Fritz Alphonse Jean, de facto president of Haiti, is calling from a well-appointed office in the Villa d’Accueil, temporary home of the Haitian government. It is an island of calm in what Mr. Jean calls the country’s “situation of war.”
The machinery of state has been forced to largely relocate from the National Palace, a grand neoclassical building in Port-au-Prince that typically houses the country’s leaders, because of regular gunfights between heavily armed gangs and the habitually underpowered police.
