Counterpunch - Nov 21, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/terrall11212007.htm


Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar

By BEN TERRALL

"The Price of Sugar" is a powerful documentary about the plight of
Haitians toiling on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. These
workers cross the border from Haiti to labor in conditions that the
film's central protagonist, Father Christopher Hartley, calls
"quasi-slavery." They are housed in sugar company towns called bateyes.
Stripped of identification papers, they cannot legally travel elsewhere
in the country.

Hartley is a Spanish priest who came to the Dominican Republic in 1997
and wound up advocating for the cane cutters in his parish. The film
gives him plenty of time to voice a thorough, articulate critique of
the system which exploits the Haitians. Hartley names the superrich
Vicini family as controlling the bateyes; the Vicinis have taken legal
action against the film to prevent it from being screened.

It is not surprising that elites profiting from such a system would
want the information in this documentary suppressed. According to the
2006 U.S. Department of State Dominican Republic Country Report on
Human Rights Practices, "Most bateyes lacked schools, medical
facilities, running water, and sewage systems and had high rates of
disease. Company-provided housing was sub-standard. Most sugarcane
workers were Haitian or of Haitian descent." A worker says on camera
that "you just watch your children die of hunger and you can't do
anything about it."

A Dominican journalist interviewed by the filmmakers explains, "what
the Vicini want, no President's going to deny them." As with a certain
Australian media mogul and a network called Fox News, the sugar barons
dominate TV and radio airwaves via adverstising dollars and direct
ownership of outlets. Wealthy elites have used the mass media to spread
divide-and-conquer demonization of Haitians, and the high-profile human
rights advocate Father Hartley (who tells his parish that according to
the second Vatican Council, workers have a right to strike). Poor
Dominicans fall for that line, partly, in the words of Father Hartley,
because Haitians are "a little bit poorer and a little bit blacker."

Given his humility and solidarity with the poorest of the poor, I
suspect Hartley might be uncomfortable with his pre-eminent role in the
film. He is certainly a worthy subject and is clearly serious about his
commitment to solidarity with the poorest of the poor, and to speaking
up for social justice.

But while the film shows Hartley's parents, sister, and brother
discussing his childhood and path toward a life in the priesthood, it
would have helped to have more context about where his Haitian
parishoners came from. Instead, all we are told of Haiti comes via Paul
Newman's voiceover narration, which explains, "Haiti is one of the most
dysfunctional countries in the world, rife with poverty and violence."

As Haiti specialist Paul Farmer explains in thorough detail in his
masterful book The Uses of Haiti, since Haitians defeated Napoleon's
army in the only successful slave revolution in history, Washington has
made sure that Haiti remained a "dysfunctional" state "rife with
poverty and violence." In the late 1980s a grassroots Haitian peoples
movement forced an end to the reign of the U.S.-backed father and son
dictatorships of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Liberation
theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide emerged as part of this movement and
surprised the U.S. by winning the overwhelming majority of the popular
vote in 1990. The George H. W. Bush Administration subsequently backed
right wing military and paramilitary forces behind the 1991 coup which
forced Aristide into exile; in 2004 the George W. Bush Administration
orchestrated (with France and Canada) a bloody coup against the second
democratically-elected Aristide government.

U.S.-trained paramilitaries launched attacks that began the 2004 coup
from safe havens in the Dominican Republic. An April, 2004 St.
Petersburg Times article on the paramilitaries explained, "They enjoyed
the tacit support of the Dominican armed forces. Ever since Aristide
had done away with the military in Haiti in 1994, some Dominican
generals were worried about their own job security. Without an army
next door in Haiti, the traditional enemy of the Dominican Republic,
calls were growing in Santo Domingo to slash the size of their own
notoriously bloated and corrupt armed forces. The Dominican generals
believed that recreating the old military threat next door would boost
their relevance."

As with the 1991 coup, thousands of Aristide supporters were killed
under the "interim" anti-Aristide government, and unemployment soared,
driving scores of peasants across the border into the D.R.

In Aristide's 1992 autobiography, a passage on his first government's
pro-poor agenda clarifies another reason why Dominican rightists wanted
him gone: "we could no longer tolerate the unspeakable banishments, the
flagrant violations of the most elementary rights that were the lot of
Haitians in the Dominican Republic. The government of that country had
to come to realize that the very recent era in which Jean-Claude
Duvalier had sold Haitians like a gang of slaves had been overturned.
Never again would our sisters and brothers be exported like
merchandise, their blood changed into bitter sugar."

Pressure on the church succeeded in getting Father Hartley reassigned
to Ethiopia in August. Anyone seeing this film will come away extremely
concerned about what will happen to the destitute Haitians whose lives
Hartley's high visibility protected while they campaigned with him for
better conditions in the Bateyes.

[Ben Terrall is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He can be
reached at bterrall@igc.org ]