Tonight we are breaking the silence,” said Regino Martínez, the Jesuit priest who is head of Solidaridad Fronteriza, a human rights and immigration organization in the Dominican Republic. “Tonight, we lose the fear.” On Oct. 4 he led a candlelight procession to the aptly named Massacre River on the border with Haiti in a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Parsley Massacre. During a five day period in early October 1937, Dominican soldiers slaughtered thousands of Haitians, many of them born in the Dominican Republic, under orders from the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Between 9,000 and 30,000 people died in the violence, a slaughter now largely forgotten. Haitians call it kout kouto-a, “the stabbing. “Dominicans refer to it as el corte, “the cutting.” It earned the nickname Parsley Massacre because some soldiers are said to have carried parsley sprigs. When they showed the parsley, victims were told to say the word. If people could not pronounce it in the Spanish way, they were killed.
'Parsley Massacre' Remembered
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist. Champions are not perfectly functioning machines, but real men and women, who, when they fall, find the courage to get back on their feet.
In his video message at White Sox stadium, Pope Leo encouraged young people to look inside themselves, recognize God’s presence in their own hearts and “recognize that God is present and that, perhaps in many different ways, God is reaching out to you,
The June 14 celebration featured the first-ever airing of Pope Leo XIV’s video message to the world’s youth at the White Sox stadium in Chicago’s Southside.
Pope Leo called for a “commitment to build a world that is safer and free from the nuclear threat.”