Just as was warned by leftist and social organizations, the march called by the Dominican far right against the community of Friusa on March 30 ended in chaos, violence and destruction of community property. Both the government, through its spokesman Homero Figueroa, as well as the paramilitary organization Antigua Orden Dominicana (AOD), which organized the march, are washing their hands and accusing alleged infiltrators of the violence, all in an attempt to do damage control and evade responsibility. According to the authorities, weapons were confiscated and 32 arrests were made.
In order to understand what happened, it is essential to review how the call to protest developed, the contradictory expectations created by the neo-fascist agitation among its followers; to be aware of the sequence of events that day, and the reason why the march was divided, in order to finally draw some lessons from this experience to better prepare the resistance against the neo-fascist threat.
Why did the Dominican far-right become obsessed with Friusa?
El Distrito Municipal turístico Verón-Punta Cana tiene 138,919 habitantes según el Censo de 2022. Friusa es su principal barrio popular y obrero, con un área de aproximadamente 4 kilómetros cuadrados y su población se estima en alrededor de 40 mil personas. Es una comunidad muy dinámica, con mucha actividad comercial y en la que convive una mayoría dominicana con una minoría significativa de trabajadores inmigrantes haitianos. Incluye zonas residenciales de clase media y otras con una infraestructura más precaria y con menor acceso a los servicios públicos. El Hoyo de Friusa, Mata Mosquito, Altos de Friusa, son algunos sectores de Friusa. No es muy diferente de cualquier otro barrio de similares dimensiones en el país, si bien es un barrio en crecimiento por la demanda de fuerza de trabajo para la construcción y los servicios del polo turístico del Este.
The Verón-Punta Cana Municipal tourist District has 138,919 inhabitants according to the 2022 census. Friusa is its main popular and working class neighborhood, with an area of approximately 4 square kilometers with a population of roughly 40 thousand people. It is a very dynamic community, with a lot of commercial activity and where a Dominican majority coexists with a significant minority of Haitian immigrant workers. It includes middle-class residential areas and other areas with a more precarious infrastructure and less access to public services. El Hoyo de Friusa, Mata Mosquito and Altos de Friusa are some of the sectors within Friusa. It is not very different from any other neighborhood in the country with similar characteristics, although it is experiencing growth due to the demand of labor power for the construction and services sectors of the tourist pole in the Eastern region.
The symbolic importance given to the place by the far-right is related to statements made in 2021 and 2022 by the then director of the General Directorate of Migration (DGM), Enrique García, who assured that the Hoyo de Friusa neighborhood was inhabited entirely by Haitian immigrants and that the police could not enter the place without military support. In addition, he raved that the country could be lost to a separatist movement like that of Kosovo in the Balkans, as if immigrants were going to declare the “Republic of Friusa”. On June 1, 2022, García again assured that “the Hoyo de Friusa is the most dangerous corner that exists in the country”. García had already received AOD members in his office at the DGM in October 2020.
Enrique Garcia and neo-fascist leaders. García is currently the Dominican consul in Boston.
Those who live in Friusa know that the majority of the population there is Dominican, that it is not the most dangerous place in the country, and that the police not only “come in” but that there are police precincts there. But the neo-fascist movement turned Friusa into a symbol, calling for ethnic cleansing in order to “recover” that territory. The AOD fueled the myth that they would be the first Dominicans to enter Friusa. That is why Esmelín Santiago Matías, alias Alofoke, called on the demonstrators to come armed and to shoot at any Haitian who crossed them. Subsequently, the AOD stated that the march would be “peaceful” and requested military support for the activity from the Ministry of Defense. According to the terms agreed between the AOD the government, it was to be a march between the Cruce de Friusa (Friusa Crossing) and Plaza Pichardo, from 2pm to 6 pm.
The AOD went from proposing the direct recovery of Friusa to saying that the authorities would recover Friusa. That shift sharpened the divisions within the ranks of the neo-fascist movement, in which several organizations and currents coexist, each with its own political and economic ambitions. Alofoke, who has his own political project, took advantage of the weaknesses and contradictions of the AOD to take over the leadership of the march.
