A Poor Example

At 5:00 p.m. today, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez Reyna will give a presentation in the Tsai Auditorium at CGIS South entitled “Development and Democracy in Latin America: The Dominican Example.” He will probably talk about Dominican Republic’s recent high rate of economic growth, about the reforms made within his country’s justice system and legislature, which have cracked down on corruption and human trafficking and emboldened free trade, and possibly even about Haiti. But he will probably not talk about bateyes, mass deportations, or the indentured servitude that chains thousands of Haitians to squalid conditions within the burgeoning sugar, banana, and coffee plantations of the emergent Dominican Republic.

In many ways, the Dominican Republic is a positive example for the Caribbean. It has free and open elections. It has recently revamped its Criminal Procedure Code, leading to a shorter criminal process and faster trials. Its economy boomed throughout the 1990s and, after a brief hiccup in 2003, clocked a 2006 GDP real growth rate of 10.7 percent. But to an estimated 800,000 Haitians currently living in the Dominican Republic, the country with which their homeland shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, is anything but an exemplar of development and democracy.

Relations between the two countries have been strained for over two hundred years. When Haiti won its independence in 1804, it quickly began a conquest of the Dominican Republic, holding parts of the nation to its east until 1844. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo instituted a program of ethnic cleansing in which his soldiers rounded up and killed more than 25,000 Haitians and black Dominicans along the countries’ border by shooting them, hacking them up with machetes, or marching them into the sea. The river separating the two countries, Rio Massacre, is now named for the atrocity.

Unfortunately, even today, the rights and security of Haitians and Dominico-Haitians are tenuous at best. These stateless individuals, who make up more than 60 percent of the Dominican Republic’s agricultural workforce, are often confined to working villages called bateyes, which are essentially labor camps. A 2007 report by Amnesty International described the Dominican Republic’s 400 bateyes as having living conditions “among the worst in the country,” without access to “the most basic public services such as health care, education, running water, and a sewage system.” A 2005 article in the Miami Herald said, “Aside from hunger, a common complaint voiced by the workers is their mistreatment by plantation foremen from insults to beatings and even being locked in fertilizer sheds for trying to escape.”

These workers and their families live a life permanently “in transit,” which is the phrasing loophole that allows the Dominican Republic to deny the basic rights of citizenship not just to Haitian immigrants, but even to their children born on Dominican soil. Although the Dominican constitution theoretically guarantees citizenship to “all persons born in the territory” of the country, an exception exists for those persons deemed to be “in transit.”

The Haitians and black Dominicans—all those, at least, who cannot afford the requisite bribes—are deemed as such. Says Roxanna Atholz, an international law lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley, “What the Dominican Republic has done is created a permanent underclass—a category of individuals that, in the eyes of the law, don’t exist, have no right to own property, to an education, to healthcare, the right to vote.” It is “by keeping Haitians in a limbo of illegality,” Dominican Rev. Regino Martínez Bretón told The New York Times, that “the government can do whatever they want with them.”

Enter President Fernandez, and his government’s systematic abuse of Haitians and Dominico-Haitians, who are not only allowed to remain in dire poverty within the miserable bateyes, but who are in fact actively rounded up and deported at the drop of a hat, their visas and work permits disregarded or even destroyed. “Snatched off the street, dragged from their homes, or picked up from their workplaces, ‘Haitian-looking’ people are rarely given a fair opportunity to challenge their expulsion during these wholesale sweeps,” noted the Human Rights Watch in a 2002 report.

President Fernandez presides over a country that is laudable for its advances in trade and tourism, its partnership with America and the improvements it has made for its own citizens. But President Fernandez also presides over a country that maintains a “permanent underclass,” confined to subhuman living conditions, unobtainable rights, and indentured servitude.

“We do all the work, but we have no rights,” said Victor Beltran, a Haitian laborer speaking to The New York Times. “We do all the work, but our children cannot go to school. We do all the work, but our women cannot go to the hospital. We do all the work, but we have to stay hidden in the shadows.”

Perhaps President Fernandez should be praised for all the ways in which his country is a positive example of development and democracy for those it serves. But for the toils and terrors of those like Mr. Beltran, who spoke while hiding in a barn, he should have to answer.

Michael L. Zuckerman ’10 lives in Lowell House. He is treasurer of the Harvard Haitian Alliance.