A Squatter in the People’s House
Imagine a squatter moves into your home while you are away. They change the locks, invite their friends over, and start picking up your mail and responding on your behalf. The neighbors treat them as the rightful owners. City officials, rather than evicting the trespasser, grant them a permit to build a pool and a gazebo, then send you a bill for the increased property tax. Even your own family starts attending barbecues and using the pool. Everyone knows this person has no legal deed, but everyone plays along anyway.
This analogy is, sadly, not an exaggeration of Haiti’s current governance. Mr. Alix Didier Fils-Aimé occupies the office of prime minister without a constitutional deed to it. He was not appointed by a president as required by the Constitution. Instead, he was chosen for the job through a chain of political arrangements, sustained by the international community and the Haitian political and economic elites who benefit from the disorder. His administration now functions completely outside the constitutional framework. Today, he acts as if he were the real owner of the people’s house because too many of us mistake possession for ownership. And, far worse, too many of us, especially those living abroad - particularly, Haitians andeyò- are too happy to play along and accept invitations to barbecues and pool parties at the house.
Still, this article is not primarily about Fils-Aimé. It is about us, the people who hold the deed but feel powerless and see no way out. The 1987 amended Constitution already contains the mechanisms needed to restore legitimate governance. What is missing is not a new constitutional framework but the coalition and political will to enforce the one we already have.
My hope is that this article will help us see that the solutions are already available and that the only challenge is in finding the collective resolve to act on them.
Our Silence Empowers the Squatters
The erosion of the constitution did not start with President Moïse, but his presidency marked the point where the consequences became irreversible. In January 2020, his administration failed to hold the required elections, and as a result, the mandates of the entire Chamber of Deputies and two-thirds of the Senate expired. This allowed him to rule by decree and removed the main constitutional check on executive power. His assassination in July 2021 created a vacancy that the constitution was not fully equipped to resolve. Ariel Henry, whom President Moïse had appointed as prime minister days before, and whose appointment was published in Le Moniteur, the paper of record, could not be ratified by the legislature as constitutionally required. However, his official appointment gave him a claim to constitutional continuity. That claim collapsed in 2024, when gangs seized the international airport in Port-au-Prince and blocked Henry from returning to Haiti after a trip to Kenya to sign a security agreement.
At that moment, a constitutional option still existed. The ministers of the Henry government retained the legitimacy of their appointments and could have convened to designate a prime minister from among their ranks, who could then have organized elections and begun restoring constitutional order. Instead, Haiti’s political elites, with the support of CARICOM and the United States, created the Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (CPT), which had no constitutional or legal basis. From that point, the country entered a governance model built entirely on the logic of exception: each departure from constitutional order became the justification for the next.
The CPT members rose to power through a loose political agreement, which they quickly undermined by failing to even publish in the official paper, as they had agreed. They appointed Garry Conille as prime minister through behind-the-scenes negotiations and later used similar backroom deals to remove him and install Fils-Aimé. When the CPT members later voted to oust Fils-Aimé, the interim coordinator refused to publish the vote in Le Moniteur. The process that brought Fils-Aimé to power was fundamentally flawed and incapable of removing him because it was never grounded in law. This is the point at which I feel the need to reaffirm that Fils-Aimé has no constitutional legitimacy. He is the de facto prime minister because we have accepted it, like the squatter in our house.
What this also means is that every decree he signs, every agreement he ratifies, and every appointment he makes derives its authority from civil society’s willingness to treat it as legitimate. While these decisions carry real consequences for Haitians, we should not confuse their practical effects with constitutional validity. However, every act of deference reinforces Fils-Aimé’s illusion that his presence in office is lawful. This is why those of us who seek a return to constitutional order must resist the temptation to treat him as Haiti’s legitimate leader. I believe a simple place to start is to refuse to participate in the charade. When we treat him as though he were the rightful occupant of the office, we blur the distinction between possession and ownership and undermine our own claim to the deed for our house.
The Constitutional Mechanism Was Purposely Never Applied
So, where do we start? First, we must look to Haiti’s Constitution, which contains a very deliberate mechanism for democratic accountability, one designed to root power in local communities rather than concentrate it in Pòtoprens. It provides for the Communal Section Assemblies, elected at the neighborhood level, to feed into Municipal Assemblies, which in turn feed into Departmental Assemblies that are responsible for proposing candidates for the Permanent Electoral Council under Article 192. Without those assemblies, there can be no legitimate electoral process, and there can be no assemblies without local elections at the communal section level. The mechanism for producing legitimate elections has been deliberately dismantled by the very people who benefit most from its absence.
Today, the challenge to restoring constitutional order through elections rests on the premise that security conditions make them impossible assumes that all ten departments are under siege. That argument collapses when one looks at the geography. According to BINUH and OHCHR data covering January through August 2025, 79 percent of casualties were documented in the West department, with Artibonite accounting for another 14 percent. Although part of the Center department is under siege, there are eight departments overall that are not under gang siege. We are caught in a catch-22 in which those who are supposed to protect the population from gangs and to hold elections have the most to lose if legitimate elections actually occur.
Since we are in an exceptional context, nothing in the Constitution prevents us from holding local elections in the eight departments where security conditions permit. This would restart the constitutional sequence that the current arrangement has suspended. The election for CASECs and ASECs would help form the Municipal Assemblies. The Municipal Assemblies would form the Departmental Assemblies. The Departmental Assemblies would propose candidates for a Permanent Electoral Council with constitutional standing. Indeed, we could even hold legislative elections to restore a functioning Chamber of Deputies capable of exercising its constitutional responsibilities, including ratifying a prime minister under Article 137.
What appears today as a political crisis is, in many respects, the result of abandoning the constitutional process and sequence.
Haiti has lived through variations of this model before. Following the 1930 parliamentary elections, the newly elected National Assembly chose Sténio Vincent as president. After the 1946 parliamentary elections, Parliament elected Dumarsais Estimé. In both cases, legitimacy flowed upward from representative institutions rather than downward from a single national vote. The question, then, is not whether local institutions can produce legitimate executive authority. Haiti’s own history demonstrates that it can.
To be sure, some will resist this proposal. The resistance will not be constitutional. Instead, it will be political, driven by those who benefit from the current ambiguity. What Haiti needs is a refoundation, and local elections would begin that process by transferring authority away from unelected actors and back to representative institutions where it belongs. Those who benefit from the current arrangement have little incentive to support a process that would ultimately constrain their discretion and subject them to democratic accountability.
The Deed Belongs to the Haitian People
The squatter is still in the house, and what should trouble us most is not that the international community recognizes him. Instead, it is our own acquiescence. We cannot both demand a constitutional order and, at the same time, celebrate this administration’s decision to spend scarce resources on building a new consulate in Miami. We cannot call the government illegitimate and then treat its officials as dignitaries when they come to our community.
For Haitians andeyò, every act of accommodation reinforces the illusion that this de facto government’s occupancy of the people’s house equates ownership.
The house belongs to the Haitian people. Each month we wait, the squatter grows more comfortable and confident. We, Haitians Andeyò, have a stake in this issue, not only because our remittances support the economy but also because, as Haitians, we remain stakeholders in the nation’s future. Moreover, we have something many Haitians inside the country lack, and that is, we have the freedom to organize, speak out, and challenge power without fear of retaliation. Haiti needs more from us than just love for its football team, land, or people. It demands of us the courage to stand wherever this government seeks legitimacy and to articulate our constitutional rights consistently and boldly. The property deed has not been transferred. As the rightful owners, we have simply stopped asserting our claim.
The process for evicting the squatters is written into the Constitution itself. What remains is the coalition and political will to use it.