The police have killed a Haitian! Run!» says Pastor Wilson on the phone.
Twenty minutes later, I’m doing my best to follow him along dark roads deep inside Punta Cana. The pastor is driving a 2005 Nissan Frontier pickup truck, or what’s left of it. The car has been fitted with larger tyres on one side, but he still manages to get it up to 120 kilometres per hour. It is nearly midnight on a Thursday and the city is possessed by partying, as it is almost every night.
Near the beach paradises, European and American tourists and the odd wealthy Latin American are celebrating. In the colmados (shops) of the neighbourhoods, Dominicans drink cold beer and listen to loud music. But in the Matamosquitos neighbourhood, in the Fiusa sector, Haitians have become a discontented, angry mob because the police went up the hill and killed people.
We are greeted by a mob of young men who form a human wall at the end of one of the alleys in Matamosquitos, the southernmost and poorest part of the neighbourhood. Pastor Wilson has made caps for himself and his collaborators with gold embroidery that says «Human Rights».
He is 46 years old, a robust man with a loud, serious voice. He was born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents who came in the 1950s to work in the sugar cane fields. He owns a small fried chicken business and also works as a private investigator, filing complaints with the prosecutor’s office, the police and immigration authorities. Although he holds no official position, Haitians recognise him as a leader.
I’m the only one here who isn’t black, and the Haitians get aggressive when they see me get out of the car. They think I’m Dominican. But the pastor speaks to them loudly, in a mixture of Creole and Spanish.
«International journalist, he’s the international journalist, calm down, calm down,» he tells them, almost scolding them. I stick close to him, as close as I can, and we move forward.
The body of Gens Joacin surrounded by an angry crowd because the young man was killed by the police.
A human tunnel opens up until we are in front of Gems Joacin. He was killed by Dominican police officers less than two hours ago. He has at least three bullet wounds in his chest, possibly one in his neck, and his eyes are still open.
«Look, here are the bullet holes, if they shot him from close range,» says Fifa, a Haitian community leader, who with her loud voice manages to calm the agitated crowd of young men. Fifa pulls aside the white sheet she has placed over Gems to protect the privacy of his death, and almost puts her finger in the holes to show me that a bullet did indeed pass through there.
The story she recounts is corroborated by at least 150 people who nod their heads and show videos; that the police came to capture Haitians to deport them, that they have done so several times this week, and that this sparked a small riot in which Gems got the worst of it. They explain to me that a few days ago, most of the construction sites in Punta Cana, where most Haitian migrants work, paid their workers. They say that these days, the unwanted police visits are more frequent and more aggressive. They claim that the police demand money in exchange for not taking them away and handing them over to immigration.
At around 11 pm tonight, when they saw the police patrol, most of them ran away, others locked themselves in their tin shacks to wait for darkness and silence to hide them, and others grabbed the weapons that poor people use when they get angry: stones.
Gems did none of these things. When the police killed him, his hands were full. He had just come from buying ten pesos worth of ice, two flavoured juices and three loaves of bread for dinner at the corner shop, about 60 metres from the rented tin shack where he lived alone.
His last purchase was still lying a few centimetres from the pool of blood that had spurted from his mouth, but the bread and juices soon disappeared. It’s not just the police who plague the neighbourhood, but also poverty and hunger.
Fifa and the others still refer to Gems by his name; he is still him, not that. Fifa, Pastor Wilson, the other four leaders who accompany him, and the mass of people from the neighbourhood believe that the police will come to take the body away. They say it’s normal, that it’s happened before. Pastor Wilson, who sped up his beat-up car in the hope of finding Gems alive, is now focused on saving his remains and, with them, he says, his identity.
«We’re not going to let them throw him on the pavement like he’s rubbish,» he tells me, his face angry, his expression warrior-like. That sea of young men insists that the police want the body, they tell me in the best Spanish they can muster, that they are going up for Gems. They still call him by his name. A group picks up stones and shovels and prepares. They are going to defend Gems. They are determined to not let him be turned into a thing.
Fifa’s megaphone voice manages to control this tide of angry testosterone. She sounds like a mother scolding her children. In this part of the country, where construction is the main occupation of the Haitian community, there are many more men than women, most of them young. They obey this surrogate mother, but young blood mixed with death and indignation creates storms that do not easily subside.
A group starts kicking a tin door and there is an outbreak of chaotic violence. They don’t know who to hit, so they hit each other. But Fifa, with her deep voice like old iron, once again manages to calm the sea. Between her and Pastor Wilson, they do an exercise as if from primary school.
