Film
On Plantations Spurs Backlash
By Michael Deibert
05 June, 2007
Inter
Press Serice
NEW YORK, Jun 4 (IPS) - When a man stood up at the
Paris screening of director Amy Serrano's "The Sugar Babies",
demanding to know how one of the film's subjects, the Belgian priest
Pedro Ruquoy, could afford such a large car on his priestly salary,
Ruquoy was nonplussed.
Ruquoy, who had ministered
to Haitian workers in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic
for 30 years before being driven from the country amidst death threats
in 2005, replied that, for the first several years of his time in the
country, he rode a mule, and from then on, a motorcycle.
The mysterious protestor
was apparently attempting to criticise another film, "The Price
of Sugar" by Bill Haney, which traces the similar struggles of
the Anglo-Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley. In the film, Hartley
is seen driving a 4x4 over the roads of the eastern Dominican Republic.
Due to technical problems
at the Esclaves au Paradis (Slaves in Paradise) conference in Paris,
which sought to explore what organisers say are the appalling conditions
of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic, the screening times of
the two films had been reversed under short notice.
"It was strange that
the questions were totally unrelated to film we had just screened,"
says Anne Lescot, the coordinator of the colloquium and its film programmer.
"They had obviously been prepared for the other film."
However disjointed, the mysterious
man's interjections appeared of a piece with similar interruptions and
protests that have greeted events attempting to discuss the ever-more
contentious issue of the treatment of the estimated 650,000 to one million
Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, fleeing the political violence
and economic stagnation of their often-tumultuous homeland.
Though these immigrants have
traditionally laboured in the sugarcane fields, known as bateys, controlled
by individuals such as the Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe
Fanjul, and the wealthy Dominican Vicini family (owners of the Grupo
Vicini collection of companies and of the Diario Libre newspaper), recently
Haitians have also taken jobs in such urban endeavors as construction,
auto repair and working in the country's booming resorts.
In a recent cease-and-desist
order sent to the makers of "The Price of Sugar", the Washington
law firm Patton Boggs (which had previously represented the government
of ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide), acting on behalf
of the Grupo Vicini -- subjects of scathing criticism in the film --
outlined what it claimed were 45 defamatory statements against the corporation
in the movie. The objections ranged from the Grupo Vicini's contention
that its workers were not under armed guard, to allegations that some
of those depicted in the film as living in sub-standard conditions on
the bateys were not in fact batey employees.
"I don't know why these
people are going after not only the sugar operations of the Vicini family
but sugar operations in the Dominican Republic in general," Read
McCaffrey, the lead counsel at Paton Boggs representing the company,
told IPS. "I've gone through the bateys and seen conditions that
are significantly better than those in this documentary. It is unfortunate
that the film is being shown as something accurate when it is propaganda."
In response to some of the
charges, Father Christopher Hartley, the priest portrayed in the film,
produced to IPS over a dozen still photographs from 2003-2004 of armed
men that he says were taken in and around Vicini-controlled sugar operations.
In many of the photos, the men carrying pump-action shotguns are wearing
baseball caps bearing the logo of the Ingenio Cristóbal Colón,
a Grupo Vicini-controlled sugar complex on the outskirts of the Dominican
city of San Pedro de Macorís.
"I believe that it is
unworthy of the human person to exist in the living and working conditions
that were present within the boundaries of my parish," Hartley,
who has been the object of great vilification in some quarters of the
Dominican media, told IPS from his home in Spain, where he has lived
since being forced out of his community deep in sugar territory on 2006.
"It is an intrinsic aspect of my pastoral mission to do the utmost
to help these people defend their dignity, and their human rights."
Supporting Hartley's position,
a prize-winning reporter for a major South Florida daily newspaper,
present during the filming of scenes in "The Price of Sugar"
and speaking on the condition of anonymity, has confirmed the general
conditions it depicts of life in the bateys as accurate. Though the
reporter feels that certain elements of the film might have been exaggerated
for dramatic effect, the reporter said that the abysmal living and working
conditions of Haitians working in Grupo Vicini-controlled bateys are
largely true.
"Everything (Hartley)
said about those conditions, he didn't need to say it," the reporter
told IPS. "When you walked around in the bateys, you could see
that people were living in bad conditions, were defeated, it was a miserable
life. You didn't need words to explain it, it was there."
"The Price of Sugar"
is not the only target of controversy.
To help shape its public
image, the Grupo Vicini has also retained the services of Newlink, a
Miami-based public relations and consulting firm founded and run by
former television journalist Sergio Roitberg. In addition to the Grupo
Vicini, Newlink's clients include the Policia National of the Dominican
Republic and the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana, (PLD),
the political party of Dominican president Leonel Fernández .
At the Paris symposium, several
witnesses charge that Roitberg, in addition to vociferously interrupting
a question-and-answer session following an address by Father Hartley,
used strong language to threaten a French-Peruvian photographer, Céline
Anaya Gautier, who spent two years documenting the lives of Haitians
in the bateys and whose photographs form a large part of the exhibition.
"We know who you are,
we know where you live," Roitberg is alleged to have said to Gautier,
an account that she confirms. "Be very careful."
Newlink and Roitberg did
not respond to IPS requests for comment.
The road for those agitating
on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent has never been
an easy one.
Sonia Pierre, a Dominican
of Haitian descent who leads the Movimiento De Mujeres Dominico Haitiana
(MUDHA), was part of a legal team that, in September 2005, successfully
argued before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the
Dominican Republic was in violation of five articles of the American
Convention on Human Rights Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica in denying citizenship
to two young girls, Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico, born in the Dominican
Republic.
That decision reinforced
that, in its denial of citizenship to persons born within its borders,
the Dominican Republic was in violation of Article 11 of its own constitution,
which guarantees Dominican citizenship to the all those born within
its territory save for those "in transit" and the children
of foreign diplomats.
For her efforts, Pierre,
a 2006 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, has been
the subject of attempts by members of the Dominican congress to revoke
her citizenship, despite the fact that she was born and raised in the
country.
Dominican Foreign Minister
Carlos Morales Troncoso, one of the bitterest critics of the newly-assertive
Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic and of Pierre in particular,
has a long-standing relationship as an executive and major shareholder
of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with the aforementioned Fanjuls.
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