Under the burning sun, surrounded by a light cloud of dust and the enveloping shriek of their plastic trumpets, the lynch mob congregated shortly after noon, covered with Dominican flags. Young gang members and old right-wingers, nostalgic for the dictatorships of Joaquín Balaguer and Rafael L. Trujillo, Trumpist influencers and evangelical fundamentalists, followers of President Luis Abinader and of his recent electoral competitors, Leonel Fernández and Abel Martínez, make up the motley scene, summoned in recent weeks by the neo-Nazi paramilitaries of the Ancient Dominican Order (AOD).
AOD members stand out, dressed in black, from boots to berets, carrying black flags stamped with a golden spear and laurel wreaths. They have come together to demand the expulsion, or to do the expulsion themselves, of the Haitian workers from the barrio Friusa, located just five kilometers from the golf courses and hotels of Punta Cana, some of the most exclusive and luxurious in the Caribbean. Above the angry crowd flies the flag of Israel.
On the eastern tip of the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Punta Cana welcomed nearly five million tourists throughout 2024. Its 50,000 hotel rooms have been built over the past 30 years by Haitian laborers. Many live within walking distance in working-class barrios such as Friusa. This, the fastest-growing economic area in the country, also concentrates the most abysmal economic and social inequalities of a nation shackled to the legacy of the right-wing dictatorships of the 20th century.
On that day, March 30, the bustling commercial activity in Friusa came to a halt, as it was militarized and taken over by neo-fascists coming in buses and private vehicles from other parts of the country. Concerned about the negative impact of the foretold violence on the image of Punta Cana, the government authorized the march but only for a short route along the barrio’s main avenue. The march became divided between those who accepted the agreement with the government and those who tried to break past the police to carry out the promised pogrom.
“We don’t want Haitians here, they must leave the country,” read a cardboard sign with childish handwriting.
The Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961) popularized referring to Haitian immigration as a “peaceful invasion”, and this political argument was used to present the 1937 genocide as a defensive action. Thousands of Haitians and black Dominicans were killed in the western parts of the Dominican Republic, near the border with Haiti, and thousands more fled to Haiti. The popular legend says that, since Dominicans are physically indistinguishable from Haitians, during the massacre the henchmen asked their victims to pronounce the word “perejil” (parsley), in order to know who to kill.
Dominican neo-Nazis see themselves as “patriots” in a sinful world, surrounded by “traitors”, that is Dominicans who cooperate with Haitians, and “invaders”, that is Haitians. The difficulty distinguishing “patriots” from “traitors” and “invaders”, as in 1937, feeds ultra-right paranoia. “Traitors, here they are all traitors”, spouts in hallucinatory overtones one of the young men who throw stones at the police. Among the marchers, people with darker skin are questioned about their nationality. Others think the police have been infiltrated: “This policeman is Haitian!” After three hours of scuffles with the police, burning barricades, and throwing stones, the “patriots” now dispersed, begin to retreat to their buses and cars, frustrated and confused.
It’s very unusual for the ultra-right to clash with the police in the Dominican Republic, a circumstance which the AOD and the government tried to minimize by blaming alleged “infiltrators” in the march. An appropriate end to a march that had also started with a conspiracy theory: the head of the Migration authority had declared in 2021 that Friusa could become an independent Republic because of the high number of Haitian workers living there and that the police couldn’t enter the barrio, making Friusa a symbol for the ultra-right of an eroding homeland.
Usually the AOD and the police are on the same side, AOD acting as the paramilitary arm at the service of repression. This was the case on June 9, 2020, when they attacked a protest in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter mobilizations in the U.S., following the murder of George Floyd. Also, on October 19, 2023, when they attacked a protest against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. A dozen neo-Nazis, supported by more than thirty police officers, threw toxic gas and hit elderly people with flag poles. When repelled by the demonstrators, the neo-Nazis took cover behind the police, from where they shouted slogans describing Palestine supporters as “communists, homosexuals, and Haitians”.
Congressman Juan Dionicio Rodriguez, of a small center-left party electorally aligned with the government, was one of those attacked by the AOD. In the days following the event, he demanded in Congress that the organization be investigated for terrorism. His call fell on deaf ears, like previous requests to the authorities by UN officials, artists, human rights defenders, and journalists who have endured death threats from the AOD.
As the “battle” of Friusa ended and the “patriots” retreated, the bearer of the Israeli flag shouted that the Dominican struggle, like the Israeli one, “is spiritual,” trying to lift his comrades’ spirits.
The Dominican right has a historical relation with Israel. Israel sold weapons to dictators Trujillo and Balaguer for internal repression in the late 1950’s and 1970’s, when not many others were willing to. Dominican police and military have been receiving Israeli training for decades, including in repressing immigration. The Patriotic March, a far-right coalition in which AOD took part, promoted several anti-Haitian mobilizations starting in August 2022, and on February 3, 2023, it sent a delegation to meet with the Israeli ambassador and hand him their manifesto. Former minister Pelegrin Castillo, who headed the delegation, took pride in the “great receptivity” their message had at the embassy.
President Abinader, a right-wing businessman of Lebanese origin, is also a close ally of Israel, with whom he cooperates in areas such as security, technology, education, and water management. Abinader announced in 2020 that he was considering moving the Dominican embassy to Jerusalem, following Trump’s lead. In 2023, Amnesty International denounced the Dominican government’s use of Israeli spyware Pegasus to illegally spy on journalist Nuria Piera while she was investigating corruption. In 2023, the Santo Domingo International Book Fair, organized by writer and government official Angela Hernandez, was dedicated to Israel, sparking an international boycott campaign. Even a full year into the genocidal offensive against Gaza, the Dominican government signed an agreement with Israel regarding tech education.
