Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
union-breaking activities, including the summoning of police
to put down union activities. These and other conditions have
both weakened and politicized the labor movement. Because
collective bargaining is limited to only a few of the larger firms,
political action, such as street demonstrations, marches to the
National Palace, and general strikes, is a widely used tactic.
These tactics are meant to put pressure on the government to
side with the workers in labor disputes.
During the 1980s, a number of important urban, neighborhood-based
protest organizations emerged. Their emergence
was facilitated by greater democratic freedoms under PRD governments,
and sometimes by the assistance of local church and
other activists as well as by international aid. The activism of
these groups was enhanced by the country's growing economic
crisis. Typically, they focused on local-level demands such as salary
increases, price reductions for basic products, and improvements
in public transportation, water, and electricity services.
Despite various efforts by the organizations during the 1980s
and 1990s to move toward more effective, centralized, unified
action, such efforts largely failed. Tensions within the organizations
and between them and the already divided labor movement
were also sometimes exploited by the government,
particularly under Balaguer, who was a master at employing
patronage and clientelism to coopt leaders and divide and
weaken popular movements.
Similarly, independent peasant groups have been limited,
weak, and often politically fragmented. Balaguer excelled at
such political fragmentation. He retained loyal support among
many in the rural sector through his appeals for a conservative,
Roman Catholic nationalism and for order and stability. He
also occasionally distributed land titles and other personalist
benefits, even as the urban bias of many government policies
led to massive rural to urban migration as well as emigration
overseas. Furthermore, trade union and peasant organizations
have rarely succeeded in forming a workable joint organization
composed of Dominicans and Haitian migrants. Indeed, during
1999, the Dominican government took steps to try to limit
the influx of Haitians and to repatriate some it considered to
be in the country illegally. The increased presence of Haitians,
in part because of the deteriorating situation in that country,
once again became a sensitive issue domestically.
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