Maria Isabel Salvador bids farewell, but Haitians must confront the legacy she represents
Politics | The Haitian Pulse | July 1, 2025
“The Haitian people don’t need another dignified farewell — they need accountability, reparations, and room to build their future without being used as a geopolitical experiment.”
A Warm Goodbye That Rings Hollow
Maria Isabel Salvador’s recent farewell message to the Haitian people was warm, respectful, and filled with flowery affirmations of our courage, legacy, and cultural strength. And while we can acknowledge the human sincerity in her words, we must also confront the truth she leaves behind — a truth soaked in decades of United Nations failures and the deep scars they’ve left on the Haitian body politic.
Haitians are tired of international officials cycling through our country, offering poetic reflections about our resilience and leaving behind broken institutions, deepened insecurity, and fractured sovereignty. Every UN-backed mission in Haiti, from MINUSTAH to BINUH, has not only failed but has often made things worse.
What They Brought: Cholera, Corruption, and Collapse
Let us not forget:
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MINUSTAH, brought to “stabilize” the country, instead brought cholera that killed over 10,000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands more — an act of negligence for which justice has never truly been served.
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UN troops were linked to sexual abuse, exploitation, and a culture of impunity that mocked the very peace they claimed to protect.
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BINUH, Salvador’s mission, gave us endless words and no tangible results — while Haiti descended into total insecurity, gang rule, and political vacuum.
Division Is Their Legacy — But Unity Is Our Future
One truth that must be stated clearly: the West has done an exceptional job at dividing us. Through media, international NGOs, elite co-optation, and foreign-funded politics, they’ve made sure Haitians are fractured by class, skin color, geography, religion, and party line. It’s a strategy as old as colonialism — divide, distract, dominate.
But here’s the more powerful truth: we are not too far off from turning the tide. The Haitian people remain a proud and resilient force, capable of transforming pain into progress when we organize ourselves from within.
“If we move beyond division — if we dare to build from the ground up, without waiting for approval — then we become a force no foreign power can control.”
Our Spirit Has Never Been Theirs to Tame
That’s a powerful truth — and one that deserves to be said out loud. Even when stripped of resources, robbed of leadership, and torn by division, Haiti remains unconquerable in spirit. There is something deeply rooted in the Haitian identity — a spiritual, ancestral force — that the West has never fully understood and never been able to contain.
It goes beyond politics or resistance. It’s the same force that led enslaved ancestors to defeat European empires. It’s the same spiritual defiance that continues to echo through our music, our language, our faith systems, and our ability to rise from every attempt to erase us.
“They fear what they can’t control. And Haiti — in its soul — has never been theirs to tame.”
No More Farewells — We Want Reckonings
Salvador’s words are meant to close a chapter. But we say the chapter is still open — and it’s time to write it ourselves. Haitians should not settle for diplomatic poetry when our youth are dying, our cities are run by terror, and our leaders are either absent or complicit.
This farewell is not just hers. It should be ours too — a goodbye to dependence, to foreign excuses, to handshakes that strangle.
The Call
Haitians must begin organizing. In neighborhoods, churches, schools, and online. Not with slogans — but with strategy, accountability, and unity. No international rescue is coming. The only salvation will come from a mobilized, self-aware Haitian population who demands more — not just of the world, but of itself.
If we succeed in doing that, we won’t need UN missions or foreign envoys. We will become what we’ve always had the potential to be: the architects of our own liberation.
“The world has underestimated Haitians for too long — largely because we’ve been taught to underestimate ourselves. That era must end.”
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