F O R U M 17

Indifference within Indignation: Anthropology, Human Rights, and the Haitian Bracero

SAMUEL MART~NEZ State University of New York CoUege at Plattsburgh

Human rights begin with breakfast.

-Lbpold Senghor

AMONG THE WAYS that ethnography currently has of conceiving of and dealing with human rights problems, the best known are cultural relativism and antirelativism. Yet anthropological engagement with human rights does not necessarily end with the question of relativism versus antirelativism. A third, more often implicit than explicit, attitude toward human rights is represented by antho- pologists who claim the banner of political economy. Politicaleconomic analysis generally does not pay much attention to individual liberties, narrowly defined as po- litical and civil rights. Even so, it may be said to represent a distinct approach to human rights within anthropology by focusing not on the collective and indigenous rights defended by cultural relativism or the individual civil liberties upheld by antirelativism, but on social and eco- nomic inequality. Political economists assume, probably correctly, that the third world poor tend to see starvation, disease, and economic uncertainty as a more immediate threat to human dignity than being deprived of the right to vote freely or organize politically with neighbors and coworkers. This may be interpreted to be an implicit rejection of the liberal definition of human rights as con- cerning only political and civil liberties. A politicaleco- nomic approach highlights the economic and social underpinnings of abuses defined too narrowly by human rights activists as concerning nothing more than political and civil rights.

These contrasting perspectives on human rights emerge clearly from a comparison of activist and aca- demic representations of the labor and civil rights abuses experienced by one minority group, Haitian sugarcane workers (braceros) in the Dominican Republic. The circu- lation of labor from villages in Haiti to sugar estates in the Dominican Republic is perhaps the largest and certainly the oldest continuing international population displace- ment within the confines of the Caribbean region. Since the 197Os, the Dominican sugar industry and the migratory labor system that sustains it have been the focus of inten- sive field study by both social researchers and labor and minority rights advocates. Taken together, the published findings of these investigators might be understood to suggest that a combination of economic need and (physi- cal and legal) coercion channels labor from rural Haiti to

sugar estates across the border. Yet human rights investi- gators and sociologists and e t h n o l o m have come to divergent and at times diametrically opposed conclusions about the status of the Haitian bracero in Dominican society. Representatives of human rights organizations allege that the constraints placed on workers' freedoms by Dominican security forces and sugarcane growers are so severe as to constitute de facto slavery. Academic researchers, by contrast, dismiss the allegation that Hai- tian braceros are enslaved in the Dominican Republic as a biased reading of the evidence. They contend that the bracero is not a slave but a free wage-laborer. To support this conclusion, scholars point to the key role played by economic incentives in both mobilizing and maintaining discipline among the migrant labor force and provide evidence of considerable geographical mobility among Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic.2

It is only broadly speaking that one can talk about "competing" activist and academic representations of the bracero's condition. So little dialogue has taken place between social researchers and labor and minority rights activists on this issue that it would be a distortion to call their divergence of opinion a "debate." Rather, the two groups participate in largely separate discourses. The activists have used little or none of the most recent and thorough scholarship. And generally academicians (my- self included) have not taken the issues raised by the activists very seriously. Scholarly engagement with the human rights literature in this case has largely been lim- ited to debunking the charge that the braceros are slaves.

I wish to suggest that restricting attention to whether the bracero is slave or free effectivelyplaces the economic roots of his oppression out of bounds of public debate. When human rights activists do not regard dire poverty as a form of unfreedom but ignore it or consider it merely a value-free migration "push factor," they participate in sus- taining public ignorance of and indifference to the wider issue of poverty and its role in undermining individual liberties worldwide. Parallels may be drawn between pub- lic indifference to the economic plight of the bracero and what Michael Henfeld (1992172-174) calls the "social production of indifference" and Allen Feldman (1994405) terms "cultural anesthesia." Like these authors, I am con- cerned with how elite representations of social injustice may help perpetuate areas of silence about the ultimate causes of oppression even as details about the condition of an oppressed group are made known to the public.

