La Apatrida: Dominicans of Haitian Descent Are Deported and Forgotten
BY
MARIO ARIZA
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2017 AT 8 A.M.
Children in Parc Cadeau often don't get enough to eat. Photo by Mario Ariza
Ena Louissaint and her four children have lived for the past year and a half in a ramshackle hut made from scavenged cardboard, faded blankets, flimsy sticks, and corrugated zinc panels. Leaning to one side, it offers little shelter from the hot, incessant wind that sweeps across the dusty outskirts of Anse-à-Pitres, Haiti. Her place is about a half-hour walk from that remote town of about 20,000 near the Dominican border.
There's little to eat here. The children — Duilyel Jan, Elia, Eliyel, and Loudi — are all under the age of 10. Their hair is brittle and feels hollow. It breaks off when touched, a sign of malnutrition.
"We eat once a day," Louissaint, a tall woman who clearly was once strong and vital but now has a worried face and work-worn hands, says in Spanish. "We eat corn flour and rice sometimes, when we have it."
Louissaint left Haiti when she was 6 years old and grew up some 20 miles away across the border, where she raised yuca, red kidney beans, and pigeon peas on a plot of dry, rocky soil. For most of her life, she was a sharecropper. Eventually, she saved enough money to purchase a herd of goats and operated a small store selling vegetables and clothing.
But then, in July 2015, roving bands of armed Dominican men whom she calls
tígueres, which translates to both "thugs" and "tigers," began showing up on motorcycles in Aguas Negras, the tiny hill town Louissaint called home. They came in the evenings. Often drunk, they carried torches and pistols. They leered at Ena and the other Haitian women of the town, and then they told all of the Haitians to get out — or else — regardless of whether they had spent their whole lives there.
Louissaint heard they had burned down a house in the neighboring hamlet of Ávila. The Kreyol-language stations on her radio warned of ethnic violence and that immigrants would soon have to register with the Dominican government. There would be mass deportations and perhaps a reprise of the Parsley Massacre, the 1937 mass murder of as many as 30,000 ethnic Haitians.
So Ena and her family fled. One day in late July 2015, taking only what she could carry, she simply walked across the border into Haiti. The
tígueres stole everything she left behind. "We lost the small store we owned, along with our livestock," she says, adding that the thieves were never punished.
Now Louissaint is 33 years old and lives in Parc Cadeau, a remote, squalid refugee camp that houses some 2,000 people. It's a haphazard collection of huts, hovels, and lean-tos that stretches alongside a dusty white gravel road. Ena and the others drink water from the dirty Pedernales River or a nearby agricultural canal. Both sources are untreated, and an outbreak of cholera last year killed 14 people.
There is no electricity and no sanitation in the camp, and dirt paths connect randomly placed abodes. It was all built in a rush with whatever material residents could find. No one expected to live here for years. The sturdiest shelters are composed of sticks covered in mud. They're roofed in thatch that keeps out most of the water. The flimsiest are made of rain-warped cardboard and rusting sheets of corrugated zinc. One family has lived for months in a donated Coleman camping tent. There are no trees for shade, only thorny shrubs.
Though nearby Anse-á-Pitres and Pedernales are home to a shared bazaar where everything from Norwegian herring to Vietnamese-made Converse sneakers are sold, Louissaint has little chance of finding the cash to become a vendor — or even of renting land to cultivate. "Here, we can barely find water to drink sometimes," she says, her voice choking with despair, "and no one is helping."
Louissaint holds little hope of returning to the country where she grew up and that she knows best. She doesn't have Haitian or Dominican identity documents. Nor does she have the 50 Dominican pesos to bribe a border guard. And she doesn't want to talk about what happens to Haitian women who get caught crossing the border without the requisite bribe.
A year and a half ago, Louissaint was one of the 750,000 Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic. But a series of events, set off by a 2013 Dominican Supreme Court ruling that stripped more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their birthright citizenship, forced her to flee. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam condemned that ruling. The United States government remained mute.
The law has become part of what is known as
la apatrida — the civil genocide, which declared Dominicans of Haitian descent born as far back as the 1930s to be "in transit" — only passing through — even if they had spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic. After October 2013, an already marginalized underclass suddenly couldn't legally own property, vote, or work formally in the private sector. Nor could they send their children to school past the fourth grade. The ruling was found to violate the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Dominican government ignored that finding.
Haitians and their Dominican-born children, who in some cases barely spoke Kreyol, were required to register by July 2015. They were 7 percent of the population, but few had the required birth certificates and identification cards.
Panic spread. Newspapers in Santo Domingo began speaking of the "invasion" of a "dark army" whose greatest weapon was a high birth rate — of the need to defend the fatherland against uneducated savages. Erroneous reports circulated of a Haitian being lynched in the Dominican city of Santiago. Louissaint's worries peaked when the
tígueres showed up in the hills near her home in Pedernales, just across the border from Anse-à-Pitres.
