Hundreds of Haitians took to the streets in March to demand the release of a final audit report accusing Haiti’s political class of embezzling or misusing well over a billion dollars received through Venezuela’s discounted PetroCaribe oil alliance program. “Mare yo! ” they chanted in downtown Port-au-Prince — Haitian Creole for “handcuff them.”
The resistance underway in Haiti started, as modern-day revolutions do, on Twitter. It was August 2018, and tensions were still high after the Haitian government announced — then retracted — a plan to raise the price of fuel by as much as 51 percent. Gilbert Mirambeau Jr., a 35-year-old Haitian filmmaker and writer, tweeted a photo of himself blindfolded, holding a handwritten cardboard sign reading, “Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a???” — “Where is the PetroCaribe money???”
“I felt betrayed,” he said in March in Port-au-Prince. “People are literally dying in Haiti because they can’t eat, and they’re going and spending the money that was supposed to help us.” The blindfold was meant to evoke a kidnapping victim — a metaphor, Mirambeau said, for the people of Haiti being held hostage by their corrupt government — as well as the Greek goddess Themis, who raises the scales of justice with her eyes covered to ensure justice is meted out objectively.
Within two days of his tweet, the hashtag #KotKòbPetwoKaribea exploded as thousands of Haitians tweeted photos of themselves holding the same sign. In some Port-au-Prince neighborhoods, it was spray-painted onto every street corner and billboard. The tweets and street protests spread to the Haitian diaspora in Boston, Miami, Montreal, and Paris. And #KotKòbPetwoKaribea became the rallying cry for a new movement unlike any other in Haitian history — one led by youth armed with smartphones, who are wielding social media to speak out against impunity and demand transparency from political leaders accustomed to obscuring their corruption behind Haiti’s dysfunctional institutions.
They call themselves the Petrochallengers.
The core group is comprised of 20- and 30-somethings who came of age after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, from which the country has still hardly recovered. More than $13 billion in post-quake aid flowed into the country, though today there’s little to show for it. The misused PetroCaribe funds are viewed as another missed opportunity for Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
For months, they’ve protested the results of two reports — one released in 2017 and another in January — that detail how the PetroCaribe money was misused. The program, the result of an agreement with Venezuela reached in 2006, was meant to give Haiti petroleum at preferential payment rates that would allow the Haitian government to finance development projects — such as housing, schools, hospitals, and roads — through domestic oil sales.
But the reports show many of those projects don’t exist, though well over a billion dollars was paid out. And they implicate 15 former ministers and senior officials along with a company once headed by President Jovenel Moïse.
The latest report was supposed to come out by the end of April but was delayed.
“The Haiti we want”
On a Tuesday afternoon, a dozen Petrochallengers gathered for their weekly meeting in a colorful, art-filled cafe near central Port-au-Prince. Known for attracting activists, expats, and an LGBTQ crowd, it’s become the de facto headquarters for their movement.
Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” wafted across their back-porch meeting space as attendees filed in, several of them dressed in business attire from their day jobs. The table was soon littered with laptops, smartphones, and bottles of Prestige, Haiti’s national beer.
Among them was Emmanuela Douyon, a 29-year-old researcher who is starting her own think tank focused on economic development. She was mobilized by Mirambeau’s Twitter challenge and has delayed the launch of her organization to devote more time to Petrochallenge activism. Uprisings in Haiti tend to have the effect of simply ousting one president or prime minister and replacing him with another, she explained.
“But now, the PetroCaribe challenge is not something against a president. It’s not against a dictatorship,” she said. “It’s people asking for accountability, and this is a huge problem in Haiti. But it’s been a long time since we have had so many people coming together to ask for it. I think this is really new.”
The Petrochallenge movement is comprised of two groups: Nou Pap Dòmi, or “We keep our eyes open,” which is focused on government accountability in the short term; and Ayiti Nou Vle A, or “The Haiti we want,” a group that encourages ordinary citizens to get involved in shaping Haiti’s long-term future by encouraging civic engagement, online and offline. Both groups started in the wake of Mirambeau’s tweet.
For inspiration, the Petrochallengers have looked to other youth-led movements around the world that used social media, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Y’en a Marre, a Senegalese movement created by young rappers and journalists to protest ineffective government and register youth to vote. They’ve also looked to France’s Yellow Vest protests, which President Emmanuel Macron responded to recently.
