The Black Line
Eighty years after the infamous “Parsley Massacre” of October 1937, when up to 30.000 Haitians where brutally slaughtered by Dominican forces, the shadow of violence and stigmatization still marks the border between Haiti and D.R. In 2013, thousands of men, women and children were stripped of their Dominican citizenship as a court retroactively revoked the citizenship of all persons born of foreign parents since 1929, violating the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and creating a whole class of stateless people. This recent kind of violence towards Haiti represented a sort of legal ethnic cleansing, replicating by judicial instruments what in the past has been done with machetes.