A construction worker observes and records a protest from the top of a building under development. About 30 workers walking along a dirt road surround a vehicle, which soon takes off, leaving the frame. A shot is heard, and the workers run away from the shooter. A second shot is fired. A worker lies motionless, face down on the hot earth, shot in the back. Another video shows the workers around their dying comrade. A third video brings us face-to-face with death: we see Haitian construction worker Fritzner Pierre Presnor, known affectionately as Sonson, lifeless, with his yellow safety vest bloodied on the left shoulder. The National Police later claimed that a machete was found near Presnor’s body, but the videos show that he was not armed and that he was wounded at a considerable distance from the vehicle where foreman Héctor Ramírez Pérez shot at the Haitian workers.
Presnor was killed in broad daylight on March 22 during a protest with fellow Haitian workers demanding their back wages. His death is one example of anti-Haitian violence in the Dominican Republic, which is systematically sanctioned and even promoted by the Dominican state, with the recent authorization of a violent march led by the Antigua Dominican Order (AOD) paramilitary group on March 30 in Friusa, a popular neighborhood of Punta Cana. Another Haitian man would also fall victim to anti-Haitian state violence, a few weeks later. Less than a month after the AOD march, all dwellers of the Mata Mosquito sector of Friusa were expelled, and more than 500 homes were demolished.
The Dominican “Economic Miracle”
The Dominican Labor Code, imposed in the 1990s by former president Joaquín Balaguer, contains a Trujillo-inspired clause, which dictates that no more than 20 percent of a company’s workforce can comprise foreign employees. To circumvent this regulation, companies do not directly hire Haitian workers but turn to informal subcontractors, a mechanism journalist Altagracia Salazar has suggested is even used by President Abinader’s family businesses in the construction sector. Construye Capital turns to Guillermo Filpo Soto—who, in his LinkedIn profile, appears as a representative of a surveying and topography company—for supplying the Haitian workers to build the hotel without an employment contract, being formally in the company’s payroll, or having access to social security. As such, the subcontractors handle enormous amounts of cash without any control and, from time to time, disappear with their employees’ wages. On March 22, Presnor and his fellow workers demanded payment of their back wages from Soto, who tried to flee the scene. His aide, Ramírez Pérez, fired shots in the direction of the workers, killing Presnor.
Presnor’s relatives noted that he worked for Construye Capital, a Spanish company contracted to build the five-star FUNEEQ Hotel Resort in the Uvero Alto sector of Punta Cana. The resort is an ambitious project spanning more than 70,000 square meters (about 750,000 square feet) of construction and twice as much urbanization. The videos of Presnor’s death confirm that he was murdered at the hotel construction site. Construye Capital builds for Fiesta Americana, a company owned by the powerful Mexican Grupo Posadas, owner of more than 150 hotels with 20,000 rooms worldwide. Ramírez Pérez’s shooting against the construction workers at Uvero Alto, as per a National Police report and the account offered by members of Presnor’s family, represents the rupture of the weakest link in the great chain of the so-called Dominican “economic miracle.”
This is a model that boasts three decades of rapid economic growth but is in fact based on tax exemptions for big capital in tourism and other sectors, a rapidly growing foreign debt, abundant remittances from the Dominican diaspora, massive privatizations, labor deregulation, and predatory gold mining. Also at the heart of this model is a near-total impossibility to form independent unions and the subjection of the Haitian immigrant labor force to work conditions often akin to semi-slavery. Punta Cana is the fastest-growing tourist region in the country, with its airport receiving almost 5 million visitors in 2024. It has green golf courses, white sand beaches, and hotels that can cost thousands of dollars a night. The Haitian workers who build these hotels live in nearby barrios, such as Friusa.
Fascism is Rampant in Punta Cana
Fascism is mainstream in the Dominican Republic. All private media, except Diario Libre and Acento, provided extensive and positive coverage of the calls to march against Haitians on March 30. The Dominican press reporting on this incident did not mention the wage theft, labor exploitation of workers, or the killing of an unarmed worker shot in the back. Instead, these events were presented as a dreaded Haitian “mutiny,” claiming Presnor died as a result of “clashes” and generic “violence,” feeding into the frenzy of the AOD’s calls to march.
The AOD, a paramilitary group that vindicates the 1937 genocide perpetrated by the Trujillo dictatorship against Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans, and whose spokesman is an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, had organized a march for March 30 in Friusa, a few kilometers from Uvero Alto, where Presnor was murdered. AOD made the so-called “Haitian mutiny” a key talking point in its agitation for the expulsion of Haitian workers from Friusa. Far-right Dominican influencer Santiago Matias, theatrically clutching a Dominican flag in front of the cameras, had already called on his followers on March 20 to bring firearms to the march and instructed his fans that, “in case a Haitian passes by, take him away.”
The Ministry of Interior and Police authorized the march, and the Ministry of Defense deployed troops to guard the AOD, following the group’s request for protection. While Friusa is a Dominican working-class neighborhood physically, socially, and economically similar to many others, the government had defined it as a target in 2021, when then director of the General Directorate of Migration (DGM) described Friusa as impenetrable to the police because there were too many Haitians living there and stated it could eventually secede from the Dominican Republic, “like Kosovo.” Since then, the far-right has been clamoring for eliminating the “threat” of Friusa.
