5 - La campaña contra los Haitianos

Summary

This chapter analyzes the nationwide coordination and concealment of the government’s “anti-Haitian campaign.” What they called the anti-Haitian campaign was actually the beginning of a genocide that the perpetrators variously misrepresented in terms of deportation, imprisonment, forced labor, and flight. This chapter brings to light leading functionaries, including Emilio Zeller and Reynaldo Valdez who played key strategic roles as architects of the genocide. By exploring records of mass arrests, and the jailers’ own descriptions of conditions of imprisonment over the course of 1937, the chapter casts doubt on the exact fate of detainees. The anti-Haitian campaign also included racialized discourse around disease, vagrancy, and illegality. The chapter argues that not only was the 1937 Genocide planned, but that a critical appraisal of the actions that the officials were willing to write about offers one of the best windows into the killings that they deliberately concealed. It wrestles with the interpretive problem of official concealment and suggests that deportation was also a euphemistic cover for killing. This chapter interrogates the fact that military and migratory documents are completely absent for the northern border regions during the most violent months of 1937 and places the archival record into dialog with eyewitness accounts.