Two sides of the same coin

A conflict rages on the island of Hispaniola, fuelled by the hatred that separates the paradise of the Dominican Republic from the hell of Haiti.

It has been raining since dawn. Four Dominican soldiers seek shelter in a small sentry box. A few yards away, a multitude of arms and heads are crammed against a closed gate. One can make out a long line of black feet beneath the rusty metal sheeting. Many are barefoot, others are wearing shoes that are either too big or too small. Beneath the bridge, a few people are crossing the Massacre River, ducking around streams of sewage and floating rubbish. At eight on the dot, a customs official turns his key in the padlock of the huge gate that divides the Dominican city of Dajabón from the Haitian town of Ouanaminthe. A stream of people, their hands, heads and barrows loaded with merchandise, cross the border without showing any documents, often by doling out a bribe to the Dominican officers.

Just as on every Monday and Friday the whole year round, in Dajabón it’s binational market day, the largest of the many markets that are organised along the 276 kilometre border that divides the island of Hispaniola into two unequal halves. To the West lies Haiti, the poorest and most unstable country in Latin America, on its knees for years as a result of exploitation by land owners, blood- thirsty dictatorships, and most recently, the devastating earthquake that swept the country in 2010, which claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people and destroyed the homes of 2.3 million. To the East is the Dominican Republic, one of the most prosperous states in the Caribbean, which has in recent years seen its GDP grow by 5% a year, a figure unmatched in Central America. 

President Danilo Medina, the leader of the progressively oriented Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), built his re-election campaign on this economic boom, and won a majority of more than 60% in the mid-May ballot. During his previous four-year mandate, the Medina administration considerably reduced the national debt, introduced sweeping tax reform and increased public spending on education, which now accounts for 4% of GDP.

Medina also enacted a number of infrastructure upgrades involving ports and roads, in part thanks to foreign investments, especially in the tourist industry. After all, tourism is the driving force behind the Dominican economy, centred primarily around the all-inclusive resorts on the east coast. According to figures produced by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTA), the tourist industry and its spin-offs contributed as much as 16.3% to the republic’s GDP, much more than Cuba (10.1%) and almost double the average on the American continent (8.6%). In 2015, over five million visitors holidayed in the more than 70,000 hotel rooms in the country (in 1980 there were little more than 5,000), generating more than 500,000 direct and indirect jobs (15% of the total).

Tourism is also the primary source of foreign currency (over six billion euro), more than the remittances from the over two million Dominican emigrants. “It’s our goose that lays the golden egg”, claimed Radhames M. Aponte, the Dominican deputy minister for tourism. “We are convinced that our model, based on high-quality hotel facilities, improved infrastructure and advantageous taxation for foreign companies, is proving very successful. We are now trying to diversify our offer: we want to target markets with higher expenditure levels and make inroads into China”.

 However, according to the last report produced by the UN agency ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), the wealth produced in the past years has not been evenly distributed among the various sectors of society. In fact, unlike other countries in the area with similar or even lower growth rates, such as Colombia and Peru, between 2010 and 2014 the poverty level in the Dominican Republic only dropped by 6.3%. Today, over one-fifth of the population still            live in poverty and 8% are destitute. A sizeable share of the poorer people in the country are of Haitian descent or have emigrated from the other side of the island.

 The Dominican state, in most instances, does not provide Haitian migrants with any documentation, nor does it grant them any rights. Many feel stigmatized by the society they move into and are subjected to cyclical periods of collective violence. The most that Haitians can hope for is to be hired as low-cost labour on farms or in the construction sector.

This is the case for Evenson, Fidel and Bernaldo, three young men who work barehanded and in flip-flops from eight in the morning until dusk for just 400 pesos a day (around €8) on the building site of the Art Deco Saviñón Palace, one of the most striking architectural features of Santo Domingo’s colonial quarter. The capital’s historic centre (it was the first town the Europeans founded on American soil and is a UNESCO World Heritage site) is undergoing a radical architectural refurbishing process in order to exploit its vast historical heritage on the tourist market. William Charpantier, coordinator of the National Bureau for Migration and Refugees in the Dominican Republic (MENAMIRD), explained this dichotomy: “The real reason that the Dominican political institutions do not grant any rights to the population of Haitian descent is that the politicians of all parties want to be able to ensure that both local and foreign businessmen have the chance to exploit the immigrant workers and then play the xenophobic card when the time is ripe”. Charpantier is referring to the verdict that the Constitutional Court issued in 2013 which transformed all offspring of foreign parents who had not normalised their presence in the Dominican Republic into stateless persons.

The verdict is retroactive and affects as many as 200,000 people from four generations, almost all of Haitian origin, who suddenly found themselves without citizenship. The mobilisation of human rights organisations and the stir created in international circles forced the Medina administration to rectify its position at the time, and yet thousands of people have still ended up in a judicial limbo. “It’s a clear demonstration of the state-approved, anti-Haiti sentiment that holds sway in our institutions”, said Quisqueya Lora, history lecturer at the University of Santo Domingo (UASD). “It’s a symptom of our contradictory identity: Dominicans have always denied their ‘negritude’, and in our imagination ‘black’ has always been associated with Haiti and something negative, even dangerous”. Lora fears the return of large-scale xenophobic violence, a phenomenon that has taken place many times in relations between the two communities. One of the most heinous instances of ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Haitians by the Dominicans took place in 1937 and was ordered by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. It is known as the Masacre del Perejil (the Parsley Massacre). A large number of the victims (tens of thousands of people) were cut down with machetes along the banks of the river that separates Ouanaminthe and Dajabón, the same river that the Haitians cross every Monday and Friday to make good on their Dominican dream by selling garlic, rum and used clothes that they have received from international cooperation organisations.