1937-10-00: (The Dominican Vespers, Rafael Trujillo Orders the Massacre of Fifteen Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Using a Linguistic Test to Di…

1937-10-00: (The Dominican Vespers, Rafael Trujillo Orders the Massacre of Fifteen Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Using a Linguistic Test to Distinguish Dominicans From Haitians Before Butchering Those Who Failed): In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of fifteen thousand Haitians living in the northwestern quadrant of the Dominican Republic. The atrocity, known as the Dominican Vespers or the Parsley Massacre, was Trujillo’s campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to increase Dominican cultural homogeneity. He justified the slaughter by claiming that Haitians were stealing cattle. Dominican soldiers used a linguistic test to distinguish dark-skinned Dominican mulattos from Black Haitians: those who could not correctly pronounce perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, were killed. The method was crude, the logic genocidal, and the irony devastating: parsley plays an important role in Vodou ceremonies, and so the test used to identify Haitians for slaughter was a word connected to the spiritual traditions that had sustained them through centuries of persecution. Trujillo eventually agreed to pay $500,000 in reparations to the families of the slain. Most of the money was stolen by Vincent’s government officials. Vincent, fearful of provoking Trujillo, attempted to keep news of the massacre out of the Haitian press. His indifference to the butchering of Black Haitians increased the appeal of Noirisme and deepened the conviction among Black intellectuals that the mulatto elite would never defend the interests of the Black majority.