The Parsley Massacre (Trancript)

In the first week of October in 1937, one of the most brutal events in the 20th century Caribbean occurred where an estimated 15,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitians descent were murdered under the orders of Dominican Republic president, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

In the Beginning 

Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island of Hispaniola and as such, have always been connected in their history. Both were first colonised by the Spanish in 1492 before 1697 when Haiti became colonised by the French. It would remained this way until the 1804, where in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the country achieved independence. Thus becoming the world’s first black republic. But DR had a different route in the 1800’s where between the years of 1822 and 1844, the DR was occupied and governed by the Haitian government. By the 1860’s, DR was then re-annexed by Spain for several years. 

But then in the early 1900’s, the US military invaded and occupied the entire island. In Haiti, this occupation lasted from 1915 to 1934 while for the DR, they controlled the island from 1916 to 1924. 

Specifically to Haiti, the US stated that invading the country was necessary, for Haiti was poor and unstable and if they did not take over, some other power would. The secretary of state at the time, Robert Lansing, backed the occupation as it allowed for an end of “anarchy, savagery and oppression” in Haiti, for according to him “the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organisation”

A few months before the invasion, American Marines stoled $500,000 worth of gold, packed in wooden boxes, from the headquarters of Haiti’s national bank. The gold was then brought to Wall Street. But this incident, the theft of Haiti’s gold, we will explore on another episode.  

But US occupation in the early 20th century Caribbean was not only limited to Haiti and DR. In the region, the US also occupied Cuba, over three different periods: 1898 to 1902, 1906 to 1909 and 1917 to 1922. In the 1940’s Trinidad and Tobago was occupied by the US Navy. And it is through these occupation that the US extended their own economic and military interests in the Caribbean in the early and to mids 20th century. It is also during this period, that the person of interest in this episode would come to power in the DR. His name was Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. 

El Jeje, Rafael Trujillo

During the US occupation of DR, the Dominican National Guard was formed and Trujillo with limited formal schooling would joined in 1919. Trujillo is of Haitian descent actually and his time in the national guards saw him been trained by the US Marines and gradually, his military career progressed. By 1927, he was named commander in chief of the National Army. 

But in 1930, a rebellion, under the leadership of Rafael Estrella Urena, took place where the rebels main goal was to overthrow Dominican President Horacio Vasquez who was going against the constitution by extending his presidential term. However, during the rebellion, Trujillo took no sides, per an agreement he had made previously made with Urena. Soon after, Vasquez was in exile and no one was in control of the government. Seeing an opportunity, Trujillo ran and eventually won the 1930 election.

But by the mid 1930’s, Trujillo true nature as a dictator was taking form. Even so, he would often celebrate himself in the form of statues and parades and in some cases, rituals. In fact, he eventually entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the head of any country who built the most statues in their honour. Then in 1936, Trujillo renamed the capital city of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo - the City of Trujillo. A year later, Trujillo took it a step further - this time, by setting his sights on reshaping the national identity of the country.

To do this, he set his sights on a particular area in the country which marked the border between Haiti and Dominica. In that area, was the Massacre River. The river got its named after an incident that occurred in 1728 where around thirty buccaneers were killed by Spanish authorities near the banks of the river . Now, in 1937, the river would earned it name once more.

Apart & Together

It key to note that from as early as 1933, Trujillo was engaged in discussions with Haitian president, Sténio Joseph Vincent, who came to rise in 1930. This discussion between both men involved a land dispute where land included in Haitian communities were incorporated into Dominican territory by a 1929 border treaty, which was suppose to calm the dispute which was birth from the days of European conquests in Hispaniola in the 1700’s and 1800’s. But in 1936, the discussion between both men came to an end with an agreement to redesigned the land to Haiti.

Also at this time in the 1930’s, the Haitian presence at the border was in two groups. The first was agricultural workers who were under contract to work on the sugar plantation. These persons, mostly men, were termed “braceros”. 

