Report of the Haiti Support Network’s Delegation to the Dominican Republic
for the Second Assembly of Caribbean People
Introduction
From April 5 - 11, 2001, the Haiti Support Network (HSN) visited the Dominican Republic in response to an invitation from the Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas (MUDHA) to investigate reports of tension, violence, and deportations along the Haitian-Dominican border.
The Haiti Support Network (HSN) is a coalition of groups and individuals based in New York which works in support of popular movements in Haiti genuinely dedicated to democracy and self-determination, in particular the Parti Populaire National (PPN).
The HSN has conducted several delegations to Haiti since its founding in 1995. Like previous delegations, the purpose of the HSN’s visit to the Dominican Republic was not simply to investigate often-reported human rights abuses, such as Dominican military’s brutal and illegal deportations of Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans, the subhuman conditions in the bateys, and the killing of Haitians along the border. It was also to understand the political forces at play, particularly the involvement of the United States government, which exercises great influence over the Dominican military establishment. With political tensions rising in Haiti, despite the Aristide government’s extraordinary concessions, the HSN suspects that the tensions along the border can be used as a cover for foreign military intrigue. The links between Dominican president Hipolito Mejià’s new Social Democratic government with Washington-backed Haitian opposition groups was also of interest to the delegation.
The delegation included Lucius Walker, director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and founder of Pastors for Peace, which has conducted world-famous aid “caravans” to Cuba, in direct defiance of the 40-year U.S. embargo against that country, as well as to Nicaragua; Berta Joubert, a videographer from the People’s Video Network (PVN), which like the HSN is affiliated with the International Action Center (IAC), as well as an active member of Workers World Party; Kim Ives, a journalist with Haïti Progrès newspaper and filmmaker with Haiti Films and Crowing Rooster Arts; Ray Laforest, a Haitian unionist with District Council 1707 (AFSCME) in New York; Dan Coughlin, formerly Pacifica Radio’s news director and InterPress Service correspondent in Haiti; Katharine Kean of Crowing Rooster Arts, a film director who has produced several films about Haiti including Rezistans and Haiti: Killing the Dream; Elisa Chavez, an HSN organizer; and Dominique Esser, documentary photographer from Germany who has photographed also with the National Labor Committee (NLC).
Overview
Lucia François, 34, is a house worker who was picked up on Feb. 6 with two of her five children on Avenue Duarte in Santo Domingo and deported to Haiti’s northeast border town Ouanaminthe. Originally from Cayes-Jacmel in Haiti’s south, she is stranded in Haiti’s northeast with no money to feed her children nor return home, with no means to contact her family in Cayes-Jacmel nor her husband and three children who remain in Santo Domingo. She had lived in the Dominican Republic for 17 years.
Idérique Paul, 33, used to work in the rice fields of Haiti’s Artibonite Valley. But cheap foreign rice imports have destroyed production in the valley, forcing him to cross the border in search of work in Dominican rice fields. On Apr. 4, he was picked up with a number of other rice-workers near Monte Christi by Dominican soldiers when going to work at 6 a.m.. He spent the night in a Dominican jail and was deported to Ouanaminthe the next day. He was never paid for the week he worked in the Dominican Republic, and consequently is penniless. He remains in Ouanaminthe awaiting an opportunity to return either to the Dominican Republic or to his hometown of Gonaïves.
Prophète Doriscat, 57, is a cane cutter in Batey #6 in Barahona. From the countryside near the southeastern Haitian city of Jacmel, he has been recruited to cut cane in Dominican fields since 1966. He lives in a filthy cinder-block barracks, with no electricity, water, or toilets. He sleeps in a grimy unlit room with six roommates on the wire-meshing of a wobbly bunk-bed. Life on the batey has never been so terrible, he says. Since the local sugar factory has been privatized, conditions and pay have worsened, and now, despite the desperate conditions in Haiti, many Haitians refuse to come cut cane in the Dominican Republic. The Barahona bateys need about 4000 braceros to cut the harvest. There are presently only about 1200 at work.
These are just three stories from dozens gathered by the HSN delegation.
Behind these tales of human suffering and tragedy lie the dynamics of an unprecedented social and economic crisis sweeping across both nations, which share the island of Hispaniola. The pressures of capitalist globalization combined with North American and European political machinations are causing vast population migrations. Peasants are being uprooted, traditional economic sectors destroyed, and new sweatshop enclaves created as capital, both local and foreign, seeks to ferret and squeeze out more profit from every back, piston, and seed. As a result, exploitation, persecution, and violence are rocketing higher.
