2 Oct 1937: Trujillo orders Haitian massacre

On this day in 1937, Rafael Trujillo, the president of the Dominican Republic, ordered the murder of Haitians living along the border of his country. Over the next several days, as many as 20,000 Haitians were killed.

The genocide was known as the Parsley Massacre because whether someone lived or died depended on his pronunciation of the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. In the territory along the borderlands of the two countries of Hispaniola, a Dominican guard would present a person with a sprig of parsley and ask what it was.

As Creole speakers have trouble with the Spanish ‘r’, if the speaker rolled the ‘r’ in any way, he was considered Dominican and allowed to go. Otherwise, he was killed.

Dominicans referred to the slaughter as El Corte, “the cutting.”

Image: via Macaulay Honors College at CUNY