Richard Lee Turits in his paper, ‘A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic’ states the following: 

“In the pre-1937 Dominican frontier, particularly the northern frontier areas, a bicultural Haitian-Dominican world evolved over several generations of Haitian immigration and interaction with Dominican residents… From the start, the society was a bilingual, bicultural and transactional one spanning the Haitian and Dominican sides of the border”

Likewise, one of Dr. Turits’ interviewees, Percivio Diaz, who resided in the Dominican town of Santiago de la Cruz, states: 

“This place was made of amalgam of people, of Haitian men marrying Dominican women and Dominican men marrying Haitian women. Many here are the products of Dominican-Haitian unions” 

And this union between the Dominicans and Haitian was not only at the border of the countries but throughout the DR. In fact, Trujillo himself, was of Haitian descent. Another of Dr. Turits’ interviewers - a Dominican man from Monte Grande also stated: 

“In those days, we crossed the border without problems. We went over there as much as they came here. Papa had many friends over there. And he would drop us off with his compadres and they would take care of me”

Isil Nicolas Cour, a Haitian Dominican, also interviewed by Dr. Turits and documented in the historical compilation, The Haitian Reader, states: 

“I went to Dominican dances. We participated in the same ways Dominican did. And there were never any disagreements. I never saw any fighting, insulting, swearing”

Then as we mentioned before, the community along the border was bilingual where residents understood both Haitian Creole and Spanish and even a fusion of the two languages. Having experience this growing up at the border, Isil states that as a child: 

“You’d speak two languages there, you speak Kreyol, you speak Dominican. That is, when you are amid your countrymen, you’d speak Kreyol. But when you are amid Dominicans, you’d speak Spanish… we speak all languages, we speak Haitian, they speak Haitian too. Those who come to see you here they speak Haitian with you. When it’s to your country they come, they speak your country’s language.”

The community labour was also shared where they was no competitions among the different residents at the border. Turtis states that theHaitians who lived in the area cultivated coffee and subsistence crops alongside Dominicans who took part in hunting and raising animals. The cohabitation of the people in areas such as Dajabon and Monte Cristi were so that many Haitians worked as tailors, tinsmiths and other skilled workers; and others as domestic workers, and some as farm workers on lands owned by ethic Dominicans. To this relationship among the residents at the border communities, Dr. Turtis states: 

“In short, ethnic Haitians did not occupy an inferior position in the overall rural economy and society in the frontier. And Dominican frontier denizens had generally viewed Haitians neither as a poorer and subordinate group nor as outsiders. Nor was Haiti seen then as being less modern than the Dominican Republic.”

As one of Dr. Turtis interviewees sum up the relationship like this: 

“Although there were two sides, the people were one, united.” 

But the Trujillo and his government presented this relationship in another matter and by doing this, they propelled anti-Haitian rhetoric that has existed in the Dominican Republic for ages. Beginning in the 19th century, many Haitians and other West Indians came to DR to work on the country’s vast sugar canes fields. It was here that elites in the country demonised Haitians where they administer a campaign that frame them as a threat to the Dominican identity and a hindrance to the country’s plan to be modern and civilised. This campaign by the DR elites continued the 20th century and when he came to power, Trujillo surrounded himself with these elites who saw themselves as white. Most notably of these advisors were: Joaquin Balaguer, Julio Ortega Frier and Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle. And so, Trujillo called the presence of Haitians in DR an “invasion” who were supposedly “Africanising” the norther frontier of the country. In his effort to rid the country of Haitian presence, Trujillo attempted to recruit white immigrants from Puerto Rico. He wrote to the US president at this time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, offering to take some of the excess population of Puerto Rico.

As his presidency went on, this anti-Haitian rhetoric became a major feature of his tenure where he even speak on his efforts to “whiten” the Dominican Republic. As he once stated: 

“Haitians are foreigners in our land. They are dirty, rustlers of cattle, and practitioners of voodoo. Their presence within the territory of the Dominican Republic cannot but led to the deterioration of the living conditions of our citizens”.

In her 1998 fictional book about the event, ‘The Farming of Bones’, Edwidge Danticat sums up this ideology pushed by Trujillo. In the book, a priest was forced to say the following words by authorities during the Parsley Massacre, 

“Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will be cane to cut, you understand? Our problem is one of dominion. Tell me, does anyone like to have their house flooded with visitors, to the point that the visitors replace their own children? How can a country be ours if we are in smaller numbers than the outsiders? Those of us who love our country are taking measures to keep it our own… Sometimes I cannot believe that this one island produced two such different peoples. We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less than three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?”

