Parsley Massacre - Contributing Factors

Contributing Factors

The Dominican Republic, the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, is the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola and occupies two-thirds of the land while having just five-million inhabitants. In contrast, Haiti, the former French colony of Saint Domingue, residing on the western portion of the island, occupies the remaining one-third of the landmass, and is very heavily settled with an estimated “500 persons per square mile.” This has resulted in many Haitians being forced to settle lands that were “too mountainous, too eroded or too dry for rewarding farm production”. However, instead of staying on lands incapable of supporting them, many Haitians began to migrate onto Dominican soil where land hunger was low. While Haitians benefited by gaining farm land, Dominicans in the borderlands subsisted mostly on agriculture, and benefited from the ease of exchange of goods with Haitian markets. Due to inadequate roadways connecting the borderlands to major cities, “communication with Dominican markets was so limited that the small commercial surplus of the frontier slowly moved toward Haiti”.

This posed a possible threat to Trujillo’s regime, because of long-standing border disputes between the two nations: if large numbers of Haitian immigrants began to occupy the less densely populated Dominican borderlands, the Haitian government could have made a case for claiming part of the Dominican Republic's land. Additionally, loose borders allowed contraband to pass freely and without taxes between nations, thus depriving the Dominican Republic of tariff revenue. Furthermore, the Dominican government saw the loose borderlands as a liability—in terms of the formation of revolutionary groups which could flee across the border with ease, while at the same time amassing both weapons and followers.