The cold, clinical reality is that this coalition has become a rational economic entity. Designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. Department of State, it operates according to market logics, optimizes its value chains, and manages cash flows which, according to our cross-estimates, range between 150 and 200 million dollars annually. This figure—colossal in an anemic economy—allows it to buy loyalties, corrupt officials, import weapons of war, and substitute for the State in the provision of precarious social services. One does not fight a multinational firm with assault rifles alone. One fights it by drying up its cash flow, breaking its supply chains, and protecting the new nerve centers of the real economy that have migrated in order to survive.

Anatomy of an economic mutation

Before prescribing a remedy, it is necessary to make an accurate diagnosis of this sophisticated tripartite architecture that has adapted to the urban mutation of Port-au-Prince. In the territories under its control, the coalition has established a true parallel taxation system in which road tolls are no longer sporadic, but function as internal customs posts. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates that extortion on container transport alone generates between 60 and 75 million dollars per year. The malevolent genius of “Viv Ansanm” lies in its empirical application of the Laffer curve: it modulates extortion rates between 10 and 20 percent so as not to completely kill activity. As the formal economy fled the devastated downtown area to take refuge in Pétion-Ville and the surrounding hills, the gangs adjusted their strategy by seeking to encircle these new zones of wealth in order to apply their “protection tax,” while maintaining total control over transit routes.