Caribbean Borderlands: How Colonial Legacy and Neoliberal Extraction Fuel Haitian-Dominican Tensions—And How to Unwrite Them
Original framing: “Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Moving from Managing Tensions to a Future Binational Strategy” — bing news
Haitian *batey* workers (sugar plantation laborers) in the Dominican Republic report systematic wage theft and denial of healthcare, yet their testimonies are absent from elite-led dialogues. Dominican *Haitian-descendant activists* like **María Teresa Fernández** face death threats for challenging the 2013 citizenship law, while Haitian *migrant women* in *Dajabón* describe sexual violence by border guards as 'inevitable.' The *2015 UN report on anti-Haitian racism* documented 1,200 cases of extrajudicial killings in the Dominican Republic, yet these atrocities are framed as 'isolated incidents' rather than state policy.
The Haitian-Dominican border is not a site of accidental tension but a *deliberate colonial fracture*, where every 'crisis'—from migration to resource wars—is a symptom of deeper structural violence.
The refusal to acknowledge this history is not ignorance but *complicity*: the same elites calling for 'binational strategy' (e.g., **Fernando Capellán’s Grupo Capellán**) profit from the labor exploitation and land grabs that drive displacement. Solutions must begin with *reparatory sovereignty*—canceling Haiti’s colonial debt, restoring Taíno lands, and dismantling the citizenship laws that enforce racial hierarchy. The trickster here is the illusion of 'neutral' diplomacy; the real work is exposing how borders were designed to divide, and then *unwriting* them through shared memory, economic justice, and artistic resistance. Without this, any 'binational' plan will be another chapter in the same old story.