Deny and deflect (The Parsley Massacre)

River Massacre, Haiti, Fran Afonso via Wikimedia 

This is the sixth consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel 'The Feast of the Goat'  (2000), by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

October 2 1937:

Durante algunos meses, he viajado y recorrido la frontera en el amplio sentido de la palabra. He visto, investigado, e inquirido sobre las necesidades de la población. A aquellos dominicanos que se quejaban de las depredaciones por parte de los haitianos que vivían entre ellos, los robos de ganado, provisiones, frutas, etcétera, y estaban por tanto impedidos de disfrutar pacíficamente del fruto de su trabajo, les he respondido ‘voy a resolver esto’. Y ya hemos comenzado a remediar la situación. Ahora mismo, hay trescientos haitianos muertos en Bánica. Y este remedio continuará”.Un mundo destruido, una nación impuesta

"For some months, I have traveled and traversed the frontier in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, ‘I will fix this.’ And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.^"

In 'The Feast of the Goat' Trujillo is described as finding blackness repugnant and being ashamed of it in his own ancestry. Today, the Dominican Republic has a racially diverse population, with 70.4% identifying as Mixed, 15.8% as Black, and 13.5% as White. 95% of Haiti's population is Black, at 95%. 

In 1937,weeks before Trujillo, when drunk, ordered the massacre of the 60,000 Haitians living along the border, he had received a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. 

Starving Haitians crossed the border, willing to work for food, the landholders hired them: they were cheaper than the local population. Trujillo had tried to clamp down in immigration but US sugar cane interests in the Dominican Republic wanted the cheap Haitian labour. Aggrieved Dominicans complained about theft of their goods by Haitians.  Trujillo's response:

Give instructions to proceed from this very night to exterminate without contemplation all persons of Haitian nationality who are illegally in Dominican territory.

Between one and three fifths of the 60,000 were murdered in the first half of October. There were so many murders in remote areas, with bodies buried in acidic soil in or thrown to the sharks and the atrocity so well covered up that it is not known whether the numbers were 12,500 killed or nearer 35,000. 

It is often reported that the test, by Dominican soldiers, of whether someone was Haitian or not was whether they could say the word “perejil” (parsley) in the Spanish way. If they could not, it meant they were Haitian and they were murdered. Thus the event became known by English -speaking researchers as the “Parsley Massacre”. How widespread this actually was is unknown. If could just be a case of an isolated anecdote growing in proportion. Dominicans know it as el corte" (the cutting) and Haitians as "kouto-a" (the knife).

Extraordinarily, because of the relationship he had with Trujillo and the financial support, the Haitian president, Sténio Vincent, a traitor to his people, hushed up the matter and prohibited discussion of it. After two years of protests and an attempted coup, Vincent was forced to seek mediation via the US's Franklin Roosevelt. Refusing to submit to an enquiry, Trujillo paid Haiti off with $525,000, about 70% of the sum actually agreed. Due to corruption, survivors received two centavos each.

The accord signed in connection with the blood money said that the Haitians had been "undesirables" and Trujillo accepted no responsibility whatsoever for the killings. He used the opportunity to prohibit migration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Thus the tyrant converts a massacre into an advantage. It is not just murderers who do this. If you have not seen the same strategy in local government, in schools, in business, in families, some way of shirking responsibility and manipulating a wrong into a perceived right, or shifting culpability in to the victim, then you live in a Utopian society, have either been very fortunate, have lived an extraordinarily sheltered existence, or - and this is probably the most common case - are unable or unwilling to see the dangers of your local tyrants. 

The tyrant is totally indifferent to the inherent morality of the situation. What they care about is what they get out if it and the account that is written that clears their name. The moral reckoning is the job of the investigative journalist, or the novelist, often much later. Fortunately, that is the account that endures. 

Deny and deflect: it was the term shared with me by Beth Morrison, who won a Saltire award for exposing abuse in schools for disabled children and was recognised as such in the UK national press. At the time I was seeking advice about the lies and cover-ups in our local school relating to school and council educational management, bullying and the handling of that complaint. 

They expect you to give up if they intimidate you enough. That is a textbook strategy of all bullies. After about a year of closed ranks persecution by the local authority, I gave up. Beth didn't.

Deny and deflect: the policy of all corrupt, self-interested, immoral authoritarians great and small.