the Canadian Government, which accuses him of involvement in human rights violations and supporting criminal gangs, on 17 November 2022. The record of his presidency is very disappointing in view of the hopes that the Haitian people put in him. Thus, women’s rights have declined, violence has increased and Michel Martelly has been the subject of suspicion of corruption on a large scale. He was directly implicated in the Petrocaribe scandal, in which hundreds of millions of dollars of Venezuelan aid were diverted by Haitian politicians and business leaders. For the political scientist Frédéric Thomas, the accession to power of Michel Martelly in 2011 marked the beginning of a "form of legal banditry" and constitutes a key step in the process of decay of the Haitian state. Early life Martelly was born in Côtes-de-Fer, the son of Gerard Martelly, a Shell Oil executive and Marie Madeleine Martelly (née De Pradines, b. 1931 – d. 21 October 2016). On his mother's side, his grandfather Auguste de Pradines was a troubadour who wrote comic protest songs against the 1915–34 United States occupation of Haiti. After graduating from high school at the Institution Saint Louis de Gonzague, Martelly enlisted in the Haitian Military Academy, but (according to Martelly) was expelled after impregnating the daughter of a general. In 1984, he moved to the United States, and worked in construction and briefly attended a community college in Miami. In 1986, after one semester, he divorced his first wife, an American citizen, and returned to Haiti just as Jean-Claude Duvalier, then president-for-life, was heading into exile. In 1987, Martelly returned to Miami with his then-girlfriend, Sophia Saint-Rémy, whom he later married in a small ceremony in Miami, Florida. They returned to Haiti in 1988. Upon his return to Haiti, Martelly had his first breakthrough in the music industry when he began playing keyboard as a fill-in musician in local venues in Pétion-Ville and Kenscoff, upscale suburbs of Port-au-Prince. Martelly "sang playful, romantic numbers over a slow méringue beat called compas, the only music allowed under the Duvaliers." After the 1991 Haitian coup d'état saw the expulsion of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Martelly opened a Pétion-Ville club called the Garage, where he entertained many of the coup's main architects, including the much-feared chief of national police, Michel François, later convicted in absentia for massacring Aristide supporters." Music Martelly has been heralded as a pioneer of a unique genre