I don't usually write like this.
If you follow my work you know I let numbers talk. Forensic economics. Cold analysis. Theta constants and extraction rates. I curb the heat because the math is hot enough on its own.
Not today.
Today I am flabbergasted. And I need you to understand exactly why.
On March 18 and 19, 2026, at the Hotel Las Américas Golden Tower in Panama City, the Organization of American States convened something called the "Haiti Maritime Security Implementers Conference." Canada funded it. The OAS Inter-American Committee against Terrorism organized it. Representatives from 15 countries attended. The Haitian delegation sent seven officials including the Coast Guard Director, a SEMANAH representative, and customs officials.
The conference produced three deliverables:
1. "A comprehensive mapping of all current and planned efforts in maritime security in Haiti"
2. "A joint statement of commitment from all participants to coordinate and collaborate on future initiatives"
3. "A set of preliminary recommendations to strengthen maritime security and coordination mechanisms in Haiti"
A map. A statement. Some preliminary ideas.
That was the output. Two days. Panama City luxury hotel. Fifteen countries at the table.
Then I read the nine discussion topics they were working through and I felt something shift in my chest. Not anger yet. Something colder.
Here is Discussion Topic 1:
"What is the current state of maritime and port security in Haiti?"
That was the opening question. At an international conference in 2026. For a country with 1,771 kilometers of coastline whose border is 82% ocean. They are asking what is the current state. Nobody in that room knew. Nobody had the data. They flew to Panama to ask each other what was happening.
Here is Discussion Topic 3:
"What minimum patrol capabilities are urgently required?"
Nobody knows the minimum. Haiti has 200 coast guard personnel with 8 patrol boats covering 1,535 km. That is one boat per 192 kilometers. But this number does not appear in the conference documents. They do not cite it. They are asking what the minimum is because they have not calculated what exists.
Here is Discussion Topic 7:
"What immediate maritime domain awareness tools or systems can be deployed to support Haitian authorities?"
They don't know what tools exist. At a conference attended by INTERPOL, UNODC, the World Customs Organization, IOM, the Gang Suppression Force, the navies of six countries... nobody brought a list of available MDA tools.
There are 21 questions like this across the nine discussion topics. I extracted all of them. Every single one is a question a functioning maritime authority would already have answered. They are asking "How can informal landing sites be secured within the next six months?" without knowing how many informal landing sites exist. They are asking "Which Haitian ports should be prioritized for ISPS compliance?" without having assessed which ports are compliant. They are asking "What challenges or barriers are associated with equipment donation and deployment?" without inventorying what equipment Haiti has.
The conference's concept note admits it plainly:
"There has not been a coordinated effort to align assistance and avoid duplication."
All previous coordination has failed. This conference was convened to coordinate the coordination.
The OAS produced a "Port Desk Study" for Port-au-Prince. I want you to sit with this fact: the port security assessment for Haiti's primary port... the port through which over 90% of the nation's trade flows... is 1,865 characters long.
That is less than this section of the article you are reading right now.
The study lists four assessment categories: Access Control, Perimeter Security, Technology and Lighting, Guard Force. Under each category: bullet points with no content. No assessment data. No findings. No metrics. Just headings.
Its key recommendation:
"Carry out site assessments to determine gaps."
The desk study recommends doing the actual study. The assessment of the port recommends assessing the port. Nobody went to look.
Meanwhile, the OAS Roadmap that this conference is operationalizing carries a total price tag of $2.6 billion. That number deserves dissection.
The OAS Roadmap for Haiti proposes $2.6 billion across five pillars. Here is what that number actually contains:
Pillar 1: Security — $1.336 billion. The document itself says: "key decision points under the new model remain to be determined, and thus, this is a figure that is subject to revision." The security budget hasn't been finalized. It is an estimate of an estimate.
Pillar 4: Humanitarian — $908.2 million. This is not new money. The document states the values are "based on figures reported in the UN Haiti Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2025." They restated the existing UN ask and called it a pillar.
Pillar 5: Sustainable Development — $256.1 million. Also not new money. The document refers to "the IADB expected 2023-2024 gross approvals for the country." They took existing IDB approvals and called them a development pillar.