On March 30, Dominicans and Haitians living in Friusa stayed at home during the march, while thousands of soldiers and policemen were deployed, and hundreds of visiting neo-Nazis shouted for the expulsion of the Haitians. In the heated mood of the lynch mob, the march was divided. Following Matias’s lead, a group of young men tried to overcome the police barrier to head for Mata Mosquito, the poorest sub-sector of Friusa, while the rest of the march turned back. The police fired tear gas and sprayed water at the burning barricades made from furniture and wooden structures. Thirty-two neofascist protesters were arrested, and police confiscated two knives, two machetes, and a gun.
“We need a Ku Klux Klan in the Dominican Republic,” lamented one of the marchers when it became clear they would not outpower the police. But it wasn’t only young gang members and uniformed neo-Nazis with military boots and black berets at the mobilization: businessmen, influencers, and even former Constitutional Court judge Jottin Cury also attended the AOD’s call. To deal with the embarrassment of the violence, AOD and the government blamed it on unidentified “infiltrators.” Yet despite the dozens of arrests, no evidence of “infiltration” was offered by either the government or the AOD, nor was any sector blamed for the alleged “infiltration.” The press also took care not to ask any questions about it.
As the neo-Nazis left Friusa, a question floated in the murky air: How would the government respond to the far-right’s mobilizations?
Militarization, Expulsion, and Destruction
Exactly one week after the neo-Nazi march, President Luis Abinader, himself the grandson of immigrants, spoke about the event. He claimed no one had done as much as he has in the face of “the Haitian threat.” Notably, Abinader had built the border wall separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic and has deported more individuals than any other Dominican president. He claimed to understand the concerns of the “citizenship” and announced fifteen measures against Haitians: from increased militarization and legal reforms intended to increase persecution against migrants to eliminating the constitutional right to free healthcare. Starting April 21, Haitian migrants have to pay for any medical service in public hospitals, and if they lack legal residence, they will be deported immediately after receiving treatment, even if they are women with newborn babies.
Militarization had already intensified before Abinader announced the measures on April 6. The military, initially sent to protect the neo-Nazis and prevent the violence from making international headlines linking Punta Cana to racist lynchings, set up a camp at the entrance of Mata Mosquito after the March 30 mobilization. A more organized attack by the military began on April 3 at dawn. Every night, the military broke down doors and searched houses and apartments looking for money, cell phones, and Haitian workers. In the first two weeks of April, more than 2,500 Haitians were expelled from Friusa, and thousands were forcibly displaced. On April 22, the police and the military imposed a total siege and brought in heavy machinery to demolish Mata Mosquito. Hundreds of houses were razed to the ground, leaving humble Dominican and Haitian families homeless.
On April 27, Minister of Interior and Police, Faride Raful, visited Friusa and published an aerial photograph on her X account of the total destruction of Mata Mosquito. While Raful was in Friusa at the destruction, AOD members in Santo Domingo were attacking people who attended a march commemorating the 60th anniversary of the April Revolution, which ended with the U.S. military invasion and occupation of 1965-66. On April 28, President Abinader admitted that the demolition of Mata Mosquito was carried out in compliance with a private request from an unnamed party claiming ownership of the land upon which the barrio was built. Mata Mosquito had existed since the 1990s. This raises doubts as to the motivations of the ultra-right mobilization and the subsequent repression in the area.
“Two Jaws of the Same Pliers”
In the early morning of April 10, Haitian worker Constant Laventure climbed onto the roof of the three-story house where he lived. Neighbors and witnesses told the human rights organization, Haitianos RD, that Laventure had already packed his suitcase to leave for Haiti. Laventure took refuge on the roof, as he thought that if the military had the opportunity to loot his house, they would be satisfied and would not try to detain him. However, the soldiers took their time to steal and climbed up to the roof anyway. The official statement from the DGM says he died after trying to jump to a nearby building. However, there is no nearby building. A neighbor interviewed by Haitianos RD identified a “very fat guard” as the one who threw Laventure off the roof. As witnesses are either in hiding or have been deported, no legal process has contested the lies and crimes of the DGM.
The Dominican government depends on the profits that emanate from the labor of Haitian workers and resorts to periodic outbursts of repressive brutality to impose a dictatorial discipline. The police and military apparatus and the neo-Nazi paramilitaries are two jaws of the same pliers of Dominican apartheid capitalism. Like Constant Laventure, Fritzner Pierre Presnor tried to save money to return to Haiti. Presnor was 29 years old and the father of two little girls. When he came to the Dominican Republic to work in 2016, he left his partner behind, but some time later, he brought her to live with him in the outskirts of Punta Cana, in the invisible barrios surrounding the golf courses and the five-star hotels. He wanted to save enough money to send his wife back to Haiti so the girls could attend school. Construye Capital engineers came to mourn at his funeral, but the family says it received no compensation.
In the fascist imagination and the official discourse of the Dominican regime, Haitian workers are “invaders” who erode sovereignty and threaten national security. In reality, they have built and fed the Dominican Republic for decades, receiving very little in return. As evidenced by Laventure and Presnor, their dream is not to invade and conquer, but to return home.
Simón Rodríguez is a journalist and researcher based in the Dominican Republic.