The history (and present) of anti-Haitian racism in the Dominican Republic

Tempest Collective: On October 2, Dominican President Luis Abinader announced a plan to deport 10,000 Haitians a week. Could you start by discussing the significance of this date in Dominican history?

Ingrid Luciano: Just 87 years ago, on October 2, 1937, the dictator Rafael L. Trujillo gave a speech justifying and announcing the so-called “Parsley Massacre”, also known as “El Corte” and therefore this date is commemorated by critical historiography and anti-racist sectors to call attention to that policy of extermination against the Haitian population and Dominicans of Haitian descent of the dictator. Currently, the Dominican State does not have an official commemoration of this massacre. The government of Luis Abinader, however, has taken the date for the announcement of the deepening of its policy of massive deportations with a weekly quota of ten thousand Haitian immigrants. But for some time now they have been carrying out arbitrary detentions, illegal raids, deportations of minors and pregnant women, in what is a de facto state of exception, violating the human rights of the Haitian immigrant population, their descendants and other black Dominicans, along with the assumption of the Trujilloist discourse of presenting Haitian immigrants as a “burden” and a supposed “threat” against the sovereignty of the country, to justify their racist and xenophobic policies.

Amaury Rodríguez: October 2nd is the anniversary of the 1937 genocide of approximately 20,000 people of Haitian descent including black Dominicans. The massacre took place under the Trujillo dictatorship and lasted for several months. Since the ruling class embraces the repressive legacy of the Trujillo dictatorship, this political class remains indifferent to the suffering of the popular sectors and the countless victims of state terror, President Abinader used the symbolism that envelops this act of genocide to send a message to the far right that ethnic cleansing is fair game.

TC: What is the immediate impetus for the mass deportations and how have Dominicans in the country and in the diaspora responded to Abinader’s brutality?

AR: There is a wide array of factors behind the current mass deportation plan. Abinader is following in his predecessor’s footsteps. In other words, xenophobia and racism did not emerge overnight. Actually, both former presidents Danilo Medina and Leonel Fernández were instrumental in rehabilitating the right in the 1990s by launching a racist campaign against Presidential candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez, a black Dominican of Haitian descent. The aftershocks of that rancid, virulent and dehumanizing racist campaign still reverberate to this day.

One factor is the recent emergence of an organized, fascist paramilitary current within the context of the rise of fascism and xenophobia at a global scale. The impact of both Bolsonarism and Trumpism emboldened the Dominican far-right which became dominant in social media and now it is spilling hate into the streets. Additionally, the twenty-year reign of the right-wing Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) enshrined racism and anti-Haitian laws within the constitutional framework.

Another underlying factor is the need of the traditional ruling class to maintain the system of super-exploitation based on racial segregation that workers of Haitian origin have endured since the establishment of the sugar cane industry in the early 20th century. This system of labor control by the Dominican state and the sugar cane industry worked well for local and foreign capitalists in the past. As a consequence of the First American occupation (1916-1924) the sugar cane industry expanded and solidified its system of labor segregation. It was the U.S. marines who dispossessed peasants of their land in many parts of the country especially in the eastern regions. Moreover, the U.S. occupation left behind a brutal dictatorship under General Rafael Trujillo who ordered the massacre of thousands of people of Haitian origin living in the Haitian-Dominican border.

These days Haitian immigrants and their descendants work in other sectors of the economy such as agriculture, construction and tourism. There are also a considerable number of people of Haitian origin who work, side by side with black Dominicans and others, in the informal sector of the economy. Meanwhile, the bosses, in complicity with the state, continue to exploit workers of Haitian origin in the same manner as it was 80 years ago or even worse.

IL: In a very concrete way, the president’s announcement was made between two demonstrations by neo-fascist sectors that have been demanding an acceleration in the government’s anti-Haitian policy. On September 27, a group of neo-Nazis called for a small march demanding more deportations and announced a larger demonstration for October 6. With his announcement, Abinader responds directly to the neo-Nazis, anticipating their requests and carrying out the policies that these sectors ask for. With this, in addition, he ignores the demands of more than a decade of the descendants of Haitian immigrants, stripped of Dominican nationality by Ruling 168-13, who had demonstrated for their right to nationality on September 23 under the slogan “If I am not Dominican, neither is Abinader,” given that the president is also a descendant of immigrants, in his case Christian Lebanese. In fact, mass deportation policies affect immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent, since immigration agents consider stateless Dominicans to be Haitians. So for Abinader, facing these various demonstrations, his announcement is a way to take sides, putting himself at the head of the most rancid and racist sectors of the country. It must also be said that in the same week, the previous Director General of Immigration was dismissed and Ballester Lee, a military officer investigated for the forceful disappearance of the journalist and writer Narciso González (Narcisazo), was put in his place.