Pillar 2: Political Consensus — $5.1 million. Five million dollars for the political consensus pillar of a country in state collapse.
Pillar 3: Electoral — $104.1 million. For elections that have no published electoral budget and no roadmap explaining how voting will occur in a country where gangs control 90% of the capital.
So the $2.6 billion is: $1.3 billion for a security plan that hasn't been finalized, $908 million restated from a UN document, $256 million restated from IDB approvals, $104 million for elections nobody has budgeted, and $5 million for political consensus.
The plan's own monitoring system? "The design of the monitoring, evaluation, and accountability system will be finalized once the operational definitions and activities of each pillar's plans/projects are completed." The accountability system for the $2.6 billion plan does not exist yet.
I searched all six conference documents... 331,654 characters. Here is what does not appear:
Hydrographic surveys. Zero mentions. Haiti has never mapped its own seafloor. The nautical charts ships use were drawn during the US occupation a century ago. The word "hydrographic" appears nowhere in the conference materials.
Nautical charts. Zero mentions.
The International Hydrographic Organization. Zero mentions. Haiti applied for membership in 2008. Was approved by two-thirds of member states in 2012. Never deposited its instrument of accession. Still not a member. Annual fee: EUR 8,000. The OAS never mentions this.
Haiti's Exclusive Economic Zone. Zero mentions. Haiti's EEZ covers 126,760 square kilometers... 4.57 times its land area. It generates $0.30 per square kilometer in revenue. Jamaica generates $741. The Bahamas generates $1,832. A 6,107x gap. Not discussed.
Fisheries. Zero mentions in Documents 1 through 4 and 6. Haiti has 26,000 fishing boats, 115,000 direct jobs, and an artisanal fisheries sector producing 82% of catch. None of this is mentioned in a maritime security plan.
Blue economy. Zero mentions in the Haiti-specific documents. Only appears in the generic Caribbean strategy (Document 5), which is subtitled "Securing the Blue Economy" but contains no Haiti-specific blue economy analysis.
Coast Guard vessel inventory. How many boats Haiti's coast guard has is never stated. I'll state it: eight. Eight boats. For 1,535 km of coastline.
AIS coverage. Zero mentions. Haiti has no AIS receiving network. Ships enter and leave Haitian waters and Haiti does not know.
Radar coverage. Not mentioned for Haiti specifically.
Coastline length. 1,771 km. Never cited. Never used for planning purposes.
Number of informal landing sites. Unknown. The conference asks how to secure them within six months. Nobody has counted them.
IUU fishing. Estimated at $10-50 million per year extracted from Haiti's waters. Not mentioned.
Navassa Island dispute. Costs Haiti 10,000-15,000 km² of EEZ. Not mentioned.
The CLCS continental shelf deadline. Haiti missed it in 2006. Never filed even preliminary information. A forfeited maritime asset. Not mentioned.
Four of Haiti's six maritime boundaries remain unresolved. Not mentioned.
You are looking at a maritime security plan that does not mention charts, surveys, the EEZ, fishing, landing sites, vessel tracking, or how many boats the coast guard has. It is a maritime plan written by people who have not looked at the sea.
The conference participant list is revealing for who it includes and who it doesn't.
Present: OAS Secretary General. CARICOM IMPACS. INTERPOL. UNODC. IOM. UN Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate. World Customs Organization. Navies from the Bahamas, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama. Canada's Anti-Crime Capacity Building Program. A retired US Coast Guard captain working as a private consultant.
Not present: No one from a hydrographic service. No fisheries representative. No environmental or maritime pollution expert. No private port operators (Port Lafito and Terminal Varreux are privately operated... they weren't invited). No shipping lines or commercial maritime industry. No France... despite being a major Caribbean maritime power with territories next to Haiti. No active-duty US Coast Guard or US Navy. No UK, no Netherlands.
Haiti's SEMANAH sent one person: Carlo Elisca Cerome from the Directorate of Cooperation and Maritime Affairs. Not the hydrography division. Not the marine environment protection division. The cooperation office. The person whose job is to cooperate... cooperated. The people who would know the technical state of Haiti's maritime domain were not there.
