Allegations Lost and Found: the afterlife of Dominican sugar slavery
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01436597.2012.729724
ISSN1360-2241
Autores Tópico(s)Cuban History and Society
ResumoAbstract In 2007 visual media reports revived allegations that sugar was being produced in the Dominican Republic using the labour of Haitian slaves. Beyond raising the general public's awareness of the plight of migrant sugarcane workers, the films and their surrounding publicity have led to the Dominican sugar slavery allegation being adopted in yearly global overview reports produced by agencies of the US Departments of Labor and State. The Dominican Republic has as a result been put back on an aid-and-trade-sanctionable track, more than 15 years after sugar slavery last featured as an allegation in any leading monitor group's reports. All this, plus evidence that one videographer knew central aspects of the allegation to be false at the moment of its public release, mark the revival of the Dominican sugar slavery allegation as a precursor to the media furor triggered by the Kony 2012 ‘viral video’. Analysis of the visual media afterlife of Dominican sugar slavery suggests that the ‘Kony effect’ may be less new than meets the eye, for Kony 2012 is not the first video campaign to promote yesterday's human rights crisis as today's imperative for action. Notes Support for teaching leave time used in researching and writing this essay, from the University of Connecticut's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Human Rights Institute, is gratefully acknowledged. 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc. 2 Well informed and sober critiques of Kony 2012 include S Anstis, ‘On Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign’, blog, 7 March 2012, at http://siena-anstis.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/07/on-invisible-childrens-kony-2012-campaign/; S Costello, ‘Blind to reality: Invisible Children and the lra’, Carnegie Council Articles, 9 March 2012, at http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/articles_papers_reports/0123.html; J Keating, ‘Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)’, Passport: A Blog by the Editors of Foreign Policy, 7 March 2012, at http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/07/guest_post_joseph_kony_is_not_in_uganda_and_other_complicated_things; M Kersten, ‘Taking “Kony 2012” down a notch’, Justice in Conflict, 7 March 2012, at http://justiceinconflict.org/2012/03/07/taking-kony-2012-down-a-notch/; and J Kron & JD Goodman, ‘Online, a distant conflict soars to topic No 1’, New York Times, 8 March 2012, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/world/africa/online-joseph-kony-and-a-ugandan-conflict-soar-to-topic-no-1.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp. 3 WM Haney (dir), The Price of Sugar, New York: New Yorker Films, 2007; A Serrano (dir), The Sugar Babies: The Plight of the Children of Agricultural Workers in the Sugar Industry of the Dominican Republic, Miami: Siren Studios, 2007; C del Punta (dir), Haïti Chérie, Rome: Esperia Film–Arethusa Film, 2007; C Anaya Gautier, Esclaves au paradis, La Roque d'Anthéron, France: Vents d'Ailleurs, 2007; and A Webb, ‘Bitter toil: Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic’, in M Sealy, R Malbert & A Lobb (eds), Documenting Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery, London: Hayward, 2008, pp 138–151. ‘Independent’, it bears adding, is not necessarily the same as ‘low budget’: according to the Daily Variety, 7 December 2007, The Price of Sugar was budgeted at $1.5 million, financed by philanthropic individuals. The Sugar Babies was more of a shoestring production, produced with $110,000 provided by the Human Rights Foundation, founded by libertarian philanthropist, Thor Halvorssen. http://www.thehrf.org/media/mediaSugarBabies.html. 4 US Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking, The Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor: Report Required by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Acts of 2005 and 2008, 2009, at http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/pdf/2009tvpra.pdf, pp16, 92–94; and US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 10th Edition, 2010, at http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/index.htm, p 134. 5 P Curtis, ‘Has Kony 2012 changed anything?’, Guardian Global Development, blog, 16 April 2012, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2012/apr/16/has-kony-2012-changed-anything; and Y Su & R Besliu, ‘The real effects of Kony 2012’, International Affairs Review, blog, 23 April 2012, at http://www.iar-gwu.org/node/402. 6 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/yeanbosi/martinez.pdf. 7 S Martínez, Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007, p 126. 8 usdl, The Department of Labor's List; usdl, US Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor: Report Required by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Acts of 2005, 2010, at http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/pdf/2010TVPRA.pdf, 2010; and usdl, US Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor: Report Required by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Acts of 2005, 2011, at http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/PDF/2011TVPRA.pdf. 9 ‘Inter-American Court of Human Rights Case of the Yean and Bosico Children v the Dominican Republic, Judgment of September 8, 2005’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 25(3), 2006, p 119. 10 Amnesty International, A Life in Transit: The Plight of Haitian Migrants and Dominicans of Haitian Descent, at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR27/001/2007/en/ad444c48-d3ad-11dd-a329-2f46302a8cc6/amr270012007en.pdf, 2007; Boalt Hall School of Law, International Human Rights Law Clinic, Unwelcome Guests: A Study of Expulsions of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian Descent from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, Berkeley, CA: Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Unwelcome_Guests.pdf, 2002; and Human Rights Watch, ‘Illegal People’: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in the Dominican Republic, 2002, at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2002/04/04/illegal-people. 11 Benito Tide Méndez, Antonio Sensión, Adrea Alezi, Janty Fils-Aime, William Medina Ferreras, Rafaelito Pérez Charles, Berson Gelim et al. v Dominican Republic, at http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/2005eng/DominicanRep.12271eng.htm; Nadege Dorzema et al., or ‘Guayubín massacre’ v Dominican Republic, at http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/2005eng/DominicanRep.12271eng.htm; and Emildo Bueno Oguis v Dominican Republic, at http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/litigation/bueno?utm_source=Open+Society+Justice+Initiative&utm_campaign=6f2b634090-osji-ec-mailing_20100501&utm_medium=email. 