Solino: When the State Abdicates and Hands Over the Population to Bandits

This Sunday, August 24, 2025, an unbearable image struck the national consciousness: a crowd of Solino citizens welcomed by the "Viv Ansanm" gangs from Bel-Air, under a shower of 1,000 gourde bills. Heavily armed men distributing money to an impoverished population, as a gesture of "peace." This is the new face of Haiti: a country where criminals impose their law and where the State remains a spectator, complicit through its silence.

This spectacle, which some describe as an improvised social pact, is in reality the symptom of a total failure. Failure of public authority, failure of justice, failure of security policy. For what is peace built on dirty money and collective humiliation, if not a surrender imposed on a population that no longer has a choice? The residents of Solino are not willing accomplices: they are hostages. Hostages of misery, fear, and the absence of a State that should have guaranteed them security and dignity.

But this "peace" comes at a terrible moral cost. It tramples on the memory of the police officers who fell in Solino in an unequal war against the gangs. Names like Jeff SWATT, Fito, and other uniformed heroes still resonate in memories. They sacrificed their lives trying to protect these neighborhoods. Today, seeing their fellow citizens applaud bandits who shower the crowd with bills is like burying these police officers, who died for nothing, a second time.

What outrages Fort National, Christ-Roi, and other neighboring areas is less the gesture in Solino than the complicit silence of the authorities. For a dignified, responsible State would have prevented such an image. However, for years, the Haitian State has transformed into a spectator, when it is not directly complicit through its inaction, its connivances, or its political calculations.

The scene of August 24 is not an accident; it is proof of a system. A system where gangs are no longer merely troublemakers, but arbiters of social peace. A system where hunger forces people to reach out to those who destroy, rape, and kill. A system where the State, having lost all authority, de facto delegates its sovereignty to armed criminals.

This is why it is urgent to ask the real question: who truly governs Haiti? The government or the gangs? And above all, how far will the normalization of horror go, when the survival of a people depends on the crumbs thrown by those who oppress them?

By allowing Solino's "peace" to be built on misery and blood, the Haitian State has confirmed what many already knew: it exists only in name.