This is the My Dark Path podcast.

Most American schoolchildren can tell you that, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The voyage of Christopher Columbus aboard the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, which resulted in the first European colony in the Americas, is part of the story we tell ourselves about where we came from.

But what most of those same schoolchildren won’t be able to tell you is that, 1) Columbus never set foot on the American continent. He only ever landed on the island he would name Hispaniola. And 2) Christopher Columbus died believing, wrongly, that he had sailed to India. He knew nothing about what came to be called “The New World”.

In history, the details which we include or overlook mean everything when it comes to what they tell us about the past. A story about Columbus trying to reach India by sailing to the west because he believed the world is round instead of flat might teach a lesson about placing your faith in modern science rather than backwards traditions – that could be valuable for children. But the reason Christopher Columbus remains such a topic of fierce debate is because he did so much more than land on that island. After all – he wasn’t an explorer, he was a businessman, seeking profits. And he made those profits for himself, at a cost which still reverberates through the world today.

Hispaniola is the second-largest island in the Caribbean, next to Cuba; and it’s divided into two independent nations – Haiti and the Dominican Republic. To this day, it is a sunny, lush, and mesmerizing place..

But as idyllic as the landscape is, there’s an ongoing sense of unease, struggle, and pain – and in large part it’s because of the history that led to this single island containing two separate countries. Since Columbus arrived from Europe, this island has seen more than its share of disaster and horror. And there’s one event which even the citizens of this island rarely discuss; but which seems to encapsulate so much of the tragedy they have tried to endure. Ironically, it involves something else which came to this island from Europe, a little plant so ordinary and unremarkable that people all over the world use it as a garnish with their meals – parsley.

Parsley, it’s claimed, played a role in the brutal mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people on Hispaniola, right as the eyes of the world were focused elsewhere during the Second World War. It’s come to be called The Parsley Massacre; but was this little plant even involved, or is it simply a way to help illustrate the story? If we’re going to understand this, we’re going to have to go back to the way this island looked before 1492, before any Europeans arrived. History owes it that much, at least.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to us at explore@mydarkpath.com. And now in 2022 we’re launching our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 2 of Season 2: The Parsley Massacre

PART ONE

The earliest names we have for the island translate to “Land of Mountains”, or, “Mother of All Lands”. The indigenous people living there are now known as the Taino, but they weren’t a monolithic culture. In fact, we have evidence of five distinct kingdoms of Taino living on the Mother of all Lands, not to mention at least two other significant tribes – the Arawak, who originated in what is now Venzuela, and the Carib. The Carib, by the way, are whom we derive the name “Caribbean” from.

All these indigenous enjoyed a diverse biosphere, abundant with natural resources and a stunning array of flora and fauna. The Taino did hunt and fish, but their lifestyle was largely agricultural – they had learned how to live and thrive using the soil and the minerals available to them. There were some conflicts among the various Kingdoms, but the largest source of discord was the Carib. The Taino saw them as aggressive and warlike; and we do see evidence that the Carib were conquering and subjugating territory in these islands. It may be this fear which motivated them to trust these visitors with their superior technology; the Taino believed that the Spanish would help protect them against the Carib.

Christopher Columbus first set for on the island on December 6th, 1492. He first referred to the island as La Isla Española; later, he shortened it to Hispaniola, meaning “The Spanish Island”. From this very first proclamation it appears that Columbus had little interest in mutually-beneficial relations; he was on a mission to extract whatever wealth he could produce on this island. In his first trades with the natives, he learned that they had gold; and he was feverishly convinced that was much more where that came from.

On Christmas Eve, less than three weeks after his arrival, one of his ships, the Santa Maria, sank in the bay. Only two ships meant reduced cargo capacity for the return trip to Spain, so Columbus made the decision to leave behind men and supplies. This is how the first European Settlement here began – it was a simple decision of accounting. Since the encampment was established on Christmas, it was called La Navidad. It didn’t last long, only until Columbus returned in 1493.