Key points (right to left): Cruce de Friusa, Plaza Pichardo and Mata Mosquito. Yellow: the authorized route is in yellow. Red: the route that the neo-fascists were not able to take to Mata Mosquito in their first attempt. Orange: the route of the second attempt to attack Mata Mosquito.
What happened on March 30?
With almost no participation of locals, the march was made up of activists brought in buses and private vehicles from Santo Domingo, Santiago and other cities, parked in long lines near Cruce de Friusa, the starting point of the march.
The march started before some of the buses arrived, shortly after 2 p.m., led by Alofoke, who took the lead from AOD’s Angelo Vásquez. Since the authorized route along the Prolongación of España Avenue was barely 1.3 kilometers long, his vanguard reached a police barrier at the end of the route in approximately 25 minutes. The march had split into several parts due to lack of coordination and leadership disputes. After a struggle, some youths overcame a first National Police barrier, where they clashed with stones with a second, larger police contingent and burned community property. The bulk of the first section of the march opted to return to the starting point.
Upon reaching the police barrier, Alofoke argued that the march could not be limited to what had been authorized, that they could march wherever they wanted. Frenzied youth agreed that it was necessary to go to the Mata Mosquito neighborhood to “get the Haitians out”, expressing their dissatisfaction with doing a small march just half an hour long and returning to the buses. Another said: “what we need is a Ku Klux Klan in the Dominican Republic”. Some of the youths who were throwing rocks and burning property shouted at the dark-skinned police, calling them “Haitians”. The mob was inflamed by racial hatred.
Some police officers tried to mediate with the attackers, saying that their role was to protect them. Despite the fact that several of the demonstrators were armed with gasoline and weapons, the police officers limited themselves to throwing tear gas and spraying water on the property set on fire by the extremists. Between the police picket in Plaza Pichardo, where the march was supposed to end, and the Mata Mosquito neighborhood, there are only about 800 mts. Had the armed mob managed to get through to attack the people living there, there would have been many dead and wounded on both sides.
At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the various sections into which the march had been divided were already in full retreat. However, upon arriving at Cruce de Friusa, marchers organized another onslaught to try to reach the Mata Mosquito neighborhood via an alternate route. A contingent of motorcycles confronted the repressive forces in front of the Texaco gas station, at the intersection of España and Estados Unidos avenues. They were dispersed with tear gas, which affected the surrounding businesses.
Hundreds of people took the alternate route to Mata Mosquito, along Estados Unidos Avenue and other roads parallel to the Prolongación of España Avenue. Their objective was to reach Mata Mosquito at all costs to “drive the Haitians out”. They arrived at the entrance of the neighborhood after a 1.5 km walk. The authorities had not sealed the alternate routes.
In Mata Mosquito people began to come out of their homes: men of different ages, both Dominicans and Haitians, with their work tools in hand; without falling for the provocations of the racists but ready not to retreat. The neo-fascists shouted slogans but did not dare to attack the community. After long minutes of tension, the police began to arrive and pushed back the extremists to establish a distance of a few dozen meters between them and the entrance of Mata Mosquito. Some neo-fascists complained that the police did not accompany them to “remove the Haitians”. It was already five o’clock in the afternoon, however, and little by little the extremists started to return to their homes, far away from Friusa.
Some marchers expressed admiration for the genocidal State of Israel
The march failed, but the threat continues
The march failed. The AOD quickly lost control of the situation, leaving the march divided. The Friusa community repealed the extremists who came with their agenda of racial hatred. Mutual accusations and lamentations ensued among the neo-fascists, who were blaming each other for what happened. Juvenal Brenes, a businessman linked to the AOD, blamed influencers “looking for likes” for breaking the discipline of the march, pointing to Alofoke. Angelo Vásquez blamed the violence on “infiltrators” who allegedly acted after he and Alofoke had left the march. However, the violence started just 25 minutes after the march began. In an interview with Nuria Piera, Vasquez confessed that Alofoke was one of the financiers and promoters of the march. He cannot be considered an “infiltrator”. The AOD has been marching for years with Los Trinitarios; they cannot be considered “infiltrators” either.
