Magazine

The Dominican Time Bomb

By JONATHAN M. KATZ
A Dominican soldier at the National Migration Office in Santo Domingo on June 24. The government provided buses for Haitians to deport themselves voluntarily after a new law threw their citizenship status into doubt. Ricardo Rojas/Reuters 
In early 2006, my first long-term overseas posting as a journalist took me to the Dominican Republic. From my new home in Santo Domingo, I planned to write about tourism, baseball, corruption and drug trafficking, while working on my Spanish. If things went well, I figured, I might even get to cross the island of Hispaniola’s international border, into Haiti, whose chronic crises — including a recent coup d’état that had overthrown the president — drew more international interest.
To my surprise, I arrived in the midst of a crisis of the Dominicans’ own. Two dozen Haitian immigrants had suffocated in the back of a van headed toward Santo Domingo. Each year, thousands of Haitians venture east into the Dominican Republic in search of low-wage jobs in agriculture and construction and at the big all-inclusive resorts. The 69 migrants in the van paid about $70 each to be stuffed in like cattle, with no room to breathe. Dominican police officers learned of their deaths when the drivers began throwing bodies out of the van as it sped down the highway.
A sign advertising the future site of a center being built to receive Haitians deported from the Dominican Republic, close to the border in Fond-Parisien, Haiti.Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
A couple of weeks after the van tragedy, with tensions over immigration running high, people in a central Dominican town burned the homes of Haitians and Dominican-born people of Haitian descent (the Dominican media and politicians tend to lump the two groups together, simply referring to both as haitianos). The arsonists were set off by rumors — never proven true — that a haitiano had raped a little girl. A major local paper headlined its story, “In Monte de la Jagua, They Don’t Want Haitianos.” The next day’s headline was more ominous: “HaitianosDisappear.” When I called the national police chief for comment, he wondered aloud if the victims had burned their own homes in preparation for leaving the country.
Like so many visitors to the Dominican Republic before and since, I saw a deep vein of racism and xenophobia that a world more interested in the country’s beaches and ballplayers generally prefers to ignore. That changed last month, when news spread of the Caribbean nation’s plan to expel hundreds of thousands of residents of Haitian descent. In broad daylight, the Dominican military showed off buses to transport the deportees; “processing centers” awaited exiles at the border.
“How is this possible?” tweeted the American antiracism activists at Dream Defenders. But for those who know the Dominican Republic well, the impending forced exodus seemed like the logical culmination of decades of hate: a long-ticking time bomb finally poised to go off.
After a raft of criticism from the United States and elsewhere — demands for a reprieve from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees; protesters at Dominican government offices in Miami, New York, Washington and elsewhere carrying signs saying “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Ethnic Cleansing”; a White House petition to pressure the Dominican government that has attracted 50,000 signatures so far — Dominican leaders reacted with denial. “We’re not going to accept false accusations of racism or xenophobia, which are baseless in a country that has been defined for centuries by the blending of cultures,” President Danilo Medina told Agence France-Presse during a summit last week in Guatemala.
But the intensity of the hatred and violence long directed against Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in Medina’s country — and against anyone black enough to be confused for either — is staggering, like something out of Mississippi in the 1890s, or Europe before World War II. In February, a Haitian shoe-shiner was lynched and hanged from a tree in a public park in the nation’s second-largest city, Santiago, while a crowd across town burned Haitian flags and chanted: “Haitians out! If it’s war they want, it’s war they’ll get!” Other victims identified as haitianos have been lynched in the past year for alleged infractions such as robbing a convenience store and burning a Dominican flag. Dominican newspapers are filled with cartoons depicting people of Haitian descent as bug-eyed, big-lipped golliwogs babbling Spanish in heavy dialect. When I lived in Santo Domingo, there were bars that openly denied entry to blacks, a practice that apparently persists.
On the most basic level, the ethnic friction in the Dominican Republic resembles the situation in borderlands around the world, from the Strait of Malacca to the Rio Grande: People from a poorer country go to a richer country in search of jobs and better lives, only to be used there as cheap labor. Nationalists and industrialists in the rich country exploit the resentment of the local working class, bound up with prejudices over race, culture and language, for their own financial and political gain. Vinicio Castillo Semán, a congressman from the ultra-right-wing National Progressive Force who is known as Vinchito, blames his country’s poverty on a “massive and uncontrolled Haitian invasion,” supported by a Dominican “fifth column” and bent on taking over the country. (His brother and fellow party member Pelegrín Castillo Semán is Medina’s former minister of energy and mines.)
But it’s not just a question of economics. Today the Dominican Republic is better off than Haiti, but the two countries had roughly the same levels of per-capita income in 1937, when tens of thousands of Haitians and black Dominicans were murdered on the orders of the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo — a massacre known by many today as El Corte(“The Cutting”). Nor is it a conflict between two nations. More than 200,000 of the haitianos slated for expulsion were born in the Dominican Republic. Many of the approximately 450,000 others have lived nearly all their lives in the country and have tenuous ties to Haiti at best. I recently talked to John Presime, a 23-year-old Internet-cafe owner on the northern Dominican coast. Born in a shantytown in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, he has lived in the Dominican Republic since he was 11. His 1-year-old daughter was born there. “If she is a foreigner, then where is she from?” he asked.
