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En HAITI | The Hidden Puppet Masters: How Haiti's Oligarchs Orchestrate Gang Terror While the World Looks Away
Haiti's Oligarchs who control 80% of the wealth of that impoverrished country and control all the gangs and ports.
Behind the chaos lies a calculated system of exploitation orchestrated by billionaire families who profit from violence while hiding behind diplomatic immunity
MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA, June 13, 2025 - While the world fixates on gang violence tearing Haiti apart, the real architects of destruction remain comfortably invisible, protected by a conspiracy of silence that spans continents. Behind every massacre, every displaced family, every bullet fired in Port-au-Prince's streets lies a carefully orchestrated business model run by what Haitians call the "BAM BAM"—an acronym that phonetically means "Gimme Gimme" in Creole.
The BAM BAM represents six oligarch dynasties—the Brandt, Acra, Madsen, Bigio, Apaid, and Mevs families—who control 90 percent of Haiti's wealth while the vast majority of the Black population lives in grinding poverty. These predominantly Middle Eastern and European-descended families have turned gang violence into a profitable enterprise, using criminal groups as private militias to protect their monopolies and maintain political control over a nation they've never truly allowed to govern itself.
For over a century, this shadow oligarchy has operated with breathtaking impunity, turning Haiti into what amounts to a perfectly designed extraction machine: maximum profit for a handful of families, maximum suffering for everyone else.
The Billionaire Behind the Bloodshed
Gilbert bigio and his son Reuven. Gilbert Bigio's Company – GB Group owns interests in sixteen of Haiti's largest companies and is head of the Oligarchs in that country.
Canada accused Bigio and fellow oligarchs Reynold Deeb and Sherif Abdallah of "using their economic power to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption." The 86-year-old patriarch, worth an estimated $1 billion, had purchased Jeffrey Epstein's Mercedes Maybach for $132,000—quite a statement in a nation where 4.7 million people face acute food insecurity.
Dan Foote, who served as U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti from July to September 2021, finally said what many had long suspected: "I guarantee there is a positive integer of oligarchs who have used the gangs for security and paid them. They've been running the country for at least 120 years."
Yet even as this confirmation emerged from a senior U.S. official, the international community continued its willful blindness to the system that creates the very crises it claims to want to solve.
The Diplomatic Shield: Immunity for Mass Murder
What makes the oligarchs virtually untouchable isn't just their wealth—it's their sophisticated use of diplomatic immunity to operate above any law. Bigio served as Israel's honorary consul for over two decades, with a large Israeli flag flying outside his palatial home. Abdallah has represented Italy as honorary consul for more than a decade. These positions allow them to avoid taxes while maintaining private ports with minimal government oversight.
This explains the mystery that has long puzzled observers: how weapons continue flooding into a country where even police ammunition is strictly controlled. The oligarchs import arms through their private ports, the same infrastructure they use to maintain their monopolies on everything from steel to consumer goods.
The system is designed for perfect deniability. When gangs like the G9 federation commit massacres—such as the December 2024 slaughter of 207 people in Cité Soleil—the oligarchs who fund and direct them remain safely behind layers of diplomatic protection and offshore companies revealed in the Pandora Papers.
Controlled Chaos: The Business Model of Violence
The gang violence isn't random—it's a business strategy. Different oligarch families fund competing gangs to maintain territorial control, protect their economic interests, and eliminate political threats. When businessman Reynold Deeb needed to challenge Bigio's control of customs operations, he found his "game-changer" in gang leader Arnel Joseph, elevating him among his "important pawns."
As one Haitian investigative report revealed: "the war was waging between Deeb and Bigio who had launched the gangs of Chancerelles and Bas Delmas. In Arnel, Deeb found his game-changer for the control of Lower Town and, thus, won the war against Bigio."
This isn't criminal opportunism—it's strategic planning. The oligarchs benefit from a weak state that cannot tax them, regulate their monopolies, or investigate their crimes. Why would they want stability when instability serves their interests so perfectly?
A Century of Coups and Complicity
The oligarchs didn't stumble into this system—they've refined it over generations. By the 1970s, families like the Bigios were collaborating with the autocratic Duvalier regime, whose fearsome Tonton Macoute paramilitaries killed and tortured thousands. U.S. diplomatic cables show how closely Fritz Mevs worked with Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, urging him to fire ministers seen as "anti-business."
When democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide threatened their stranglehold with policies favoring Haiti's poor majority, the oligarchs orchestrated his overthrow—twice. The 1991 coup was backed by the same families who appear on today's sanctions lists. In the 2004 coup, oligarch André Apaid offered to pay gang leaders in Cité Soleil to turn against Aristide.
