Economic Entanglements: The International Reluctance to Sanction Haiti’s Oligarchy

Introductory Historical Context

The paradox of Haiti’s economic landscape is striking: while approximately 60% of its population lives below the poverty line, a handful of families—often referred to as the “BAM BAM” oligarchy (Brandt, Acra, Madsen, Bigio, Apaid, and Mevs)—control an estimated 90% of the nation’s wealth. This extraordinary concentration of economic power began during the colonial period but solidified during the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986), when these families received monopoly rights and exclusive import licenses in exchange for political support.

What makes Haiti’s case particularly compelling is not merely the existence of this oligarchy but the intricate web of international connections that shield it from accountability. While Haiti faces recurring cycles of political instability, gang violence, and humanitarian crises, its economic elite maintains lavish lifestyles in Miami’s exclusive enclaves and operates businesses that span multiple countries. Their wealth flows freely across borders even as ordinary Haitians struggle against blockaded fuel terminals, food insecurity, and collapsed public services.

In December 2022, Canada took unprecedented action by imposing sanctions on Gilbert Bigio—often described as Haiti’s only billionaire—and other business figures, accusing them of using “their economic power to protect and enable the illegal activities of the armed criminal gangs”. This marked the first time a Western nation had directly targeted Haiti’s economic elite for their alleged role in the country’s ongoing crisis.

Yet despite repeated calls from members of the U.S. Congress to follow Canada’s lead, the United States has maintained a conspicuous silence regarding potential sanctions against Haiti’s oligarchs. This reluctance persists even as the U.S. applies aggressive sanctions against economic elites in countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. The contrast raises critical questions about the entangled economic interests that may be shielding Haiti’s oligarchy from more comprehensive international accountability.

This asymmetry in international response reveals a complex web of economic entanglements, diplomatic calculations, and historical relationships that collectively create a protective shield around Haiti’s most powerful families—even as the country they dominate descends further into crisis.

The Erasure of Historical Truth

The role of Haiti’s oligarchic families in shaping the nation’s trajectory has been systematically obscured through multiple mechanisms of erasure that serve both domestic and international interests. This erasure operates on several interconnected levels.

First, the narrative of Haiti’s problems typically focuses exclusively on corrupt politicians and violent gangs while downplaying the role of economic elites who finance and benefit from this corruption. International media coverage rarely examines how certain families have maintained their economic dominance across multiple political regimes, coups, foreign interventions, and natural disasters. As The Globe and Mail noted, “While the roles of foreign powers and corrupt politicians are well known, the oligarchy has received little attention outside Haiti”.

Second, the complex ownership structures of businesses controlled by Haiti’s oligarchy deliberately obscure ultimate beneficial ownership. The Pandora Papers investigation revealed how wealthy Haitian families use offshore structures in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, and Panama to shield their assets from public scrutiny. These financial arrangements make it difficult for researchers, journalists, and even government agencies to track exactly who owns what in the Haitian economy.

Third, the international financial system facilitates this opacity. U.S. lawyers and bankers have provided Haiti’s wealthiest individuals with tax advice, letters of reference, and other services that enable their offshore activities. The Miami-based law firm Packman, Neuwahl & Rosenberg wrote a 2010 letter of reference for Gilbert Bigio stating they had “found him to be of the utmost integrity, to be extremely moral and professional,” helping him open a Swiss bank account. Such professional enablers rarely face scrutiny for their role in facilitating potentially illicit financial flows.

Perhaps most significantly, there is a deliberate erasure of the connections between Haiti’s economic elite and Western business interests. The reluctance of the United States to follow Canada’s lead in sanctioning Haiti’s oligarchs raises questions about potential conflicts of interest. As noted by the New Republic, “The United States cannot follow Canada’s example by imposing stiff sanctions, possibly because Bigio may be a U.S. citizen with significant business ties in America”. This suggests that the economic entanglements between Haiti’s oligarchy and U.S. interests may be more extensive than publicly acknowledged.

The cumulative effect of this erasure is to shield Haiti’s economic elite from accountability while maintaining a narrative that places responsibility for the country’s problems primarily on corrupt politicians, violent gangs, or cultural factors—never on the systematic extraction of wealth by a small group of families with extensive international connections.

Spotlight: The International Shield Around Haiti’s Oligarchy

The Miami Connection: Safe Haven for Assets and Influence

For Haiti’s economic elite, Miami serves as both safe haven and operational base. Gilbert Bigio, now sanctioned by Canada for allegedly enabling gang activities, maintains a multimillion-dollar oceanfront property in Bal Harbour, held through the offshore “Deep Blue Trust”. The city’s exclusive Indian Creek Island and other wealthy enclaves house numerous members of Haiti’s oligarchic families, who move seamlessly between Port-au-Prince and Florida.