But the age of globalization is also that of deception. The Social Democratic government of Hipolito Mejià, despite its progressive posturing, continues to condone the Dominican Army’s brutality against Haitians, but it has instructed them to be more discreet. Refugees are now carted to the border in covered trucks. Often they are returned at night. In the month of March alone, over 12,000 Haitians were deported, according to Dominican military and immigration officials, up from an average of 10,000 per month during the last six months of 2000.
Increasingly, capital and commodities freely circulate across the border between the two neighbors. Dominican coconuts, plantains, tomatoes, and lemons have flooded Haitian markets. Haitian assembly industrialists have set up factories in Dominican free trade zones. This month, the Haitian and Dominican Commerce ministers are discussing how to create a free trade agreement, a mini-NAFTA, for the island. Meanwhile, labor, both Haitian and Dominican, is told to stay put. But it is not. In one week last month, close to 100 Dominican boat-people drowned trying to flee the island. And every week, thousands of Haitians cross into the Dominican Republic in search of work.
The HSN’s Findings
During the six days from April 5th to 11th, the HSN delegation visited the border towns of Dajabòn and Barahona in the Dominican Republic and Ouanaminthe in Haiti, inteviewed human rights activists in Santiago and Santo Domingo, and traveled to half a dozen bateys located outside Santo Domingo, Puerto Plata and Barahona. The delegation also met with Haitian consuls and Dominican government officials, Dominican political parties such as Fuerza de la Revolucion and the Dominican Workers Party (PTD), and groups fighting for the rights of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans such as the Jacques Viau Network, Frontier Solidarity, Centro Puente, and the Movimeiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas (MUDHA).
The delegation had five principal findings:
The level of violence and extortion directed against Haitian workers and merchants has risen dramatically in the last month, particularly in the northwest border area.
There, Dominican soldiers shot and killed three Haitians in the month of March alone.
On March 16, a Dominican soldier, Santos Cabrera, shot and killed a student from Ouanaminthe, Elie Jean Baptiste, 20, when the student was unable to pay a bribe of 20 pesos (about $1.25) after he was stopped crossing the Massacre River about 100 yards south of the international bridge linking Ouanaminthe to Dajabòn. Jean-Baptiste was entering Dajabòn on a Friday, which like Monday, is when Dominican authorities allow Haitians to cross the border to buy and sell merchandise in the town. Jean-Baptiste was trying to cross over before the official 8 a.m. opening of the border. Dominican soldiers routinely ask Haitians, particularly merchants, for a bribe to participate in the Dajabòn market, especially if they are trying to beat the crowds by crossing over early. Jean-Baptiste offered to pay the soldier a bribe of 10 gourdes (about $.40) but the soldier refused. When Jean-Baptiste called the soldier a thief, the soldier shot him. The student died about 30 minutes later in the Dajabòn hospital. The soldier had been one of a unit which last June had fired on a truckload of Haitians, killing 7
On March 12, Dominican coast guard sailors with a Dominican soldier fired on 10 Haitian fishermen sailing near the Dominican port of Manzanillo, killing fisherman Ronald Pierre and wounding at least one other.
On March 27, Dominican soldiers shot a Haitian, Estilieses François, 28, when he escaped with four other prisoners from a Dajabòn jail. Two of the fugitives fled across the Haitian border, the other two were captured by Dominican soldiers.
These three killings are part of a larger trend. In the 15 months from Jan. 2000 to Mar. 2001, Dominican soldiers have killed 15 Haitians in the border region, an average of one killing a month.
In addition to the deaths, the Haitian consul and people in Dajabòn and Ouanaminthe told the delegation that beatings occur on a daily basis. Assaults mostly occur after disputes arise when Dominican soldiers and military-affiliated civilians routinely extort money from Haitian merchants and shoppers who visit the Friday and Monday markets in Dajabòn. The Mejià government has done nothing to stem this corruption, which is open and widespread.
The delegation witnessed the effects of such violence as soon as it entered Dajabòn on Friday, April 6. In the Dajabòn hospital, the delegation interviewed Marie Pierre, 38, mother of seven, who was severely beaten that morning for refusing to pay a bribe when she came into Dajabòn. A soldier agreed to let her enter the town with some bags of rice and beans to sell on the condition that she pay him 400 pesos when leaving town. She agreed. After leaving the soldier, she was approached by a Dominican civilian who, according to Haitian consul Jean-Baptiste, works in cahoots with the soldiers. The civilian asked the woman to pay him 560 pesos. She refused, saying she was obligated to pay the soldier on leaving town. He beat her unconscious and took her merchandise, she told the delegation.
Under the new Mejía government, expulsions have become more systematic while at the same time more discreet.
Under previous governments, there were sporadic waves of massive expulsions, involving large-scale military operations in rural areas coupled with media fanfare. Today, the expulsions are carried out with a lower profile. They are constant and systematic and are being carried out all along the 386 kilometer border. The military transports deportees in covered trucks and often expels them under cover of night.
