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At the opening of the twenty-first century the outlook for the Dominican sugar industry is uncertain and tenuous, while the bateys languish in the dustbin of history. Once part of a sugar kingdom that provided almost a third of the world’s sugar, the Dominican Republic is now ranked at 28 on the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s list of the most important producers of sugar in the world.
In 1986, Central Romana, Grupo Vicini, and the rest of the mills run by the Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA) together produced over a million metric tons of sugar, but that quantity was sharply reduced thereafter, and in 1999, the year that the CEA privatized its holdings, the total output came to a mere 380,014 tons, with Central Romana producing almost two thirds of that figure (236,527 tons). For the year 2004 the USDA GAIN report projected a total output of 505,000 tons and a slightly higher output for 2005. Thus the Dominican sugar industry is currently operating at less than half the capacity it maintained during the 70s and early 80s, with the majority of it yielded by a single mill, Central Romana, owned by the Fanjul family. Few of the mills sold off by the CEA are still in production, though Ingenio Porvenir is back online as of 2008, and certain other mills are being refurbished for ethanol production. The industry is betting that ethanol will rescue it, so that while sugar will continue to be produced, albeit at lower levels sufficient to supply local demand and fulfill the US sugar quota, the cultivation and processing of cane for fuel will substantially increase business both for the colonos and for the mills, which will have to be upgraded. Mothballed mills may be brought back online as well.
The Monte Plata region, which contains some of the poorest bateys due to the fact that sugar production there came to a complete halt, will now have a new mill dedicated to producing ethanol. Alcor Dominicana, affiliated with Alcofinance of Belgium, will be investing about 150 million dollars to install a new plant, which is expected to begin production in March 2009. The mill has arranged to rent some 80 to 100,000 tareas for cultivating cane and will also buy cane from local colonos. The plant is to have the most modern system for milling the cane (molienda de difusión), and the harvest will be mechanized. In addition to Alcor, Brazil’s Infinity Bio Energy in tandem with Bioetanol Boca Chica SA will be refurbishing Ingenio Boca Chica with an investment of 200 million dollars. They expect to be able to produce 55.5 million gallons of ethanol, beginning in 2009. This endeavor will not make use of cane cut in the Dominican Republic and will function merely as a processing plant for imported raw material. Finally, Grupo Vicini and Central Romana have, as of March 2008, joined together to initiate ethanol production as well.
But there are dissenting voices, and environmental and agricultural organizations argue that cane cultivation is deleterious to the soil as well as wasteful of precious resources, particularly water. Irrigation is intensive and depletes the water bed ; moreover, so much land is needed to cultivate the quantities of cane needed for adequate supplies of ethanol that this jeopardizes the supply of food. As reported in the Dominican press on Feb 27, 2008, "the economist Arturo Martinez says that President Leonel Fernandez is mistaken in thinking that he can solve the country’s fuel problems with ethanol production. Martinez argues that land that is now being used to produce food will, in the future, be used to produce ethanol. He added that only 30 million tareas of land in the country can be cultivated, and if this were to be used for ethanol production it would decrease food production. Martinez was responding to an announcement made by President Fernandez, who stated that the Vicini Group and the Central Romana Corporation will jointly invest US$500 million in the production of ethanol fuel, electricity and sugar. According to the President, the investment will create 30,000 jobs and will also allow for the installation of a 15,000-ton capacity grinder, a sugar derived energy generator and a secondary plant capable of producing 50 million gallons of ethanol fuels annually" (Feb 28, 2008, DR1.com).
As of April 10, 2008 the Fanjuls and the Vicini Group announced via Hoy newspaper that they would not in fact be producing ethanol fuel in the east because there wasn’t enough sugar cane to supply the projected amounts of ethanol that they had planned. The engineer Jimmy Garcia Savinon, an executive with Etanol Dominicana, said that just sugar would be produced for the local and export markets, and that the only ethanol project to be launched in the next few years would be the Brazilian backed effort in Boca Chica.