The Test

Now in the early years of Trujillo regime, persons were targeted in order to pay tax. The government double down on enforcing a migration tax and an identity card fee. The central government, then devised a plan which targeted Haitian immigrants who resided in southwest DR but their plan would also include Dominicans who had not paid road tax. This plan was soon contested by local authorities and abandoned. Still, this was just a series of discrimination by the state towards Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. 

Another tactic was when soldiers demanded that residents pronounced the word “peril”, which when translated to Spanish means parsley, “tijera”, meaning scissors and other world that contains the letter “r”. The notion behind this is that the inability of persons to pronounce the Spanish “r”, meant that the person is Haitian. It is through this practice that solider would determine whether persons were of Haitian identify and then ordered them to pay an annual migration tax. On the other hand, persons who pronounced the “r” were told presumed to have been born in DR and would not ordered to pay a tax. 

As one person told Dr. Turits: 

“You were going to the market or to Loma de Cabrera, you run into the guards, they say to you, ‘Stop right there!’ And so you do that, you stop. ‘Say “perejil!’ And so you say, ‘Perejil, perejil, perejil!’ ‘Say claro, ‘¡Claro, claro, claro!’.” 

And when Ercilia was asked to if she needed to produced a birth certificate or baptismal, she states: 

“No, no. As soon as you could say that (“perejil” or “claro”), you didn’t have any problems with them.” 

To this, Turtis stated, when lacking records of Dominican birth, fluency in Spanish allowed many persons of Haitian descent to pass for Dominican citizens. 

Another person said to Dr. Turits: 

“If  you spoke Dominican well, Dominicans said you were not Haitian.”

And as such, it was this language test that laid the basis of what would come in 1937. 

The Massacre

And so it happened that throughout the week of October 2, 1937, soldiers under the order of Trujillo, rounded up and killed Haitians residents and Dominicans of Haitian descent who have lived in the country for decades. As recounted by one eye witnessed the Dominican Secretary of Justice, Julio Ortega Frier, stated that Haitian were leaving the Dominican Republic, “alive or dead”. With this, authorities used the parsley language test to target Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. 

By this means, the vast majority of this massacre took place along the border of the two countries but soon spill over to other non-border towns in DR. We should note that Haitian working on sugarcane fields in DR were not targeted. Still many persons were seized and killed where the main weapon of choice was the machete. According to scholars, the machete was used intentionally as it projected a narrative of ordinary Dominican citizens murdering Haitians in their communities and not a deliberate plan by the government to get rid of Haitians presence in the country. 

Besides the use of machetes, there were other tactics used. One group of Haitians were forced in a courtyard between government building located in Santiago and killed, while about a thousand others were forced off the pier at Montecristi to drown. Then, children were throned against rocks and trees. Furthermore, in the early days of the massacre, many Haitians tried to escape by crossing the Massacre River that divide the two country but a few days after, the official checkpoint between the countries was close and persons were unable to escape.

Dominican civilians and local authorities also played a role in the massacre. Some aided the army by identifying and locating Haitians and in some cases, the state recruited a number of persons to participate in the killings. Others were tasked with burning and burying the bodies of the victims. Most of these individuals were prisoners all from other areas in DR or ordinary citizens who supported the regime views and their stances. However, a number of local Dominicans help Haitians hide and flee but this was not enough for by the end of the massacre which Dominicans have termed, “el corte" (the cutting) and Haitians called “kout-kouto-a” (the stabbing), an estimated 15,000 persons were killed.

International Consequences or Lack Thereof

In the weeks after the massacre, there was little international outcry or even calls to held the Trujillo regime accountable. One of the reason: since their revolution which led to their independence in 1804, Haiti had been the most diplomatically isolated country in the western hemisphere and this, which is still an issue today, and coupled with the anti blackness towards the country, the country could not rely on external assistance if a war erupted between the countries. Another reason was the US and their Good Neighbour Policy. The Good Neighbour was a specific program created in the 1933, which according to the US, was to strengthen their relationship in Latin America.