«If the police come, the forensic team, we’ll stay calm, right?» And the crowd responds with a «Yeah» that conveys more violence than peace.
A small, old pickup truck appears in the alleyways. It is driven by two young, muscular Haitians.
«We’ve come to pick up a body. The police sent us,» they say.
Then it starts, a strange sound, like a lion just before it roars. It comes from the chest, just above the stomach of those large Haitian men. The two men freeze. Fifa and Pastor Wilson tell them to leave, to leave quickly, before the sound turns into something else and there are two more bodies in the neighbourhood. The young men leave in their pickup truck, but the whole neighbourhood has now had their fear confirmed: the police want the body.
The pastor makes non-stop calls and in less than an hour a small minivan with a funeral home logo arrives. Two men roughly load Gems, who is already stiffening.
The pastor’s beat-up pickup truck and my rental car escort Gems’ body at full speed through dirt roads and puddles with a haste that has nothing to do with the solemnity of death.
As we leave the neighbourhood, we are stopped by a police roadblock. There are two patrol cars with at least seven officers. The community leader travelling with me as my co-pilot puts his hands to his head.
«It’s an ambush, they want the body,» he says. They ask us all to get out of the vehicles. They pull Pastor Wilson out of his car and rudely tell me to get out too.
FIFA, one of the Haitian leaders in Punta Cana, explains how the police killed Gems Joacin. A police checkpoint stops the hearse carrying his body.
They look at me with fear; they weren’t expecting outsiders here. I try a bluff that could easily backfire.
say as loudly as I can, «Good evening, I am a member of the international press. Who is in charge of this operation? I need them here right now.»
The young policeman in front of me stammers, telling me that he is not the boss, that the boss is not there, that I should go to the station. He says something to the others and they get into the patrol car. They see the body, take photos of it, but don’t dare to take it away in front of my camera, which I have already turned on. So they order the driver of the mini-van to follow them to the station.
The pastor won; it will be more difficult for them to get rid of the body now. It’s already been recorded and you already know his name. Everything indicates that thanks to the work of Haitian leaders, Gems Joacin, the construction worker who left somewhere in Artibonit, Haiti, around 2004, when he was very young, looking for a better life, will continue to be himself and not “that”.
***
In the last three years alone, Punta Cana, the territory where Pastor Wilson is resisting the authorities, has welcomed approximately nine million tourists. This place has brought the concept of a tropical paradise to life and is by far the most luxurious spot in the Greater Antilles. Originally known as Drunkard’s Beach or Fisherman’s Beach, it was founded in the late 1960s by a group of American businessmen who saw the overwhelming potential of this piece of Eden. Since then, more than 70 luxury mega-resorts with golf courses and private beaches have been built, along with hundreds of smaller hotels. In total, there are 44,000 rooms available to accommodate holidaymakers.
Since a group of businessmen founded Punta Cana in the 1960s, this part of the Dominican Republic has become one of the quintessential Caribbean paradises. In the last three years, it has welcomed nine million visitors.
Dominican magnate Oscar de La Renta was enchanted by the crystal-clear waters and decided to build a private mansion and hotel here, the Tortuga Bay, which is considered the most luxurious place on the entire island of Hispaniola.
The romantic Spanish singer Julio Iglesias did the same, building a mansion facing one of the white sand coves with turquoise water. Punta Cana attracts celebrities like honey attracts ants. Shakira, Marc Anthony, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and a string of big businessmen from all over the world have passed through here.
But this paradise is not just for celebrities and millionaires. Thousands of Americans and Europeans arrive on cruise ships every day, and the nightclubs and bars make every day and every moment feel like Saturday night.
All this rapid growth, all this construction, needs to be turned into columns, roofs and beams, and these things don’t build themselves; money does not yet have that power over the elements. More than 111,000 Haitians have arrived or been brought here by large construction companies to turn these ideas of grandeur into something tangible, according to estimates by local researchers.
Tourists also need people to welcome beachgoers and offer them clean towels when they come out of the sea or the pool, someone to tidy their rooms and serve their lobsters. The large tourism industry employs at least 54,000 Haitians, according to a study by the Institute of Migration of the Republic.
The same people who are being persecuted by Abinader’s policies are essential to several economic sectors in the country. That is why merchants in various markets have protested against the large deportations, saying they are selling less than half of their products due to the absence of Haitian buyers.
Complaints are also coming from the agricultural sector, especially banana and sugar cane growers. Even the Minister of Housing, Carlos Bonilla, has acknowledged that the deportations are seriously affecting the construction sector. Everyone’s complaints revolve around the same thing: the deportations are causing a shortage of workers, which is depressing production and domestic consumption.