Academic researchers for their part correctly point to the dire economic circumstances of many rural Hai-

18 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 1 M A R C H 1 9 9 6

tians as a major force behind emigration to the Dominican Republic. Yet still broader lessons about the meaning of freedom under capitalism may be drawn from the case at hand. Even as I reject the idea that Haitian immigrants are enslaved in the Dominican Republic, I take on board what I regard as the basic insight of the activists, which is that the bracero is not free. Explicitly conceiving of severe individual and structural poverty as a form of unfreedom, I draw attention particularly to the way in which eco- nomic powerlessness sets up these migrants to be de- prived of essential civil liberties.

The liberal dogma that there is no such thing as an economic or social right has no relevance to my argu- ment, because I do not believe that economic needs nec- essarily should be given the status of human rights. On the contrary, the only entitlements that I assume to be "human rights" are the individual political and civil liberties cham- pioned by liberalism, and my concern is activated throughout by the threat that poverty may pose to these core human rights. In upholding the fundamentality of political and civil rights while at the same time inquiring into "the material conditions of free selfdevelopment" (Eagleton 1993142), my approach may be said to straddle the liberalMarxist divide. While I do not pretend to de- velop a well-dehed third position between liberalism and Marxism, it is important at least to recognize that my project covers highly polarized political and theoretical ground.

Two Concepts of liberty Attempts to define human rights have conventionally

distinguished civil and political rights from economic and social rights. These two types of rights emerge from com- peting liberal and Marxist philosophical traditions.

Liberal ideology, based on eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, emphasizes the freedom of individuals, civil and political rights, contractually based obligations and, in par- ticular, property rights. . . . Marxist ideology has been critical of liberal conceptions of rights, considering them to be "bour- geois rights" which sustain power relations in society. M m - ists have emphasized economic and social rights. These two ideological approaches have occupied center stage in [inter- national] discussions of human rights. [Leary 1992:106]

The distinction between political and economic rights was a key point of contention in the ideological contest between the superpowers during the cold war. For example, in drafting the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, compromise between so- cialist and Western capitalist perspectives produced a divided document. The first 20 articles of the Universal Declaration are in harmony with the various Enlighten- ment statements of the "Rights of Man." These articles spec@, among other things, the rights of all people to life,

liberty, and property, to equality before the law, and to a fair public trial if accused of any crime. Slavery, torture, and arbitrary detention are prohibited. The final ten arti- cles of the Universal Declaration-inserted into the docu- ment under pressure from the Soviet Union and its al- lies-go beyond what many in the West would call "rights." These are most notably the rights to work, edu- cation, and a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including food, housing, medical care, and social ~ecurity.~ UN agencies would paper over the liberal- versus-Marxist rift built into the Universal Declaration with glib affirmations of the "indivisibility" of political and economic rights. Yet, after the Universal Declaration was enacted in 1948, socialist opposition to the liberal human rights agenda undermined the goal of setting up effective institutions within the United Nations to monitor member states' compliance with international human rights stan- dards (Farer 1987558-559).

The tasks of investigating abuses and putting pres- sure on governments to guarantee human rights has in- stead fallen largely to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), of which the best known perhaps are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (Donnelly 1993:ll-14). The NGOs recognize thevalidity of economic and social rights but devote the greater part of their time and energy by far to documenting abuses of civil rights committed by states against individuals and minority groups. To the degree that NGOs pay attention to eco- nomic needs, they tend to see the economic advancement of oppressed groups as a desired product of strong demo- cratic institutions and labor rights rather than as a form of power that may itself help people resist rights abuses (e.g., Human Rights Watch 1992). More generally, NGOs "have not yet attempted to analyze underlying causes of repression" (Wiseberg and Scoble 1981:258), and have therefore failed to increase international appreciation of the structural bases of human rights abuses. In equating human rights with political and civil rights, human rights pressure groups are heirs to a Western liberal philosophi- cal tradltion that stretches back centuries before the cold war.4 It should therefore come as no s q r i s e if NGOs continue to be reluctant to confront the economic and social background to human rights problems.