This time, they built a temporary town, which they named La Isabela, in honor of the Spanish Queen. Then came the first permanent settlement, Santo Domingo. It was established in 1498 and to this day serves as the capital city of the Dominican Republic. It was the beginning of Europe’s presence in North America. It was also the beginning of a systematic genocide of everyone who had lived here before. While we don’t have sufficient knowledge of the total population of the Land of Mountains before Columbus’s arrival, we do know that in the twenty years that followed, somewhere between one and eight million of them died as their land was seized, their homes destroyed and cleared away, and others were taken into slavery to work in the gold mines.

The settlers realized that conditions on the island were favorable for growing sugar cane. The plant wasn’t native to Hispaniola, but settlers from the Canary Islands brought it over, and the first sugar mill was established in 1516. Sugar was immensely profitable, and as the island started to produce, demand for it back in Europe grew exponentially. Money and political power flowed towards the plantation owners - if you could control sugar, you were as powerful as a King.

Vast areas of land were cleared away for sugar planting, killing off much of the native flora which had evolved naturally on the island. And the European settlers came to believe that the Taino, the Arawak, and the Carib weren’t productive enough as slave labor. And so they drove away or murdered any indigenous people in their way, and started to import slaves from Africa. It’s what we now call the Trans-Atlantic slave trade – slaves would be taken to the Americas aboard ships, where they would harvest sugar cane. Molasses and rum derived from the sugar cane would be sent to Europe, which would pay for tools, manufactured goods, textiles – the fruits of European technology. And these would be shipped to Africa – to buy more slaves.

Christopher Columbus was, of course, long dead by this point. He had only visited Hispaniola three times in his lifetime. But his arrival makes me think about the phrase “life cycle” – which we can use to describe the lifespan of a single organism, or a living environment. The island, its flora and fauna, its indigenous people, they had a life cycle which was by no means fully peaceful, by no means abundantly prosperous, but relatively stable. In many ways, it’s as if Colombus’s arrival – the intrusion of a foreign people, foreign technology, and even foreign plants, set off a death cycle, one which still consumes the island over 500 years later. Remember this when we start talking about parsley.

With Hispaniola generating so much wealth for the powerful and connected in Spain, other colonizing nations wanted in on the action. France and Great Britain moved aggressively to establish their own colonies throughout the Caribbean. This set off decades of naval battles, of islands seized, fortified and lost, and the heyday of piracy, as some ships in the Caribbean stole and conquered for themselves.

France gained a foothold on Hispaniola that the Spanish were unable to beat back. And finally, they signed a treaty, recognizing France’s claim to the western third of the island; while formalizing their claim to ownership over the other two thirds. And here is where the story of one island becomes the story of two nations. Haiti, ruled by the French, is just under 11,000 square miles, roughly the size of Maryland. While the Dominican Republic, serving Spain, stood at around 19,000 square miles, just a bit larger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined. There were ongoing disputes, skirmishes, incursions, and of course ferocious competition over who could make the most money from this island, but the two nations remained separate, divided by mountain ranges which make it difficult to find passage across the middle of the island. Two nations, with two stories. Let’s take a look at each of them.

PART TWO

Now the unchallenged rulers of Haiti, the French set about cutting down nearly every forest in their territory, using the trees for timber and filling the cleared land with plantations for sugar and coffee. Like the Spanish, they systematically murdered the indigenous Taino, while importing slaves from Africa to work the plantations. On average, an African slave would be worked to death after seven years. It’s in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean that a supernatural myth began which turned into one of the most popular fictional monsters in our own culture. Some African slaves were so desperate to end their life of torment that they committed suicide, hoping that their spirit would go home to Africa. Their slavemasters told them instead that, if they killed themselves, they were committing the sin of theft, robbing their masters of the labor they were entitled to. And, as punishment for this theft, their spirit would be trapped forever as their lifeless body continued to move around. They would become a zombie.

