A truck leaves Port-au-Prince on an ordinary morning. The driver knows he will pay; he does not yet know where. The collection point will be indicated to him along the way, rarely in the same place from one week to the next. No barrier across the road, no checkpoint, no visible armed presence. The tax exists; the collection window, however, is nowhere to be found. This scene is not the account of a single convoy: it reconstructs a mechanism described separately, and in converging terms, by several transportation, commercial and logistics operators. Other accounts go further: companies provide the license plate numbers and colors of their vehicles in advance, and their convoys pass through controlled areas without stopping anywhere because the right of passage was paid elsewhere, higher up the chain, according to an agreed schedule. One must immediately guard against the opposite misunderstanding: visible checkpoints have not disappeared. Very real barriers still control major roads, and they continue to collect payments. What these accounts describe is not a substitution but a superimposition: the collection apparatus now has two levels, only one of which is visible.

Part of the response to the Haitian crisis nevertheless rests on an entirely different interpretation of this economy: the coalition as an aggregate of predators without a model, whose taxation would be limited to roadblocks and whose financial strangulation could be achieved by destroying these visible installations. This interpretation has a direct operational consequence: it makes the toll checkpoint the central target of economic reconquest. It also has a rare virtue in this matter: it is falsifiable. If the coalition were nothing more than that, collection should cease wherever there is no barrier. Yet the opposite is observed: along entire routes, no checkpoint is visible, yet collection continues. A levy that does not need its collection window in order to be collected is no longer opportunistic toll-taking; it is criminal governance, with a tax base, rates, records and collection mechanisms.