The Dominican Conference of Bishops released its much-awaited Pastoral Letter dealing with the issues surrounding the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic. Most of today’s newspapers comment on the letter. Santiago Archbishop Ramon Benito de la Rosa y Carpio, the president of the council released the contents of the letter to reporters. In essence, the letter asks the Dominican authorities to apply the full extent of the law on those that smuggle and hire illegal Haitian immigrants. The immigration itself is labeled “a serious and growing problem.” The initial reaction to the letter was positive, according to the El Caribe. Sonia Pierre, who heads the Dominican-Haitian Women’s Movement, gave her approval, saying that the bishops spoke a lot of truths in the letter. The bishops describe the immigration from Haiti as having diverse causes, among which they mentioned the deteriorating political and economic situation in Haiti itself. The bishops also criticized the international pressure on the Dominican Republic to solve the Haitian issues on it own. A serious problem with such immigration is that the cultural differences between the two people could “generate continuing conflicts because of our complicities, inadmissible and corrupt, and because of the economic distortions created by the employment of illegal immigrants outside of the Labor Codes.”
The bishops suggested the creation of a development program for regions on both sides of the frontier that includes education, health, sports and culture.
Diario Libre’s Adriano Miguel Tejada comments in his editorial that the document will be known more for what it did not say, than for what it said. He mentions that the document failed to address that many excesses are committed in the name of defending the rights of Haitian citizens. “That chapter, that should not have been forgotten, is also part of the Haitian problem and could be creating new reasons for confrontation and division among Dominicans, because it confronts church pastors, that may have the best good will in the world, but that use the wrong methods, with their Dominican constituency, that who are also poor and Christians, and feel discriminated against.