This geographic proximity creates both financial and political advantages. Financially, it allows Haiti’s elite to quickly move assets out of Haiti during periods of instability while maintaining control over their Haitian business interests. Politically, it positions them to influence U.S. policy toward Haiti through donations, lobbying, and social connections.

The Miami connection extends beyond residential real estate. Haiti’s oligarchs have established significant business interests throughout Florida, including shipping companies, import-export businesses, and financial services firms. These enterprises create employment, tax revenue, and commercial relationships that generate economic incentives for U.S. authorities to maintain cordial relations with their owners.

As one Haiti Policy House foreign policy expert noted in a recent op-ed, “Why does U.S. sanctions enforcement remove Russian oligarchs but allow sanctioned Haitian elites to live freely in Miami? Sanctions without enforcement are meaningless”. This question highlights the apparent double standard in U.S. sanctions policy, potentially driven by the economic entanglements between Haiti’s oligarchy and American business interests.

Banking Relationships: The Financial Architecture of Protection

The financial relationships between Haiti’s oligarchy and major U.S. financial institutions represent another layer of protection against potential sanctions. According to the Pandora Papers, Haiti’s wealthy families maintain banking relationships with prominent institutions like Santander Bank, whose representatives have provided character references describing figures like Sherif Abdallah—later sanctioned by Canada—as “a person of the highest character”.

These banking relationships are particularly valuable in a context where Haiti faces significant “de-risking” challenges, with many international banks severing correspondent relationships with Haitian financial institutions due to perceived compliance risks. The ability of Haiti’s elite to maintain direct banking relationships with U.S. institutions while ordinary Haitians struggle with limited financial access represents a significant advantage.

The reluctance to disrupt these banking relationships may partly explain the U.S. hesitation to impose sanctions. Sanctioning prominent Haitian business figures would require U.S. banks to freeze their assets and terminate their accounts—actions that could have cascading effects on financial flows between the two countries and potentially disrupt legitimate business activities.

The Honorary Consul System: Diplomatic Shields for Economic Interests

Haiti’s oligarchy has strategically utilized the honorary consul system to obtain diplomatic protections that further shield them from accountability. Gilbert Bigio served as Israel’s honorary consul in Haiti for over twenty years, while Sherif Abdallah—also sanctioned by Canada—represented Italy as honorary consul.

These diplomatic positions provide significant protections, including the diplomat’s ability to shield certain communications and properties from searches by law enforcement. When former Haitian President Jovenel Moïse faced growing unrest in 2018, he reportedly sought refuge in a home owned by Abdallah that benefited from diplomatic protections.

The Pandora Papers revealed that Bigio and his wife used diplomatic passports to help set up an offshore company in 2016. As Haitian university professor Jacques Jean-Vernet explained, “Police won’t search their homes or their places of work because they believe them to be protected as part of the honorary consulate. They have diplomatic power”.

This system creates an additional layer of international protection that complicates potential sanctions enforcement. Sanctioning individuals with diplomatic status—even honorary—raises complex questions of diplomatic protocol and potentially strains relationships with the countries they represent.

Trade Dependencies: Economic Leverage in Both Directions

Haiti’s economy depends heavily on imports from the United States, with American goods accounting for approximately 42% of Haiti’s total imports. This trade relationship creates economic leverage that works in both directions. For Haiti’s oligarchy, control over import businesses provides enormous economic power domestically. For U.S. exporters, these same oligarch-controlled businesses represent crucial distribution channels for American products entering the Haitian market.

The Bigio family’s GB Group conglomerate, for instance, controls significant portions of Haiti’s import infrastructure, including the private Port Lafito container terminal. Similarly, the Mevs family owns Terminal Varreux, which handles approximately 70% of Haiti’s fuel imports. These strategic chokepoints in Haiti’s import infrastructure give these families extraordinary influence over U.S.-Haiti trade flows.

Sanctioning the owners of these facilities could potentially disrupt supply chains for essential goods and fuel entering Haiti—a humanitarian concern that likely factors into U.S. sanctions calculations. It would also potentially harm U.S. exporters who rely on these distribution channels to reach Haitian consumers.

