Word: dominicans
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...