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 Over half a million Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent live in the Dominican Republic, where certain government policies reflect racial discrimination and xenophobia. Because the Dominican government makes it difficult for Haitians to obtain legal residency documents, the vast majority are undocumented. In violation of the Dominican Constitution, Haitians' Dominican-born children are frequently denied Dominican citizenship. Haitians' precarious legal status leaves them vulnerable to economic exploitation, arbitrary expulsion, and violations of basic rights. |
J.G., age 58, was born in Haiti but as a young man he moved to the Dominican Republic, where he worked as a sugar cane cutter for nearly forty years. One day in October 2000, he was stopped by Dominican migration police on his way home from work and deported to Haiti.
J.G. wasn't allowed to inform his wife and three children that he was being deported. Because their home has no phone, he has not been able to call his wife since arriving in Haiti.
Anxious to inform his wife of his whereabouts, J.G. told Human Rights Watch: "I can't continue without her."
The son of this elderly man died in the custody of the Dominican military in April 2001, in a town located at the northern border with Haiti. Border police told the son's wife that he had died of disease, but other prisoners said that he was beaten to death by police.
"We knew he wasn't sick because his wife saw him every day," said the dead man's father, who was never allowed to see his son's body.
The small boy, age 5, is the dead man's son.
This young Haitian woman was deported from the Dominican Republic in December 1999, when she was six months pregnant. Soldiers picked her up from a market and sent her to the border in the back of a large truck.
They did not allow her to inform anyone, even the baby's father, that she was being deported.
Many Haitians live in "bateyes": enclaves, generally bordering on sugar cane fields, which house cane cutters. Their living conditions are extremely poor.
In a 1999 report, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticized the bateyes' "overcrowding, lack of hygiene, of drinking water, and of latrines."
The very worst lodgings of the bateyes are found in the tin-roofed "barracks." The barracks where these men live have no furnishings except for metal bunk beds without mattresses.
The hands of a 62-year-old Haitian man who has worked all his life cutting cane in the Dominican Republic.
Sugar cane cutters in this region near Barahona, in the southwest Dominican Republic, said that they earned between 20 and 60 pesos a day: from U.S. $1.25 to U.S. $4.
