Apartheid on Hispaniola: The Crystallization of Anti-Haitianism and the Silent Architecture of Exclusion
There is a word that has been carefully avoided in every diplomatic communiqué, every press release from the Dominican Ministry of Defense, every statement from the international community as it watches Haiti collapse. That word is apartheid.
I am writing this because I can no longer pretend that what is happening on our island is merely a migration crisis, a border dispute, or a "humanitarian emergency." What is being constructed on Hispaniola is a two-tier apartheid system: a Dominican state with the weapons, foreign backing, and bureaucratic machinery to enforce permanent exclusion, and a Haitian population denied both sovereignty and refuge. This is not an accident. It is a design. And it must be named.
The word apartheid did not arrive on Hispaniola in 2026. It was seeded in 1937, when Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of an estimated 9,000 to 20,000 Haitians and Black Dominicans along the border. The Parsley Massacre, named for the shibboleth used to identify Haitian victims by their inability to roll the Spanish "r", was not a spontaneous explosion of popular hatred. It was a state project, carried out by a dictator who had been elevated to power through the National Army created by the U.S. occupation (1916–1924).
The United States did not invent anti-Haitian prejudice, but it provided the material and ideological conditions for that prejudice to become state ideology. The U.S. occupation established the administrative categories that racialized Haitian labor, institutionalized racism within the Dominican state apparatus, and constructed the border as a racial boundary. When Washington continued to support Trujillo after 1937, Secretary of State Cordell Hull's infamous "he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch", it sent an unmistakable message: the extermination of Black life was an acceptable price for geopolitical alignment.
This is the origin of what we now call antihaitianismo. It was never merely a cultural prejudice. It was a bureaucratic project, cultivated by Dominican elites who learned that aligning with U.S. racial hierarchies could secure recognition, investment, and protection. The 2013 Constitutional Court ruling that stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactively to 1929 was not an aberration. It was the legal codification of an ideology that had been building for nearly a century.
What distinguishes the current moment is the bureaucratic and military machinery that has transformed antihaitianismo from a diffuse cultural attitude into an operational state apparatus. This is the crystallization.
Consider the numbers. In the first half of 2026 alone, the Dominican Republic deported 196,321 Haitians. In the last weekend of September 2026, the General Directorate of Migration detained 3,759 Haitians and deported 2,636 in a single three-day operation. The Dominican Ministry of Defense budget has nearly doubled under the Abinader administration, rising from RD$32.9 billion in 2020 to RD$68.7 billion in 2026, a 96.6% increase, with capital investments explicitly aimed at enhancing border security along the Haitian frontier.
The military hardware is not Dominican-made. In August 2026, the Ministry of Defense showcased newly acquired IWI ARAD rifles and NEGEV machine guns from Israel Weapon Industries during ceremonies at the 27 de Febrero Naval Base and the San Isidro Air Base. A newly formed battalion of the Dominican Army's Military Police has been equipped with Jericho 941 pistols and Galil SAR assault rifles, also from IWI. Technical cooperation between the Dominican and Israeli militaries dates back to 1962, with Israeli trainers advising Dominican police on counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, and the repression of irregular migration.
This is not merely a military relationship. It is an apartheid architecture**,** the same Israeli Occupation apparatus that engineers Palestinian dispossession is now arming and training the Dominican state apparatus that engineers Haitian dispossession.
The parallels are not coincidental. As the NACLA report For Palestine, from Ayiti documents, "apartheid and genocide in the occupied territories hold up a mirror to the racist exclusion of Haitians and Black people in the Dominican Republic". The "methods and technologies of repression are increasingly circulated between the Dominican and Israeli governments," making the struggle against apartheid in the Dominican Republic inseparable from the struggle against apartheid in Palestine.
The deportations are occurring against the backdrop of Haiti's total state collapse. Gangs now control an estimated 80–90% of Port-au-Prince. More than one million people are internally displaced, and at least 16,000 have been killed since 2022. An estimated 6.4 million people need urgent humanitarian assistance, with 5.83 million facing acute food insecurity, including 1.2 million children under five. Only 10 percent of the country's in-patient medical facilities remain operational.
The UN recorded a 163 percent increase in verified sexual violence cases in 2025, with UNICEF reporting a 1,000 percent increase in sexual violence against minors since 2023. Children now comprise 30–50 percent of some gangs.
The Dominican Republic is deporting people into this. The U.S. is terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitians. The report from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants concludes that returning individuals to conditions of well-founded persecution risk would violate the principle of non-refoulement, a binding legal obligation.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is population transfer, the removal of Black bodies from a territory where they are no longer wanted, into a zone of death and displacement that the international community has abandoned.
The Comprador Class and the Machinery of Extraction
To understand why this apartheid architecture persists, we must confront the comprador class**,** the local elite that mediates between foreign capital and the local population. This class exists on both sides of the border, and it profits from the arrangement.