The announcement also serves as a smokescreen for his tax and labor reforms and other anti popular measures that he intends to cover up by stoking hatred towards Haitian migrants. There has been an immediate response of rejection from anti-racist organizations, but also feminist and leftist sectors that have also spoken out against the government announcement.

TC: Can you give a brief overview of the history of the Haitian population in the Dominican Republic and the policing of the Haitian border?

AR: I’ll mention some key historical background here: the presence of Haitian people in the Dominican Republic traces its origins to the triumph of the Haitian revolution, an internationalist revolution that abolished slavery and popularized the idea of revolt and Black and indigenous freedom in the European settler colonial societies of the Americas and beyond. The idea of Black and indigenous freedom was dangerous then and it is still dangerous now.

When the Haitian revolutionaries spread their revolution to the next door colony, known back then as Spanish Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic), their revolutionary policies were instrumental in abolishing slavery in the Spanish Santo Domingo colony in 1801; and to the chagrin of the French, Spanish and other colonial empires, the Haitian revolutionaries unified the island for 22 years (1822-1844) in defiance to both the French and Spanish powers which had divided it into two political territories. As part of expressing solidarity with the Dominican people under U.S. military occupation in the 1920s, African-American radicals such as Chandler Owen and A.Philip Randolph characterized the colonial division of the island as a partition similar to what the Irish had undergone under English rule. It is key to understand that the colonial and artificial division of the island disrupted the continuity of shared ecology, natural resources and indigenous culture. With that said, from the very beginning the Spanish colonial elite saw the Haitian revolution as a threat to their wealth and to the survival of the colonial order in the Caribbean region which explains why Santo Domingo became a site of counter-revolution and, as a consequence, the place from where some of the most rabid anti-haitian propaganda emerged at the time.

Emerging as a semi-sovereign nation after it separated or decoupled itself from the Republic of Haiti in 1844, the Dominican Republic would maintain cordial relations with its neighbor in the next following decades. The truth is, Haitian-Dominican solidarity became a fact of life. For example, when the Spanish empire regained control of the Dominican Republic in 1861, Haiti aided the combative Dominican anti-imperialist struggle that defeated the Spanish Crown and put to rest its ambitions to turn the newly independent nation into a provincia de ultramar or overseas province. During the American occupation of Haiti (1915-1924) Dominicans aided anti-imperialist Haitian fighters and built ties with labor activists like Joseph Jolibois Fils who traveled to Santo Domingo in 1922 to attend a Dominican labor congress.

But Trujillo’s genocide of Haitian people living on the borderlands caused widespread trauma, instilling fear across the island, creating mistrust between Haitians and Dominicans, and ultimately, derailing those early efforts of Haitian-Dominican political collaboration that in our view would have been crucial in building an united, working-class and peasant front to combat capitalist exploitation and oppression in the sugar industry and beyond as well as Washington’s imperial reach. Indeed, in a matter of months, the Trujillo regime crushed the “internal enemy” namely progressive sectors and the incipient Dominican labor movement, pushing political dissent underground and sending political opponents into exile until the fall of the regime in 1961. At the onset of the Cuban revolution, the post-dictatorial Dominican society saw a revival of labor struggles and left-wing mobilizations. Meanwhile In neighboring Haiti the dictatorship under François Duvalier, ally of the Trujillo regime, radicalized the youth and persecuted dissent. As a result, many Haitian exiles, some of them with links to the socialist Left, began arriving to the Dominican side of the island.

By 1965, the Dominican Spring culminated into a democratic revolution that exploded in response to the U.S.-backed military coup that overthrew Juan Bosch, the first democratically-elected president after thirty years of dictatorial rule. The importance of this historical event lies in the fact that Haitian revolutionaries living as exiles in Santo Domingo sided with the Dominican revolution and fought in defense of Dominican sovereignty as Washington ordered a military invasion to prevent the emergence of “another Cuba”. And while the 65’ revolution ended in tragedy and defeat–its defeat paved the way for the bloody twelve-year counter-revolutionary regime under Trujillist diplomat and politician Joaquín Balaguer– the rich legacy of Haitian-Dominican solidarity that materialized during the 1965 popular revolt lives on.

IL: I would add to the role played by Joaquín Balaguer, who was a puppet president of the dictator Trujillo and then governed the country for many years. Balaguer, as a politician and “intellectual” played a fundamental role in the crystallization of the anti-Haitian policies of the Dominican State, and in the ideological justifications of a conception that the neighborhood with Haiti is a “threat” to the “Hispanic” Dominican identity, Therefore, the whitening of the border was part of his policies and has been ever since.

TC: Can you explain how racism against black Dominicans factors into this?