Based on the reports of local human rights groups, Haitian deportees, and our own observations, there was an average of 300 people deported every day through Dajabòn from April 5th to 7th. A Dominican soldier at Dajabòn told delegation members that at least one truck load of Haitians is deported every day. Each truck is packed like a sardine cane with about 70-80 Haitians.
Dominican authorities flouted the 1999 Bilateral Accord between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in carrying out these expulsions. The Haitian consuls in Dajabòn and Barahona told the delegation that they receive no notification of the deportations, as specified by the accords. However, Dominican Ambassador Wenceslao Guerrero, in charge of Haitian Affairs, showed us monthly folders with lists of hundreds of names which he claimed were transmitted to the Haitian consuls and Haitian Foreign Ministry. Guerrero said that it was the responsibility of the Haitian consuls to inform him if the accord was not being followed.
Dominican authorities are also supposed to give deportees a slip of paper informing them of their deported status, which they can present to Haitian authorities in order to obtain transportation home. The delegation interviewed 17 Haitians in Ouanaminthe who had been deported along with hundreds of others on April 5th and 6th through Dajabòn. They all said they had received no deportation slip, nor had they seen any other deportees with deportation slips.
Despite this violation of the accord, the slips would do deportees little good. A “Welcoming Committee” member of Haiti’s National Migration Office (ONM) told the delegation that for the past 6 months, the ONM has had no funds to provide any transportation or other support for deportees. Through the valiant efforts of some local popular organizations, the deportees do receive some food and a place to sleep, the delegation learned.
All these illegalities pale beside the brutality of the deportations, which has been described in numerous reports. Deportees are picked up off the street, not allowed to gather their belongings or contact their families, are often beaten and terrorized, and are sometimes held in jails for days, even with their children.
The delegation also notes that Dominican authorities have begun targeting Haitians living in and near cities. This reflects the changes occurring in the Dominican economy. As sugar production declines, Haitian workers are increasingly moving into new economic sectors such as construction, transport, and tourism. Haitian workers are also entering new agricultural domains, working in rice, tomato, and bean production. This process has accelerated because many Dominicans are now leaving agriculture and migrating to the cities or overseas in search of work.
The conditions in the bateys are worsening as privatization of the sugar industry takes hold.
The exploitation of braceros has grown while their working and living conditions, already horrific, have deteriorated. For instance, the delegation found that cane cutters are no longer being paid according to the weight of cane cut. Instead, cane bosses arbitrarily estimate the amount of cane cut and pay according to whim.
Previously, many bateys were owned and run by the state through the Consejo Estatal de Azucar (CEA). As a state-run enterprise, the CEA was forced to commit itself to certain responsibilities and minimum conditions for the braceros in housing, education, health, and other services. Although these commitments were rarely met, some were and they provided a handle for advocacy groups to exert leverage for the betterment of conditions in the bateys. With the wholesale privatization of the sugar industry and its continuing decline (today the Dominican Republic even imports sugar), the Dominican state has washed its hands of any commitment to maintaining conditions in the bateys.
The sugar factory in Barahona, for example, has been taken over by the French sugar giant, Sucden, which has slashed payrolls and invested nothing in the factory or workers’ facilities, the delegation was told.
More generally, the delegation learned that neoliberal policies in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, such as lowering tariffs and privatization, are increasing pressure on peasants to uproot and search for work elsewhere. By following the directives of the International Monetary Fund and Washington, both the Haitian and the Dominican governments are fueling the crisis which forces their people to migrate in search of survival.
The delegation was impressed to learn that Haitian-Dominican solidarity was robust and growing.
One of the most dramatic expressions of this solidarity occurred on the northern border the day before the delegation arrived.
On Apr. 5, five thousand Haitians in Ouanaminthe and two thousand Dominicans in Dajabòn marched in parallel demonstrations calling for an end to violence and abuse against Haitians in the Dominican Republic. The two demonstrations gathered on either side of the Massacre River at the spot where Elie Jean-Baptiste was shot on March 16 and planted a symbolic wooden cross. For two weeks following the shooting of Jean-Baptiste, demonstrators in Ouanaminthe stopped all traffic from crossing between the two border towns. (Following the shooting and in the face of the protests, the Dominican government has said that it will issue rubber bullets to its troops along the border, a measure which was ridiculed by human rights activists the delegation met with.)
The delegation learned of a similar solidarity action in the Dominican border town of Jimani. On Apr. 2, Haitian truck drivers were terrorized by a Dominican Army sergeant who threatened them at gunpoint and fired off his gun near the head of one driver. In the face of government inaction, the union representing the Haitian and Dominican truck drivers blockaded the border-pass between Jimani and the Haitian town of Malpasse for two days with over 30 trucks. The action was lifted when Dominican authorities agreed to arrest and prosecute the sergeant.
