Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz

Author:Jonathan M. Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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In November 2015, I went to the border. I approached from the Dominican side, crossing into Haiti over a dry creek bed near the mouth of the Pedernales River. Once I’d passed through exit customs, the only sign of the border itself was a squat orange concrete marker stamped with the year the border was made official: 1929.

In this limbo, about a mile up from the crossing, was a makeshift camp home to thousands of fleeing Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Most had been living on the barren patch for months, in shacks fashioned out of whatever they could carry or find: used cardboard, bedsheets, old clothes, bits of tin.

A shack close to the road, with driftwood walls and a couple of ratty comforters for a roof, belonged to Peres Yves Jean and Mirlene Lamour.33 Both Peres and Mirlene were born on the Haitian side of the border. They met as teenagers working on the far eastern tip of the island, near the all-inclusive Dominican resorts of Punta Cana. As adults they became sharecroppers on a Dominican farm outside the little town of Los Patos, on the southern Barahona peninsula. They and their seven children spoke mostly Spanish with Kreyòl mixed in. Peres and Mirlene loved dancing to Dominican music and telling Haitian jokes. Their kids, like most Dominican kids, loved baseball.

Because their parents had brought them illegally as children, Peres and Mirlene were not Dominican citizens. Each of their children—three boys and four girls—had a different legal status, based on whatever the arbitrary laws had been at the moment each was born. But almost all the kids should have been Dominican citizens, because they were all born on Dominican soil before the constitution was changed. (Their youngest, two-year-old Milana, was the exception.)

As I sat on an upturned plastic wash bucket, Peres told me what had happened to them that year. In March, three months before the registration deadline, he had been coming home from a day job when he was picked up by men in khaki uniforms and thrown into the back of a truck. Because he did not have identification, the men drove him fifty miles west to the nearest border crossing and left him on the other side. Peres waited until the truck disappeared, then headed back across the shallow river to the Dominican side. For two days, he walked through cattle ranches and banana groves, under the turbines of a wind farm, until he reached his family in Los Patos. Then they gathered their things and left.

For a few weeks, the couple thought they could stick it out in another town right next to the border, on the Dominican side. But as the deadline approached, the drumbeat of threats and violence got louder. Before Peres’s express deportation, a Haitian man had been found hanging from a tree in a park in Santiago de los Caballeros, his hands and feet bound with black cord. On the night of the lynching a nearby crowd of

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