On March 20, 2026... the day after the conference ended... I sat down and started working. By the time my computer died around midnight, I had built:
An interactive maritime surveillance map of Haiti's entire coastline. 300+ infrastructure points. Every pier, dock, harbour, marina, ferry terminal, lighthouse, and wreck mapped from OpenStreetMap data. Leaflet map, dark theme, clickable. Cost: $0.
A four-module Python tool that pulls vessel activity from Global Fishing Watch, satellite imagery from Copernicus Sentinel, and maritime infrastructure from OpenStreetMap. Generates the map automatically. Cost: $0.
A comprehensive EEZ economic analysis. 420 lines. 50+ sources. Every Caribbean nation benchmarked. Revenue per km². EEZ per capita. Maritime Theta: 0.96-0.98. Haiti captures 2-4% of the value in waters it legally owns. Cost: $0.
An opacity flag intelligence report. Seven flag states profiled. 64,008 hours of vessel time by ships from Bolivia (landlocked), Togo (registry run from Lebanon), Vanuatu (government inquiry into its own registry), Comoros (EU-sanctioned operator), Tanzania ($165 million cocaine seizure February 2026), Honduras (self-closed its registry in 1982 for enabling "illegal traffic of all kinds"), and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (24-hour registration from offices in Switzerland and Monaco). Composite opacity scoring. Île de la Gonave convergence documented: no commercial port, documented human trafficking hub, highest concentration of opacity-flagged vessels. Cost: $0.
The OAS conference asked: "What is the current state of maritime and port security in Haiti?" I answered it. In one night. From a desk in Delaware.
The OAS conference asked: "What immediate maritime domain awareness tools or systems can be deployed?" I deployed one. It runs on free data. The code is open source.
The OAS conference asked: "How can informal landing sites be secured within the next six months?" I mapped 300+ maritime infrastructure points. The conference mapped zero.
Their conference deliverables: a map (of efforts, not infrastructure), a statement, and preliminary recommendations. My deliverables: an actual map, an actual economic analysis, an actual intelligence report, and actual code.
Here is where the anger changes texture.
The International Hydrographic Organization visited Haiti in 2008. They found, in their words, that Haiti "as a maritime country, does not have the capability to conduct hydrographic surveys, oceanographic studies and generate information, products and services." Zero capability. Zero equipment. Zero trained personnel. Zero national nautical charts. Zero tide gauges. Zero maritime degrees at any Haitian university.
They proposed establishing a Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of Haiti... SHOH. They listed the basic equipment needed in Annex F of their report:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Single beam echo sounder, 200 kHz | $23,000 |
| Tide gauge | $5,000 |
| Post-process differential GPS | $30,000 |
| Hydrographic software | $10,000 |
| Computers | $6,000 |
| Accessories | $5,000 |
| **Total** | **$79,000** |
$79,000. Less than a Land Cruiser. Less than what the OAS spent on the Panama City hotel.
After the 2010 earthquake, ten countries showed up for a donors' meeting: Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Japan, Peru, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Venezuela. They funded a two-week training course. Nobody funded $79,000 in equipment.
The IHO visited again in 2017. Nine years later. Same findings. SHOH still "proposed." Maritime code still pending Parliament. Two hydrographers trained by Brazil in 2014, returned home to no equipment. The Prime Minister declared maritime development "a priority." Nothing happened.
Commandant Joseph Jean Mary Wagnac of the Haitian Coast Guard appears in both reports. 2008 and 2017. The same man told the same visiting delegation that his operations were hampered by the lack of national nautical charts. Nine years. Same man. Same request. Same nothing.
The IHO membership fee is EUR 8,000 per year. One share. Haiti was approved for membership in 2012. Never deposited the accession letter. Fourteen years later, still not a member.
None of this appears in the OAS conference materials. The word "hydrographic" is absent from 331,654 characters of conference documentation. The IHO is not mentioned. The $79,000 equipment gap is not mentioned. Commandant Wagnac's nine-year request is not mentioned.
They convened a maritime security conference without knowing the maritime domain has never been surveyed.
While the OAS asks questions in Panama City, here is what is happening in Haitian waters right now.
64,008 hours of vessel time logged by ships flying opacity flags. Seven flag states. All confirmed ITF Flags of Convenience. Most on the Paris MOU black list.
