Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
other bilateral and multilateral donors for the rehabilitation
and development of the country over five years. Four years
later, the majority of those funds (approximately US$1.5 billion)
remained undisbursed, largely as a result of factors in
Haiti (see Economic Policies, ch. 8).
Relations with the Dominican Republic
The second most important country to Haiti is the Dominican
Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola. An
enormous amount of trade, much of it informal, crosses the
border. The Haitian economy has proved to be a desirable market
for Dominican products. During the 1991-94 period of
international economic sanctions on Haiti, the flow of goods
from the Dominican Republic provided a lifeline for the de
facto military regime and facilitated the market penetration of
Dominican products as never before. By the mid-1990s, an estimated
US$50 million in products flowed annually from the
Dominican Republic into Haiti.
Until recently, political relations between Haiti and the
Dominican Republic have been strained. For generations, Haitians
had informally crossed into the Dominican Republic in
search of work. The perceived "blackening" of the Dominican
population resulting from this population flow motivated dictator
Rafael Trujillo (1930-61) to carry out a notorious massacre
of Haitians in 1937. Nevertheless, more than 250,000 people of
Haitian parentage now live in the Dominican Republic.
In recent decades, Haiti has supplied cheap labor to the
Dominican Republic, mostly to harvest sugarcane and coffee,
and, until 1986, through a formal intergovernmental
exchange. The question of the status and treatment of those
laborers, a prickly issue between the two countries, occasionally
has spilled onto the international stage. In July 1991, for example,
when United States congressional hearings on the treatment
of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic exposed
abusive treatment of Haitian children in the canefields,
Dominican President Joaquin Balaguer responded by pushing
thousands of poor, dark-skinned people, mostly Haitians, but
also some Dominican-Haitians born in his country, across the
border, creating a refugee crisis in the hemisphere's already
poorest country. Although the issue of Haitians in the Dominican
Republic remains a difficult one, since the mid-1990s and
the election of Presidents Rene Preval in Haiti and Leonel
Fernandez in the Dominican Republic, relations between the
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