The High Human Cost of America’s Sugar Habit
Low pay, chemical exposure, and a life of debt.
BY SANDY TOLAN WITH EUCLIDES CORDERO NUEL; PHOTOS BY PEDRO FARIAS-NARDI
SEPTEMBER 17, 2021
It was 5 a.m. and still dark as we rolled west out of Santo Domingo, on a cool morning in May 2019. We rode through the tourist zone, past whitewashed Spanish colonial buildings, pointing our truck toward the Haitian border. A sliver of waning moon hung in the eastern sky.
After three decades, I’d returned to the Dominican Republic, pulled back by the haunting memory of a Haitian child. All stick legs and sunken eyes, he stood barefoot and shirtless under a fierce and pounding sun, surrounded by endless fields of Dominican sugarcane. His name was Lulu Pierre; he was 14 years old. I’d met him in March 1991, when I went to a Dominican state-run sugar work camp, known as a batey, to investigate widespread human trafficking and forced labor in the harvest. I’d visited a transit camp where Haitians were secretly processed. I’d read the human rights reports documenting the Dominican military’s role in transporting Haitian men, and sometimes children, to the harvest. But now I was seeing it for myself.