What this will mean for the bateys and the legion of Haitian braceros responsible for sowing, cutting and crushing the cane is as yet unknown. Will already established companies like Grupo Vicini act on its promises to improve worker housing and provide better salaries and the training needed to prepare workers for the promised mechanization of the harvest ? Will new companies like Alcor create new housing for its workers, or rely on existing but superannuated bateys in the area to provide its workers’ needs ? If the latter, will recruitment and maintenance of the labor pool proceed along more informal lines than in the past, or will such companies find that some version of the batey system is necessary for its efficient operation ? Will the state, in an effort to control migration, step in and regulate the industry more closely and oversee management of the labor pool ? Will employment increase sufficiently to confirm Dominican fears about a disproportionate and potentially problematic Haitian emigrant presence, thus warranting a rigorous state policy ? Will the batey system eventually cease to function, like a vestigial organ, or will it adapt and acquire a new form of existence ? Will there in fact be enough workers, or will they have been siphoned off to other industries such as construction, which presently command the attention of many Haitian emigrants ? Some have argued that it is no longer feasible to depend on a labor pool made up of transitory workers whose flow in and out of the country cannot be adequately controlled. Will salaries improve to the point that they will attract Dominican workers as well as Haitians ? And is there, in fact, enough cane and land for cane cultivation available to support an industry based on ethanol production ? So far the papers are full of editorial opinions but little exists in the way of concrete information.
Meanwhile, decreased production, privatization of state-owned mills, and social prejudice exacerbated by the recent influx of emigrant Haitians seeking work in other sectors of the Dominican economy, have conspired to worsen conditions on the bateys, which are neglected, abandoned, lacking basic services, and now largely cut off from the rest of the economy, so that employment opportunities are practically nonexistent. On a fact finding tour with a team from the Clinton Foundation, this reporter witnessed an incident that pretty much sums up the major problem facing the bateys. The team was concerned to determine the presence of HIV/AIDS in the bateys and limited itself to asking questions in reference to that particular issue. In Batey La Balsa, just north of San Pedro de Macoris, a circle of residents collected round the team and one of the elders took it upon himself to answer the questions while the rest nodded in acquiesence. When asked what was the gravest disease afflicting the residents, a woman broke from the crowd and loudly asserted, "you want to know what the worst disease here is, I’ll tell you, it’s unemployment, that’s what it is. Unemployment is killing us. We need work." She was chided by the crowd for breaking ranks, but she told the truth, which was all the more impressive for being blunt. The bateys have been sidelined by history, and a potentially valuable and sizeable workforce has been lost because the sugar industry is so much smaller than it once was and there are no plans or programs whatsoever for retraining these workers or finding them other types of work. The NGOs are overtaxed just trying to provide some measure of health care and other services such as potable water and basic education, while the CEA’s mandate does not encompass what would be, at any rate, an ambitious program of training and job referral.
Because of the privatization of the mills, and their subsequent closure due to the fact that the foreign investors found the properties financially unfeasible, many bateys are no longer connected to the industry and their basic needs now go unmet : potable water, electricity, latrines, sewerage, access to markets, adequate food supply, medical services, and other resources are all lacking and there is no authority presently to oversee future reforms. While bateys in general do not appear to be much different from some rural Dominican villages (which also lack water, electricity, paved roads, and basic social services), their economic isolation and the stigma of social prejudice work together to create a somewhat different set of circumstances that are more difficult to alleviate. Certainly, many Dominicans in small villages also lack opportunities and feel the pinch of severe poverty, but they are comparatively better off since they enjoy the rights of national citizenship and are free to come and go without incurring the wrath of the immigration authorities and the national police. Up until now, raids on bateys and random, poorly supervised deportations of batey residents — even those who had lived here for years or were in fact legal Dominicans — have instilled such fear in the bateyeros that they hesitate to venture outside the bateys so as to avoid calling attention to themselves, regardless of whether they are foreign emigrants or native Dominicans. (The bateys as a whole are composed of approximately 70% Dominicans, according to the 1999 survey carried out by CREP on behalf of the CEA, but since a third of Dominicans themselves lack the legal documents that would allow them to obtain a cedula and prove their legitimate citizenship, these people largely exist in a political limbo, and the authorities often have difficulty distinguishing between Dominicans and Haitians.)
