By Youri Kemp
Caribbean News Now associate editor
[email protected]
PORT AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The upheaval in Haiti never fully subsided after the protests of 2018 created by the government’s failed attempt to remove a fuel price subsidy as recommended by the International Monetary-Fund (IMF), which was extended and subsequently made worse by the loss of the PetroCaribe subsidised oil agreement due to the current political and economic turmoil engulfing the supplier, namely, Venezuela’s state owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), and what seems to be an end to the agreement for the Caribbean by PDVSA and the Venezuelan government.
Prior to the apparent full scale collapse of the PetroCaribe oil agreement signalled at the end of November 2018, Haitians were already protesting the lack of accounting and transparency and overall misuse of the PetroCaribe funds and subsequent short-term windfalls generated by the arrangement, of which most of the $1.8 billion owed to PDVSA was accumulated as a result of the previous eight years of support under the agreement given to the Haitian government post-2010 earthquake.
