In January 2012, park ranger Eligio Eloy Varga was hacked to death by a machete near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This incident, still unsolved, kicks off the new documentary thriller, Death by A Thousand Cuts. Airing in the Raindance film festival in London on 1 October, the film explores how the fate of forests in two neighbouring countries has exacerbated social conflict, xenophobia, poverty, and even resulted in multiple murders.
“[Haiti and the Dominican Republic] share the island of Hispaniola, but have starkly different trajectories, in large part, related to how they have managed their natural resources,” said Jake Kheel, co-director of the documentary, which won the Jury’s best documentary prize at the Seattle film festival.
The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is visible from satellite: the Dominican side is covered in thick forest while the Haitian is largely bare hills.
Over hundreds of years, Haiti has lost the vast majority of its forests to charcoal production, which even today remains the primary source for cooking fuel in the impoverished country.
Meanwhile, “the Dominican Republic, with far greater forest cover and a functioning protected area system, has become one of the strongest and most stable economies in the region and is often held as a model for natural resource protection and conservation,” said Kheel. “This inequality of resources has often lead to violent conflicts.”
Working in the Sierra de Bahoruco national park, murdered park ranger Varga was tasked with combatting an epidemic of illegal deforestation for the charcoal trade that has put pressure on the park’s forests and wildlife.
Yolanda Leon, a Dominican biologist and president of local NGO, Grupo Jaragua, called Bahoruco “the jewel of the crown for Hispaniolan biodiversity.”
A part of the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Unesco biosphere reserve, the national park is one of the most important biodiversity sites in all of the Caribbean. It’s home to the Hispaniolan solendon, a bizarre mammal that lived with the dinosaurs, as well as six critically endangered amphibians. Experts have also documented 107 bird species, including many endemic species, and more than 1,500 plants in the reserve. Many of the animals and plants found here no longer survive on the ecologically devastated Haitian side.
But the park has also become a flash point for Haitians desperate to make a living by producing charcoal and the Dominicans charged with protecting the forest.
“The tragic irony, of course, is that along the border, working class Haitians and Dominicans work side-by-side and have rich and complex intermixing of language, cultural customs and traditions,” said Kheel, who directed the film with Juan Mejia Botero.
Up to 1 million Haitians live and work in the Dominican Republic, but have recently become subject to new laws that have forced mass deportations.
Tensions between Haitians and Dominicans are largely due to “racism,” according to Leon. She calls it a product of national “patriotic’ sentiment” that portrays Dominicans as Spanish, white, and Christian versus Haitians, who are consistently painted as other, ie black, French, and voodoo-practitioners.
“This attitude has been enforced by ruling classes and elites who profit from the cheap labour provided by Haitians to many sectors of the Dominican Republic economy without regard for humane treatment,” she said.
Kheel, who has recently screened the film for the Dominican Republic’s new environment minister, hopes his powerful documentary can create change at the top. But he said that he’s not only targeting the Dominican Republic’s government.
“There is a tendency in the Dominican Republic, for example, to transfer all responsibility for environmental protection to the government and to simply retreat in frustration when the environment continues to be degraded. I think this is a grave mistake. The government, private sector, environmental groups, and society at large all have a responsibility in environmental stewardship.”
To Kheel, the only way forward is for both countries to do something they are not known for: work together.
“Until they begin to come up with an integrated, holistic, bi-national solution, it will be difficult to see great progress made,” he said.
Shortly after Varga’s murder, two Haitian men had their throats slit and bodies dumped in a canal. Many suspect it was a revenge killing.
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