The Parsley massacre, Dominican Republic. 12,000-40,000 (jan 1, 1937 – dec 1, 1937)

Description:

The Parsley Massacre (also known as El Corte "The Cutting" in Spanish, Kout Kouto-a "The Stabbing" in Haitian Creole, or the Haitian Massacre of 1937) was carried out by the Dominican Republic (under dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Dominican Army forces, and conscripted Dominican civilians) against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic between October 2, 1937 (Trujillo's speech in Dajabón) and October 8, 1937 (end of main killing period, though violence continued through late October 1937), with an estimated death toll between 9,000 (lower estimates including U.S. sources) and 35,000 (upper estimates), with most scholarly consensus around 20,000 deaths, representing between one-fifth and three-fifths of the entire Haitian population in the Dominican Republic.

The perpetrators also engaged in systematic executions using machetes and bayonets (to avoid rifle evidence), mass drowning in the Dajabón/Massacre River (which ran with blood and corpses for days), burning of bodies, torture, linguistic testing using the Spanish word "perejil" (parsley) as a shibboleth to identify Haitians by their inability to trill the "r", arbitrary killings regardless of actual nationality (some darker-skinned Dominicans and bicultural Dominican-Haitians were also murdered), hunting down fleeing refugees into Haiti, killing of Dominican civilians who attempted to help Haitians escape, complete ethnic cleansing of the northwestern Dominican frontier (virtually the entire Haitian population was either killed or forced to flee), forced confinement of surviving Haitians to sugar plantations, confiscation of Haitian-owned land and property, and systematic institutionalization of anti-Haitian (antihaitianismo) ideology into Dominican national identity.

It has been labeled as genocide by U.S. Ambassador R. Henry Norweb (who described it in 1937 diplomatic cables as "a systematic campaign of extermination"), historian Edward Paulino (who characterizes it as "arguably the largest mass murder in the Americas that targeted people of African descent in the 20th century" and explicitly calls it genocide), the film "Perejil" directed by José María Cabral (whose 2022 film states "No international court dealt with the 'Parsley' Genocide"), scholars who note it fits Raphael Lemkin's criteria for genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention (committed with intent to destroy a national group).

Various genocide studies scholars and students who have analyzed it as meeting genocide criteria, human rights activists and organizations including Border of Lights commemoration organizers, and numerous historians and human rights advocates, though it has never been formally recognized as genocide by any international court or the United Nations, and remains underrecognized internationally compared to other 20th century genocides despite its massive death toll.

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