More generally, the delegation heard many accounts of how Dominicans assist Haitians in eluding capture by the Dominican authorities. For example, the delegation met with Haitian coffee workers who had been assisted by Dominicans when they were pursued by the Dominican army. The delegation heard other stories of Dominicans hiding, transporting, feeding, and generally supporting Haitians.
In the border area, there are strong bonds of fraternity and solidarity, and often blood, between Haitians and Dominicans, the delegation found.
The delegation was troubled to learn of the growing role of the US government in training and supporting the Dominican military under the guise of a “war on drugs.”
The delegation learned that U.S. military advisors had been sighted along the border training Dominican troops, ostensibly to interdict drugs coming in from Haiti.
Furthermore, the Dominican government recently borrowed $10.3 million to purchase 11 US-made helicopters and 120 all-terrain vehicles for the Army. The Navy also recently borrowed $23 million to by patrol and speed boats. Some Dominican commentators have criticized the purchases, saying that the US government should foot the bill for such purchases, not Dominicans, since countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic are being asked to act as the border patrol for the United States.
Some of those interviewed by the delegation felt that the tensions along the border may be politically motivated. In 1991, then Dominican President Joaquin Balaguer expelled about 50,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry, a deportation campaign which was aimed in part at destabilizing Aristide’s first administration. The deportations were halted on Sep. 30, 1991, the day that the Haitian military overthrew Aristide in a bloody coup d’état.
In a similar fashion, today’s deportations and violence could also be aimed in part at pressuring the Aristide government, the delegation was told. Some noted that the ruling Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) of Mejià, as a member of the Socialist International, is close to two Haitian social-democratic parties, the PANPRA of Serge Gilles and the CONACOM of Victor Benoit, both part of the Haitian opposition front, the Democratic Convergence, which has established a “parallel government” in Haiti.
Furthermore, Republican sectors in Washington, which are traditionally close to the Pentagon, have expressed great hostility to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his government. The Pentagon enjoys a close relationship with the Dominican military; for instance, one detachment of the U.S. Special Forces is permanently deployed in the Dominican Republic. Washington has intensified its training of Dominican army units at a military base in Samana, the delegation was told.
Although Aristide has reversed his political course by bowing to an 8-point list of directives from Washington and by integrating Duvalierists into his cabinet, the concessions may only buy him some time. Washington may now or in the future encourage the Dominican government to carry out large deportations as a means to destabilize Haiti, the delegation learned. The delegation also notes that the Dominican military is the only army remaining on Hispaniola (the Haitian Army was disbanded in 1995) and questions whether Washington could influence it to act in a hostile manner against Haiti. This apprehension was heightened when the delegation learned that the Mejià government has renewed a “Memorandum of Understanding” between Santo Domingo and Washington, originally signed a decade ago by Balaguer during the coup, that authorizes U.S. forces to use Dominican airfields, ports, and territory to launch military attacks against Haiti. Knowing the history of four U.S. interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the past century, the delegation expresses its concern.
Finally, US military aid and training only encourages the inhumane polices which the Dominican Army enforces against the Haitian and Dominican people.
Conclusion
Despite newly signed accords and declarations, Dominican authorities continue to brutally and illegally deport Haitian workers and in many cases, dark-skinned Dominicans. The authorities have made today’s deportations more scientific, more systematic, and, ultimately, more effective. The real beneficiaries are Dominican and international businessmen, who find a migrant workforce which is terrorized and ready to work for very little pay under very poor conditions. In many cases, the delegation was told, Dominican and international employers have their Haitian workers rounded-up shortly before pay-day, thereby obtaining free labor.
Mejià government officials told the delegation that they are contemplating changes to the laws governing Haitian workers. Such legislation, the delegation was told by human rights groups, is aimed at preventing the children born to Haitian parents on Dominican soil from claiming Dominican citizenship. The Dominican Constitution says anyone born in the country can claim citizenship except people “in transit.” The Dominican government says that Haitians are in transit and will seek to write legislation formalizing this interpretation of the Constitution, the delegation learned. Presently, many Dominicans born of Haitian parents are denied Dominican identity documents.
Meanwhile, the movement for the rights of Haitians and Haitiano-Dominicans appears to be gaining in strength. As the conditions deteriorate for the working people of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, both peoples appear to be building solidarity with one another, despite the racist and xenophobic propaganda of reactionary sectors which seek to pit the peoples against each other.
In short, the delegation observed that the solidarity between the Haitian and Dominican peoples seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the violence and exploitation they are being forced to endure.