Social media is a key component of the Petrochallenge movement, said Gaëlle Bien-Aimé, 31, a Haitian women’s rights activist, comedian, and Petrochallenger. For example, people have tweeted photos of vacant lots and skeletal structures where some of the nearly $2 billion in PetroCaribe funds were supposed to have been spent.
“It’s not the first time money has disappeared like this or been wasted,” she said. “But this is one of the biggest financial scandals in a time when information is not hidden. Everything is posted on WhatsApp, Twitter, and other social media.”
“This will make people believe in Haiti again”
The Petrochallengers have pledged to keep protesting until those named in the report are put on trial for the money they stole. They’ve said they’ll keep going until they can vote in a new government, one that answers to the Haitian people. And they want the trial to take place in Haiti, to be overseen by the Haitian judiciary.
“I think if we have the PetroCaribe trial and some really, really, really powerful people go to prison or pay for what they did, then this will show that in Haiti, we too can fight corruption,” Douyon said. “I think it will show us — for the younger generation, this is what we can do. If we reach this, people will start believing that we can create jobs. We can develop Haiti.
“If we have at least the trial, this will make people believe in Haiti again,” she added. “Because for now, no one does.” The difficulty, however, will be ensuring their activism leads to accountability. The Petrochallenge movement is not aligned with any political party — and that’s by design. They want it to be as inclusive as possible. Some observers say that could be their downfall.
“This movement is interesting because they tend to be neutral in terms of politics,” said Robert Fatton, a Haiti analyst and politics professor at the University of Virginia. “In one way, that gives them strength. But it also gives them a rather weak hand, because the people who are accused have more power than the people who are accusing them. We’ll see what will happen, whether political parties in the opposition are going to hijack the movement for their political purposes.”
Politicians are already tapping into the discontent. In February, the Democratic and Popular Sector, an alliance of Haitian opposition groups that want to oust the president, promoted protests that turned violent and lasted 10 days, bringing the country to a standstill. Twenty-six people died, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Private businesses were set on fire and looted. And though the protests drew from the same deep well of anger beneath the Petrochallenge movement, they weren’t organized by the same groups of which Mirambeau, Douyon, and Bien-Aimé are part.
The Petrochallengers’ insistence on staying out of politics may not be enough, said Jocelyn McCalla, a longtime Haitian human rights advocate based in New York.
“Where they are weakest is in believing that popular pressure alone is going to force the people — the people implicated in the report as well as the people who have influence over the judicial system — to act,” he said. “They have to take one more step. And that one more step is being more politically engaged.”
In the Petrochallengers’ view, the pressure they’ve exerted from outside politics has already brought about some change. Their biggest impact has been heightened awareness of how public funds are spent, said Jeffsky Poincy, a 32-year-old economist and Petrochallenger. “People didn’t know what was happening in the public administration in Haiti, nor with the PetroCaribe funds. Now, they do,” he said. “Now, the government cannot take any action without taking into account PetroCaribe.”
In addition, amid the demonstrations, Haitian lawmakers have forced out two prime ministers and their governments in the span of six months. A new prime minister, Jean Michel Lapin, took the job earlier this year with a goal to quell disagreement among various political factions.
The next generation
Haiti is a young country: More than half the population of about 11 million is under 25 years old, according to World Bank figures. More than 6 million people live below the poverty line of $2.41 per day. They are plagued by a weakening local currency, years of double-digit inflation and widening inequality.
Not only that: Access to clean drinking water has always been rare, and power outages have grown more frequent in the past few months as PetroCaribe woes have the country scrambling for ways to pay for fuel. Gang violence is on the rise. Then, of course, there’s the corruption. Haiti ranks 161 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
“The country is sitting on top of a volcano of discontent,” said Fatton, the Haiti analyst from the University of Virginia. “So many issues are incredibly pressing. To send your kid to school — you can’t do that anymore. Teachers have not been paid, and the price of transportation has increased significantly. It’s impossible to sustain yourself. It’s really a very, very desperate situation.”
Without basic public services and infrastructure, let alone opportunities for social mobility, many young people feel their futures have been stolen. That’s why the Petrochallenge movement has exploded, said James Beltis, a 36-year-old sociologist and co-founder of Nou Pap Domi and its spokesperson. The group organized the recent protest and others last fall. “For me, it’s a big, historical moment because normally, the Haitian people are victims of political manipulation,” Beltis said. “I feel I’m participating in destroying a system that’s existed for hundreds of years and turned Haiti into a country of beggars. And I’m participating in the construction of a new Haiti.” Continue reading