Badly paid work, under a blazing sun, in a field of sugar cane… Born in the Dominican Republic, Andrés, 22, dreams of an identity card and a better life in this country he consider as his.
His Dominican father did not recognize him, and his mother is Haitian. “Dominican men are fickle,” he laughs, in El Seibo, 120 km west of Santo Domingo.
But, beyond the joke, his situation is dramatic. Although he does have a Dominican birth certificate, he has not had Dominican nationality for 10 years. A 2013 Constitutional Court ruling, applied retroactively to people born between 1929 and 2010, deprived more than 250,000 Dominicans of foreign parents, mostly Haitians, of their nationality. Many were deported to a country they didn’t even know.
Ten years later, Andrés is still there, but he has no choice but to moonlight. With seven companions, he hopes to harvest in one day some four tons of sugar cane paid 16 dollars… to be divided into eight.
Many other companions of Andrés have taken refuge like him in the “bateyes”, small villages or slums made up of wooden and sheet metal houses with outdoor latrines where the sugar cane workers usually live.
There, they are generally safe from the raids of the immigration services which lie in wait for them when they go to town to try to find better wages or simply to run errands or go to the doctor. Pregnant women were thus expelled after a medical visit.
In one of El Seibo’s bateyes, children have fun after dark in the dirt streets. Groups of workers play dominoes and joke in Creole, the Haitian language derived from French.
Most sugar cane workers are of Haitian descent. A tradition. The Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961) had asked for labor from his neighbour. As life in Haiti became difficult, the workers stayed.
This is the start of the confusion.
For the most part illiterate, these workers were registered in the registers of the sugar cane companies but without legal existence: no official document for them, no visa, no residence permit.
The Constitutional Court relied on this lack of official registration to deprive them of nationality, considering that they were “in transit”.
Some Haitian families have paid Dominicans to register their children under another name so they can have citizenship.
Associations are putting pressure on the government to obtain the regularization of these stateless persons and appeals have been filed with the courts.
The government announced in 2014 the creation of a special register but the process, full of pitfalls and now closed, has only led to the normalization of the situation of 26,800 people, according to the NGO Participacion Ciudadana.
“They are neither from here nor from there,” laments Elena Lorac, 34, an activist from the Reconocidos movement, herself concerned by the problem. “All these denationalization policies make us extremely vulnerable,” she said.
The situation is all the more complicated as the difference in standard of living between the two countries of the island of Hispaniola has fueled xenophobia which has spread.
Many Dominicans evoke an “invasion”, affirming that three million Haitians live in the country, while they are officially only a little more than 750,000 between immigrants and their descendants.
“They immediately point the finger at me, she’s a Haitian, because of the color of my skin and because I have frizzy hair,” said Maria Paul, 53, born in the Dominican Republic but who has never been registered in the country.
She obtained a foreigner’s identity card which expired and which she could not renew. “My parents were immigrants, but I am not an immigrant,” she complains.
Criticized for the hardening of its policy towards Haiti with more expulsions and the construction of a border wall, the government of President Luis Abinader did not respond to requests from AFP.
International organizations offer their support to those affected, but also do not wish to speak on the subject, which is very sensitive in the Dominican Republic.
But Elena Lorac is categorical: “we are here, we will not go anywhere else because we do not even know” Haiti, the poorest country on the American continent.
04/14/2023 20:17:55 – Santa Cruz de El Seibo (Dominican Republic) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