IL: Well, you have to understand that the Dominican population is majority Black or Afro-descendant. But the elites have built a narrative that to be Dominican is to not be Haitian and to be Haitian is to be Black, therefore to be Dominican is to not be Black, in a very schematic way. This translates into state policies such as the denationalization of some 200,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent under racial criteria, the arbitrary detention of any Black person on the street by the anti-immigrant raids, because they are “suspected” of being Haitian, and the crystallization of a regime with characteristics of apartheid, since you have a good part of the population with their basic political, economic and social rights annulled, even going out to work or to the hospital can make them vulnerable to being deported to a country they have never been to, in the case of Dominicans of Haitian descent or black Dominicans.

AR: It is worth noting the widespread criminalization of black Dominican youth who live in working-class neighborhoods and face police harassment and brutality on a daily basis. Also, we need to point out the links between the police in the Dominican Republic with police departments from the U.S.

TC: What are the international dynamics of this policy, in particular with regard to the Dominican Republic’s relationship to the United States?

IL: As we have published on our webpage successive Dominican governments have been subservient to North American interests in the region. In the case of Abinader, he is obsessed with military intervention in Haiti, which is what he requests in all international forums, reinforcing the false notion that the Dominican Republic cannot “carry” Haiti on its shoulders. The U.S. government, in practice, endorses the racist policies of the Dominican government. For a long time, Dominican sugar has had preferential treatment in the U.S. market, despite widespread knowledge that it is the product of the semi-slave labor of Haitian, and Dominicans of Haitian descent, sugar cane workers. After many complaints, protests, and reports, the U.S. government made timid gestures of condemnation of the government’s policies, sanctioning the U.S.-owned company Central Romana for practicing forced labor in the sugar industry and issuing an alert to African-American citizens who travel to the Dominican Republic, due to the possibilities of being detained by the police. However, that alert was later withdrawn. Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Abinader and called on its citizens to visit the country, calling it a “vibrant democracy,” which shows the falsehood of the U.S. government concerns and ratifying the mutual loyalties between the two governments. Also Dominican foreign policy is subordinated to the U.S., as can be seen in Abinader´s shameful support for the Israeli state.

TC: Can you describe the organizing efforts taking place to confront this escalation, within the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, across the border, and in the diaspora?

IL: Various organizations have spoken out demanding, not now, but for more than two years, the cessation of the Abinader government’s policy of mass deportations and for four years we have been denouncing the government’s complicity with the neo-fascist sectors. We have demanded that the Procuraduría General de la República (Attorney General’s Office) stop granting impunity to these paramilitary sectors that threaten and attack human rights activists and that, in fact, kidnap immigrants with full police complicity. We have also demanded that they fulfill their legal obligation to investigate and sanction the agents of the General Directorate of Immigration for their crimes against immigrants, which include extortion, robbery, injuries and even torture, sexual abuse and murder.

We have denounced the de facto state of exception, where all constitutional guarantees are suspended for Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. We have sought the solidarity of union, social, feminist, and youth organizations with the cause of the sugarcane workers who demand their pension. Dominicans of Haitian descent have not stopped fighting for their right to nationality and have denounced how all their administrative processes for the recovery of their nationality have been abruptly halted by this government. Haitian immigrants have also organized to demand respect for their human rights, a true regularization plan for immigrants, respect for the Dominican immigration laws by the government itself, which prohibit many of the abuses committed by the current authorities, such as deporting pregnant women, taken even from hospitals, kidnapping and expelling children separated from their parents, raiding homes in the middle of the night, and all this, often with repressive agents acting without proper identification.

Abinader’s policy of racist and xenophobic persecution against Haitians is not new. However, this announcement on October 2 confirms that the government has been working with a system of quotas or deportation goals and that is why they have been increasing the annual record of deportations, which they want to break once again. What this announcement by the president himself confirms is what we have always said, that Abinader is directly responsible for all the crimes against immigrants committed by immigration agents, police and military and also by paramilitary sectors emboldened by the speech of the president himself.

TC: What solidarity actions are you calling for?

IL: We are calling for all actions and campaigns that draw attention to the violation of human rights by the Dominican government. We call on Dominicans and Haitians in the diaspora, as well as workers and leftist organizations to speak out, demonstrate or write to the Dominican embassies demanding the cessation of their racist and xenophobic policies, demanding: 1) End to mass deportations, regularization now 2) End of apartheid and the state of exception in the Dominican Republic, 3) Restitution of nationality to Dominicans of Haitian descent, 4) Pensions for sugarcane workers, union liberty and stop forced labor, 5) End of impunity for neo-Nazi groups and the crimes of police and immigration agents.

Please sign the petition asking President Abinader to stop the mass deportations.

Featured Image credit: Duke University Libraries; modified by Tempest.

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