The Message
In a widely shared post this week, Errol Boulos — a member of one of Haiti’s most prominent business dynasties — offered a scathing diagnosis of the country’s political crisis. He argued that nearly two years into a transition meant to restore security and prepare elections, the Presidential Transitional Council (CPT) and Prime Minister Didier Fils-Aimé have failed on both counts. Gangs continue to massacre, burn, kidnap, and displace with near-total impunity, he wrote, while the country’s leadership appears more preoccupied with privilege and access to state resources than with the population’s survival. Each successive government, he observed, promises transparency and reform, only to be accused of repeating the sins of the one before it.
It is a diagnosis many Haitians would recognize and, in its broad strokes, agree with. The security collapse in Kenscoff and elsewhere, the retreat of law enforcement, the recycling of the same political class through the same institutions — these are documented, lived realities, not partisan talking points.
But the message also raises an unavoidable question: who is naming the problem, and what is their relationship to it?
Who Gets to Diagnose the Crisis?
Boulos writes as an outside observer of a corrupt system. Yet the Boulos name is itself inseparable from the structure he describes. For decades, Haiti’s most powerful families — industrialists, importers, bankers — have operated alongside, and at times through, the state, regardless of which government or transitional body nominally held power. This is not a claim about any individual’s personal conduct; it’s a structural observation that matters for how we read elite commentary on Haitian governance: when someone positioned inside the economic elite critiques the political elite, the critique can be genuine, self-serving, or — most often — both at once.
This is precisely why “demystifying the face of the elite” matters as a political project, not just a rhetorical one. Denouncing corruption from a position of immense inherited economic power is not disqualifying, but it is not neutral either. It can function as a call for accountability, or it can function as a bid to reposition which elites get to hold the levers of the next transition. Haitians have watched this cycle before: a crisis discredits one set of power-holders, a “reformist” figure or faction emerges to occupy the vacuum, and the underlying architecture of who controls capital, security contracts, and access to the state remains untouched.
Understanding this dynamic — and building toward elections that produce a government accountable to the population rather than to its economic patrons — requires more than better candidates. It requires structural strategies.
Five Strategies for Real Democratic Rebuilding
1. Reject Top-Down “Electoralism”
For decades, Haitian elections have been treated by both domestic elites and international partners as a legitimacy-manufacturing exercise: a technical box to check so that a government can be recognized abroad and financed, rather than a genuine expression of popular sovereignty. Real rebuilding means refusing the premise that any election, on any timeline, organized under any security conditions, is sufficient. Elections held amid gang control of major roads and neighborhoods, with displaced populations unable to register or vote, do not produce legitimacy — they launder it. A credible process has to be sequenced around actual conditions on the ground, not around donor calendars or elite succession planning.
2. De-Link Elites from Armed Elements
Haiti’s gang crisis and its elite political economy are not separate stories. Investigations by Haitian and international journalists, UN panels, and researchers have repeatedly traced weapons, financing, and political cover for armed groups back to business and political figures. Any credible reform agenda has to include real consequences — asset freezes, prosecutions, sanctions enforcement — for the individuals and networks, elite or otherwise, who arm or fund gangs, rather than treating gang violence as a freestanding security problem to be solved by police and international missions alone.
3. Support Local and Independent Institutions
Rebuilding legitimate governance from the top down, through a new prime minister or council, repeats the same failure mode. Communal sections, local civil society organizations, journalists, church and community networks, and grassroots watchdog groups have often been the only functioning check on both gang violence and elite capture during the transition. Channeling resources, protection, and political weight toward these local institutions — rather than exclusively toward Port-au-Prince-based political appointees — builds accountability structures that don’t depend on whichever family or faction currently holds the presidency or premiership.
4. Foster Political Literacy and Civil Alliances
Elite capture thrives when the public cannot easily trace how power, money, and armed force connect. Independent civic education, investigative media, and cross-class civil alliances — between labor, diaspora organizations, students, and grassroots movements — make it harder for any single family or bloc, whether political or economic, to present itself as the sole alternative to chaos. This also means Haitians assessing statements like Boulos’s should be equipped to ask not just “is this criticism accurate?” but “what alternative arrangement of power does this criticism serve?”
5. Reframe the Role of the International Community
Much of the transition’s dysfunction stems from an international posture that has repeatedly negotiated with whichever elite faction is most accessible and English- or French-fluent, rather than with representative Haitian institutions. Fils-Aimé’s continuation in office “with the presumed support of part of the international community and certain influential economic sectors,” as Boulos himself notes, is itself an illustration of the pattern this analysis is trying to break: international legitimacy conferred through elite proximity rather than popular mandate. A genuine reframing would condition international support on transparent, verifiable steps toward local accountability — not on relationships with familiar elite interlocutors.
The Larger Point
None of this means Boulos’s underlying description of the crisis is wrong. The security collapse is real. The impunity is real. The recycling of promises without results is real. But diagnosing corruption is not the same as dismantling it, and the loudest critics of a broken system are not always positioned — or incentivized — to replace it with something structurally different.
Rebuilding a genuine Haitian government will require Haitians to hold two things at once: taking seriously the accurate parts of elite critiques of the transition, while refusing to let those same elites define what comes next by default. That distinction — between naming a crisis and owning its solution — is the real test of whether Haiti’s next chapter breaks the cycle or simply rotates the cast.