Among academic interpretations of what sets the liberal and Marxist theories of justice apart, Amartya Sen's work is of particular relevance to my concerns. Sen goes further than any other author to date toward tran- scending both liberal-versus-Marxist polemics and UN- inspired platitudes about the indivisibility of economic and political rights. Broadly speaking, his project is to redehe human need in terms of freedom rather than utility. For Sen, freedom means more than either person- al autonomy or an absence of external restraints on the individual. He is concerned also with freedom as "Aris- totle, Marx, Gandhi and Franklin Roosevelt" thought of it

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(Sen 19W49). This includes what Isaiah Berlin calls the "positive concept of liberty," which refers to a person's or a people's ability "to choose to live as they desire" (1969: 170). Sen brings these various dimensions of liberty together under one concept, "effective freedom" This he defines as a person's ability to convert "primary goods," such as education or the right to participate in govern- ment, into the kind of life that she or he would choose to lead. In contrast to "hard-core" liberal thinkers, Sen con- siders it entirely appropriate to use the wordfreedom in phrases like "freedom from want" and "freedom from dangerous disease." As an example he cites "the freedom to live in an epidemic-free atmosphere," since "a public policy that eliminates epidemics is enhancing our free- dom to lead the lifeunbattered by epidemicsthat we would choose to lead" (Sen 1992:65). Good health, educa- tion, and a decent standard of living enhance our freedom not just because they permit us to do things that illness, ignorance, or poverty would prohibit, but because they fullill our wishes about the kind of life we would like to live.

Sen's argument that well-being is itself a form of freedom does not answer all the important liberal misgiv- ings about placing economic needs under the umbrella of political rights. In particular, there is room for skepticism about Sen's seeming faith in government to do just what the people would freely choose, if only they were well informed and sensible (cf. Berlin 1969:132-134). Where Sen may be said to represent an advance, for mypurposes, is in leaving behind him the all-or-nothing attitude that has typified liberal-versus-Marxist debate. He is less con- cerned with whether liberalism or Marxism provides the better blueprint for society than with how precisely eco- nomic needs and political rights may complement each other, and how they may conflict in public policy. "Is a dichotomous view of economic needs and political rights a sensible way of approaching the problem? Do needs and rights represent a basic contradiction? Do the former really undermine the latter?" (Sen 1994:32). Questions like these are useful as much as anything else for setting a permissive tone for renewed debate about the meaning of freedom in a post-cold war world and for inviting empiri- cal study of the links between particular needs and rights in specific political and economic contexts.

The Migratory labor System in Activist and Academic Perspective

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Domini- can sugarcane growers set circulation in motion on a large scale by recruiting labor in rural Haiti. In its early years, recruitment was largely a private affair, organized by Dominican cane growers and their Haitian agents. Begin- ning in 1952, labor circulation became regulated under the

terms of an accord between the two governments, and responsibility for organizing recruitment passed largely into the hands of the Haitian state. The formal agreement permitting the recruitment of cane cutters in Haiti lapsed with the exile of Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. Today, Haitian men cross the border as cane workers either on their own or with recruiters working in Haiti without official approval of the Port-au-Prince gov- ernment.

Before 1986, labor and minority rights reports fo- cused mainly on evidence of abuses in the official contract labor system. Suspension of the labor contract in 1986 did not bring international criticism to a halt. Scrutiny shifted to the unofficial, semiclandestine channels of recruitment that antedated and had long operated in parallel with the contract labor scheme. Officially condoned but extralegal practices of forced and fraudulent recruitment outside the official labor contract had already been revealed by ear- lier investigators. Human rights reports after 1986 brought these abuses to the fore. It is on this post-1986 literature that I focus here.5

Based on interviews with Haitian braceros in the Dominican Republic, human rights investigators have found a clear and consistent pattern of labor rights abuse. Men and boys as young as seven in rural Haiti are accosted by Haitian Creole-speaking recruiters making promises of easy, well-paid employment in the Dominican Republic. Those who agree to go are taken to the frontier by bus or boat. The recruits are guided across the frontier on foot and are either taken directly to a farm in the Dominican Republic or, perhaps more often, are turned over by the recruiter to Dominican soldiers for a fee of a few pesos per recruit. Inside the Dominican Republic, soldiers and policemen also detain undocumented Haitians at highway checkpoints and in roundups conducted mostly in rural areas. Contrary to common international practice, the Dominican authorities generally do not deport undocu- mented Haitian entrants but hand them over, again for a fee, to agents of state-owned sugar estates, for shipment to sugar company compounds. The recruits are trans- ported from the frontier under armed military guard in buses that stop infrequently on the way east to minimize the risk of their Haitian passengers absconding.

