Danny Shaw on Honduras & Venezuela Elections + Movements in Haiti

Correction: The definition of Haitians of Dominican descent has been clarified. The length of the constructed portion of the border fence has been corrected. The name that Dominican officials had given for a victim has been updated, based on newly obtained information.

Whenever Malena goes to work or heads out to study, she tries to leave her home very early and return after dark. The 33-year-old mother of five does so for fear of being detained by the Dominican Republic’s immigration agents, even though she is Dominican.

Born and raised in a batey, a settlement around a sugar mill in the San Pedro de Macorís province, Malena is the daughter of Haitian sugar cane workers who arrived in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, during the U.S.-backed Dominican dictatorship of Joaquin Balaguer.

Malena now lives in La Romana, also in the eastern part of the country. She has three sisters, two of whom have an identification card, acquired through a regularization plan for foreigners. Meanwhile, she and her other sister don’t have any documents. Close encounters with immigration authorities are normal.

“On a trip to the capital, Migration [officers] stopped the bus,” Malena recounted. “They said to a young man: ‘Papers, moreno!’ And since he only had a Haitian ID card, they took him off the bus. They only look for Black people. Luckily, they didn’t look at me. Sometimes by WhatsApp, I’m warned not to pass through some place because Migration is there. It’s always a danger.”

Malena and her sisters are some of the more than 200,000 people affected in the last 10 years by Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, according to estimates of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This ruling deprived Dominicans of Haitian descent who had been born after 1929 of their citizenship. As such, the impacts of statelessness are rampant.

“My children have no papers,” Malena said. “Without papers, you can’t have health insurance. You can’t have a good job. I had to repeat 8th grade because I couldn’t take the national test. The same thing happened to my son.”

Mass Deportations

Since 2021, the government of Luis Abinader has been promoting a campaign of mass deportations of the Haitian immigrant community. This also affects Dominicans of Haitian descent. Those are people who were born in the Dominican Republic, have Haitian parents or grandparents, and often are stateless, as in Malena’s case. The head of the General Directorate of Migration, Venancio Alcántara, declared recently that between August and April, more than 200,000 Haitians had been deported. “A record in the history of this institution.”

This statistic shows its true dimensions when contrasted with the size of the Haitian migrant community and the population of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Although no recent official figures exist, Dominican Ambassador to Spain Juan Bolívar wrote an opinion piece in June that estimated both populations, when counted together, at less than 900,000 people, or about 8 percent of the country’s population of 10.6 million. Bolívar’s estimation is based on the 2017 National Immigrant Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office.

That means 22 percent of Haitians had been deported between August and April.

This is why Dominican and Haitian organizations have warned of the danger that the mass deportation campaign could turn into a process of open ethnic cleansing and consolidate an apartheid regime, as previously reported in Toward Freedom.

Extortions, Theft and Violence at the Border

One of the flagship projects of the Dominican government is the expansion of a border fence. Previous governments built the first 23 kilometers (14 miles). Now, fence construction is continuing, so it can cover 164 kilometers (101 miles).  The Abinader government insists in forums, such as the United Nations, on the need for the “international community” to militarily occupy and “pacify” Haiti, complaining about the “burden” the neighboring country represents for the Dominican Republic.

However, the violence of the Dominican state has crossed the border into Haiti.

On March 19, members of the Dominican military attacked the Haitian border village of Tilory in the north, killing two people—Guerrier Kiki and Joseph Irano—and wounding others in their attempt to suppress a protest. According to a statement signed by Dominican and Haitian organizations, the Dominican military regularly engages in extortion and theft, including the seizure of motorcycles and other property, which led to the protest.

This is not the only recent cross-border incident. On August 5, an agent of the Dominican Directorate General of Customs (DGA) shot and killed 23-year-old Haitian, Irmmcher Cherenfant, at the border crossing between Pedernales and Anse-A-Pitres, in the southern end of the north-to-south Dominican-Haitian border. Dominican officials identified Cherenfant as Georges Clairinoir. The DGA and the Dominican Ministry of Defense justified Cherenfant’s killing as an instance of self-defense. Dominican social organizations questioned this version, pointing out contradictions in the official communiqués.