In 1791, Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave, led a violent rebellion against the white French plantation owners, and successfully took control of Haiti. The liberated slaves wrote a constitution, and on the first of January, 1804, Haiti declared itself independent from France. This makes it the second oldest independent nation in the Western hemisphere, after the United States.

The wounds of slavery, though, did not go away quickly. France demanded, as a condition of recognizing Haiti’s independence, that Haiti reimburse the French for its lost property – and by lost property, they meant the slaves. The French King, Charles X, backed up his demand with a fleet of warships. Haiti, a brand-new nation just starting to govern itself, had to pay 150 million francs; not to the slaves, but to the slave owners. By point of comparison, that’s ten times more than what the United States gave France for the Louisiana Purchase. It took over 120 years for Haiti to pay off this debt; and in order to finance it, they had to borrow from French banks. There’s a lot of gray area in the definition of independence.

Saddled with this crippling debt, and with none of the structures or mechanisms of a civil society, Haiti fell prey to the aggression of autocrats and dictators for over a century. In 1915, American President Woodrow Wilson intervened, sending our military to Haiti to restore order. They occupied the country for the next two decades. After this, Haiti’s military ruled unchecked until an election in 1957, which gave the presidency to a medical doctor by the name of Dr. Francois Duvalier. He became known as Papa Doc; and, after an attempted coup against him by the military, he instituted a massive purge against anyone he considered disloyal.

He then formed a secret police force, loyal only to him. They were called the “Tontons Macoutes”, which means “Uncle Gunnysack”. Uncle Gunnysack is a boogeyman from Haitian folklore, a sinister figured who comes in the night to steal bad children away by stuffing them in the bag he carries with him; then takes them back to his lair to devour them. Not only did the name inspire fear, it was accurate, as the Tontons Macoutes would frequently kidnap citizens, stealing them away to be tortured, murdered, or simply never heard from again.

The details of their atrocities sound like something out of a horror film. In the 60’s and 70’s, the leader of the Uncle Gunnysacks was a man named Luckner Cambronne – his nickname was “The Vampire of the Caribbean”, and he earned it. To make money, he would extort, or outright take, the blood plasma of prisoners and local civilians, selling it to American medical labs. When this wasn’t enough, he stole corpses from hospitals and prisons to sell to a medical school.

At this point, we need to spend a moment discussing Vodou. That’s not a mispronunciation, one of the most widespread religions practices by Haitian is a distinctive blend of multiple ancient African beliefs with the Roman Catholicism practiced by the French colonists which once enslaved them. There are many remarkable forms of faith practiced by African communities who were stolen from their homelands and evolved new forms and traditions of worship along the way – religions such as Santería, Obeah, Rastafari, as well as the Hoodoo and Voodoo which made their way to Louisiana. The Haitian form is called Vodou, and it’s been widely misunderstood over the years; often associated with sacrifice rituals and dark magic.

Papa Doc Duvalier did more than a little to encourage this misunderstanding; citizens of Haiti were encouraged to believe that he had powers of dark sorcery at his command. Remember when we discussed the dictatorships of the Kim family in North Korea – part of maintaining dominance in a cult of personality is to elevate the ruler to literal superhuman status. And with the power to dispatch ghoulish individuals like Luckner Cambronne and make people disappear in the middle of the night; it was a story people were willing to believe. The bosses of the Tonton Macoutes, it was said, were all active practitioners of the darkest and most fearsome form of vodou.

But despite all his supposed powers, Papa Doc did have to run for re-election; which he did in 1961. The government proclaimed that he won, 1,320,748 votes to zero. Then, in 1964, there was another election, to determine whether he should be named “President for Life”. With the Tontons Macoutes supervising the election, the outcome was hardly a surprise.