Once on the sugar estates, the recruits are given only one means of earning money for survival, cutting sugar- cane. Cutting cane is very physically debilitating labor, and in the Dominican Republic only the strongest and most experienced cane cutters can earn more than the equivalent of US$2 a day. Given the horrible labor condi- tions on the estates and the availability of lighter and better-paying work elsewhere in the Dominican Republic, it is not surprising that cane growers take measures to try to prevent their Haitian recruits from leaving. For exam- ple, armed guards patrol estate grounds on the lookout for any bracero who tries to leave in the night.

20 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 98, N o . 1 M A R C H 1 9 9 6

At work, too, the braceros are subjected to open coercion. On ordinary work days, they are obliged to go out to the cane fields before dawn, sometimes even if they are too sick to work. Company overseers may also force them to work on Sundays or after dark, to help ensure a constant supply of cane to the sugar mill or to harvest accidentally burned cane before it spoils. As if all these abuses were not bad enough, a many-branched system of pay reductions and petty corruption deprives the braceros of a large fraction of the wages to which they are legally entitled. Many Haitians on the sugar estates say that they have never been able to save enough money to return home, or report that on their way to Haiti they have been robbed of their savings by Dominican authorities or physi- cally prevented from reaching the border. On the basis of t h evidence, such international organizations as the Anti-Slavery Society, Americas Watch, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights have publicly denounced the recruitment of Haitian braceros as a new system of slavery.

Given how serious the allegations are, it may seem surprising that social researchers who have done careful studies of the situation of the Haitian braceros have seem- ingly had little patience with the neoslavery thesis. Our fieldwork has confirmed that all forms of coercion docu- mented by human rights investigators either exist today or have been practiced in the recent past. Yet among social researchers, myself included, the charge of "neoslavery" has not commanded much attention. With perhaps one exception, we social researchers have raised the issue in print merely to brush it aside in as few words as possible, thereby "clearing the ground" for our own analyses.6 Martin Murphy (199134-97) gives the most systematic refutation of the neoslavery thesis to date, but stops short of adequately assessing why Dominican cane growers seem to be so concerned with labor control and how much this factor may matter when compared to labor cost. A number of recent studies make no mention of the neoslavery thes i~ .~ Others allude to or make mention of the allegations of slavery, to evoke how horrible work conditions are on the sugar estates, but go on to ignore the issue of labor control in their own analyses, whether informed by equilibrium theory or historical-structural perspectives.' Only a few social researchers seem to give the neoslavery thesis much credence?

Admittedly, after two decades of nearly continuous scrutiny of the migratory system, we still do not have the broad-based survey data to say for sure whether force, fraud, or economic need is the most common circum- stance of recruitment. Yet, from the academic perspec- tive, several field observations appear to contradict the idea that Haitian braceros are enslaved by the sugar com- panies." To begin with, the existing evidence, incomplete and indirect as it is, strongly indicates that economic need generally plays the crucial role in the decision to leave

Haiti. My interviews with migrants and returnees suggest that the majority cross the border of their own volition, independent of labor recruiters. In the part of rural south- eastern Haiti where I did fieldwork, little or no recruit- ment is needed to mobilize 10 percent or more of the economically active men each year as Dominican-bound migrants. Also, even though physical and legal compul- sion is clearly used to redirect undocumented Haitians to the sugar estates from various points within the Domini- can Republic, recruitment by force in Haiti is practically unheard of. On the contrary, if this is a system of slavery, it may be the first in history to have to turn uwup potential recruits. As late as 1985, official recruitment drives turned away men in numbers perhaps two or three times greater than the 20,000 slated for shipment as contract workers. Many recruits even paid bribes to ensure being hred.