Even the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse fits this pattern. Many believe Moïse had finally decided to challenge the oligarch system, knowing it would likely cost him his life. As one observer noted: "I believe that at some point he had this revelation and was willing to take on the oligarchs, knowing it would not end well for him."
Miami Money Laundering: How America Enables the Extraction
The oligarchs couldn't maintain their system without sophisticated international support. U.S. lawyers and bankers in Miami have provided tax advice, letters of reference, and financial services that allow these families to move wealth through offshore companies in secretive tax havens.
The Pandora Papers revealed how Bigio and Abdallah owned or controlled almost 20 companies and trusts in various tax havens. Abdallah established a British Virgin Islands company to own a $1 million yacht named Karisa, listing his Miami apartment as his home address. His private bankers at Santander Bank in Miami facilitated these transactions with professional discretion.
This isn't ancient history—it's ongoing collaboration. Even as Haiti burns and 1.3 million people flee gang violence, American financial institutions continue enabling the very oligarchs who fund that violence.
The Racial Dimension: White Warlords, Black Scapegoats
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this system is its deliberate racial structure. The oligarchs—many of whom are descendants of Middle Eastern and European immigrants—use what one analysis calls "Black faces" as political puppets while maintaining real control behind the scenes.
A Haitian writer explained the brutal calculus: "For over a century now, with US complicity, ultra-national 'white' families routinely pick 'Black faces' to front dictatorships in Haiti that do their bidding." When those Black politicians outlive their usefulness or threaten the system, they're disposed of—often violently.
This creates the perfect illusion: Haiti appears to be a Black-run country destroying itself, when in reality it's controlled by oligarchs who have every incentive to maintain chaos. The international media rarely shows the oligarchs' faces or mentions their names, allowing them to operate in comfortable anonymity while Black Haitians bear the blame for the violence these families orchestrate.
The Kenya Mission: Protecting the Puppet Masters
The current Kenyan-led security mission takes on a sinister dimension when viewed through this lens. The mission's failure isn't accidental—it's by design. With just over 380 Kenyan police officers facing 12,000 gang members, the force is woefully inadequate for its stated mission.
But perhaps that's the point. The oligarchs don't want the gangs eliminated—they want them managed. A successful security mission that actually dismantled gang networks would threaten the very system the oligarchs use to maintain control.
Meanwhile, the international community focuses on gang violence as if it's a natural disaster rather than a deliberately maintained system of control. This allows donors to feel virtuous about providing humanitarian aid while carefully avoiding the root cause of the crisis.
The Ultimate Extraction Machine
What the oligarchs have created in Haiti represents colonialism's perfect evolution: all the extraction benefits with none of the administrative costs or international oversight of formal colonial rule. They maintain monopolies on key imports, avoid virtually all taxes, import weapons at will, and use gangs to eliminate competition—all while maintaining the fiction of Haitian sovereignty.
The system works so well that when successful Black entrepreneurs try to challenge it, they're quickly eliminated. Telecommunications executive Franck Ciné invested $85 million in Haiti's largest private investment at the time, only to be arrested on dubious charges and have his assets seized by a government controlled by the oligarchs.
The message was clear: even wealthy Black Haitians are not allowed to compete with the oligarch families. The extraction must continue uninterrupted.
Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence
The international community's continued engagement with Haiti's puppet governments while ignoring the oligarchs isn't incompetence—it's complicity. Foreign powers find it convenient to deal with easily manipulated politicians while the real power brokers remain safely in the shadows.
This arrangement serves everyone except the Haitian people. Donors can claim they're helping while ensuring their aid never threatens the fundamental power structure. Politicians can grandstand about gang violence without addressing its root causes. And the oligarchs continue profiting from a system that has served them perfectly for over a century.
But the mask is finally slipping. Canada's sanctions represent the first crack in a wall of international silence that has protected these families for generations. The question now is whether other nations will follow suit or continue enabling a system that has turned one of the world's first free Black republics into an oligarch playground.
Until the international community stops treating the symptoms and starts dismantling the oligarch networks that fund gang violence, Haiti's suffering will continue exactly as designed. The BAM BAM families have created the perfect crime: a system so brutal and effective that its victims are blamed for their own destruction, while the architects of that destruction live in luxury, protected by diplomatic immunity and international willful blindness.
The world's failure isn't in its response to Haiti's crisis—it's in its refusal to acknowledge who's really behind it.
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