In Haiti, the comprador class has historically organized around intermediation, not production. A handful of families control the import of food, fuel, cement, and consumer goods. They do not need a productive domestic economy; they need a captive market that cannot produce for itself. Customs fraud, monopoly control, and the rents that come from crisis are their revenue streams. The "Republic of NGOs" is not a parallel structure; it is a comprador arrangement in which local elites, foreign contractors, and international organizations share the revenues of service delivery that the state has been systematically prevented from providing.
The brain drain is not an accident this class regrets. It is functional to the arrangement. As one Haitian writer put it: "We export our talent, our doctors, our engineers, our young graduates. We import their dollars. It is a model of dependency. A model where human capital leaves the country, and where remittances replace the state's responsibility". When remittances represent approximately 20% to 25% of Haiti's GDP, the economy is not producing enough. The diaspora is subsidizing the arrangement with its own separation. Every doctor who leaves creates a vacancy that an NGO fills. Every engineer who leaves removes a potential political competitor. Every intellectual who leaves weakens the counter-hegemonic capacity of the nation.
In the Dominican Republic, the comprador class is configured differently. It has retained enough of the professional and intellectual class to staff the ideological and repressive apparatus. The university system produces lawyers, economists, and security professionals who reproduce the ideology, antihaitianismo, that legitimizes the arrangement. The military and police apparatus, armed by Israel, provides the coercive enforcement of the racial and national hierarchy. The tourism and free-trade-zone economy provides a productive base that Haiti lacks, which means the Dominican comprador class has a material interest in a functioning state, not a collapsed one.
The difference is not that the Dominican Republic escaped the comprador arrangement. It is that its comprador class has a different relationship to the state: it needs the state to function, because the state is the mechanism through which it extracts from tourism, remittances, and the labor of Haitian migrants. Haiti's comprador class, by contrast, has historically been able to extract through dysfunction.
The Suppressed History
In August 1863, Dominican rebels launched the War of Restoration against Spanish annexation. They were joined by Haitian President Fabre Geffrard, who provided sanctuary, arms, and troops. Haitian and Dominican guerrillas, many of them former slaves, fought side by side against the Spanish army. The Restoration flag was sewn in Haiti. The U.S. State Department's own historical records confirm that "those Dominicans who refused to accept Spanish annexation received open aid from the Haitian Government and people".
This history is suppressed on both sides of the border. In Haiti, the comprador class has no interest in a history of solidarity that would undermine the narrative of Haitian victimhood and Dominican aggression. In the Dominican Republic, the comprador class has no interest in a history that would legitimize Haitian claims to shared sovereignty. The suppression of this history is comprador work on both sides.
But the Restoration War is not a myth. It is a suppressed truth. And it reminds us that another path was once taken, a path of pan-Caribbean solidarity against empire, where Haitian and Dominican fighters shared a common cause.
The Apartheid Parallel
We use the word apartheid deliberately. We are not engaging in hyperbole. We are naming a structure.
Apartheid is not merely segregation. It is a system of racialized governance in which one group is granted rights and privileges while another is systematically excluded from the body politic, confined to zones of neglect, and subjected to state violence. It is a system that is legalized, bureaucratized, and enforced by state institutions.
On Hispaniola, this system takes the following form:
- Legal exclusion: The 2013 Constitutional Court ruling stripped citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, creating a legal underclass. Article 10 of the constitution, reformed in 2015, establishes a border property regime that privileges "the property of Dominicans," shielding the land thefts perpetrated in 1937.
- Bureaucratic enforcement: The General Directorate of Migration conducts daily operations across the country, detaining and deporting Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent based on racial profiling. Amnesty International has documented that access to healthcare is now tied to immigration control, with hospitals becoming sites of detention and expulsion.
- Military architecture: The border is being militarized with Israeli weapons, a wall, and surveillance technology. The defense budget has doubled. The message is clear: the border is not a line of sovereignty; it is a line of racial exclusion.
- Ideological reproduction: The educational system reproduces antihaitianismo. Textbooks frame Haitians as the constitutive outside of Dominican identity. A 2026 bill to teach Haitian Creole in public schools triggered nationalist backlash, with opponents framing it as a step toward an unwanted "unification" of the island.
- Cultural policing: The far-right paramilitary organization Antigua Orden Dominicana (AOD) marches alongside followers of President Abinader. On March 30, 2025, a lynch mob led by neo-Nazi paramilitaries flew the Israeli flag as it demanded the expulsion of Haitian workers from barrio Friusa.
This is the apartheid architecture. It is not a metaphor. It is a system of rule.
Breaking the Silence
The apartheid architecture is an assault on survival. We are being deported into a zone of death and displacement. Our educated class has been scattered to the winds. Our comprador class profits from our dysfunction. Our history of solidarity with Dominican rebels has been erased. We are not sovereign. We are a population under siege.
The anti-apartheid struggle is not a distant cause. It is our cause. Every Haitian who refuses to be a victim of a siege.
The word apartheid has been avoided for too long. We are naming it now.