Correction: The arrest in Ciudad Juan Bosch occurred in May.
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic—Manuel Dandré recounted a case of injustice suffered by Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent.
The Haitian parents of two daughters had a permanent apartment in the Dominican Republic. Both young men were Dominicans because they met the constitutional criteria that their parents must be in a normal migration scenario at the time of their birth in Dominican territory.
“Despite that, the women were detained,” Dandré, a lawyer, told the reporter. “The father had to go out on a motorcycle to catch the bus carrying them. “Thanks to the intervention of the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM), they prevented deportation at the border.
Unfortunately, this is just one case where a circle of relatives has not been broken. From January to November 2022, UNICEF counted more than 1,800 unaccompanied youth deported to Haiti from the Dominican Republic, without documentation proving they were Haitian. In this situation, Dandré provides legal assistance through two organizations that provide assistance to Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, the Mouvement socioculturel des travailleurs haïtiens (MOSCTHA) and the Réseau Jacques Viau.
A record 154,333 Haitian immigrants were deported in 2022. This is more than triple the annual average between 2017 and 2021. The Dominican government’s crusade of mass deportations is the latest episode in what human rights defenders and social and political activists describe as a strategy. deepening racial discrimination.
Deportations without stopping
United Nations officials had called in November for an end to mass expulsions of Haitian citizens. However, Dominican President Luis Abinader responded that the expulsions would only continue, but would accelerate. Abinader also issued Executive Order 688-22, which creates a police unit to target immigrants and orders the prompt deportation of immigrants living on public or private land. This definition coincides with the reality of the Bateyes, communities established in sugar regions for Haitian migrant personnel and their families.
On November 19, the U. S. Embassy The U. S. Food and Drug Administration issued a travel alert that travelers to the Dominican Republic “reported being delayed, detained, or subjected to extensive interrogations at ports of access and other encounters with immigration officials discovered in the color of their skin. “U. S. Customs and Border Protection blocked access to uncooked sugar and sugar products produced through the Central Romana Corporation, which operates in the east of the country, saying it had discovered signs of forced labor.
The reaction of the Dominican Foreign Ministry that the “humanitarian, social and political” crisis in Haiti “seriously affects the national security of the Dominican Republic. “
“The Dominican government would never have imagined such serious insinuations about our country, whose population testifies in the color of its skin a melting pot of races,” the official note adds.
Central Romana, owned by the Cuban-American Fanjul family, responded that CBP’s comments “reflect Central Romana’s policies and practices. “
Extortion of detainees
Dandré, born in 1960, is himself one of more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent affected by a denationalization policy initiated in 2004, when immigration law explained visa-free immigrants as “in transit” to exclude their children from obtaining Dominican nationality. . This policy culminated in 2013 with Constitutional Court Judgment 168-13, which retroactively implemented the criteria of the 2004 General Migration Law to all persons born after 1929. There was widespread foreign condemnation. After a dispute, Dandré discovered documents proving his Dominican citizenship.
Dandré told the journalist about a 16-year-old girl who was detained by police and taken to the migrant detention center in the town of Haina, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, where she remained for nine days. The law prohibits the detention of minors. , pregnant women and the elderly as a component of immigration proceedings, however, such violations of the law are common, he said.
“The Haina detention center is overcrowded and in extraordinarily unsanitary conditions,” Dendré said. “If a detainee has relatives who bring food, officials ask for bills to deliver it, extort them. “
When the court was imminent to order the girl’s release, she was transferred to another institution, the National Council for Adolescents and Children, which proceeded to deport her to Haiti.
“She has never been taken to Haina, where most of the detainees are men,” Dandré said.
“Dehumanization” of the Haitian people
Ana Belique is one of the young leaders of the Recognized Movement, which fights for the recovery of Dominican nationality to those affected through sentence 168-13.
“In 2004 the new migration law was enacted and in 2010 the Constitution was reformed. Both adjustments are strategically designed to restrict the rights of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic,” Belique said.
A signed by the Recognized Movement and dozens of Dominican and Haitian organizations describes the strategy as imposing systematic racial discrimination, warning of the dangers of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Belique has first-hand knowledge of cases of foreigners who have been discriminated against because they “look like Haitians. “He mentions Caribbean and African exchange students, as well as the case of two black American citizens besieged in May by neo-Nazis and national police officers in Ciudad Juan Bosch, a suburb east of Santo Domingo.
“What worries me most about the existing crusade of mass deportations is the dehumanization of the Haitian people,” Belique added.
On December 2, representatives of social organizations met with Dominican Attorney General Miriam Germán.