Duvalier then amended the Constitution so that, on his death, the Presidency would pass to his son, Jean-Claude. “Baby Doc”, as he was called, took power in 1971. His rule saw Haiti become increasingly unstable, with resistance growing to his power. In 1986, Baby Doc fled the country, stealing nine hundred million dollars in aid money as he went. A new Constitution was written, but elections were canceled due to threats of terrorism. More elections happened in 1988, but the military nullified the results. It wasn’t until 1990 that Haiti finally had internationally recognized, free and fair elections for the Presidency and Parliament. The newly-elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, won in a landslide, but after just a year, he fled the country as well, in the face of another military coup.

After an international outcry, Aristide returned and was reinstated; but with conditions in Haiti still violently unstable, in 1994 President Bill Clinton did what President Wilson had done 80 years before – send the American military to maintain order. In the year 2000, Aristide was declared the winner of another election, but this one was widely seen as rigged and illegitimate. With civil unrest leading to yet another round of tragic bloodshed, Aristide was once again driven from power; and ever since, the government of Haiti has changed hands countless times, whether through disputed elections or, in July of 2021, the assassination of their President, Jovenel Moïse.

Compounding these human-wrought catastrophes, Haiti has suffered disastrously from Mother Nature. In 2010, a 7.0 Earthquake devastated the island, leaving as many as 300,000 dead and over 1.6 million homeless. Worse still, after the earthquake, a United Nations peacekeeping station contaminated the nation’s primary river with waste that had been infected by cholera. A nationwide outbreak caused as many as 10,000 more deaths, and the U.N. has so far offered nothing but an apology.

With so much accumulating suffering, Haitians in recent years have fled their country in massive numbers. This has created a crisis everywhere they have traveled, over how to care for these refugees. It’s especially impacted the nation they share an island with – the Dominican Republic.

Remember that Haiti was created under French control; so even after its independence its culture, its language, and its history are all irrevocably colored by its time with the French. By contrast, the Dominican Republic was dominated by the Spanish. So as the years passed, these two countries weren’t just divided by a line on a map, but by cultural difference that diverged wider and wider.

Spain maintained its colonial power over the Dominican Republic for over a century longer than the French held Haiti; but they, too, were eventually driven out. The Dominican people declared their independence in November of 1821, over three centuries after the first arrival of Christopher Columbus. But their freedom was short-lived. Just months later, Haiti annexed the whole island of Hispaniola, declaring it to be one nation. Years of resistance by the Dominicans spilled over into outright war in 1843. When the fighting stopped, the island was once again two separate nations.

Hostility always seemed too close for comfort, though. For one thing, the two nations never fully-agreed on where the border between them actually lay. Not only did the Dominican Republic fight over multiple invasions by Haiti, they had their own, internal Civil War. They even briefly fell back under Spanish control again. And when President Wilson sent American soldiers to occupy Haiti, he sent them to the Dominican Republic as well; occupying the nation for eight years.

In this atmosphere of unending fear and outside threats, this country, too, fell under the sway of a dictator promising protection from the outside world. After a coup in 1930, there was a so-called election, in which the winner, with 99% of the vote, was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. His nickname was “El Jefe” – the Chief; and he ruled the Dominican Republic for over 30 years until his assassination.

Trujillo’s life paints a fascinating, but disturbing picture of how the violent elements in a society can gradually infect and overtake the channels of political power. He was born into a lower-middle-class family but, from the start, showed a knack for organizing people through aggressive means. While serving time in prison, he organized and led a criminal gang called “The 42”. But when the American military arrived to occupy the island, he seemingly turned over a new leaf; joining the local military. He impressed the US Marines, who gave him training and equipment, praised his leadership skills, and encouraged the Dominican military to promote him. This they did – he ascended from a cadet to a General in a jaw-dropping nine years. And when he turned his eye towards political power, all that American training in modern warfare, the loyal followers he’d attracted within the military ranks; they served him all too well.