Rather than economics, it is a classic case of what Sigmund Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences.” In its early years, the Dominican Republic struggled to find an identity vis-à-vis its neighbor. Haiti had defeated Napoleon and the most powerful army in the world to end slavery and win its independence; the eastern half of Hispaniola, by comparison, was just another Spanish colony, which took 60 years more to break free.
One thing that set Dominicans apart was a particular concept of race. Nearly everyone on the island of Hispaniola is descended from the West Africans and Central Africans enslaved and brought there to work the island’s once-bountiful plantations. (The native Taino people, who greeted Christopher Columbus there in 1492, were slaughtered in one of the most thorough genocides in human history.) But smaller numbers of slaves and different laws under the Spanish resulted in a higher proportion of people with mixed African and European ancestry than there was on the formerly French side of the island.
In a world where whiteness conferred power, and vice versa, Dominican elites began emphasizing these European roots, contrasting themselves with the more “African” Haitians and downplaying the countries’ many shared cultural influences — Roman Catholicism, Haitian voodoo and Dominican Santeria, music, language, art. Trujillo, who rose to power through a military guard installed by the 1916-24 American occupation, institutionalized that prejudice into a pseudoscientific state racism called antihaitianismo, in which schoolchildren learned the differences between “Dominican” and “Haitian” facial features. (Trujillo himself is said to have powdered his face to look whiter.) Fifty-four years after the dictator’s assassination, most dark-skinned Dominicans still identify themselves by terms such as “indio-oscuro,” or “dark Indian” — an allusion to the murdered Tainos. “Negro” is reserved for haitianos.
This can be confusing for Americans, whose ideas of race go back to the “one-drop rule,” instead of the subtler but no less pernicious Spanish racial caste system. In the Caribbean, race is often as much a question of hairstyle, culture and speech as it is a question of skin color. In that system, being Dominican often comes down primarily to not being Haitian — and thus not being black. Policing that line has taken a lot of violence, sometimes by the law.
Citizenship is at the heart of the current crisis. The Dominican Constitution, like its American counterpart, confers citizenship on anyone born in the country’s territory. But there are technical exceptions for the children of diplomats and anyone who can be said to be “in transit.” For years, and in defiance of multiple rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Dominican authorities have exploited that vague second loophole to refuse papers and passports to anyone of Haitian descent, arguing that even families who have been in the country for generations are “temporary.” Those who have tried to advocate for the rights of Dominico-Haitians to fully integrate into society, such as the late activist Sonia Pierre, have worked under constant surveillance and threats.
In September 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Court moved to settle “La Cuestión Haitiana” for good. In an extraordinary ruling, the justices revoked the citizenship of anyone in the Dominican Republican born to those the court deemed “foreigners in transit” since 1929. More than 200,000 people, nearly all of them Dominico-Haitians, were instantly rendered stateless and eligible for deportation.
Medina’s government announced a national program — the National Plan for Regularization of Foreigners in Irregular Migratory Situations — that threatened the country’s three-quarters of a million haitianos with deportation. A May 2014 law laid out a program in which those who had lost their citizenship could reapply. As the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat put it: “It’s as if the United States said, ‘Yes, everybody who has been here since 1930, you have to prove you’re a citizen. You have to go back to the place where you come from to get a birth certificate from there.’ ”
After disorganization and delays, the deadline was set for June 17, 2015. On that day, thousands massed at government offices, some protesting the deportations, others scrambling to get their papers in time. Then the clock struck midnight — and nothing happened.
Why? International pressure may have worked, for a time. Foreign investment is taking a hit. Dominican officials are busy decrying what they call an international conspiracy to discredit their country. Medina, who is up for re-election in 2016, has to walk his own fine line: appearing tough enough to appease right-wing critics in his government without going further than his backers in Washington and Brussels will allow.
But although attention elsewhere has moved on, the threat to hundreds of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic has not gone away. Dominican officials are clear that mass deportations are still planned. Fearing violence, at least 17,000 people with ties to Haiti have chosen to flee the country on their own, provoking fears of yet another humanitarian crisis in Haiti. In a gleefully Orwellian turn, Dominican authorities responded by offering a “free bus service to take migrants to the border.” They say at least 1,000 people have been transported so far.
Presime told me he hasn’t gone to work since the deadline passed for fear of being separated from his daughter. “Immigration could come looking in the middle of the night and surprise us,” he told me by phone. “It is insanity.” For people like him, who have no family or support on the other side of the border, the Dominican Republic is the only home they can imagine. If the bomb does go off, there will be nowhere for them to go.