The issue of human rights is not taking a back seat, nor is it being relegated to second or third place. It is not even on the table.
One day in October, in the late afternoon, as the sun seems to blush over a blue sea, an American couple gets married on the beach. The staff at their hotel have set up an altar and tables for the perfect photos. The man, an African American man almost two metres tall, puts the ring on his wife’s finger just as the afternoon paints its last scene. Further on, a group of models are photographed as they pose proudly, impossibly, with the expression of divas on their faces.
A group of French families float in the calm waters of the Caribbean. Behind them, on the sand, watching over the beachgoers’ belongings, arranging sun loungers, handing out towels and serving wedding champagne, are the Haitians, always Haitians, always behind, always living in the hills, like Matamosquito, where they can build their shacks on dirt floors and tin roofs. A few hours after this wedding, the police will kill Gems Joacin.
The body of Gems Joacin, shot and killed by police in the Matamosquitos neighborhood of Punta Cana.
***
Pastor Wilson had briefly confirmed that Mikelson was alive, under his protection, and he would guide me to him. But before that could happen, he called for another reason.
«You have to come, I have a terrible case here. I’m at the hospital with a boy who… you better come, I’ll show you.»
At the Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia General Hospital, at the end of a corridor, separated from the other patients, Wikey, the skinned man, was moaning.
Wikey was dragged by a pickup truck. After 17 days hiding in his home, the Haitian support network arranged for him to get a hospital bed.
Visitors are not allowed in the area where Wikey was, but Pastor Wilson smuggled me in like contraband with the complicity of a Haitian security guard, who winked at him when he saw him accompanied by a white man. Wikey is a thin young man with short dreadlocks. He had a lost look in his eyes and responded to my greeting very slowly, very softly, as if we were in a dream.
Life seemed to have already left his body. He spoke as if from the bottom of a well. Almost half of his body was skinned, without the skin and flesh that usually surrounds the bones. From his right knee down, he was blackened, as if scorched.
«He was run over by a jeep, it seems on purpose, in the early morning, and dragged along the street for a whole kilometre. He came loose on a curve because the man never stopped,» Pastor Wilson explained to me. He told me that the boy’s neighbours had taken him to the municipal hospital in Verón, Punta Cana, some time between between October 1 and 3, but that he had been sent home.
Wikey had languished for 17 days in his house with a dirt floor and everything else made of tin, plastic and wood. Those were the very days when police immigration raids were at their peak and his neighbours fled the village. He was left alone with a little rice and water, trying not to make any noise and with the door locked, hoping not to be discovered by immigration, the police or the army.
He had spent just over two weeks like this, with his body infected, hungry and dying, until Pastor Wilson found him, moved him into his pickup truck and called his contacts to get him admitted to this other hospital.
At the hospital, Pastor Wilson took it upon himself to tell anyone he came across that he was accompanying «a man from the international press». A nurse arrived with a stretcher and took Wikey away for X-rays. Then they moved him to a larger room where, it seemed, he would finally be seen by a doctor.
Three young women were chatting casually in the room about a piece of furniture that one of them was going to put in her house. The women did not hide their horror when they saw the skinned man. The doctor approached to examine him and ask him questions, which Pastor Wilson hastily translated. When they explained that he had been infected for 17 days, she reacted with great annoyance.
«Seventeen days you’ve been like this? Young man, looking at the state you’re in, and you’ve only just come to the hospital. My God…»
Pastor Wilson explained that he had been unable to leave for fear of being captured by immigration. The doctor ignored this, gave him a couple more scoldings and left. Then a nurse came and threw a package at Pastor Wilson.
«You are responsible for him. Undress him and put this cap and gown on him. He is now going to be treated,» she said.
Pastor Wilson changes Wikey, a skinned young Haitian man, in a hospital.
Pastor Wilson began to slowly remove his clothes, which by now were melting into his skin. Wikey clenched his teeth, opened his eyes and flailed his arms in an agonising struggle, as if, possessed by pain, he did not recognise his benefactor. But then the pastor whispered in his ear, told him about a different future, said nice things to him in Creole. He seemed to be humming a song softly to him. He managed to calm him down and the clothes began to give way, coming off very slowly, the pastor going centimetre by centimetre, and although he did so carefully, tearing the fabric was also tearing away part of Wikey.
