The Haiti – Dominican Republic border, on September 25, 2012. (Photo: Alex Proimos)
They called it the Parsley Massacre.
Directed by the ruthless Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, soldiers rounded up thousands of people along the Dominican Republic’s borderlands with Haiti, demanding that they identify a sprig of parsley. The story goes that when French- and Creole-speaking Haitians failed to mimic the Spanish pronunciation, perejil, they were murdered. Estimates of the number killed range as high as 20,000 to 30,000.
The 1937 massacre is a haunting flashpoint in a long tradition of anti-Haitian politics — anti-haitanismo — on the eastern half of the island shared by the two countries. Now there’s a different kind of test for Dominicans of Haitian descent. And the price for failure is deportation.
It began in 2013, when a Dominican court ruling stripped up to 200,000 Haitian immigrants and their descendants of their Dominican citizenship — a stunning and unprecedented reversal of the country’s normal rules allowing birthright citizenship. Thousands of Dominicans were put at risk of being deported to Haiti, where many also lack citizenship.
The Dominican legislature followed the ruling with the Naturalization Law, or Law 169-14. In theory, the law is supposed to help disenfranchised Dominicans reclaim their citizenship, but it puts the burden of proof on the victims to provide records of their births — or even their parents’ births — in the Dominican Republic.
Yet many of these births were never registered, in many cases because Dominican officials deliberately denied records to people of Haitian descent. There’s hardly any official reporting on how many Haitians have been successful at obtaining Dominican citizenship, though not even 7,000 were able to apply before the window closed last June. The rest must now register as foreigners in their country. Meanwhile, anti-Haitian lawmakers like Vinicio Castillo Semán are fighting for legislation to deny nationality to…