The government crushed the protests of the workers of the Central Sugar Consortium with blood and fire: Enough of overexploitation and semi-slavery!
Military and police agents attacked a strike by sugarcane workers of the Central Sugar Consortium (CAC) in Batey 5 on May 26, leaving at least 14 workers injured by guns, knives, fractures and other serious injuries . During the attack, the repressors used heavy machinery and fired bullets and pellets at the workers who the day before were exercising their right to stop work in the face of company abuses.
After the attack, the General Directorate of Immigration (DGM) carried out the expulsion of more than sixty workers arbitrarily detained, even though they were in the country in a regular immigration situation, with a current contract. and a work visa. This atrocious crime against the working class demonstrates the absence of fundamental democratic freedoms such as freedom of association, as well as the persistence of forms of semi-slavery and forced labor in the country.
It is very serious that the police and the army intervene in a labor dispute to crush the workers’ protest and that the DGM carries out arbitrary expulsions in violation of the immigration law. The use of the DGM to expel workers and prevent them from receiving their full wages and benefits is once again confirmed, acting as a paramilitary arm of the employers. The Ministry of Labor, historically complicit in forced labor in the sugar industry and which defended it nationally and internationally in the Central Romana case, is also responsible for protecting Dominican and Guatemalan capitalists from the CAC. This company is the one that pays the lowest amount per ton of cut cane, less than one hundred pesos, an amount even lower than those paid by Central Romana and the already miserable CAEI.
At Batey 5, a climate of employer terrorism has taken hold and great secrecy reigns, which, added to the complicity of the main media, has prevented more details from being known about this brutal anti-worker repression.
The CNUS union bureaucracy was also complicit in this “public-private” crime, since there is a union in this company which, in the face of repression and deportations, did nothing to defend the workers in struggle. , not even issuing a statement denouncing the actions of the government and the company. This is not surprising, since President Abinader was a speaker at the CNUS congress in 2021 and its leader for life Pepe Abreu, who benefits from a large privileged pension granted by the government, has spoken in the past in favoring sugar companies, facing complaints of labor rights violations and forced labor, and has always been a servile agent of the PLD and PRM governments. The international trade union organizations CSA and CSI have as a member the CNUS, a racist bureaucratic apparatus directly complicit in forced labor in the sugar industry.
The company, with Guatemalan and Dominican capital, leases land and assets belonging to the Dominican state, following the privatization process carried out by the first PLD government at the end of the 1990s. These capitalists defrauded the Dominican state , according to a complaint from the National Peasant Articulation before the PGR in 2020, by not paying rent to the State, in addition the company expelled farmers from their land, destroying their crops, which generated protests in recent years in the region, including a permanent peasant camp known as Camp Libertad. Peasant communities also suffered arbitrary arrests and denounced the company’s contamination and hoarding of water.
We join the popular demand to end the leasing of state lands to CAC operators. It is time to lead united mobilizations among worker and peasant organizations across the country against this exploitative company. We demand that the Attorney General’s Office cease its complicity with the crimes of the PN, the army and the DGM against Haitian immigrant workers and act against repression and arbitrary detentions. We call on labor organizations around the world to reject the semi-slavery to which sugarcane workers are subjected and to demand that the government of Luis Abinader respect labor rights and immediately pay pensions to retired sugarcane workers. sugar, as well as compensation to the repressed workers of Batey 5. .
Stop the government’s anti-worker policies! Punishment of corrupt and repressive members of the PN, the DGM and the military! Immediate revocation of the concession to the Central Sugar Consortium! International solidarity with sugar cane workers!
Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic June 3, 2024