Bolivia: 10,488 hours. A landlocked country. No coastline. No ports. No coast guard. No capacity to inspect vessels flying its flag. A Bolivia-flagged vessel spending 10,488 hours in Haiti's EEZ raises one question: what legitimate purpose brings it there?
Togo: 12,062 hours. Concentrated at Île de la Gonave. The registry is privatized... run from Lebanon and Greece by the International Registration Bureau. The US State Department has held direct meetings over "several ships discovered trafficking drugs." In September 2020, a Togo-flagged freighter called the Norma H II was seized in San Juan with $27 million in cash hidden in unmarked boxes.
Comoros: 84 hours. The company operating the registry... Intershipping Services LLC, a Dubai condominium tower... has been directly sanctioned by the European Union. Comoros-flagged vessels account for 38% of the global sanctioned dark fleet. Even 84 hours of a Comoros-flagged vessel in Haitian waters is an extreme anomaly.
Tanzania/Zanzibar: 3,527 hours. Paris MOU black list, "Very High Risk"... the worst category. In February 2026, one month before our data snapshot, a Tanzania-flagged vessel was seized off El Salvador with 6.6 tonnes of cocaine worth $165 million. Largest drug seizure in El Salvador's history.
These vessels concentrate at Île de la Gonave. No commercial port. No coast guard base. No radar. No AIS. Documented as a human trafficking hub by CNN. The darkest spot in a completely dark maritime domain.
Haiti cannot see them. Not "won't intercept." Cannot see. There is no sensor. There is no system. There is no person watching. And under UNCLOS, Haiti cannot board these vessels in its own EEZ without flag state consent. Bolivia's consent. From a country with no coast guard because it has no coast.
The OAS conference Discussion Topic 7 asks: "What immediate maritime domain awareness tools or systems can be deployed to support Haitian authorities?"
I can answer that. $5 million a year buys eyes on every beach in Haiti. SAR satellite imagery. Optical monitoring. AIS integration. AI anomaly detection. Complete maritime domain awareness.
$5 million is 0.83% of the MSS annual kinetic budget. It is 0.37% of the OAS Roadmap security pillar. It is the cost of seeing.
Nobody at the conference proposed it.
While the OAS plans a $2.6 billion roadmap and the IHO waits eighteen years for EUR 8,000, the money that IS being spent deserves examination.
The Fils-Aimé government contracted with Vectus... Erik Prince's latest vehicle... for security services. The contract structure: 20% of customs revenue increases for years 1-3, dropping to 15% for years 4-10, plus a 3% fixed fee on all import volumes.
Under moderate assumptions, that is $192 million a year. For ten years. Nearly two billion dollars.
$192 million a year. What has it produced?
Gang leaders killed: zero. Gang leaders captured: zero. Territory permanently reclaimed: zero. Gang control of Port-au-Prince: 90%, unchanged.
Civilians killed by drone strikes: 559. Children killed: 16+. Including eight children at a birthday party in Cité Soleil on September 20, 2025. The target was gang leader Albert "Djouma" Stevenson. He escaped unharmed. The drones killed a pregnant woman, three adults, and eight children celebrating a birthday.
Cost per claimed combatant killed: $167,000. Cost per strategic objective achieved: infinite. Divide by zero.
The global standard fixed fee for customs management is 0.5-1%. Vectus charges 3%... three to six times higher. Commission on revenue increases is not standard practice anywhere. Standard contract duration is 3 years. Vectus has 10 with extension options. The only historical parallels for this contract structure are colonial-era chartered companies: the East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the British South Africa Company.
Erik Prince costs more than healthcare. $192 million is 1.6 times Haiti's entire health budget. 1.3 times education. 2.5 times the military. For every $21 the diaspora sends home in remittances, $1 goes to Erik Prince.
And the per-capita extraction rate is identical to 1825. France charged Haiti for its own freedom. Vectus charges Haiti for security that doesn't arrive. Different century. Same receipt.
One year of Vectus. $192 million. Let me show you what that buys if you spend it on things that work.
Complete customs modernization: $35-55 million one-time. ASYCUDA World upgrade, single window system, scanners at every port and border crossing, 500 officers trained, anti-corruption systems automated. The World Bank has already committed $21 million. The gap is $7.5-25 million. Pays for itself in 4-7 months through revenue recovery. Gambia got +23% in year one. Iraq got +128%. Haiti's own reforms already cut clearance times from 21 days to 3. Full modernization finishes the job.
