News — Dominica

Human rights activist Sonia Pierre was born in Villa Altagracia, San Cristobal, Dominican Republic on July 4, 1963, and she died at forty-eight years old of a heart attack on December 4, 2011. Sonia was one of the most internationally-recognized activists working on behalf of the human and civil rights of Haitian immigrants and their Haitian-descended children in the Dominican Republic. Her mother came to the Dominican Republic from Haiti on a temporary work permit in 1957 and her father moved back-and-forth between the two countries for work. Pierre was one of eleven children who grew up in the bateys (migrant labor camps) for sugar workers in the Dominican Republic. Sonia Pierre was the mother of four children.

Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic has a long and troubled history rooted in the differences between Spanish colonialism in the Dominican Republic and French colonialism in Haiti. Tensions were also generated when newly-independent Haiti overran and controlled what was then the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo between 1801 and 1844. One legacy of these colonial histories is the anti-blackness discrimination directed toward Haitians and Haitian-descended Dominicans, which persists to this very day.

Haitians migrated to the Dominican Republic to work for sugar companies owned by the United States. At times, this migration was welcomed and encouraged by the Dominican Republic, such as during the 1950s when Sonia Pierre’s mother first arrived in the country. During other periods, such as the 1930s when the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo had tens of thousands of Haitian migrants slaughtered, the migrants became scapegoats for the country’s economic and social ills.

Against this background, at the age of thirteen, Sonia Pierre organized her first five-day rally to protest the poor living conditions in the bateys. She was arrested, but the public attention her actions brought ensured a wage increase for the sugar workers. In 1983, 20-year-old Pierre founded the Movimiento de Mujeres Dominco Haitianas (MUDHA, the Movement of Dominican Women of Haitian Descent). Initially, the organization focused upon women’s health, family planning, and educational opportunity. Later, it expanded to include fighting sexism and anti-Haitian prejudice more broadly. As Pierre’s political consciousness and activism grew, she began to emphasize citizenship rights, both legal and cultural, of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic and their children who, according to the constitution, were supposed to be citizens of the country.

Hoping that appealing to the international community would help her cause, in 2005, Pierre initiated a case brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding two ethnic Haitian children who had been denied birth certificates in the Dominican Republic. She won the case but unfortunately Dominican government authorities refused to accept the ruling and proceeded to enact harsher laws invalidating the citizenship rights of her people.

Sonia Pierre’s dedication to activism was recognized: in 2003 she received an award from Amnesty International; in 2007 she received the Robert R. Kennedy Human Rights Award; in 2010 Haiti gave her the Order of Honour and Merit in the rank of Knight of the Republic; and in 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama presented her the International Women of Courage Award.

Yolanda Guzmán was a young Afro Latina activist in the Dominican Republic who was killed in 1965 at the time of an uprising by supporters of the country’s democratically-installed president Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by military-backed forces. Guzmán, who had worked for the Bosch administration, disappeared along with five companions within days of the United States’ invasion of the island republic in support of the anti-democratic forces. Most Dominicans believe that Guzmán was assassinated on May 2, 1965, by the Centro de Ensenanza de las Fuerzas Armadas (the federal branch of military education under the dictatorship). The Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States eventually gained access and identified her body.

Guzmán’s death at age 21 came to symbolize the ways in which women and young people fought against one of the longest-running and vicious dictatorships in 20th century Latin America, that of Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo had dominated the Dominican Republic for over thirty years, with the support of the U.S. government, before he was assassinated in 1961. Bosch was elected president in 1962 but the Dominican military did not like his reformist policies, and he was overthrown in 1963. In April 1965, after pro-Bosch forces attacked the military-controlled government to reinstate Bosch, President Lyndon Johnson sent in U.S. troops, who, supported by forces provided by some of the members of the OAS, helped install a conservative, non-military government.

Guzmán was born on July 8, 1943, in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. She was the daughter of Beatriz Guzmán, a domestic worker, and Carlos Maria Paulino Fernandez, who served in the brief Bosch administration. Both of her parents were fierce anti-Trujillistas. Because of the repressive environment for those who dared to criticize the Trujillo dictatorship, and the possibility of torture, imprisonment, and death of activists, Guzmán ran in clandestine circles and the specifics of her activities are not well documented. It is known that she worked in some capacity for the women’s division in the Bosch administration and that her passion for women’s rights fueled her work. Some authors have pointed to the deaths of the well-known anti-Trujillo activist Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa, known as las mariposas (the butterflies), as a crucial moment in Guzmán’s commitment to opposing anti-democratic forces in her homeland. After the sisters’ deaths, Guzmán began to engage in more public protests. Most likely she, like other female activists during this period, helped with weapons training, instructed other combatants, managed funds and food between the capital and the interior, organized secret communications and care for the wounded, procured food, and buried the dead.