A human rights defender from Anse-A-Pitres who spoke with witnesses said the conflict began when the victim refused to pay a customs guard to be allowed to transport a power generator purchased in the Dominican Republic. After Cherenfant was killed, a struggle ensued, in which the guard was disarmed by Haitians. Subsequently, the Dominican military fired weapons of war indiscriminately into Haitian territory, injuring two people. The human rights defender, who works for a local organization, asked not to be identified for security reasons.

The Dominican government paid a compensation of 400,000 pesos (approximately $7,200) to Cherenfant’s wife the following week. But when the community mobilized on August 12 against military violence and in memory of the victim, the Dominican military threatened some of the protest organizers that they would be prohibited from entering Dominican territory.

‘A Vibrant Democracy’

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Santo Domingo on April 12 and met with Abinader. According to State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, they discussed their “deep ties” and “shared democratic values,” as well as regional security issues, including the “urgent situation in Haiti.”

During her visit, Sherman recorded a video message in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, extolling the country as a tourist attraction and calling the political regime a “vibrant and energetic democracy… a strong and exceptional partner with the United States of America.”

In her tour of the colonial zone, Sherman can be seen escorted by the mayor of the National District, Carolina Mejia, a member of the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), and by Kin Sánchez, a guide of the Tourism Cluster. Significantly, Sánchez was part of a mob led by the neo-fascist organization, Antigua Orden Dominicana, which attacked and shouted racist slogans against a cultural activity held on October 12 that was intended to commemorate Indigenous resistance. The complicity of the National Police caused nationwide repercussions.

After Sherman’s visit, Republican U.S. Congressmember Maria Elvira Salazar and Democratic U.S. Congressmember Adriano Espaillat, announced the U.S. State Department would withdraw a November 19 travel alert warning Black tourists of racial profiling by Dominican immigration authorities. The April 17 travel advisory only mentions risks related to criminality. Dominican Tourism Minister David Collado welcomed the move as a “very positive and appropriate” measure, describing the U.S. as a “strategic partner.”

Meanwhile, two days after Sherman’s visit, Haitian driver Louis Charleson was shot and killed by a military officer in the Dominican border town of Jimaní following a traffic altercation. A young Haitian man was wounded, too. The Haitian Support Group for Returnees and Refugees (GARR) denounced the impunity that covers the Dominican military and police in the border area. The agent who murdered Irmmcher Cherenfant last year in Pedernales continues to hold the same position at the Directorate General of Customs. He has not been dismissed or prosecuted.

“As always, Dominican officials present the simplistic argument of self-defense to comfort the offending soldiers with impunity,” GARR stated.

Vladimir Fuentes is the pen name of a freelance journalist based in the Dominican Republic.

Correction: The event in Ciudad Juan Bosch took place in May.

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic—Manuel Dandré recounted a case of the injustice suffered by Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Haitian parents of two girls had permanent residency in the Dominican Republic. Both children were Dominicans because they met the constitutional criteria that their parents be in regular migratory status at the moment of their birth in Dominican territory.

“In spite of this, the girls were detained,” Dandré, a lawyer, told this reporter. “The father had to go on a motorcycle to catch up with the bus that was transporting them.” With the intervention of United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and UN-affiliated International Organization For Migration (IOM), the deportation was prevented at the border.

Unfortunately, that is but one case where a family was not broken apart. From January to November 2022, UNICEF had counted more than 1,800 unaccompanied children expelled to Haiti from the Dominican Republic, often without documents to prove that they were Haitians. In the midst of this situation, Dandré provides legal assistance through two organizations that assist Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, the Sociocultural Movement of Haitian Workers (MOSCTHA) and the Jacques Viau Network.

A record-breaking 154,333 Haitian immigrants were expelled in 2022. That’s more than triple the yearly average of the period between 2017 and 2021. The Dominican government’s campaign of mass deportations is the latest episode in what human-rights advocates, and social and political activists, describe as a strategy to deepen racial discrimination.

Deportations Continue Unabated

United Nations officials had called in November for an end to the mass expulsions of Haitian citizens. However, Dominican President Luis Abinader responded the deportations would not only continue, but would be accelerated. Abinader also issued decree 688-22, which creates a special police unit to target immigrants and orders the immediate expulsion of immigrants living on state or privately owned lands. This definition coincides with the reality of the Bateyes, communities established in sugarcane regions for migrant Haitian workers and their families.