The spokesman for the Presidency, Homero Figueroa, also pointed to alleged infiltrators. If there are 32 people detained as the government says, then it’s impossible that they don’t know who the alleged “infiltrators” are, who sent them, etc. The AOD is lying to cover up the weakness of its own leadership in the divided neo-fascist movement. The government is lying to cover up its responsibility for having authorized a march whose organizers were calling for people to go armed and to murder people because of their nationality and race. It was known that the march would inevitably turn to violence against the people in Friusa.
The PLD and the FP parties, which supported the call, complained that a “peaceful march” had been repressed. The PLD, the FP and the PRM have a lot of experience repressing peaceful marches against mega-mining, against corruption and in favor of labor rights. The National Police has a long record of repression and atrocious crimes such as torture and executions, but reserves its brutality for protests that politically question the regime. In the case of the neo-fascist march at Friusa, they took measures to avoid deaths only out of political calculus, since the government determined that it was inconvenient for Punta Cana to be linked to tumultuous violence in the international press, which would affect tourism.
There is great bitterness from the marchers due to their own disorganization and division. Those who wanted to “expel the Haitians” regret not being able to reach Mata Mosquito; those who hoped to participate in a “peaceful march” are dismayed at the violent actions of their own comrades, and those who saw the police and military as their allies are disappointed that they were tear-gassed instead of helping them “get the migrants out”. Going forward, the AOD announced that it would call for a “national strike” and march on April 24, ironically on the anniversary of the 1965 anti-imperialist and anti-fascist revolution.
Although the ranks of neo-fascism are divided today, this movement continues to dangerously grow due to a range of factors — despite its leaders’ incompetence. Given the weakness of the socialist left, the far-right is positing itself as an alternative to break with the present system, with which many people are justifiably disgruntled. The government cooperates with the neo-Nazis of the AOD and gives them impunity, as a paramilitary arm of its racist repression, while corrupt businessmen and politicians finance them. The fascists, capitalizing on working people’s lack of hope in the face of a brutal capitalist system that deprives them of all their rights, scapegoat immigrant workers and offer the drug of hatred to those who join their ranks. It is necessary to organize a revolutionary alternative to channel the rejection of this inhuman system into a real struggle to expand the rights of the entire working class, from the point of view of our liberation. Only from the socialist left can we truly defend national sovereignty by opposing those who violate it, who are not the workers who build the hotels in Punta Cana, but rather the imperialist capital that plunders and ravages our environment while exploiting the working class.
One cannot confuse the right to protest – which the government restricts for workers and popular sectors – with the intention to lynch immigrants, which is not a right but a crime. Nor can freedom of speech be confused with a supposed right to incite ethnic cleansing and genocide. Fascism is much more than a set of ideas, it is a counterrevolutionary project of annihilation and crushing of the working class, and it is not enough to refute it at the level of ideas – we need to fight it.
In the days leading to the march, social organizations and leftist groups like the MST called upon the people of Friusa not to fall for the neo-fascist provocations, to turn the day of the march into a day of stoppage, to close the stores and avoid going out to the streets to minimize the risk of provocations and attacks by the racists. It’s been clearly proven that the police are not there to protect the popular communities, but rather to protect the fascists. That’s why it is necessary to self-organize from within the neighborhoods and workplaces to defend ourselves from the far-right.
On April 24, we have the obligation to organize a great national anti-imperialist and anti-fascist march, to show the country that the great April Revolution represents the opposite of what the Trujillo followers and racists represent. It is an opportunity to demonstrate that the streets belong to the people, not to the neo-Nazis.
Translation by Compas de la Diáspora