Vectus provides zero of what modernization delivers. No ASYCUDA. No single window. No scanners. No training pipeline. No anti-corruption systems. No institutional capacity that survives the contract's termination. Haiti becomes dependent. That is not a side effect. That is the product.
Cap-Haïtien port upgrade: $79-141 million. Phase 1 brings capacity to 35,000 TEU. Full build reaches 50,000-100,000 TEU... enough to handle over half of Haiti's pre-crisis trade volume. Two Panamax cranes. Berth deepening. Container yard expansion. Cold chain. Road connection. Power infrastructure. A functioning second port that decongests Port-au-Prince and creates a northern economic corridor.
Source-side firearms interdiction: $25 million a year. Enhanced ATF inspections in Miami-Dade and Broward (where 1,300-1,700 FFLs operate, most never inspected). eTrace Caribbean expansion. NIBIN cross-border ballistic matching. Outbound container scanning at Port Everglades and Port Miami. A multi-agency task force. Cost per firearm interdicted at source: $50-$6,000. Cost per firearm interdicted in Haiti: $50,000-$600,000. Ten to one thousand times cheaper to stop the guns before they leave Florida.
Maritime domain awareness: $5 million a year. Eyes on every beach. SAR satellites. Optical monitoring. Dark vessel detection. AI analytics. A small operations center. Two ScanEagle drones. Coverage of all 1,771 km. Every informal landing site monitored daily.
IHO membership plus basic survey equipment: $87,000. EUR 8,000 membership fee plus $79,000 in equipment. Haiti begins mapping its own sea.
Total: approximately $185 million. One year of Vectus.
For the cost of Erik Prince, Haiti gets: complete customs modernization, a functioning second port, guns stopped at the Florida source, eyes on every beach, and the ability to begin mapping its own waters for the first time in 220 years.
Or you can have 559 dead civilians and zero gang leaders captured. Pick.
The plan inherits a fiscal disaster. The Conseil Présidentiel de Transition governed for 22 months and left no financial accounts.
Investment budget allocated: $917 million. Executed: approximately 25%. That is $688 million allocated and never spent. Vanished into the same institutional void that swallows everything else.
GDP growth 2024: -4.2%. GDP growth 2025: -2.7%. Textile employment collapsed from 32,084 to approximately 20,000. Food insecurity rose from 4.5 million to 5.7 million people. Tax-to-GDP ratio: 5.2%... the lowest in the world. The ULCC anti-corruption body submitted 87 reports. None were acted on. No consolidated financial statements were published. No investment execution reports. No response to parliamentary inquiries.
Réginald Surin, the economist I work with, wrote it plainly: "Deux ans de transition du CPT ont produit... aucun bilan présenté à la nation." Two years. No accounting presented to the nation.
And before the CPT: PetroCaribe. $4.237 billion received between 2008 and 2016. Estimated $2 billion embezzled or wasted. Prosecutions: zero. Convictions: zero. Civil asset recovery: zero.
International aid flows through Haiti at a 66% loss rate. Only 34% reaches beneficiaries. Of 47 Health Cluster partners in the OAS's own Roadmap document, only 12 regularly report and have capacity to conduct health interventions. Less than 25% of health facilities are operational in critical areas. The OAS admits it in their own documents.
This is the fiscal foundation on which the $2.6 billion roadmap is built. A foundation of unspent budgets, unaudited accounts, and embezzled billions.
Buried in Annex 12 of the OAS Roadmap is something extraordinary: Haiti's own government criticizing the OAS plan. The observation reads:
"The integration of agriculture through the roadmap is partial and superficial, with actions presented too generally, lacking specifics on priority sectors, agricultural diversification, agroecology, local processing, and equitable market access."
The Haitian government told the OAS that its own development pillar is "partial and superficial." This is in the document. This is the plan they are supposed to implement.