On Nov. 19, the U.S. embassy issued a travel alert according to which travelers to the Dominican Republic “reported being delayed, detained, or subject to heightened questioning at ports of entry and in other encounters with immigration officials based on their skin color.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stopped the entry of raw sugar and sugar products produced by Central Romana Corporation, which operates in the eastern part of the country, stating it had found indicators of forced labor.

The Dominican Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response stressed that the “humanitarian, social and political” crisis in Haiti “seriously affects the national security of the Dominican Republic.”

“The Dominican government would never have imagined such serious insinuations about our country, whose population evidences in its skin color a wide melting pot of races,” added the official note.

Central Romana, owned by the Cuban-American Fanjul family, replied that CBP’s remarks “do not reflect the policies and practices of Central Romana.”

Extorting Relatives of Detainees

Dandré, born in 1960, is himself one of the more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent affected by a denationalization policy initiated in 2004, when the migration law defined immigrants without visas as persons “in transit,” to exclude their children from acquiring Dominican nationality at birth. This policy culminated in 2013 with Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, which retroactively applied the criteria of the 2004 General Law of Migration to all born after 1929. Widespread international condemnation ensued. After litigation, Dandré regained documents certifying his Dominican citizenship.

Dandré told this reporter about a 16-year-old girl who was detained by the police and taken to the immigration detention center in the town of Haina, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, where she was held for nine days. The law prohibits the detention of minors, pregnant women and elderly people in immigration proceedings, but such violations of the law are frequent, he said.

“The Haina detention center is overcrowded and in terribly unsanitary conditions,” Dandré explained. “If a detained person has relatives who bring food, the officers demand payments to deliver it—they extort them.”

When it was imminent that the court would order the release of the girl, she was handed over to another institution, the National Council for Adolescence and Childhood, which carried out her expulsion to Haiti.

“She should never have been taken to Haina, where most of the detainees are men,” Dandré pointed out.

‘Dehumanization’ of Haitian People

Ana Belique is one of the young leaders of the Movimiento Reconocido, which fights for the restitution of Dominican nationality to the people affected by ruling 168-13.

“In 2004, the new Migration Law was made and, in 2010, the Constitution was changed. Both changes are strategically designed to limit the rights of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic,” Belique pointed out.

A statement signed by Movimiento Reconocido and dozens of Dominican and Haitian organizations describes this strategy as the imposition of systematic racial discrimination, warning about the risks of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Belique has first-hand knowledge of cases of foreigners who have suffered discrimination because they “look Haitian.” She mentions Caribbean and African exchange students, as well as the case of two Black U.S. citizens besieged in May by neo-Nazis and National Police officers in Ciudad Juan Bosch, a suburb in the eastern part of Santo Domingo.

“What worries me most about the current campaign of mass deportations is the dehumanization against Haitian people,” Belique added.

On Dec. 2, representatives of social organizations met with Dominican Attorney General Miriam German.

Among the complaints they presented regarding human rights violations against the immigrant community were the murders of Joel Lolo and Delouise Estimable. Lolo, a 18-year-old construction worker, was shot in the head by an immigration agent during a warrantless raid on his home in Las Matas de Farfan in March, while Delouise was beaten to death in a truck in the northern province of Valverde in July.

Little more than a week later, an illegal raid took place of the offices of the Dominico-Haitian Women’s Movement (MUDHA), one of the organizations represented in the meeting with the Attorney General. In a joint statement, social organizations denounced that raiding agents wore military intelligence uniforms.

‘To This Day, I Am Without a Pension’

Meanwhile, thousands of Haitian sugarcane workers who arrived in the country between the 1960s and 1970s, like Belique and Dandré’s parents, have organized in the Union of Sugarcane Workers (UTC) to demand the payment of their pensions. Around 15,000 sugarcane workers have been waiting, many of them taking to the streets for years. Some have passed away without the state recognizing their claim. On Dec. 7, they rallied again in front of the Ministry of Labor in Santo Domingo, to demand an end to forced labor in Central Romana.

“I joined in 1972, I worked in Altagracia, in the State Sugar Council,” recounted retired sugarcane worker Yega Fabián. “When I went to the sugar mill they gave me a machete, a sack and sent me to cut cane. I applied for the pension in 2012. To this day, I am without a pension. I have six children and 13 grandchildren. All of them have an identification card, but not me.”