Modern Implications

The international reluctance to sanction Haiti’s oligarchy has profound implications for Haiti’s present crisis and future prospects. These impacts manifest across multiple dimensions:

Perpetuating the Gang-Elite Nexus

Canada’s sanctions against Gilbert Bigio and others explicitly cited their alleged role in “protecting and enabling the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs”. By shielding these individuals from broader international sanctions, the current approach potentially allows the relationship between economic elites and armed groups to continue—a relationship that has devastated Haiti’s security landscape.

Gang violence in Haiti is not merely criminal activity but has evolved into a form of parallel governance in many areas, particularly in Port-au-Prince. The alleged connections between these armed groups and economic elites suggest that gang violence serves specific economic and political interests—maintaining territorial control, eliminating competition, or creating pressure for foreign intervention that preserves the status quo.

Without comprehensive sanctions that target the financial sponsors of these activities, international efforts to address gang violence will likely remain insufficient. As Crisis Group noted in a recent report, “Haiti urgently needs a legitimate government able to lead the campaign to curb gang violence”—but such legitimacy is impossible when economic power remains concentrated in the hands of families allegedly connected to the very gangs terrorizing the population.

Undermining Economic Development

The extreme concentration of wealth in Haiti—with an estimated 90% controlled by a handful of families—fundamentally constrains the country’s economic development. By protecting the architects of this system from accountability, the international community tacitly endorses an economic model that has demonstrably failed to generate broad-based prosperity.

Haiti’s oligarchy maintains monopolistic control over key sectors including ports, fuel distribution, banking, and food imports. This concentration stifles competition, keeps prices artificially high for basic goods, and limits opportunities for entrepreneurship and job creation. As one shop owner explained to the New Republic, “Haiti’s elite profits from monopolizing everything in the country. If new businesses were to enter the market, everyone would benefit except for them”.

The international reluctance to sanction this economic model enables its continuation at tremendous cost to Haiti’s development. A more competitive, diversified economy would better serve Haiti’s long-term interests—but such transformation threatens entrenched oligarchic power.

Eroding Democratic Governance

Perhaps most fundamentally, the concentration of economic power in Haiti directly undermines democratic governance. When a small group controls 90% of a nation’s wealth, formal political institutions inevitably become subordinate to economic interests. The oligarchy’s influence extends deep into Haitian politics, with documented involvement in supporting coups, financing politicians across the political spectrum, and maintaining connections to security forces.

By shielding these economic interests from accountability, the international community effectively prioritizes stability for business interests over democratic governance for the Haitian people. As one Haiti expert observed to Jacobin magazine, “The strength of the gangs is inextricably linked to the character of the Haitian state and its ties to economic elites at home and abroad”.

This fundamental contradiction—attempting to build democratic institutions while protecting the economic interests that undermine them—helps explain why decades of international interventions in Haiti have failed to produce sustainable progress. As long as oligarchic economic power remains untouched, political reforms will likely remain superficial and temporary.

Call to Awareness and Action

Addressing the international protection of Haiti’s oligarchy requires action from multiple stakeholders. Here are concrete steps various groups can take to challenge this system:

For Haitian Diaspora and Global Allies:

1. Demand Sanctions Harmonization: Advocate for the United States and European Union to follow Canada’s lead in sanctioning oligarchs who enable Haiti’s gang crisis. This should include pressure on U.S. lawmakers through calls, letters, and organized advocacy campaigns.
2. Support Investigative Journalism: Fund independent media outlets dedicated to investigating the business practices, political connections, and international assets of Haiti’s economic elite. Transparency is the first step toward accountability.
3. Monitor Sanctions Enforcement: Create community-based monitoring systems to track whether existing Canadian sanctions are being effectively enforced, particularly regarding assets and travel restrictions.
4. Advocate for Financial Transparency: Push for regulations requiring beneficial ownership disclosure for businesses operating in Haiti and for stronger anti-money laundering measures in countries where Haitian elites hold assets.

For Policymakers and International Organizations:

1. Harmonize Sanctions Approaches: Coordinate sanctions regimes across allied nations to prevent sanctioned individuals from simply relocating assets to non-sanctioning jurisdictions.
2. Address Diplomatic Shield Abuse: Reform the honorary consul system to prevent its exploitation as a shield for economic interests involved in destabilizing activities.
3. Support Anti-Monopoly Enforcement: Provide technical assistance for developing effective competition laws and regulatory bodies that can break up concentrated economic power in Haiti.
4. Condition Aid on Economic Reforms: Link international assistance to concrete measures that address wealth concentration and promote economic inclusion rather than focusing solely on security or political reforms.

