulate quietly but insistently in boardrooms, WhatsApp groups, and the corridors of Haiti’s business elite: Olivier Barreau . Barreau, a Wharton‑trained entrepreneur and longtime chair of the Banque de l’Union Haïtienne (BUH), is not a newcomer to Haiti’s private sector. He founded Alternative Insurance Company (AIC) in 2001, helped launch Ayiti Leasing , and sits on the boards of several major firms, including Caribbean Bottling Company . His résumé reads like a map of Haiti’s formal economy — banking, insurance, manufacturing, logistics — sectors that have survived decades of instability by sheer pragmatism. Now, as Haiti stumbles through yet another political transition, Barreau’s emergence as a presidential candidate has raised a delicate question: Is the privat...
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Face à nos errances en transitions démocratiques génératrices de chaos : est‑ce venu le temps du Troisième Empire haïtien ?

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  Faced with our wanderings in democratic transitions generating chaos: has the time come for the Third Haitian Empire? Opinion — Par Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le français suit) Port‑au‑Prince — For three decades, Haiti has lived inside a political ritual that no longer produces meaning: the democratic transition. A word that, ailleurs, evokes movement, progress, passage. In our country, it has become synonymous with stagnation, crumbling, violence. We are a country that never stops "transiting" without ever arriving. A nation suspended between impossible elections, provisional governments that are prolonged, and institutions that dissolve under the weight of their own emptiness. The result is visible in every street, every displaced camp, every ministry emptied of authority: our democratic transitions have become generators of chaos . Not by accident, but by structure. They are designed to fail because they rest on a model that has never taken Roots in our political...
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Le décret électoral sans honte, dicté par les bandits légaux

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  The Shameless Electoral Decree Dictated by the Legal Bandits Opinion — By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le Français suit) Haiti’s newest electoral decree of October 5 is not a legal document. It is an insult — a brazen, shameless maneuver by a transitional apparatus that behaves less like a government and more like a cartel with official stationery. Adopted on June 2, rewritten on October 5, and still mutating like a virus, the decree has become the clearest proof that the country’s institutions are no longer guardians of democracy but instruments of delay, distortion, and self‑preservation. The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) and the government have effectively taken a national process hostage, hiding behind legal language while dismantling the very possibility of a fair election. Let’s call this what it is: a decree dictated by legal bandits — actors who operate inside the state, cloaked in authority, but accountable to no one. The first round of elections, once ...
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Le Grand Braquage Américain : Comment l’Or Haïtien de 1914 a Hypothéqué un Siècle de Croissance

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  OP-ED | The Great American Gold Heist: How the 1914 Seizure of Haiti’s Reserves Mortgaged a Century of Growth By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) There are dates in a nation’s history that sit like a stone in the collective memory. For Haiti, December 17, 1914 is one of them. That morning, eight U.S. Marines walked into the Banque Nationale in Port-au-Prince, loaded 17 crates of Haitian gold —the country’s entire reserve—onto a waiting naval vessel, and shipped it to New York. The official justification was “stability.” Haitians called it what it was: a heist , executed under the shadow of gunboats, months before the full military occupation began. For decades, the episode lived in the footnotes of diplomatic history, sanitized by euphemism. But numbers have a way of cutting through myth. And now, thanks to a new analytical tool—a Monte Carlo simulation app built to model Haiti’s lost century of capital—we can finally quantify what that theft meant. The ...
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