The Service Counter Has Disappeared, but the Tax Still Exists

A truck leaves Port-au-Prince on an ordinary morning. The driver knows he will pay; he does not yet know where. The collection point will be indicated to him along the way, rarely in the same place from one week to the next. No barrier across the road, no checkpoint, no visible armed presence. The tax exists; the collection window, however, is nowhere to be found. This scene is not the account of a single convoy: it reconstructs a mechanism described separately, and in converging terms, by several transportation, commercial and logistics ope