In summer 2015, more than 70,000 people fled the Dominican Republic for Haiti. The Dominican government, in an Orwellian twist, called them "voluntary returnees." Like Louissaint, they lost their homes, businesses, and property. For a time, international news and human rights organizations publicized the refugees' problems. Then they were forgotten.
Louissaint and the other residents of Parc Cadeau tell a story of intense intimidation and fear. Long after they were chased down from the hills and left to live in wretched poverty on this dust-filled plain, they remain here, out of the international spotlight and out of luck. "No one is helping us anymore," Louissaint says, "not even the parish priest."
"I left because of the threats," says Wayom, who has lived in a tent for more than a year. "The bosses wanted us out." Photo by Mario Ariza
Eliseo Jean Luis isn't quite sure how old he is. A tall, rail-thin, gray-haired father of 11, he thinks he must be pushing 60. But because he was born in a rural part of the Dominican Republic to illiterate parents who were never issued a birth certificate, he can't be sure. Though he speaks fluent Spanish and can name more Dominican towns than Haitian ones, he doesn't plan to ever go back to the land of his birth. He has lived in dusty Parc Cadeau for a year and a half but would like to resettle deeper into Haiti. "A thousand pesos could get me out of here," he says.
Jean Luis left his home because he was afraid. He and his wife walked across the border and into Haiti in early July 2015. They left behind a life growing beans in Las Mercedes, a hill town 13 miles from Pedernales. When he talks about his decision to return to Haiti, his voice drops to a hushed tone. "The
tígueres showed up one night in June. They were on motorcycles. They had machetes and pistols."
Jean Luis says they caught him on the road as he was walking back to his home. He thinks they didn't hurt him because he looks so old. But they insulted him and told him to return to his country, or else.
He says he felt like "the
tígueres from Pedernales wanted to burn us all, and the radio was saying it was going to be like 1937 all over again."
His voice lowers to a whisper when he mentions that far-off year. He's like many Haitians on the island, one of Columbus' first landing spots in the New World. He still shudders at the thought of the genocide perpetrated by American-backed dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo exactly 80 years ago.
The Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic and the mostly Kreyol-speaking Haiti share the island of Hispaniola, a landmass that's 700 miles from Miami and about the size of North Carolina. The island's 137-mile, mountainous border divides the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation from Latin America's fastest-growing economy.
Because the majority of both countries' populations are of African descent, the genocide perpetrated by Dominicans against Haitians can be difficult to understand for Americans, says Harvard professor Lorgia García Peña. "Early in the 16th Century, the Spaniards said, 'fukk sugar — there's gold in Peru and native people we can exploit,' so they abandoned Hispaniola," she says. "To be
negro ["black" in Spanish] meant you were a slave, so even just one drop of white blood meant a better social position."
The French showed up early in the 18th Century and took the western side of the island. They quickly imported millions of slaves and turned the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the richest in the New World. The new influx of slaves meant that being something other than "
negro" became much more important to the mixed-race Spaniards on the island's eastern side.
The French slaves heroically rebelled in 1791 and eventually conquered the whole island. Ultimately, Dominicans of all colors rose up against the Haitian occupation and gained independence in 1844.
"Dominican mulattos made the Republic possible," García Peña clarifies, "but then the white people took over."
The United States occupied Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 and helped a white elite to consolidate power in the latter. Along with building roads and providing sanitation, the United States brought institutionalized racism to the island and began importing Haitian labor to work in the Dominican Republic's sugarcane fields. Since then, Haitian labor has been integral to Dominican success.
"We feel like what the Dominican Republic is doing is equal to some type of apartheid in the Caribbean," says Marleine Bastien, director of Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami, a community social services nonprofit based in Miami. She helped organize the Haitian diaspora's response to
la apatrida. "We went to Congress but got nowhere," Bastien remembers. "We felt that [
la apatrida] was very unfair. Haitians had built Dominican infrastructure and were now being kicked out."
One activist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican writer Junot Díaz, testified before Congress alongside Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat about the civil genocide. The Dominican government responded by stripping Díaz of a national prize he had been given in 2009. Authorities cited his "un-Dominican activities."
Though a law was passed in 2014 to allow Haitians to stay in the Dominican Republic and get access to social services, hundreds of thousands couldn't meet its stringent requirements. Among them: If one lacked proper documents, one would need testimony from two people who had been present at one's birth.
"Hypocritical" is how Bastien describes it. "The interior ministry knew the burden placed on families was too high."
The Dominican government claims that Louissaint, Jean Luis, and the other residents of Parc Cadeau left the country of their own accord — "self-deported."
In a sense, they did. Filled with fear, some 4,000 people fled to Parc Cadeau. Today there are about 2,000 left. Though more than 230,000 Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic have registered for new documents, a half-million haven't.
Recently, deportations have slowed, mob assaults have been reported less often, and there has even been some humanitarian cooperation.
But all of this is far from the mind of Eliseo Jean Luis. His concerns are more immediate: clean water, cash for food, shelter from the dust and sun. Asked about his hope for the future, his face clouds over and his eyes narrow. In a voice choked with emotion, he says, "Everything here is fukked."
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