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On the afternoon of October 19, 2023, about a hundred people gathered in Santo Domingo’s Parque Independencia to condemn the Zionist-led, U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza and express solidarity with the Palestinian people. The action brought together leftist and progressive political parties such as the Communist Party of Labor (PCT), collectives such as the National Popular Coordinating Committee, social movements such as the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), and unaffiliated young people. As protesters gathered, so did members of the far-right paramilitary organization the Antigua Orden Dominicana (AOD), which describes itself as a “patriotic” movement committed to “protecting Dominican identity.” The AOD members, dressed in their signature black uniforms and caps, and some plainclothes supporters, were joined by twice as many Dominican police.
According to the MST, as the demonstration assembled, AOD provocateurs released a “toxic gas” into the air, and tensions between the two groups escalated into fist fighting. Consistent with a pattern of increasing cooperation between these neofascist paramilitaries, law enforcement, and immigration authorities, police failed to protect the pro-Palestinian protesters. AOD members claimed they had come to the rally to prevent “communists, homosexuals, or pro-Haitians” from entering the mausoleum that houses the remains of the founding fathers who ushered in the Dominican Republic’s 1844 separation from Haiti. After more protesters gathered, however, the event proceeded as planned. Those assembled shouted slogans like “Gaza Resists, Palestine exists,” and various speakers denounced both the Dominican government’s support of the Israeli apartheid state and U.S. complicity in the genocide. One of the demands was for President Luis Abinader to cease the government’s close relationship with Israel.
Not far from the site of that protest, but half a millennium earlier, in 1521, Muslim Wolof Africans enslaved on the sugar plantation of Christopher Columbus’s eldest son, Diego, rose up in rebellion. They burned Diego’s plantation and others along the Nigua River as they marched west toward Azua, freeing enslaved Africans along the way. Today, antiracist and human rights activists like the Palestine solidarity protesters in Parque Independencia reaffirm and continue the island’s over 500-year radical tradition of resisting the forces of colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. They also continue to face the brunt of a long history of repression of radical movements in the Dominican Republic, where apartheid-like conditions for people of Haitian descent, limited rights for women, anti-Blackness, homophobia, and the suppression of labor and progressive movements shape daily life.
Since methods and technologies of repression are increasingly circulated between the Dominican and Israeli governments, the struggle against apartheid in the Dominican Republic is also a struggle against apartheid in Palestine and globally. Palestine and Ayiti—the Taíno name for the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti—are both geopolitically and economically important for the United States and Israel and extremely profitable for the military, mining, tourism, and agricultural industries. Over 850 companies benefit from free-trade zones in the Dominican Republic, while in Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly proposed a massive free-trade zone project for the postgenocide Gaza Strip. Ayiti and Palestine are also key symbolic sites of the ideological structures of anti-Blackness, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia.
In the Dominican Republic, genocides and apartheid of the 20th and 21st centuries—carried out both by the dictatorships of Rafael Trujillo and Joaquin Balaguer and by the legalistic governments of Abinader and other elected presidents—not only parallel Israel’s actions but have been developed in consultation with and in admiration of Israel, the United States, and other imperialist powers. At the same time, building on deeply anti-Haitian and anti-Black attitudes in government and society that blame the country’s ills on a disenfranchised, denationalized, and highly exploited Haitian community, Abinader and his conservative predecessors have not only tolerated but actively encouraged the growth of the AOD and its ideology, including by refusing to hold the group legally accountable for its violence against social justice activists.
The AOD and their far-right allies in government—many of them Black and Brown—include neo-Nazis, supporters of Donald Trump and Israel, deniers of African ancestry in the Dominican Republic, and evangelical Christians with Islamophobic, patriarchal, and homophobic beliefs. In a pattern happening all over the world, these fascists support the very structures of racial and colonial capitalism that oppressed their ancestors and continue to oppress them. Against this backdrop, building solidarity right now between Palestine, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, their diasporas, and their allies is imperative: the anti-imperialist struggles of these communities strike at crucial nodes of material and ideological power in the global capitalist system.
Shared Histories of Genocide, Apartheid, and Occupation
According to some estimates, by the 1520s, two decades after Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean in 1492, 95 percent of the Taínos of Ayiti were dead. In 1502, the Spanish began bringing Africans to Santo Domingo, still the name of the Dominican capital today, to replace Indigenous people in a developing system of colonialism and slavery on stolen land. The enslaved African and Taíno population in Ayiti resisted immediately and persistently, leading to their further racialization as negros (Blacks) and indios (Indians). In addition to their darker skin, Africans and Taínos were racialized and criminalized because of their lack of Christian religion. Citing historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, writer Sylvia Winter explains that Europeans felt they were justified in “their conquest and exploration” because the people they targeted practiced “idolatry,” and their lands were “therefore perceived as legitimately expropriable.”
The interactions between Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and Africans in Abya Yala during the first half of the 16th century were foundational to the dehumanization and exploitation that have divided our world between the darker, racialized, colonized, poor masses on the one hand and the white supremacist transnational elite on the other. As the modern history of Ayiti demonstrates, even when that elite incorporates people of color, it is still white supremacist and existentially afraid of the rebellion of Black and Indigenous masses.
Another genocide in Ayiti came in 1937, when 20,000 Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans were massacred in many established, mixed communities along the Haitian-Dominican borderlands over a period of several weeks. The order for the ethnic cleansing campaign came from the Dominican dictator Trujillo, who, like the Dominican leaders of today, scapegoated Haitians to distract from his repressive regime’s severe acts of violence and the legacies of U.S. intervention. Under U.S. occupation from 1916 to 1924, the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry grew quickly, benefiting foreign corporations. After Trujillo came to power in a coup in 1930, his regime actively recruited Haitians to labor in the Dominican cane fields while also enforcing their segregation within bateyes, under-resourced communities created to house plantation workers. Throughout Trujillo’s 31-year dictatorship and into the present, Haitians working for Dominican and U.S.-owned sugar companies in the Dominican Republic have helped to create a transnational elite class, of which President Abinader, himself a multimillionaire, is a part.
Today, the deplorable and slavery-like conditions in the cane fields and bateyes have been well documented. In 2022, the United States banned imports of Dominican sugar produced by the company Central Romana, sold in the United States under the brand Domino, over its alleged use of forced labor. Already marginalized, Dominican workers of Haitian descent became additionally vulnerable after a 2013 Constitutional Court decision denationalized more than 200,000 Haitian descendants, stripping them of their Dominican citizenship. The court ruling upheld a 2010 constitutional amendment abolishing birthright citizenship and applied the change retroactively. Dominican citizens with Haitian parents who had irregular immigration status at the time of the child’s birth were effectively rendered stateless overnight, leaving them vulnerable to expulsion. Haitians in the Dominican Republic continue to be subjected to violent official immigration raids, but they are also targeted by a number of armed paramilitary groups that capture people and deliver them to police and military authorities.
Since entering office in 2020, the Abinader administration has doubled down on anti-Haitian policies. In 2022, the president ordered immigration authorities to ramp up detentions and deportations of Haitians and denationalized Dominicans of Haitian descent on private and “state-owned land,” which includes the bateyes, by any means necessary. The country reported 250,000 deportations in 2023 alone. In the latest round of mass expulsions, the government has vowed to deport as many as 10,000 Haitians per week. Labor organizers from the affected communities, as well as the well-organized movement of sugarcane workers demanding their retirement pay, are steadfast in resisting the assault, even though they face threats, jail time, or death for their organizing on behalf of Haitian workers.
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Sandy Plácido is a historian of Latinx and Caribbean peoples and an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark.
