Michel Martelly 2007, he moved back to Haiti. In the process, when the mortgage/financial sector crashed, he defaulted on more than $1m in loans, losing 3 properties to foreclosure. Following the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hits Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince in January 2010, Martelly ran for President of Haiti in the general elections. He benefited from his celebrity status as a musician, and held musical rallies called koudjay (musical political endorsement rallies), drawing crowds and media attention. He challenged the results as to whether he placed second, making the runoff, or third. On 3 February 2011, it was announced that he would participate
Michel Martelly 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." Martelly has been heralded as a pioneer of a unique genre of compas, a style of Haitian dance music sung predominantly in the Haitian Creole language. Originally, compas, was the creation of Nemours Jean-Baptiste. Martelly, a keyboardist and the self-proclaimed "President of Compas," popularized a