One must also bear in mind that these communities are hobbled by the fact that they were conceived not as communities in themselves but as appendages to an industrial complex, the "central," and all the elements that one expects to find in a real community, giving it both a certain autonomy and a meaningful relation to the rest of the world, were purposely omitted from the batey design. Moscoso Puello’s simple description of a batey is typical : "A street with bohios (rustic shacks), another half dozen tin shacks, a bodega, four barracks and a wind mill" — that is, other than the mill, there is only the merest form of shelter and a small convenience store to supply the needs of the workers, nothing more. Markets, for example, did not exist ; instead, the company installed small stores, or colmados, which stocked items provided by the company and distributed them to the workers in return for company issued script. Consequently, the braceros were deprived of any independence through this arrangement, since the money they used had no value outside the batey, and the goods they bought were wholly controlled by the company, which determined the types of goods for sale and the prices. The batey was constructed in a such a manner as to guarantee the virtually total dependence of the workers on the company. It created a false semblance of community that also functioned as a means of isolating the workers, wrapping them in a cocoon intended to obviate the need to go outside the batey in order to satisfy one’s needs. Once the mill ceased to function, the batey was cut off even from its own means of survival, so the lack of autonomy and means for development was aggravated by these new circumstances. Ironically, while employment created a kind of capitalist-based vassalage for the braceros, liberation from the mill merely served to confirm their crippling state of dependency in a different form.
While privatization has deprived many bateys of services that once were rendered in part by the CEA, another blow was dealt recently with the reform of the law concerning health care. The Dominican press throughout the year 2007 published stories in which staff members of hospitals located along the border, in the capital, and in San Pedro de Macoris alleged that the public health system, in particular the maternity wards, was overtaxed by the flood of emigrant Haitians seeking free health care, but the reporters have never bothered to verify the numbers or even bear witness to the putative excessive presence of Haitians in the wards. In fact one problem confronting the batey population is the inability to get to the clinics. According to a report prepared by CREP,
El 79.9 % de las madres entienden que la distancia de los centros de
salud le dificulta el acceso, el 63.3% entiende que su principal problema de
acceso a los centros de salud es el costo del transporte, y el 80.2 % señala su
imposibilidad para comprar las prescripciones de los médicos.
The batey population has trouble getting access to clinics because of the distance and the cost of transportation ; additionally, they cannot afford the medications. Moreover, it never occurred to any reporters to question whether in fact their presence is unwarranted, since one could argue that so long as emigrant workers are contributing to the Dominican economy, then they are entitled to a measure of health care, particularly as their jobs tend to be high risk occupations. And finally, not a single reporter has bothered to research the story and thus publish the fact that the new law regulating health care and payment for services has effectively closed the hospitals to this population, so that while there may well be emigrant Haitians taking advantage of hospital services, many more are being turned away.
During the final year of Hipólito Mejia’s administration the law was revised in order to relieve the government’s financial burden in the health sector by more strictly defining payment procedures. This law was put into effect during the second year of the subsequent administration under Leonel Fernandez. Henceforth, people were to furnish the appropriate paperwork needed to assess one’s ability to pay, and since the bateyeros more often than not have no legal identity papers, they are shut out of the system. Of course, some doctors turn a blind eye to the legal procedures and treat all comers as a matter of principle ; but there are not so many of these good-hearted mavericks as one would suppose. Patients are routinely refused treatment by doctors or other staff who assess their ethnic identity on the basis of their speech, their dress, their manner, or their features. Several NGOs working in the bateys have volunteers whose job it is to accompany batey residents to local hospitals in order to ensure that they be treated. In one tragic case, a volunteer working with Onè Respe’s program in Haina was herself refused treatment for hemorrhagic dengue, and she subsequently died.
However, in a recent turn of events, the government announced that it would no longer deny health services to illegal Haitians. As reported in Hoy, on April 9, 2008, " ’El Gobierno entiende que este es un servicio que no se le puede negar absolutamente a ningún ciudadano de la tierra’, dijo el Ministro de Salud local, Bautista Rojas Gómez." It remains to be seen how this will play out on the ground and whether the hospitals and clinics will alter their policy, given that they are short on resources, the government is short on funds, and some doctors are short on tolerance. But there is no doubt that this announcement marks a step in the right direction.