The protest, to the traditional cry of “No sugarcane workers, no sugar,” was marked by news that another retired Haitian sugarcane worker, Lico Alerté, had died early that morning.

Alerté never received his pension.

Vladimir Fuentes is the pen name of a freelance journalist based in the Dominican Republic.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis and was originally published in Eurasia Review.

On December 16, two Haitian embassy diplomats—Williamson Jean and Jackson Lorrain—were arrested on their way from the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo to a farm in the Monte Cristi province, where they were planning to deliver 11 passports for the hundreds of Haitian workers awaiting their arrival. The Dominican military confiscated the passports and computer equipment used to produce personal identification cards—all of which belong to the Haitian state. The arrest took place in spite of Jean and Lorrain showing diplomatic identification, the authenticity of which was later confirmed by a top Haitian consulate official, Francois Guerrier. 

These incidents have occurred against a backdrop of rising tensions between the two countries, with the Dominican Republic tightening border surveillance and implementing a series of measures to curb irregular migration from Haiti.

Colonial Exploitation

Present-day hostilities between the countries that occupy the island of Hispaniola are deeply rooted in the historical soil of racism and imperialism. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick formalized French control over the western third of Hispaniola—at that time a Spanish asset—under the name of Saint-Domingue. In 1797, Spain ceded the entire island to France. A valuable spigot of wealth, Saint-Domingue supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. It was a greater source of income for its owners than the whole of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies combined.

The half-a-million slaves who propped up the dazzling opulence of the French commercial bourgeoisie rebelled in August 1791—two years after the French Revolution and its ripple effects in Saint-Domingue. Collective British, Spanish and French efforts to crush the rebellion set off a war that lasted 13 years and concluded with the humiliating defeat of imperial powers. William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon

Bonaparte together lost some 50,000 troops in the campaign to restore slavery and the elaborate structures of exploitation. The defeat of the latter’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the state of Haiti on January 1, 1804. Frightened by Haiti’s establishment of a black republic resolutely opposed to the barbarism of European civilization, Dominican elites developed a national identity that defined Dominicans as white, Catholic and culturally Hispanic, in contradistinction to Haitians, whom they characterized as black, animist and culturally African. “Antihaitianismo,” or anti-Haitian racism, became stronger with Haiti’s occupation of the Dominican Republic, which lasted from 1822 until 1844.

President Jean-Pierre Boyer—under whom Hispaniola was unified—feared the French would use Dominican territory as a base to try to re-conquer Haiti. His decision also followed a constitutional ideal: Merger of the whole island in the face of foreign aggressions. Though Haiti’s occupation was welcomed positively by poor Dominicans, the Dominican ruling class disliked being ruled by people they considered inferior. Thus, soon after Boyer was overthrown in 1843 and General Charles Rivière-Hérard took power, a small group of activists in Santo Domingo overturned unified rule. Rivière-Hérard tried to oppose the separation and sent troops eastward, but he was more focused on the consolidation of power at home and could not succeed due to domestic instabilities. On February 27, 1844, the Dominican rebels drove the last Haitian troops from the capital, securing independence.

The Myth of the “Indio”

The fight for independence among Dominicans was heavily tainted by anti-Haitian myths. One such myth concerned the Dominican “Indio.” Even though the indigenous Taíno people were mostly killed after the Spanish conquest, Dominican leaders insisted Dominicans’ ancestors were Indigenous and Spanish, not enslaved African laborers. Why were Indigenous people chosen as the central symbol of Dominican identity? Taínos are neither white nor Black—an attribute capable of accommodating the ambiguity of the Dominican mulatto, a slang term for a person of mixed European and African ancestry. Battle lines were now drawn according to this racial schema—the Indio being pitted against the Haitian, who came to be regarded as the real Black.

These conflicts intensified over the subsequent decades, preparing a context of disunity favorable to the imperial project of the United States, which threatened both nations of Hispaniola with the possibility of intervention if they did not get “upheavals and banditry” under control.

