After having endured so many ordeals and so much violence under the Macoute regime, now praised by some, one might have thought that the Haitian people had been “saved” in 1986. Yet, after 40 years of chaotic democratization, Haiti is on the verge of a genuine societal and existential collapse, virtually crossing the gates of hell. Trapped in a labyrinth of crises and age-old failures, our history is filled with examples of collective failure caused by governments that, through blindness or greed, collapsed miserably: from the execution of President Sylvain Salnave on January 15, 1870, then the explosion of the National Palace with President Cincinnatus Leconte on August 8, 1912, to the execution of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by a mob on July 28, 1915—not to mention the lynching of Vice President Septimus Rameau in the middle of a street in Port-au-Prince on April 15, 1876—leading to the U.S. Occupation on July 29, 1915, a catastrophic event in itself. Instability, insecurity, violence, obscurantism, material deprivation, and moral poverty have led the First Independent Black Republic to sink into chaos. The heinous assassination of President Jovenel Moïse at his private residence in Pèlerin on July 7, 2021, is evidence of this. Foreign intervention to restore democracy, resulting in the demobilization of the FAd’H, and intervention to prevent a fratricidal confrontation, in 1994 and 2004, were therefore only the precursors of an even more spectacular catastrophe to come.

A large part of all our misfortunes stems from the fact that we are not an independent country, free to govern in accordance with our higher national interests. We know the famous formulation of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” (Political Theology, 1922). The challenge, then, is to understand the relationship between a dependent country under the influence of anti-national forces and internal states of exception.