The Caribbean Maritime Security Strategy, adopted in July 2023 as a CARICOM-wide framework, requires each participating state to establish a permanent National Maritime Security Committee, a National Maritime Security Operations Centre, and a National Maritime Security Strategy. Three years later, Haiti has established none of them. The OAS conference is trying to do what a three-year-old CARICOM agreement already required.
And the CMSS itself? The acknowledged main risk: "limited resources to implement the CMSS." A regional strategy with no budget, asking broke island nations to fund it from central budgets they cannot execute.
You cannot write a budget for a house you have never walked through.
Haiti's budget planners do not know what is in their waters. They do not know who is using their waters. They do not know what their coastline infrastructure looks like. They do not know what revenue their EEZ could generate. They do not know what the seafloor looks like. They are writing a national development plan for a country whose maritime domain... 82% of its border, 4.57 times its land area... is a blank space on their map.
Can't see the waters → can't measure what's extracted → can't enforce against opacity flags → can't generate maritime revenue → can't fund the capacity to see → repeat.
Maritime Theta: 0.96 to 0.98. Haiti captures 2 to 4 percent of the value in waters it legally owns.
Kiribati... population 131,000... implemented a Vessel Day Scheme in 2012. Fishing license revenue went from $29 million to $207 million in four years. 711% increase. That revenue now constitutes 91% of government revenue. Kiribati has fewer people than Cap-Haïtien. It figured this out.
The OAS plan does not mention Kiribati. Does not mention the VDS. Does not mention fishing licenses. Does not mention EEZ revenue. Does not mention blue economy for Haiti specifically. Does not mention the $94 million annual revenue gap between Haiti and Jamaica's maritime performance.
The plan does not know what it does not know.
I need to be honest about something. I came here to drag people into the street. And I have. But the IHO reports changed the texture of my anger, because in those documents I found real people who tried.
Azad Belfort at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized the 2008 IHO visit. Gina Porcena at CNIGS offered her GIS infrastructure for nautical chart production. Ronald Jabouin at SEMANAH presented the SHOH project. Commandant Wagnac asked for charts twice in nine years. Matthieu Polyte and Frenold Cheristin trained in Brazil, interned at NOAA, came home to no equipment.
These are not villains. These are people inside a broken system making requests that go unanswered. The IHO told them what to do. The equipment cost $79,000. Ten donor countries showed up. Nobody wrote the check.
And the Labadee test: Royal Caribbean surveys Haitian waters to dock its cruise ships at its private resort. The data is proprietary. Haiti gains no institutional knowledge. A corporation knows more about Haitian seafloor than the Haitian government does. SEMANAH has complete LIDAR coverage of Haiti's land (via CNIGS). It has zero coverage of its sea. Land was mapped because donors funded it for disaster response. Sea was never mapped because the use case... revenue capture, fisheries management, boundary enforcement... requires a functioning state. Which is what extraction prevents.
The cycle.
Everything I built is open.
The interactive maritime map. The Python tool. The EEZ analysis. The opacity flag intelligence. The customs modernization budget. The port upgrade plan. The firearms interdiction cost analysis. The satellite surveillance cost estimate. The cross-analysis with IHO primary sources. 47 charts. 408 facts. 13 source files. $0.
analyticsresearchsciencesorcercies.github.io/barss-reports/FLABBERGASTED.html
I am one person. With no budget. With no institutional mandate. With no security clearance and no donor funding and no government contract and no invitation to Panama City. I built this from a desk in Delaware because I saw a LinkedIn post about a maritime conference and I felt something cold move through my chest.
Take it. Use it. Hand it to SEMANAH. Hand it to Commandant Wagnac's successor. Hand it to whoever writes the next budget. Or hand it to the OAS so they have answers to the 21 questions they flew to Panama to ask each other.
Or don't. God bless and good luck.
But know this. Coups happen because of mismanagement like this. I know, because reading that plan pushed me to a place where I understood... viscerally... why someone would want to just seize control. Not from ideology. From frustration. From watching a country with 1,771 kilometers of coastline that has never counted its own beaches, spend $2.6 billion on a roadmap that does not mention the sea.
That impulse is the canary. When your citizens start thinking "I could govern better from my apartment"... your governance has failed at a level that elections cannot fix.
I built 47 charts in one night. The conference produced three deliverables: a map, a statement, and some preliminary ideas.
Fix it.