Using these pretexts, the U.S. empire invaded the Caribbean island. First in 1915 in Haiti, then entering the Dominican Republic in 1916. The 8-year-long occupation of the Dominican Republic sparked the creation of a comprador class—local people who served as a subsidiary to the foreign corporations that owned Dominican sugar plantations through their dominance in the National City Bank of New York, which managed the country’s finances. A social architecture as rigidly exploitative as this required an authoritarian government—an imperative fulfilled by the Guardia Nacional Dominicana (Dominican National Guard, or GND). The U.S. Marines instructed Rafael Leonidas Trujillo to lead the GND in 1918 and made him commander-in-chief of the National Army in 1927. In 1930, with support from his military, Trujillo supported a coup against then-President Horacio Vasquez.

Under the ruthless dictatorship of Trujillo—which lasted until 1961—antihaitianismo solidified. In 1937—during what is now called the Parsley Massacre—Trujillo aimed to whiten the Dominican Republic by expelling Haitians. Trujillo, who was known to lighten his own skin with makeup, ordered the deaths of those who refused his order to leave. These Haitians were recognized by their inability to pronounce “perejil,” Spanish for “parsley.” Most Haitians could not make the Spanish “r” sound as the French “r” was different. This massacre killed nearly 30,000 people. These mass killings were followed by the production of propaganda in favor of an anti-Haitian ideology. Dominican history books started over-emphasizing the Haitian occupation—the demonization of the dark-skinned “other” became par for the course.

In 1962, Juan Bosch ran for president under the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), inaugurating the first democratic government of the post-dictatorial era. Seven months later, he was overthrown by a coalition of the oligarchs, the old Trujillist army and the Catholic Church. Faced with a popular revolt, the putschists solicited the support of the United States, which sent its military in 1965, killing 5,000 people. After the defeat of the democratic revolution, Joaquin Balaguer—a disciple of Trujillo—led a repressive government. An anti-communist flunky of the United States, as well as a close collaborator of François Duvalier’s dictatorial regime in Haiti, Balaguer’s 12-year reign was responsible for incarcerating, torturing and murdering 6,000 people.

In the late 1970s, the PRD came to office. After that, the reins of the national government alternated among the PRD, the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) and, briefly, the Social Christian Reform Party (PRSC)—associated with Balaguer. 

Antihaitianismo Under Neoliberalism

While the PLD became largely dominant, the PRD came to represent the country’s main official opposition. With the growing impact of neoliberal globalization, the progressive legacy of the struggle against Trujillismo and Balaguerismo was abandoned in favor of a rightward shift toward anti-Haitian Hispanophilic identities. In 2010, the formerly center-left PLD called a constitutional convention, largely to exclude a new group from the birthright-citizenship clause: The children of anyone “residing illegally in Dominican territory.”

The injunction was aimed at Haitians and served as a blueprint for the Constitutional Court’s regressive ruling on September 23, 2013. It declared the nearly 500,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were illegal, thus subject to deportation. The ruling extended to the descendants of Haitian immigrants who came to the Dominican Republic as early as 1929. Systematic stigmatization has enabled the Dominican bourgeoisie to force Haitians into conditions of semi-slavery on sugar plantations, to deport tens of thousands of Haitians without a court hearing, and to deny citizenship and access to public services to Dominican-born children of Haitian parents. In the en masse expulsions of Haitians, some dark-skinned Dominican citizens have been identified as Haitian and deported to Haiti without being given a chance to prove citizenship. This is emblematic of a wider problem facing the Black and mulatto masses of the Dominican Republic: To either assume the Indio identity and Hispanic culture, or to be ostracized from the body politic.

In 2014, when former president Hipólito Mejía left the PRD to form the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), Luis Abinader—a 52-year-old businessman with no previous experience in public office—jumped on the bandwagon. In 2020, he was elected president, ending the 16-year dominance of the PLD. Dominicans of Haitian descent—who make up 7.3 percent of the population—had placed their trust in the administration, hoping it would put an end to their condition of statelessness. 

Abinader, however, has continued to deport thousands of Haitians. He also has begun constructing a 118-mile border wall between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The estimated cost is over $100 million. Taking into account the negative impact of the pandemic on tourism, construction and the flow of remittances, the erection of a xenophobic wall should be the last thing on Abinader’s agenda. The government’s continued maintenance of such an exclusionary project indicates it is fundamentally anti-people in nature, using antihaitianismo to deflect the public’s attention from its destructive, market-oriented economic policies.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. He can be contacted at [email protected].