In his paper, Genocide Next Door, “The Good Neighbour Policy, the Trujillo Regime and the Haitian Massacre of 1937”, Eric Paul Roorda, states that the Parsely Massacre, ‘threatened to damage the Roosevelt administration Good’s Neighbour Policy”. As such, the US did not speak out against Trujillo’s actions but advocate for some sort of settlement. Trujillo promised an investigation into the killings but the person who would be place in charge of said investigation was DR’s newly appointed acting foreign minister, Julio Ortega Frier. The same Frier, who were mentioned early evoked strong anti-Haitian rhetoric stance. As such, one Haitian minister who would soon become the Haitian prime minister in the 1940’s, Elie Lescot, stated that any investigation overseen by Ortega would be “whitewashing”. 

Then a few weeks after the massacre, November 9th, a reporter ask President Roosevelt if he has given any concern to the what occurred in Dominican Republic, to which the president responded “Yes and no. I am familiar with it as it goes on”. By the first week of December, a series of talk was scheduled at the Mexican embassy in the US between Haitian and DR representatives. When the mediators of these talks recommended that an investigator commission be sent to DR to prepare a report, the DR government declined. 

Still, by this time, the US news outlet caught wind of the massacre. The Nation called Trujillo a “miniature Hitler” and called for the US State Department to severe ties. Life Magazine then ran photos of Trujillo and his victims. One US politician, representative Hamilton Fish of New York called the massacre “the most outrageous atrocity that has ever been perpetrated on the American continent”. Now Trujillo faced a major blow to the image of been a great leader that he took years to curate and thus when the label “miniature Hitler” was thrown on him, he launched an all out public relations campaign to change this perception. Immediately, Trujillo offered to accept into the DR, one hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria where land would be donated by the government to create a refugee colony. This endeavour was widely praised by the US but as history would have it, by 1941, only 235 Jewish refugees settled in DR. It seems at some point, the Trujillo administration started to limit immigration visa towards refugees. To this, Dr. Roorda states, “the settlement’s rigorous selectivity in some ways resembled the discrimination that Jews faced in Europe”. 

Still, Trujillo went further with his PR campaign. He took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times where he stated that that the murders were a result of a minor squabble between farmers and squatters, where only 105 Haitians were killed. Remember the machete been used as a deliberate weapon of killing? It would play a role in the rhetoric.  

However, soon after, Trujillo would agree to an arbitration. Under the terms of the arbitration treaty, a commission would be created - DR would nominate two persons and Haiti, nominates another two. And in the name of the “Good Neighbour Policy” both countries would then named an American as one of their representatives. According to Eric Paul Roorda, “the Roosevelt administration seemed relieved that its good offices were no longer required and that its brief official connection with the controversy had ended”. 

And so, whatsoever pressure and publicity given to the massacre, dwindled and Trujillo did not faced any consequences that would have come from this arbitration. What did happened however was that Trujillo offered to pay USD$525,000 to the Haiti, at which, the Haitian government agreed. Immediately after Haitian acceptance, the US president, Roosevelt, made a public statement of congratulations towards the two countries where he made a special mentioned of the two US representative on the arbitration committee. But the editors at American publication, The Nation, were highly critical of what was done and in a February 5, 1938 article, said the following: 

“Washington's main concern has been to prevent war between the two countries, and that is understandable. But what of its announced determination to prevent the growth of fascism in the Western Hemisphere? . . . A thorough official investigation by the mediators that identified and indicted the murderers of the 10,000 would have an excellent effect on the little Hitlers of South and Central America. Instead Trujillo is now in a position to whitewash a major crime - with the concurrence of all “good neighbors”. 

And The Nation was actually right, for there’s a lesser known fact that occurred after the payment was made to Haiti. For even though the media would move on from the massacre of October 1937, come the New Year, the massacre occurring in DR didn’t end. For the first half of 1938, thousand more Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent was forcible deported and hundreds more killed in the southern frontier region of DR. 

The Border of Lights

In the years following the massacre, a few things happened. WWII broke out of course and Trujillo regime continued for a further 25 years until 1961 when he was assassinated. As for Haiti, the consequences of the events of the 20th century, including the Parsley Massacre, the US occupation and the Good Neighbour Policy, led to the decades of the Duvalier dictatorship which would dragged the nation into further economic and social despair. 

