By Socialist Workers’ Movement of the Dominican Republic
Military and police agents attacked a strike by sugarcane workers of the Central Sugar Consortium (CAC) in Batey 5, on May 26, leaving at least 14 workers with injuries from firearms, sharp weapons, bone fractures and other serious injuries. During the attack, the repressors used heavy machinery and fired buckshot and bullets at the workers who had been exercising their right to strike the day before in response to abuses by the company. After the attack, the General Directorate of Migration (DGM) proceeded to deport more than sixty Haitian workers arbitrarily detained, despite the fact that they were in the country in a regular migratory situation, with a valid contract and a work visa. This heinous crime against the working class demonstrates the absence of elementary democratic freedoms such as freedom of association, as well as the persistence of forms of semi-slavery and forced labor in the country.
It is very serious that the police and military intervene in a labor conflict to crush the workers’ protest and that the DGM carries out arbitrary expulsions in violation of the immigration law. The use of the DGM to deport workers and prevent them from collecting their full salaries and benefits, acting as a paramilitary arm of the employers, is once again confirmed. The Ministry of Labor, which has historically been complicit in forced labor in the sugar industry, and which has defended it nationally and internationally in the case of Central Romana, is also responsible for protecting the Dominican and Guatemalan capitalists of the CAC. This company is the one that pays the lowest amount per ton of cane cut, less than one hundred pesos (less than 1.5 US dollars), an amount even lower than that paid by Central Romana and CAEI, which is already miserable.
In Batey 5 a climate of bosses’ terrorism has been installed so there is great secrecy, which added to the complicity of the main Dominican media has prevented more details of this brutal anti-worker repression from being known.
In this crime the CNUS union bureaucracy has also been complicit, since there is a union in this company that in the face of the repression and deportations did nothing to defend the workers in struggle, it has not even issued a statement denouncing the actions of the government and the company. No wonder, since President Abinader was a speaker at the CNUS congress in 2021 and its eternal leader Pepe Abreu, who is the beneficiary of a hefty privilege pension granted by the government, has spoken out in the past in support of the sugar companies in the face of denunciations of labor rights violations and forced labor, and has always been a servile agent of the PLD and PRM governments. The international trade union organizations CSA and CSI have affiliated the CNUS, a racist bureaucratic apparatus that is a direct accomplice of forced labor in the sugar industry.
The company, owned by Guatemalan and Dominican capitalists, leases land and property belonging to the Dominican State as a result of the privatization process carried out by the first PLD government at the end of the 1990s. These capitalists have defrauded the Dominican State, according to a complaint filed by the Articulación Nacional Campesina before the Attorney General’s Office in 2020, by witholding lease payments to the State, in addition the company has evicted peasants from their lands, destroying their crops, which has generated protests in recent years in the region, including a permanent peasant camp known as Camp Libertad. The campesino communities have also suffered arbitrary detentions and have been denouncing the company’s pollution and water grabbing.
We join the popular demand for an end to the leasing of state lands to the CAC exploiters. It is time for united mobilizations among workers’ and peasants’ organizations throughout the country against this exploitative company. We demand that the Attorney General’s Office cease its complicity with the crimes of the National Police, the military and the DGM against Haitian immigrant workers and that it take action against the repression and arbitrary detentions. We call on the workers’ organizations of the world to reject the semi-slavery to which the sugarcane workers are subjected and to demand that the government of Luis Abinader respect labor rights and immediately pay pensions to retired sugarcane workers, as well as compensation to the workers repressed in Batey 5.
Stop the anti-worker policies of the government! Punish the corrupt and repressive National Police, DGM and military! Revoke the concession to the Central Sugar Consortium now! International solidarity with the sugar cane workers!
Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic is a section of the International Workers’ Unity-Fourth International.