For Civil Society Organizations:

1. Document Economic Power Networks: Systematically map the ownership structures of major businesses to illustrate the extent of economic concentration and its impacts on governance and security.
2. Develop Alternative Economic Models: Support community-based economic initiatives that create alternatives to oligarch-controlled supply chains, particularly in essential sectors like food and energy.
3. Build Transnational Advocacy Coalitions: Connect Haitian civil society with international human rights, anti-corruption, and economic justice organizations to amplify calls for accountability.
4. Highlight Double Standards: Document and publicize the inconsistencies in international sanctions approaches, particularly the contrast between aggressive sanctions against certain countries versus the protection of Haiti’s oligarchy.

Conclusion

The international reluctance to sanction Haiti’s oligarchy reveals a complex web of economic entanglements that transcend national boundaries. While Canada’s groundbreaking sanctions against figures like Gilbert Bigio acknowledged the role of economic elites in enabling Haiti’s crisis, the United States and other powers have maintained a conspicuous silence—likely due to the deep economic connections between Haiti’s oligarchy and international business interests.

This protective shield around Haiti’s most powerful families operates through multiple mechanisms: residential and commercial real estate in Miami and other international cities; banking relationships with major financial institutions; diplomatic protections through the honorary consul system; and strategic control over Haiti’s import infrastructure. Together, these create powerful disincentives for comprehensive international sanctions.

The consequences for Haiti are profound. The continued concentration of economic power undermines democratic governance, constrains development, and perpetuates the nexus between economic elites and armed groups that has devastated Haiti’s security landscape. Without addressing this fundamental economic reality, other interventions—whether political, humanitarian, or security-focused—will likely remain insufficient.

Moving forward requires acknowledging that Haiti’s crisis is not merely political or security-related but fundamentally economic. The extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few families with extensive international connections creates structural barriers to progress that no amount of electoral reform or security assistance can overcome alone.

True transformation requires challenging the economic entanglements that shield Haiti’s oligarchy from accountability. Only by confronting these realities can the international community develop approaches that address the root causes of Haiti’s persistent crises rather than merely treating their symptoms.

FAQ Section

1. Why has Canada sanctioned Haitian oligarchs while the United States has not? Canada imposed sanctions on Gilbert Bigio and other Haitian business figures in December 2022, citing their alleged role in enabling gang activities. The U.S. has not followed suit despite Congressional calls for action, potentially due to the extensive business interests these individuals maintain in the United States, particularly in Florida, and possible U.S. citizenship status of some oligarchs. 2. What specific allegations led to Canada’s sanctions against Haitian business leaders? Canada accused sanctioned individuals of being “members of the Haitian elite who provide illicit financial and operational support to armed gangs,” stating they use “their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption”. 3. How do Haiti’s oligarchs shield their assets internationally? The Pandora Papers revealed that wealthy Haitians use complex offshore structures in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, and Panama, often connected to Swiss bank accounts. They also hold properties through trusts and shell companies in places like Miami, maintain diplomatic protections through honorary consul positions, and use diplomatic passports to facilitate international financial activities. 4. What role do U.S. professional enablers play in protecting Haitian wealth? U.S. lawyers and bankers provide Haitian oligarchs with tax advice, letters of reference for opening international bank accounts, and assistance establishing offshore structures. Firms like Miami-based Packman, Neuwahl & Rosenberg have written character references describing individuals later sanctioned by Canada as having “the utmost integrity”. 5. How does the honorary consul system protect Haiti’s economic elite? Many of Haiti’s wealthiest individuals serve as honorary consuls for foreign nations, including Gilbert Bigio (former honorary consul for Israel) and Sherif Abdallah (honorary consul for Italy). These positions provide diplomatic protections that shield homes and businesses from searches by law enforcement and facilitate international travel and financial activities. 6. What economic leverage do Haiti’s oligarchs have domestically and internationally? Haiti’s oligarchs control strategic infrastructure including ports (Bigio’s Port Lafito) and fuel terminals (Mevs’ Terminal Varreux) that handle the majority of Haiti’s imports. This gives them enormous domestic economic power while making them essential partners for international businesses seeking to enter the Haitian market, creating economic disincentives for sanctions. 7. How do economic concentrations of power affect Haiti’s political stability? The extreme concentration of wealth (approximately 90% controlled by a handful of families) undermines democratic governance by giving economic elites disproportionate influence over political processes. This creates a fundamental contradiction in international efforts to promote democracy in Haiti while protecting the economic interests that systematically undermine it.