Four journalists in the Dominican Republic say they have been threatened for covering their country’s increasingly contentious citizenship and immigration debate and accuse an outspoken nationalist of calling for their deaths.
The journalists filed a lawsuit this month alleging Dominican nationalist Luis Díaz fomented the threats at a public protest. The reporters also demanded that the government address the growing trend of protesters calling for “death to traitors” during demonstrations advocating the expulsion of undocumented Haitian migrants.
One of the journalists, Juan Bolívar Díaz, said the reporters have been threatened while at the supermarket and while driving through Santo Domingo. Bolívar Díaz, who has been reporting for four decades in print and television, said he and three colleagues have been targeted for denouncing hostility toward Dominicans of Haitian descent and the country’s widespread repugnance against Haitian migrants.
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The Dominican government has staunchly defended the laws and bristles at criticism, complaining of undue influence by international human rights organizations defending Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants.
“Amnesty International is an organization with private interests, directed by Mexicans who want to drag our country down so that tourism doesn’t prosper and instead people go to Mexico, to the Riviera Maya, where they hang people in the streets, and then you see them on the poles,” the Dominican minister of the interior and police, José Ramón Fadul, said of the U.K.-based group earlier this month. “What do they want? For the country to declare itself a desert, without laws, and that everyone here be equals and that everyone walk around without any kind of proof of identification?”