The lack of paperwork ties in with another problem that plagues both the bateyeros and the newer migrant workers, some of whom never set foot in a batey. The legal status of these people has been a major issue for the past few years, particularly in the wake of increased migration, with one side arguing that anyone born or permanently resident on Dominican soil ought to be granted citizenship, while others argue that the offspring of illegal immigrants have no legal claim on the state and do not automatically merit citizenship. This latter position was upheld recently by the Dominican Supreme Court, but article 11 of the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, confirms the principles of jus soli, and states :
Son dominicanos : 1. Todas las personas que nacieren en el territorio de la República, con excepción de los hijos legítimos de los extranjeros residentes en el país en representación diplomática o los que estén de tránsito en él.
(Dominicans are : All persons born in the territory of the Republic with the exception of the legitimate children of foreigners resident in the country in diplomatic representation or those who are in transit through it.)
Opponents have argued that these workers are by definition "foreigners in transit" (despite the fact that many of them reside permanently in the Dominican Republic) and therefore are not eligible for Dominican nationality. Apart from the legal logic adduced to ratify contemporary practices regarding these workers, it must be admitted that a certain disingenuousness lurks behind the argument against granting citizenship or residency, because it ignores the fact that these so called illegal immigrants are caught up in an informal network of human trafficking and that their labor is valuable to the Dominican economy. They come through the back door, but they are nonetheless being invited, however surreptitiously, to do so. That is, certain sectors of Dominican society collude in this illegal migration. Aside from the cane growers, there is the border guard who accepts bribes from Haitians who want to cross over ; there is the Cibaeño farmer whose crop will fail if he cannot get enough Haitian workers to bring in the harvest ; there is the construction contractor who needs a crew to do the digging and demolition ; and there is the hotel owner who also needs that construction crew. The illegal status of the worker is a highly ironic condition, therefore, because it is what makes these workers simultaneously desirable and an anathema. Thus it becomes useful as a means of control, since all dealings with such workers are thoroughly and legitimately extrajudiciary — the state and the industry leaders can do as they please with them, since the laborers exist wholly outside the framework that normally regulates relations between a state and its citizens or a company and its employees.
While many emigrants take it upon themselves to cross the border and search for work, others are actively recruited and smuggled across — and regardless of the manner of their entry, their presence is relied upon by many sectors of the Dominican economy. This may seem to contradict the woman from Batey La Balsa, unless we take into account that the new wave of migrant laborers is mobilized and drifting right through the big cities of the Cibao and the South, where their labor is sought, whereas the bateyeros are somewhat more fixed, even trapped, in place, and recruiters simply ignore the bateys in their search for laborers. Moreover, the new wave is essentially homeless, so they can be easily settled in shantytowns or worker camps, whereas the bateyeros eventually become rooted to their homes on the bateys. All types of plantations — coffee, fruit, tobacco, rice — now depend on Haitian migrant labor, as do the construction industry and, to some extent (given that Haitians are employed in the construction of hotel complexes), the tourism industry. Jobs that Dominicans no longer want, low-paying back-breaking jobs, go to the Haitians. In Gazcue, when a stately old home is knocked down to make room for a condominium complex, machinery is rarely used to do the job ; instead, a crew of Haitians and hammers pound at the concrete until it is reduced to rubble. Why pay for machinery when the labor is so cheap ? In Villa Trina, when the coffee harvest is afoot, Haitian workers do the picking — except, it must be said, in 2005, when the workers fled their shantytown in a panic after a Haitian was accused of having killed a Dominican, and up to 35 homes were burned down. As a result of the subsequent mass flight no one was left to pick the beans and the coffee growers were faced with a loss of around forty percent of the crop. The president of the Villa Trina Association of Coffee Farmers, Hugo Gonzalez, was quoted as saying that they only had 140 of the 300 workers needed to pick the crop, so they expected a financial loss of over RD$3 million. The interesting thing is that no Dominican workers could be found to replace the Haitians, since the former group is steadily being absorbed in the new service-oriented economy and thus are no longer interested in traditional peonage. Whereas some people claim that Haitians pose a competitive threat to Dominican workers because they offer their labor at a cheaper rate, the truth is that most Dominicans no longer seek this type of work and the low wages that obtain are the result of several unsuspected, or at least unacknowledged, factors.