Among the court cases they filed related to human rights violations against the immigrant network were the murders of Joel Lolo and Delouise Estimable. Joel, an 18-year-old structural worker, was shot in the head by an immigration officer at his home in Las Matas de Farfán in March, while Delouise was beaten to death in a truck in the northern province of Valverde in July.
A little more than a week later, there was an illegal raid on the premises of the Dominican-Haitian Women’s Movement (MUDHA), one of the organizations represented in the assembly with the Attorney General’s Office. In a joint statement, the social organizations denounced that the agents of the raid were wearing army intelligence uniforms.
“To this day, I am a pension”
Meanwhile, thousands of Haitian sugarcane workers who arrived in the country between the 1960s and 1970s, such as Belique and Dandré’s parents, organized within the Union of Sugarcane Workers (UTC) to demand payment of their pensions. Some 15,000 sugarcane workers are waiting, many of them taking to the streets for years. Some died without the state noticing their request. On December 7, they rallied again in front of the Ministry of Labor in Santo Domingo to call for an end to forced labor in downtown Romana.
“I joined in 1972, I worked in Altagracia, in the State Sugar Council,” says Yega Fabián, a retired sugarcane grower. “When I went to the mill they gave me a machete, a bag and sent me to cut the cane. I applied for the pension in 2012. To date I am without a pension. I have six young people and thirteen grandchildren. Everyone has an identity card, even me.
The protest, with the classic cry of “No sugar, no sugar,” marked the news that another retired Haitian sugarcane, Lico Alerté, had died that morning.
Alerté won his pension.
Vladimir Fuentes is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist in the Dominican Republic.
Mobilizations took to the streets of Colombia on April 28 a national strike in protest of social injustice and competitive tax reforms proposed by the government of Iván Duque. Student movements, industrial unions, youth organizations, feminist groups, and indigenous peoples’ and other movements. Afro-descendants marched, blocked roads and organized cultural activities in urban centers and rural territories throughout the country, exercising their right to nonviolent protest. But the state responded quickly with violent repression, especially in primary cities such as Cali, Bogotá, Palmira and Popayán.
– Victor (@victor4nj) May 8, 2021
Although the vast majority of protests were peaceful, remote incidents of looting and violence were used as an excuse to use superior force opposed to demonstrators. The media’s discourse about “good protesters” and “bad protesters” legitimizes this response. Many reports of infiltrators are used to galvanize violence and looting, as has been the case in previous movements in the country. The armed forces reportedly stood idly by and allowed looting to take place, only to respond to such incidents with violent repression.
Instead of responding to the demands of citizens who oppose tax reform and social injustice, the state responded with militarization, turning nonviolent protests into war theaters.
– Truee K✯ (@Truee_K) May 5, 2021
Several villages are occupied through 4 armed state actors:
Instead of seeking to pacify the scenario and shield citizens, these forces have threatened security, peace and human rights.
Serious human rights abuses
Innumerable videos recorded by protesters and onlookers circulate on social networks, in which cases of police brutality, indiscriminate shootings and the use of tear gas in internal neighborhoods involving young people and older adults appear. In recent days, violence has taken on a new face in Cali, with the presence of plainclothes police and reports of unmarked cars firing at protesters.
The Bogotá-based non-governmental organization Indepaz reports that between April 28 and May 8, the following occasions occurred:
Armed police threatened lawyers and human rights defenders while investigating missing users in police stations. The foreign network became aware of the gravity of the scenario when, on May 3, members of a humanitarian project composed of representatives of the United Nations and the State were attacked by armed police. while waiting to enter a police station in search of missing users. On April 7, while a humanitarian project took position north of Cali with the presence of Senator Alejandro López, a car took position, injuring one user and killing three.
The racialization of state repression
Violence and repression have a disproportionate effect on black communities, reflecting only the internal armed conflict that Colombia is experiencing. For example, 35 of the 47 murders reported by Indepaz took place in Cali, home to South America’s largest Afro-descendant population. . No wonder structural and systemic racism is deeply rooted in Cali. Many of the highest competitive instances of state violence have been perpetrated in neighborhoods with a majority or giant population of Afro-descendants, treating communities as enemies of war. Historically, those neighborhoods have suffered socioeconomic exclusion, most reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, and state violence. spaces in the north of the department of Cauca, in which Calí is located, and the Pacific coast.
While official statistics do not reveal the proportion of black victims in this existing wave of police brutality due to the lack of disaggregated data, images of victims clearly show the disproportionate effect on black youth.
