The Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic (1937)

The Parsley Massacre was the killing of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic ordered by dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in October 1937. Victim estimates range from the 12,168 calculated by Haitian president Élie Lescot to the 35,000 estimated by Dominican historian Bernardo Vega.

On the night of October 2, 1937, at a dance held in his honor in Dajabón, a province on the Dominican northwest border, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo spoke of the Haitians living in the country as thieves of livestock and crops. He said he would remedy the situation. Shortly afterwards, the Dominican army began killing Haitians throughout the Northern department. The operation lasted about eight days and ended on October 8. There was no exception for women, the elderly or children.

The exact death toll is unknown and will probably never be known. Haitian president **Élie Lescot** calculated **12,168** victims. Haitian historian Jean Price-Mars spoke of **12,136** dead and **2,419** wounded. Joaquín Balaguer, who was acting foreign minister at the time of the events, wrote in his memoirs that there were **17,000**. Dominican historian Bernardo Vega considered the possibility of **35,000**. None of these figures is officially recognized in Dominican historiography.

## Parsley as a password and the geographic spread of the massacre

The method for identifying Haitians was simple and cruel. Before killing them, the soldiers forced potential victims to pronounce the word "perejil" (parsley). Dominican Spanish pronounces the j as an aspirated sound and the final r softly; Haitian Creole, which is French-based, has no such j sound, and the French r is guttural. Anyone who did not say "perejil" like a Dominican was marked out. The password made no distinction between legal residents, undocumented migrants or simply descendants born in the country.

The massacre was confined to the Northern department, a military division covering **Bonao**, **La Vega**, **Puerto Plata**, **Samaná**, the border area up to **Restauración** and the entire Northwest line. The Southern department was spared. Most of the killings took place in isolated areas, without witnesses, and many bodies ended up in the Massacre River, in the sea or in mass graves. This dispersal of the bodies is one of the reasons why a count is impossible.

The sugar mills protected some of their Haitian workers. Not out of humanity: they did not want to lose cheap labor. Those who managed to cross the border in time also survived. The rest were left at the mercy of the troops for more than a week.

## The causes: pressure on land, a blurred border and popular distrust

Trujillo's motives were several and reinforced one another. The regime portrayed Haitian farm laborers as competition taking jobs from Dominican peasants, which made the government unpopular. Also at play was the obsession with establishing a clear international border. Haitian settlement in Dominican territory went back almost a century: since the First Republic, between **1844** and **1872**, many Haitians had occupied farmland abandoned by Dominicans.

Historian **Frank Moya Pons** explains in his "Manual de Historia dominicana" that attempts at a border agreement failed for decades because the Haitians failed to honor the pacts. The definitive treaty on the fixing of boundaries was signed in **1929**, during the government of Horacio Vásquez. Even so, there were areas where the population did not feel bound by Dominican laws. The country's elites watched with concern as the newcomers gained economic power in those ambiguous regions.

The distrust of much of the Dominican population toward Haiti meant that any measure against cross-border immigrants was acceptable. Trujillo knew this and took advantage of it. Balaguer, in "Memorias de un cortesano de la era de Trujillo", described the genocide as "the act of a man, or of an egomaniac if you will, who obeys not only the brutality of his instincts but also a barbaric conception of his destiny as a patriot and as a ruler".

## The $525,000 compensation and the silence of the Haitian elites

Trujillo's government tried to cover up the massacre and presented it to the world as an isolated incident between peasants. It did not work. The international media began reporting that orders had been given to annihilate thousands of Haitians, and the Dominican delegation in Washington had to issue a statement to try to save the regime's image. It did not prevent international repudiation.

The Haitian government of **Sténio Vincent** reacted tepidly. The massacre had affected a very poor segment of the population with no political power, and the Haitian elite showed no outrage. Even so, Vincent filed an official claim demanding **US$750,000** in compensation. The government of **Franklin D. Roosevelt** backed the claim, interested in avoiding border disputes between allied countries in the Caribbean. Trujillo managed to reduce the amount to **$525,000**.

Most of that money never reached the victims. The Haitian bureaucracy kept it. According to historical records, the Dominican Republic never paid the compensation in full either. The episode left an uncomfortable precedent: a state negotiating with another the price of its dead while the survivors see nothing.

## Why there is no official figure

Bernardo Vega addressed the counting problem in "Trujillo y Haití". Instead of relying on testimony, he cross-referenced the population censuses before and after the massacre with the reports of American officers stationed at the border customs posts. The last census before the massacre, from **1936**, recorded **8,492** Haitian residents in the country. From this, Vega concluded that the dead may have ranged between **4,000 and 6,000**, a figure far below the usual ones.

That calculation does not settle the debate. Luisa Peña, director of the Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance, maintains that the figure of **17,000** is the one most corroborated by research, although she admits it is impossible to establish a specific number. The range used by most scholars runs from a minimum of **5,000** to a maximum of **35,000**. The range is so wide that any categorical statement about the total number of victims should be taken with caution.

The Parsley Massacre was not a sudden outburst. It was a planned military operation, carried out over more than a week in a specific geography, with an identification method designed to separate Haitians from Dominicans by their way of speaking. Eighty-eight years later, there is still no official figure. That absence may itself be the most eloquent proof of what peine.