Fabric and skin had become one, but Wikey looked at him calmly, listened to him and seemed to follow the thread of the beautiful story. He seemed to believe him. I suppose that’s what kindness looks like: in the midst of horror, a person singing softly and promising good things while changing the clothes of a man who has been skinned alive.
***
After the night the police killed Gems Joacin, the pastor takes me near the Fuisa neighbourhood to meet Mikelson.
We arrive at a hill where this week Haitians, fed up with the harassment of the uniformed men, threw a storm of stones at the patrol cars. The army had to come to get those police officers out of there. In the cuarterías, places where Haitians rent small temporary rooms to live in, there is an air of alertness. The authorities’ hunt has been so overwhelming that the Haitians leave their windows open so they can escape across the rooftops in case of a raid.
We drive around the neighbourhood several times, Pastor Wilson greeting everyone. We stop at a two-storey shanty and knock on a tin door. A young man comes out half-dressed, his face covered in paint residue. The pastor asks him something, the man points to another tin shack, and the pastor scolds him. The man hurries away, unlocks a door and comes out carrying a baby girl.
I’m not good at guessing the age of children, but this one is less than a year old. Her mother was kidnapped in the second week of October on the streets of Verón, Punta Cana. She was taken to one of the prisons that serve as a holding place before deportation. She left the baby in her shack and begged the officers to deport them together, but to no avail.
Pastor Wilson found out and went to get the girl, who stayed at his house, where he lives with his wife and children, for several nights before handing her over to the woman’s neighbours.
«How many babies have you had to take in so far this year?» I ask the pastor.
«Hmm, several, Juan, several,» he replies with a sad smile.
«Will that be about four?» I ask after doing a calculation that is already horrifying to me. But the pastor jumps up like a spring.
«Four? Are you crazy?»
Pastor Wilson says he has had to take in at least 25 children under the age of ten since the start of the year.
A young man cares for a baby left alone after Dominican authorities arrested her mother..
The boy with paint on his face does not know the baby’s name or how old she is, nor does he know the mother’s name or if she will return. The pastor reassures him, telling him that he has managed to get the mother released and hopes that they will be reunited. In the meantime, the underground railway, a semi-clandestine network of Haitian leaders and organisations resisting apartheid, will take care of her.
We then go to another neighbourhood and then another in search of Mikelson. The stories seem endless and the leaders do not want to miss the opportunity for a journalist to document the tragedies in their neighbourhoods. There is the case of the woman who was taken from the hospital on the same day she had a caesarean section and had to hide from immigration in her shack with her baby for a week, with talcum powder as her only medicine. There is the case of the man who had to hide in a hole filled with glass bottles and whose body was left looking as if it had been bitten by a thousand piranhas.
We finally arrive at a building that serves as a boarding house, and a man comes out with both legs in plaster casts. This was the result of being thrown from a great height by an immigration officer.
«Bonjour, Mikelson, je vous cherchais. C’est un plaisir,» I say, my rehearsed line with the worst pronunciation French has ever heard since it was invented.
He greets me very kindly, but his name is not Mikelson, my man on the roof. His tragedy, which will keep him out of work for at least six months, was not recorded by anyone.
At this point, I begin to believe that this underground railway, this vast network of Haitian leaders, may indeed know who Mikelson is and where he is, but that what matters to them is showing me the horror of apartheid. Or maybe not, maybe there are just too many Mikelsonsin the Dominican Republic.
***
Gems Joacin rests where those who die should rest. He is in a very simple wooden coffin, which the pastor managed to buy with help from his parishioners and money from his own pocket. The police had to return the body and there will be an investigation into the case. The vast majority of these investigations come to nothing, but at least there will be a record and, above all, he was not thrown into a ditch in the middle of cane rubbish.
In the last week of October, Pastor Wilson, his team of leaders and some people from the neighbourhood say goodbye to Gems Joacin with a song. It is a sad song, as if from afar. They sing it slowly, lengthening the vowels and with a rhythm reminiscent of the ritual songs of some African societies.
«Come to him, come to him. Come to him. Your great saviour is waiting for you, come to him…»
Funeral of Gems Joacin, who was killed by the police.
The melody reminds me of another song, the one sung by the wind over the endless fields of green cane. It evokes another time, reminding me of the good things that still dwell in the human soul.
The pastor tells me to get ready, that tomorrow he will take me to see Mikelson. I no longer know if that man will only be remembered as the person a chronicler never found. Without meaning to, he already showed me so much.
To be continued…
*This investigation is a production of Redacción Regional and Dromómanos and was originally published in December 2024 thanks to the support of the Consortium for Supporting Regional Journalism in Latin America (CAPIR), led by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