— NCP (@renacientes) 28 April 2021
Racial profiling not only underpins state violence, but is at the center of state denial and impunity. Debates about gang violence and existing urban conflicts are already being used to ask whether some of those young people participated in the protests or whether criminals were killed in the context. of daily violence in their communities. This narrative no doubt seeks to decrease the number of protest-like deaths, justifying the deaths of young black men. The first recorded death in Cali occurred in the predominantly black neighborhood, Marroquín II, where a 22-year-old boy was killed. But the army later denied that his death was similar to the protests.
Militarization, imperialism and protests
The existing scenario in Colombia cannot be understood in isolation from the broader armed clash and deepening of the neoliberal timetable supported and supported through the United States and the multinationals that feed on Colombia’s herbal resources. U. S. imperialist interests in the region have been transparent ever since. the last nineteenth century, with the attempted invasion of Colombia’s neighbor, Panama, in 1885 and the beginning of the assignment of the Panama Canal in 1904. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created in an assembly in Colombia.
Colombia has been the strategic point of Washington’s political, economic and military operations in recent decades. Thanks to the technical and logistical support of the United States, Colombia is one of the largest military powers in the region. With the signing of Plan Colombia in 1999 and Plan Patriota in 2002, the presence and influence of the U. S. military was seen in the future. The U. S. economy only deepened.
Moreover, U. S. military aid has depended on state policies that derive advantages from U. S. imperial interests. For example, in 2009, the United States signed an agreement with the Uribe government to operate from seven Colombian military bases. Although this agreement was blocked by the Constitutional Court, the Santos government subsequently reached select bilateral agreements. These have allowed access to and use of the bases in practice, and have further facilitated the failed and harmful strategy of spraying the herbicide glyphosate on illicit crops. All this helps the ‘enemy within. ‘” Ideology and terrorist risk that underpinned the original emergence and expansion of paramilitarism in the 1980s.
It is exactly this style of paramilitarism that the Colombian state is employing in the context of existing protests, specifically in Cali, where state agents, without proper identification, are participating with civilians to shoot and kill demonstrators from high-end cars. The Indigenous Guard, which was accompanying the protests in Cali, suffered several such attacks, the most recent on May 9, when eight other people were injured.
This violent state repression is another result of imperialist intervention and the neoliberal extractivist allocation that militarism uses for a traditionally racialized population that it sees as residual and as a risk to the white supremacist capitalist order.
– Danny Shaw (@dannyshawcuny) March 29, 2021
Singing “The Revolution of Popular Poetry!” on May 3, young writers and poets took to the streets to call for a Haiti where other young people have a future. A cultural worker, Jan Wonal, says: “They [the imperialists] are the messengers of art, of literature, of art history. So, for us, the cultural revolution opposed to cultural imperialism is an imperative.
Haitian society is in rebellion.
Who cares about Haiti?
CNN, MSNBC, Fox and all the mainstream media have paid little attention to this social insurgency. The headlines, if they mention Haiti, focused on U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). riots. ” The anti-neoliberal aspect is overlooked.
According to one protester at a mass demonstration, “If we were Hong Kong, Taiwan or any country labeled as an enemy by the U. S. we would be able to do so. “In the U. S. , there would be a policy of our movement. “
– Danny Shaw (@dannyshawcuny) March 28, 2021
The corporate press mentions Haiti only in the context of an herbal disaster, a fatal disease or chaos. Millions of other people who move in a U. S. neocolony like Colombia, Chile or Haiti are not newsworthy. The dominant narrative is that the other people in the streets protesting is not a revolt, but a “political crisis. “It is not convenient for a neocolony to make noise and rise up against the lackeys and puppets handpicked by the empire.
Reacting to the media’s white veil, Haitian intellectual Patrick Mettelus emphasized: “Our struggle for national liberation is first and foremost a war of ideas; It’s a war. How can we counter the dominant narrative and show what is good, beautiful, encouraging, and hopeful about our homeland?
Confrontation: Haitian imperialism
Ignoring months and years of widespread anger, Moses goes on to say that quitting is not an option. The United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) agree that the U. S. -backed despot still has a year left in his presidency, even though the 1987 constitution stipulates that his term ends on Feb. 7. Former President Jean Bertrand Aristide called the UN, OAS and UN states “the troika of evil” for the leading role they played in Haiti’s historic destiny. This explains why Aristide twice victim of blows orchestrated through those neocolonial forces.
Moses gave the impression to the United Nations General Assembly on February 24. In a 28-minute show of arrogance, the deaf puppet congratulated himself for allegedly wearing down ongoing socio-economic reforms. This letter is the result of consultations between many local committees representing all sectors of society. Women, peasants, slums, etc. 一 gathered in the wake of the 1986 dechoukaj (uprooting) that overthrew dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Coverage of Haiti’s cultural and economic sovereignty and women’s empowerment are enshrined in the charter, among other democratic rights. Today, those same sectors, representing the vast majority of Haitian society, are taking to the streets against Moïse and his dictatorial plan to overthrow the people’s charter.