First of all, this type of work is at the lowest end of the economic scale, and in an economy whose emphasis has shifted from agriculture to services, it will suffer inevitably from a generally held prejudice as to its negligible value. This kind of work lends no status to the worker and receives little praise or attention in the culture, which is now drooling over all things having to do with progress and development. Employers won’t pay more because the work is universally considered to be of little value. Second, Haitians work for less not because they are deliberately competing with Dominicans but because they are compelled to accept less due to their being here illegally. They are in no position to demand more. Third, the sheer quantity of migrant laborers available, numbering some several hundred thousand, guarantees that wages remain low since there is an overabundance of such labor. And fourth, the wages are depressed because no machinery is involved — hence it is unskilled labor that is compensated accordingly — and machinery won’t be used because the low wages make their use impractical and unprofitable, so they are trapped in a vicious circle.
***
All in all, the batey is characterized by isolation, scarcity and by the absence of the fundamental elements that combine to form a meaningful society. Services are lacking, jobs are lacking, education is lacking, and they possess nothing : no papers, no land of their own, no rights, no recourse. It is ironically and sadly apt that they are called "braceros" (from "brazo" = arm) — they are not conceived of as whole human beings, they are mere arms for cutting, a tool, a synecdoche. As the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights observed in its 1999 report, the state of "permanent illegality" that defines their status has severe repercussions for their ability to escape poverty and achieve autonomy :
The Commission observes that some 500,000 undocumented Haitian workers reside in the Dominican Republic. In several cases these persons have lived in the Dominican Republic for 20 to 40 years, and many were born there. Most of them confront permanent illegality, which is passed on to their children, who cannot obtain Dominican nationality, because according to the restrictive interpretation by the Dominican authorities of Article 11 of the Constitution, they are the children of "foreigners in transit." It is not possible to consider persons who have resided for several years in a country in which they have developed innumerable contacts of all types to be in transit. Consequently, numerous children of Haitian origin are denied fundamental rights, such as the right to nationality of the country of birth, access to health care, and access to education.
With the rest of the nation rushing full tilt along the path of development and globalization, the bateyeros and the new wave of emigrant laborers are left behind in the dust created by all the hubbub of a society in the throes of a massive transformation of its base socioeconomic structure. Yet the Dominican economy still has need of these workers and thus is obliged to contract with them in a just and forthright manner. Certainly the Dominican state has the right and a legitimate need to regulate the flow of emigrant workers, and the hope is that it will be able to do so in the future with greater efficiency, justice and guidance by enlightened policy that recognizes the mutual benefit to be enjoyed by both parties. There is no doubt that grave problems arise from the unrestrained flow of emigrants from a poor country to one that, for all its modernization, is itself still poor and unable to assimilate an excess of such workers.
Moreover, it is likely that a solution can be devised only with outside help, since the two nations involved are unable fully to cope and, after all, these problems of the postcolonial era are in part the legacy of practices instituted by the foreign powers that for so long benefitted from their existence. (Not that this should subsequently serve as an excuse for foreign powers to dictate policy or otherwise overstep the bounds of their mandate, since ultimately it is up to Haiti and the Dominican Republic to make their own decisions ; however, this is just what many Dominicans fear, that the "Haitian Question" will be used against them as a means of subverting their sovereignty and eventually consolidating the two nations as one. Though there is no evidence at all that any foreign powers are interested in such a unification — after all, what good would it serve anyone ? — this fear is pervasive and somewhat understandable given the history of meddling in this country from outside powers.) Nonetheless, any further progess is undoubtedly contingent upon the firm resolve and good will of the governments involved, and given the recent and dismaying conflict over Haiti’s embargo of Dominican chickens due to the presence of avian flu, along with other local border disturbances and an ongoing climate of mistrust and ideological combativeness, it is unlikely that any real, solid progress will be seen in the near future.