Not long after his quote-unquote “election”, the island was struck by Hurricane San Zenón, an intense category 4 hurricane which killed as many as 8,000 Dominicans. El Jefe seized the opportunity to do two things: 1) declare martial law, and 2) rebuild the battered capital city and fill it with monuments to himself. Just a few years later, he renamed the capital Trujillo City.

That gang he formed when he was just a teenager, “The 42”, they still existed, and were a vital tool in protecting his power. They worked outside of the country’s justice system to kidnap, torture, or murder any spark of resistance in the population. The plan was simple – keep El Jefe and his puppets in power forever.

But by the 1950’s, the unrest was becoming more and more difficult to contain. An entire generation had come of age under him; they had no memory of the colonial occupiers, of the fear of outsiders that their parents held. All they saw was the dictator oppressing them today.

Trujillo unleashed his Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, the Military Intelligence Service. They worked much like the Tonton Macoute did in Haiti, acting as a secret police force to repress the population futher.

But Trujillo made a fatal mistake beyond his own borders. He had a fierce rivalry with Rómulo Betancourt, the President of the powerful South American country of Venezuela. He backed a rebel force trying to oust President Betancourt and, in return, Venezuela’s President gave his support to the Dominican opposition. And many other nations in the region backed his efforts.

On May 30th, 1961, El Jefe Rafael Trujillo was assassinated by his own army officers. When you cultivate a system with no mercy, no hesitation to use violence, and no loyalty but its own preservation, the results are as natural as the seasons. Fifty years after the murder, the BBC interviewed General Antonio Imbert, one of the conspirators to the assassination. He told his interviewer “The only way to get rid of him was to kill him.” So that’s what they did.

PART THREE

Parsley is a remarkable herb. Its origins are in the Mediterranean, but it has been successfully transplanted and grown all over the world. With the savory touch it adds to dishes, it’s ubiquitous in Spanish, French and Italian cuisine, but that only scratches the surface of its presence in our food. Even the name itself is a bit of a travelogue – an English naturalization of a German word, which was itself derived from a Latin word, which began as a Greek word meaning “rock celery”.

And, being used in both French and Spanish cuisine, it can be found not only in dishes all across the island of Hispaniola, but in many of their home gardens. In many of the stories we tell, this area of commonality might point the way to some silver lining, a lesson about food overcoming the barriers of history and culture. But in the sad history of this island with two nations, parsley turned out to play a shocking and tragic role.

Remember what I said earlier, about how the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic has been in dispute for as long as the two countries have existed. In the northern border region is a River called the Dajabón. But it has another name, one that’s spoken differently whether you’re in French-influenced Haiti or the Spanish-influenced Dominican Republic. To the Haitians, it’s commonly called Rivière du Massacre. To the Dominicans - Río Masacre. In English, you can probably guess – its name is the Massacre River. Sadly, there is more than one story of mass killing associated with it.

It first earned its name in 1728, when it was the site for the killing of thirty French buccaneers by Spanish settlers. With Spanish colonial interests spread thin across Central and South America, Hispaniola was suffering from pirate raids. Unable or just unwilling to protect the island’s coasts, in 1606 Spain’s Philip the III had ordered all its subjects to move inland, closer to the capital city of Santo Domingo. The theory was that this would keep the citizens of Hispaniola safe. Instead, it left the coastal regions wide open for the pirates to establish their own bases. This long-standing conflict is what led to the 1728 massacre – after the pirates were murdered, the settlers dumped their bodies in the river.

The name took on even greater residence in 1937 – the time of the Parsley Massacre.

Despite the long hostilities between the two nations, and the lack of freedom and stability in their governments, there were still some ostensible efforts to resolve their differences diplomatically. At least twice, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo met with Haiti’s President, Sténio Vincent, with the goal of settling the border dispute. Many years of Haitian incursions had created a sort of blended region, where citizens of each nation dug in and attempted to plan firm roots for their own country.