The reformist wing of the opposition has subsidized a transitional president, Joseph Mécène Jean-Louis, who has been in hiding since February 7 for fear of persecution through Jovenel’s National Intelligence Agency (ANI). Families of ruling elegance like the Vorbe/Boulos faction, who supported Jovenel (and Michel Martelly before) have now become opposed to Moses and need to update him on systemic change.
The kidnappings have reached epic proportions. The Djaspora (Haitians in the diaspora) are afraid to return home. The Center for Human Rights Research and Analysis reported 157 kidnappings in the first 3 months of 2021. This anarchy is representative of a society that has lost all confidence in Moses. The maximum The oppressed layers of society have been hit by the weakness of the gourde (1 US dollar equals 87 Haitian gourdes), widespread unemployment and lack of hope for a dignified future. According to the United Nations World Food Program, part of the other 10. 7 million Haitians are malnourished. This grim social truth has driven the top hotel castaways to armed violence and hostage-taking.
The basic call of the popular sectors is a “sali piblik”, or a united transition away from dictatorship and neocolonialism that reaches and empowers the masses of the Haitian people.
While the corporate media silences Haitian voices, the Committee for Mobilization Against the Dictatorship in Haiti (KOMOKODA), Leve Kanpe, the U. S. Outside Haiti Coalition (KOMOKODA), the Outside Haiti Coalition, and the Outside Haiti Coalition,The U. S. and the UN and the diaspora and anti-imperialist organizations in the U. S. rebellion.
“The ‘Core Group’ is a clique of predatory countries and establishments created across the US. “The U. S. military was overthrown and kidnapped after the overthrow and kidnapping of President Aristide in 2004 to give a semblance of foreign legitimacy to its rule over Haiti,” KOMOKODA said as the organization protested in May. 3 outdoor from the French embassy in Port-au-Prince. “Join us in our solidarity with the Haitian people, who are in the streets fighting for their liberation and emancipation. “
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American studies at the City University of New York. Since the start of the recent peak on February 7, he has visited Haiti twice to stay with the mass anti-imperialist movement. A senior fellow at the Center for Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Creole, Spanish, Portuguese, and Cape Verdean Creole.
Dear readers of Towards Freedom:
This week, the Toward Freedom board of directors bids farewell to guest editor Charlotte Dennett, welcomes new Toward Freedom editor-in-chief Julie Varughese, and sincerely thanks Sam Mayfield for stepping down as Toward Freedom board chair in December 2020.
Charlotte Dennett, guest editor of Toward Freedom last October. Her decades of delight as an academic, author, and activist have allowed Charlotte to move seamlessly into the Toward Freedom project booth, “publishing foreign reporting and incisive investigations exposing government and corporate abuses. “of power, supporting movements for universal peace, justice, freedom, the environment and human rights.
Charlotte brought only her editorial and writing skills, but also her wonderful intensity of geopolitical knowledge, as well as her enthusiasm for collaborating with other writers. He went above and beyond his call of duty to advise new writers, guiding them through the editing process, resulting in the publication of many articles on positions and issues covered through any other English-language medium. You can read Charlotte’s reflections on her time as a guest editor here. Thank you, Charlotte!
Earlier this month, Julie Varughese joined as the new editor-in-chief of Toward Freedom. Julie comes to us after applying as a journalist, video producer, and communications professional in contexts. He has worked with Black Alliance for Peace since its inception, supporting their impressive expansion over the past 4 years. Julie’s strong writing, editing, video, graphic design, and social media skills will be a boon to Toward Freedom as we expand and grow to serve a more varied audience and cover other parts of the world. Last week, Julie edited and published articles on Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine and drones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. Send a message to editor@towardfreedom. org with any comments or suggestions. Welcome, Julie!
Sam Mayfield led the organization through an era of transition in our operations, finance, and governance, with a transparent vision and commitment to high-quality reporting and research of global events and popular movements from an anti-imperialist perspective. His principled leadership, sound ethical paintings, and enjoyment as a journalist and filmmaker have been invaluable as we have faced demanding situations in recent years. Thank you Sam!
Visit versfreedom. org for all the latest news and expect to see an increased presence of Toward Freedom stories on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in the coming weeks.
Thank you readers of Hacia la Libertad for your support!
On behalf of the Toward Freedom Board of Directors,
Rebecca Kemble
President