Centre Department

Centre exists because mountains exist. Haiti's central plateau—the Cahos Mountains—divides north from south, and Centre Department occupies that highland backbone. Landlocked and mountainous, Hinche sits at 500 meters elevation where the Artibonite River begins its descent to the coast. But Centre's significance isn't geography—it's what humans built on that geography. In 1956, Haiti constructed the Péligre Dam, creating Lake Péligre and transforming Centre from a backwater into the hydraulic control point for the nation's breadbasket below.

The Artibonite River begins in the Dominican Republic's Cordillera Central, flows through Centre Department, then spreads across Artibonite's rice fields before reaching the Gulf of Gonâve. For centuries, the river flooded seasonally, depositing nutrients but also destroying crops. The Péligre Dam—72 meters tall, Haiti's tallest and the Caribbean's largest hydroelectric project—was built to regulate that flow. Three 17-megawatt Francis turbines generate 51 MW of electricity. More importantly, the dam operators control when water reaches farmers 80 kilometers downstream.

Ecosystem engineers are species that physically modify their environment: beavers build dams, termites build mounds, humans build infrastructure. The Péligre Dam flooded the Péligre Basin, displacing thousands of families and creating Lake Péligre—Haiti's second-largest lake—as an artificial reservoir. It was supposed to control floods, irrigate farmland, and power industrialization. It succeeded at the first two. Haitian industry never arrived. By 2025, the dam supplies about 15% of Haiti's electricity, but most of that goes to Port-au-Prince. Centre Department itself remains poor, rural, and without reliable power.

The upstream-downstream dynamic creates biological dependency: Centre controls the resource (water), Artibonite depends on the supply. When the dam releases water, rice paddies flood. When it withholds water, crops die. Sedimentation has reduced the reservoir's capacity by an estimated 30% since 1956—deforestation upstream sends topsoil into the lake, slowly filling it. No one dredges. The infrastructure built for 100 years will fail in 70.

By 2026, Centre Department faces the paradox of engineered ecosystems: you can reshape landscapes, but you can't escape the laws of thermodynamics. Sedimentation is entropy in action. As gangs spread from Port-au-Prince into Artibonite, Centre's role as water gatekeeper becomes strategic. Whoever controls the dam controls the rice. The central plateau—once bypassed for coastal plains—suddenly matters again.