12 My translation of I Olmedo, ‘Un cura en el infierno: República Dominicana/un cura español entre esclavos’, Crónica: Un Suplemento de El Mundo, 5 January 2003, at http://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2003/377/1041929167.html. 13 C Greene, ‘The Price of Sugar. documenting the decidedly un-sweet lives of Dominican cane cutters', The Slate, 143(10), 2007, pp 51–52. 14 ES Goldberg, Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, pp 28–29. 15 See http://www.thepriceofsugar.com/takeaction.shtml, where the viewer is encouraged, ‘Write your congressman and ask him or her to make sure that the full civil and labor rights of the cane workers are respected and guaranteed in exchange for the opportunity to export Dominican sugar to the US market’. 16 MT Martin, ‘Documenting modern-day slavery in the Dominican Republic: an interview with Amy Serrano’, Camera Obscura, 25(2), 2010, p 166. 17 I model the term ‘witness/theorist’ on Elaine Showalter's term for doctors who unconsciously promote outbreaks of hysteria, ‘Physician-enthusiasts and theorists’, in Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p 17. Like hysteria, contemporary slavery today presents in a staggeringly diverse array of forms (ie human trafficking, sweatshop labour, child labour, forced prostitution, bonded labour). What triggers belief that all these wrongs are one thing is the intervention of authority figures (eg priest, policeman, politician, activist or researcher) to ‘define, name, and publicize the disorder’ and attract adherents to belief in it. 18 The definition of ‘slavery’ in international law—‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’ (http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/slavery.htm)—formulated in the Slavery Convention of 1926, seems inadequate for the conditions of today, in which slaveholders can neither obtain nor desire to hold others as property. For this reason, the influential conceptualisation of the problem proposed by Kevin Bales, the leading scholar/advocate of contemporary slavery, discards the criterion of property to define slavery today as the use of violence to keep and exploit people against their will. ‘The economic exploitation and loss of free will that are inherent in slavery are often accomplished through the threat of violence…The bonded laborer whose family has been enslaved for generations against a falsely accounted debt, the child kidnapped and locked into a workshop, or the woman forced into prostitution have all lost the element of choice and control of their lives. This loss is normally enforced…through violence’. K Bales & PT Robbins, ‘“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”: a critical analysis of international slavery agreements and concepts of slavery’, Human Rights Review, 2(2), 2001, p 29. 19 R Pacatte, ‘Blood, sweat and tears: film review’, National Catholic Reporter, 30 July 2009, pp 15–16. 20 Subsequent 2010 and 2011 versions of The Department of Labor's List repeat the allegation that Dominican sugar is an offender in both child labour and forced labour. Department of Labor's List, 2010, p 23; and Department of Labor's List, 2011, p 22. 21 It should be noted, however, that ocft has contracted the independent labour rights monitoring organisation, Verité, to organise a field-based assessment of force labour indicators in Dominican sugar production as part of a seven-country study. As of the first week of September 2012, whenthefinal version of this article was being written, the findings of that study had not yet been published. 22 Department of Labor's List, 2009, p 16. The same list of 29 references is published in the separate bibliographies for the 2010 and 2011 usdl ocft reports. See http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/TVPRAbibliography.pdf; and http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/2011TVPRABib.pdf. 23 Christian Aid, On the Margins: Discrimination against Haitian Migrants and their Descendants in the Dominican Republic, 2006, at http://www.stopthetraffik.org/downloads/2006_haiti_report.pdf. 24 BL Bernier, ‘Sugar cane slavery: bateyes in the Dominican Republic’, New England Journal of International and Comparative Law, 9, 2003, pp 17–45; E Ceolan, ‘Migration and trafficking in migrants on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic’, in Hands Up for Freedom: Compilation of Reports from the Conference on ‘Trafficking of Human Beings and Migration: A Human Rights Approach’, Anti-Slavery International, Lisbon, 4–5 March 2005, pp 15–23, at http://www.antislavery.org/includes/documents/cm_docs/2009/h/hands_up_for_freedom_conference_report_english.pdf; D Harman, ‘Haitian Cane-Cutters Struggle’, Christian Science Monitor, 1 February 2006; and International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, (icftu), Internationally-recognised Core Labour Standards in the Dominican Republic: Report for the wto General Council Review of Trade Policies of the Dominican Republic (Geneva, 7 and 9 October 2002), 2002, at http://www.icftu.org/www/pdf/englishclsdominicanrepublic.pdf. 25 ilo, Stopping Forced Labour: Report of the Director-General, Geneva: ilo, 2002, p 24 at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_norm/—declaration/documents/publication/wcms_088490.pdf. 26 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/16/acd.02.html. 27 B Wooding & R Moseley-Williams, Needed but Unwanted: Haitian Immigrants and their Descendants in the Dominican Republic, London: ciir, 2004, at http://eng.yspaniola.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Needed-but-Unwanted.pdf. usdl researchers could have taken a fairly complete and up-to-date set of references to other scholars' work from Martínez, note 7. Of particular value are the strongly worded but well founded critiques of the Dominican government's policies towards Haitian immigrants and Haitian-ancestry Dominicans to be found in studies by Dominican-based sociologists Franc Báez Evertsz, Wilfredo Lozano, Rubén Silié, Eddy Tejeda and Bridget Wooding. 28 Department of Labor, Office of the Secretary, ‘Notice of the Procedural Guidelines for the Development and Maintenance of the List of Goods From Countries Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor; Request for Information’, Federal Register, 72(247), 27 December 2007, p 73 374. 29 Americas Watch, A Troubled Year: Haitians in the Dominican Republic, New York: Americas Watch and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, 1992. 30 Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, p 134.
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