Still, although the massacre would still carry scars in the Caribbean, it seems the rest of the world had moved on. That was until 1983 when the Black American poet, Rita Dove, who would go on to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987, published the poem, “Parsely”. 

“El General has found his word: perejil.

Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining   

out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.   

And we lie down. For every drop of blood   

there is a parrot imitating spring.

Out of the swamp the cane appears."

Then in December of 2011 Dominican writer, Julia Alvarez, was inspired to create a “border of lights” ceremony to commemorate the event. The ceremony consists of lightening up the DR-Haitian border, by raising candles alongside the Massacre River that separates both countries. By August 2012, the playwright Nehandra Loisea organised the Night of Monologues at New York University - an event which was a presentation of work about the massacre. This event marked the first time in the US that the Massacre was publicly commemorated. With the attention from that ceremony, a month later, Border of Lights raised over $5000 through a Kickstarter campaign. Julia Alvarez and other donated books to fundraise. The funds were used to purchased equipments, food and supplies in DR and Haiti. 

Soon after, the Border of Lights ceremony became a three day event in October of 2012. This ceremony marked the first time that the Parsley Massacre was remembered in transactional manner on Haitian and Dominican territory. As one resident, Regino Martinez, stated: 

“I’ve been here on the border for thirty nine years and this is the first time that local residents have engaged in such a public and intense conversation about the massacre”. 

Today, the Border of Lights has become a yearly tradition. 

Old Wounds

Decades of passed since the massacre but still today, the anti-immigration stance by the DR government towards Haitians and Dominicans of Haitians descent has continue. In 2013, the Dominican citizenship of a vast population of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic was revoked by the Dominican government. The country’s Supreme Court states that their families had been admitted to the Dominican Republic only temporarily for seasonal work and as such they legally could not claim birthright citizenship because their ancestors had been “in transit” at the time of their birth. To this, historians Richard Turtis and Lauren Derby in their academic piece “Haitian-Dominican History and the 1937 Haitian Massacre” states: 

“The casting off of great numbers of people of Haitian descent into statelessness and sightlessness continues to echo in contemporary history and not only in the Dominican Republic”. 

You can check out our Lest We Forget episode, “Everyone Except Haitians” to see learn how about the coupling of anti-immigration and anti-black discrimination has led to anti-Haitian rhetoric in the United States. 

Still, according to the latest data from the Organisation for International Migration, it is estimated that about 500,000 Haitian migrants are living in DR where many are undocumented. In January of 2021, the government agreed to help Haiti provide identity papers to its Haitian citizens living in DR. But this declaration took place at the same time when the government was expelling large numbers of Haitians on a daily basis.

In May of 2021, the DR government began constructing 102 miles of the border fence along the borders of the two nations. According to the then Dominican president, Luis Abinader, the estimated US$224 million fence will be built with technological systems such as facial recognition cameras, motion sensors, and infrared light. The government stated that this “wall” was to curb “illegal immigration, drugs, and the flow of stolen vehicles. But in a 2021 Bloomberg article titled “A 102-Mile Wall Is Separating an Island's Haves and Have-Nots”, Jim Wyss writes: 

“The wall is highly controversial on both sides of the island of Hispaniola, where animosity and mistrust run deep. Some of the resentment is anchored in nationalistic grievances tied to Haiti’s 1822 invasion and 22-year occupation of its neighbor; along the border, memories still linger of the 1937 massacre that killed an estimated 9,000 to 20,000 Haitians on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Part of the acrimony is also rooted in racism and xenophobia directed at the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere” 

Then for a few weeks in 2021, Santo Domingo saw a series of marches occurring where DR residents demanded the deportation of Haitians, who protesters blame for crime and soaking up jobs. The local newspapers followed suite with fear filled editorials.

With all of this, there is no doubt that the Parsley Massacre had a huge impact on the relations between both countries. It is to this that Michele Wucker in her publication, ‘Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola’, made the social analysis that the massacre had a lasting effect where even to this day, “it is nearly impossible for Dominicans and Haitians to think of each other without some trace of the tragedy of their mutual history”.