OUANAMINTHE, HAITI
The Massacre River is running high tonight, coursing and angry under a thunderclad sky. It’s a trick the river likes to play, inviting women in the midday to pound their washing in placid, shallow waters; rising to menace under nightfall as the rains sluice down from the mountainside.
The suddenly changed mood plays to the region’s dark historical narrative, the river marking the border that cleaves the Dominican Republic from Haiti, the division of strife and woe, the place where Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo backed the ethnic slaughter of tens of thousands of Haitians more than 70 years ago and the river did run with blood.
The past is grimly echoed in the present. The Dominican border town of Dajabon, which sits across from the Haitian border town of Ouanaminthe, offers inexpensive and clean accommodation at the Hotel Massacre. The hotel comes recommended on some hitchhiker’s travel blogs.
Ouanaminthe seems an unlikely location from which to chart a future for this stricken country. Yet the lockstep alliance of Haiti’s plutocracy and foreign leaders has looked here to the north and declared that the country’s best economic hope lies in the base-wage assembly of T-shirts and blue jeans, an agenda that has flourished in the region, albeit to the aid of Dominican business interests
Read the complete story at the link below:
http://www.thestar.com/haiti/economic/article/875952--haiti-s-garment-industry-hanging-by-a-thread