In 1936, Trujillo signed a treaty, officially defining and recognizing a border in Hispaniola; but privately, he had other plans. See, to him, this wasn’t just about the ownership of territory, and not even about the centuries of Haitian invasions, his belief that his nation had lost land which was rightfully theirs. To him, this was a fight over who were the superior people.

Trujillo celebrated his nation’s longer association with Spain, he believed that the Dominican people were genetically greater because of their European ancestry. He saw the Haitians as, quote, “pure African stock”, having driven off their French superiors. He believed that Haitian refugees, inferior in every way, were responsible for all the problems plaguing his own nation. For decades, Dominican sugar plantations relied heavily on Haitian laborers freely crossing over the border regions for work. But with the Great Depression pummeling economies all over the world, Trujillo had no answer for the collapse of his sugar-driven nation. Rather than show the responsibilities of leadership, he would blame his own failures on immigrants, and stir up violent racial hatred against the culture, and the people, living on the other side of the border.

In late September of 1937, the Dominican army began to round up Haitians along the border. Then, on October 2nd, El Jefe delivered a speech in the disputed border region, very near the Dajabón River. There he announced that he needed to answer the pleas of hard-working Dominicans living near the border who were victims of theft by Haitian criminals. He would solve their problems, he said, by removing all the Haitians from all the territory he considered to be rightfully Dominican. We don’t have any confirmation whether or not any local land-owners ever made such a request – to Rafael Trujillo, it was just a fig leaf, a public pretext to cast himself as a protector, rather than a genocidal aggressor.

By the time he made his speech, over 200 Haitians living in this area had already been killed. And now, Trujillo ordered his army to murder every Haitian they could find in the northwest region of the country. No one was to be spared.

Troops armed with guns, bayonets, and machetes flooded the terrtitory, and methodically worked their way through every acre of land; killing every man, woman, and child they believed to be Haitian.

And this is where the humble, ordinary herb that garnishes our dinner plates – parsley –  enters the story.

See, in Spanish, parsley is called perejil, and to pronounce the word properly, you’re supposed to lightly trill the letter “r”. But in French, the plant is known as persil, with no trill. Without trilling that “r” as a matter of everyday speech, it would be almost impossible for an ordinary person to convincingly fake it. Especially when someone is pointing a gun at you.

According to the story, Trujillo’s soldiers carried springs of parsley. They would stop anyone they encountered, hold up the plant, and demand that the people identify it. If you pronounced it the Spanish way, the soldiers considered you Dominican. You were spared. But pronounce it the French way, and you were determined to be Haitian, and you were executed.

Neither country kept reliable enough records of the population in the border region; but the best estimate is that, in the week after Trujillo’s speech, between twelve and thirty-five thousand people were massacred. Those who survived tell horrific stories – victims being hacked to death by machetes, having their limbs bound before being thrown into water to drown, being strangled to death in front of family members. Soldiers laughed and drank, making up games like throwing babies in the air and trying to catch them on their bayonets. Even those who were able to escape their actors risked drowning in the violent currents of the Massacre River. Their bodies, and the bodies of countless victims, were carried by the River out to the sea, never to be counted or identified.

Not every incident in this week of horror was an evil one. Some Dominicans who lived in the vicinity risked their lives to help their Haitian neighbors escape – secretly sheltering them in their own homes, helping them safely across the river by night. There are always heroes to be found, but their small, personal acts of risk and sacrifice so often seem to get swallowed up by the greater atrocities happening around them.

Washington, D.C. was well aware of what was happening. Diplomatic cables described the border situation as, quote, “a systematic campaign of extermination.” In Germany, Adolf Hitler was only beginning to assemble the facilities, machinery, and fanatical followers who would bring about the Holocaust. On Hispaniola, Rafael Trujillo’s attempt at a Holocaust was already underway.

