Over 500 former Peace Corps volunteers are calling on the U.S. government to withhold military aid and stop funding the Dominican Republic’s ethnic cleansing of people of Haitian descent, adding theirs to the cacophony of voices—from Pope Francis to United Nations experts to thousands marching in Port-au-Prince—speaking out against the mass-scale human rights violations.
In a letter addressed to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, 560 former volunteers who have spent at least two years working with Dominican communities, including three former country directors, invoked the Leahy amendment, which bans the U.S. from aiding security forces guilty of gross human rights violations.
“Given the Dominican government’s disregard for international law with respect to the status of its citizens of Haitian descent; the violent track record of Dominican security forces receiving funding and training from the United States; and the Dominican Armed Forces’ readiness to execute a potentially massive campaign of rights-violating expulsions, we ask that the United States suspend its military aid to the Dominican government,” the letter declares.
The letter notes: “The security forces that appear poised to carry out mass deportations within the country, including the U.S.-trained border patrol agency, CESFRONT, have received more than $17.5 million in assistance from the United States since 2013.”
The year 2013 also saw the Dominican Republic’s highest court issue a ruling that stripped hundreds of thousands of people of their Dominican citizenship, based on a retroactive reinterpretation of the country’s nationality laws. The vast majority of those impacted are of Haitian descent, particularly those born to undocumented parents between 1929 and 2010, with an estimated 200,000 people made stateless by the ruling. The ruling worsened the Dominican Republic’s bloody history of mass expulsions and discrimination targeting people of Haitian descent.
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