This alliance with the Dominican government led then-Israeli Ambassador Daniel Biran and Consul Avia Levi to declare in early 2023 that in the Dominican Republic, “there is no antisemitism.” This is partially true in a country where anti-black racism predominates and Jewish people are perceived as white. But the worst expressions of antisemitism exist precisely among the most aggressive supporters of Zionist apartheid: evangelical fundamentalists and neo-Nazis.
Angelo Vasquez, AOD’s spokesman, is a character that could well figure in Jorge Luis Borges’ Universal History of Infamy. He gives the impression of a ten year old child trapped in the body of a sumo wrestler. Not quite an articulate propagandist of the fascist counterrevolution, Vásquez has admitted he did not finish secondary school and claims to make a living renting motorcycles and selling pit bull dogs. His hatred of Haitian workers is as big as his admiration for Mussolini, Franco, Primo de Rivera, Oswald Mosley, Eva Perón, Trujillo and Hitler, whose quotes appear on the social media of AOD and Vásquez himself.
In 2018, Vásquez made a post praising Hitler as “one of the greatest examples of self-improvement, conviction and character. A fervent nationalist, in love with his culture, protector of his values and a tremendous visionary (…) supreme commander of the Wehrmacht (…), leader and creator of the National Socialist party with millions of followers (…) one of the few opponents who proved to be a threat to the international Zionist power and its subordinates such as communism and capitalism.” In this context, under the misleading umbrella of “Zionist power” Vasquez formulates the old antisemitic conspiracy theory shared by Czarism and Nazism, among others, according to which there is a Jewish power behind both financial capital and socialist movements worldwide.
In the Dominican Republic, there is no legislation against incitement to racial hatred or apology for Nazism. It is forbidden to exalt Trujillo and Trujilloism, by virtue of a 1962 law, which the authorities do not enforce. Taking advantage of this impunity, AOD shows in its activities a banner reading “1937: Quisqueya woke up”, in allusion to the Parsley Massacre.
AOD believes in other contemporary versions of the old antisemitic tropes, such as that of “globalism”, an imagined attempt to impose a world government by liquidating the national sovereignty of countries, and in the case of the Dominican Republic, by seeking the “fusion” of the country with Haiti. AOD associates “globalism” with the UN and liberal NGOs “funded by Soros”. During the pandemic, Dominican neo-Nazis protested against vaccines and masks. Despite these extreme and delusional positions, and the fact that they sometimes label the “politicians” as a whole as “traitors”, in his public interventions Vasquez always underlines his collaborative relationship with the police and the military. In fact, this paramilitary collaboration includes the kidnapping of Haitian workers in areas such as Montecristi and handing them over to the police.
On October 5, 2024, AOD held a rally in Santo Domingo’s Plaza de la Bandera. U.S. Flags and Trump campaign banners abounded. The Israeli flag was also there. Personalities from the artistic world participated, officials from the Instituto Duartiano, a state institution, and political leaders from various parties, including Abinader’s PRM (Revolutionary Modern Party).
A writer and scholar of extreme right-wing movements, not named for security reasons and who witnessed the October rally, noticed the fascist elements are not restricted to the black military costumes but in fact central to AOD’s discourse, challenging capitalism from the right and talking about the need for a “revolution”. One of the most repeated slogans was: “if they don’t get them out, we’ll kill them”, referring of course to Haitians. Unlike the chaotic mobilization of March 30, in October they had a stage on which dozens of speakers gave short speeches, addressing all the anti-Haitian and anti-Black tropes: from attributing excessive reproduction and hospital overcrowding to Haitian women to holding Haitian peasants responsible for deforestation and attributing terrible sexual crimes to Haitian men.
In practice, the Dominican government is implementing the main demands of the AOD: the construction of a border wall and the massive deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. It is also openly making concessions to neo-fascists. Anticipating the October rally, the president announced on October 2, the same day as the unofficial commemoration of the 1937 massacre, that he would set a minimum quota of ten thousand weekly expulsions to Haiti, doubling the pace of the mass deportations which began in 2021.
After the March 30 march, the government militarized Friusa, detaining and expelling thousands of Haitian construction workers and generating a forced displacement in the community. Abinader also announced fifteen measures to toughen anti-Haitian persecution, including the elimination of access to free medical care in public hospitals for Haitians and the requirement that health personnel hand over their patients to immigration authorities.
Abinader also appointed Milton Ray Guevara, a former judge who wrote the 2013 court ruling that stripped more than two hundred thousand black Dominicans of their Dominican nationality for having Haitian ancestry, to head a commission to reform migration-related laws. Ray Guevara’s ruling, which was applied retroactively to persons born after 1929, was compared at the time by the conservative Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to the Nazi racial laws of Nuremberg and considered an apartheid ruling by the Dominican journalist Juan Bolivar Diaz. Bolivar Diaz now represents the Abinader government as ambassador to Mexico.
Abinader’s measures have the tactical sense of seeking to appease the neo-Nazis, but strategically they strengthen a system of institutionalized racism, expanding the scope of an undeclared state of exception that de facto empowers the police and military to carry out raids without warrants and arbitrary detentions without a right to legal defense, now eliminating the constitutional right to healthcare. It is apartheid, the hallmark of Israeli colonial society which the Dominican ruling class aspires to emulate, which explains the admiration of Abinader and the black neo-Nazis of the AOD for the Israeli regime, and which makes the Dominican authoritarian experiment, so far relatively unnoticed by the rest of the world, one of the most dangerous phenomena in the context of the rise of the ultra-right in Latin America and the Caribbean.