Up to this point, the official American position was to see Trujillo as an ally. As with many dictators in Central and South America who kept business running smoothly for American companies, he was viewed as a force for stability in his country. But this open effort at mass murder could not be hidden under political euphemisms. President Roosevelt’s administration demanded that Trujillo’s government pay reparations to the victims’ families. Trujillo assured FDR that he would comply; but unsurprisingly, he never paid.

And from there, the nightmare disappears into history to a surprising extent. Trujillo made sure that no media outlet in his country even reported the story; to this day, many Dominicans don’t even know that it happened.

***

PART FOUR

When he returned to Spain in 1493 after his first voyage, Christopher Columbus wrote a a widely-circulated letter describing his experiences. He referred to the place he visited as India, somewhere beyond the Cathays. He goes into great detail about the islands and their peoples, offering a vastly exaggerated and heroic account of his own deeds. History has poked many holes in his self-celebrating narrative; especially his boasts of the vast wealth he believed could be had on the island of Hispaniola. If we see him as a businessman trying to inspire investors in his growing enterprise, the hyperbole and overpromising makes a degree of sense. But when you consider his outright dismissal of the rights, the dignity, even the humanity of the Taino and other indigenous citizens of the island, you see the true dark path laying beyond his promises.

Behind it all, though, you can see a genuine admiration for the beauty and splendor of the island. “Hispaniola is a marvel,” he writes, “the mountains and hills, and plains and fields, and the soil, so beautiful and rich.”

In 2012, candlelight vigils were held marking the 75th Anniversary of the Parsley Massacre. Standing on either side of the border, participants described their candles as a Border of Lights. Not everyone agreed with the choice to spotlight the incident. For many, it’s ancient and evil history, and reviving the memory of it risks increasing the never-ending tensions between the two nations. Given the natural disasters Haiti has suffered in recent years, undocumented refugees are an enormous presence in the Dominican Republic, and the source of constant controversy that needs no reminders from the past.

But others believe that it’s the silence about the massacre, the lack of recognition by history, that makes it more likely that atrocities like it could happen again. There’s now even open argument as to whether or not parsley played a role in the killings; with only secondhand testimony, some now suggest that this may be an urban legend exacerbated by the lack of any official record.

And yet, as we’ve found in many of our stories on this podcast, the detail probably sticks because it seems to sum up so well the compounding tragedies and crimes that have been visited on this island ever since Columbus arrived. A plant that was foreign to this soil. Two languages that were never spoken by either of the indigenous people, but rather by rival colonial powers exploiting the island for wealth. Two nations, created by lines on a map with no regard to the on-the-ground reality of the people living near those lines.

Many fortunes have been made from the soil of Hispaniola; whether it was from the sugar harvested by slaves, or from the banks holding debt markers over nations struggling to live independently. Following the devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010, a movement arose demanding that France return the reparations it aggressively forced Haiti to pay to French slave owners all those years ago. The money would amount to at least $28 billion now; more than three years’ worth of Haiti’s national Gross Domestic Product. Money like that could make a life-changing difference in allowing a nation to rebuild its infrastructure and institutions, to literally save thousands from starvation. The French government has, thus far, shown no interest in the proposal.

Are the wrongs committed in the 20th and 21st century an inevitable result of Columbus’s arrival in the 15th century? Does colonization, exploitation, enslavement, revolution, oppression, and genocide flow inevitably into one another like the waters of the Massacre River? It doesn’t feel like it should be, and yet stories like this have happened in many other places in our history. And somehow, this beautiful island with its warm weather and abundant soil has never fully escaped that cycle of death.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Ashley Whitesides and Evadne Hendrix; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

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REFERENCES/ADDITIONAL READING/MEDIA:

Nick Davis, “The massacre that marked Haiti-Dominican Republic ties” (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-Latin-america-19880967).

Carrie Gibson, Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day

Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History - From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation

“Haiti’s Spiral of Misery” The Week, July 30, 2021

Edward Paulino, Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic's Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930-1961

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/parsley

https://web.archive.org/web/20130125140004/http://therevealer.org/archives/16375