The prevalence of return and repeat migration also sits uneasily with the neoslavery thesis. Of every ten men who go to the Dominican Republic, about nine return home within a year. And it is common for migrants to make several seasonal trips as cane workers. It may be reasonably asked, if Haitian men were lured to the Do- minican Republic simply by false promises of decent em- ployment, why they would return again in subsequent years, once aware of the bitter truth about working on the other side. Further, my interviews in southeastern Haiti reveal that even young people who have never set foot in the Dominican Republic know about the horrible con&- tions on the sugar estates. Some of these young people may hear a recruiter say the streets on the other side are paved with gold and know this to be a lie, but still elect to go with the recruiter because they lack any better means of earning money at home.

Further confirmation of the nonslave status of the bracero is found in the fact that the primary means of maintaining labor discipline in the cane fields is not the threat of physical punishment but wage incentives. A piece-rate wage system quietly assures that the bracero will work hard practically without direct supervision. The rate of pay is so low that he must work days of 10 or 12 hours or longer just to earn enough to feed himself. Also, contrary to the claim that the sugar estates are "like concentration camps" (Plant 1987:80), migrants' life his- tories reveal that, in any given harvest season, many bra- ceros move repeatedly from estate to estate. The bracero who is determined to leave the estate to which he has been assigned will ultimately find an opportunity to do so, because close surveillance of the braceros is generally maintained for only one or two weeks after their arrival. Finally, at the end of the harvest, cane growers' interest in retaining surplus hands abruptly diminishes, and the braceros are largely left free to go or stay. Much more evidence could be cited, but I think by now my point is clear. From a scholarly standpoint, the proposition that the Haitian bracero is a slave seems not so much untrue

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as half true. Specifically, human rights reports omit or at most make passing mention of the pressing economic needs and forms of economic coercion and employer discrimination confronted by the braceros.

A closer look at one influential human rights report may illustrate how activists have elided the bitter eco- nomic predicament of the bracero. H a m s t i n g Oppms- sion: Fmced Haitian Labor in the Dominican Sugar Industry was prepared for Americas Watch in 1990 by Mary Jane Camejo, an Americas Watch researcher, and Amy Wilentz, a noted freelance journalist. On page 1 of the report, Camejo and Wilentz observe that there is a "part of the Haitian work force that willingly cuts Domini- can cane season after season." This is the first and last time they mention Haitian men who cross the border of their own informed volition. Rather than examining the braceros' economic motivations for leaving home and the forms of economic constraint and coercion they experi- ence in the Dominican Republic, the report presents only testimony concerning forced and fraudulent recruitment.

Yet, given how closely economic injustice and state- sanctioned coercion are linked in this labor system, it is not surprising that some of the testimony presented seems to reflect other reasons for emigrating than recruitment by force or fraud. For example, the words of one bracero evoke how desperate many may be when they "decide" to emigrate. "There was a busdn [labor recruiter] who told me that there was good work to be had in the Dominican Republic. He never said what I would get paid m what I would be doing, but I took my chances, because the situation in Haiti is so bad" (Americas Watch 19W.21; emphasis added). Concerning having been detained and extralegally relocated to a stateowned estate, another bracero remarked, "You resign yourself, because a Hai- t ian hus r ~ ) choice. If your neck is already on the butcher block you're not afraid of the knife. But you are not content" (Americas Watch 1990:27; emphasis added).

I do not know whether it was recruitment by fraud, as Camejo and Wilentz maintain, or desperation born of dire poverty that led these particular men to cross the border. I can say for sure only that the testimony I elicited in my fieldwork on either side of the border points consis- tently to a side of the story not discussed by these authors or any of the other human rights reports. I refer to the thousands of Haitians who have so few other economic alternatives at home that they cross the border of their own volition, even though they know they will likely be taken to a sugar estate, where mistreatment and exploita- tion await. As one veteran migrant told me, "It is the money situation, the money you need, that makes you go. . . . He who can, resigns himself, really resigns himself and goes. He goes through hardships, he goes after the bucks. . . . When you return, you meet your obligations for the moment. It is all because the money situation is very, very hard here."

Consent and Coercion: Two Faces of Immigrant Labor

Human rights reports have implicitly portrayed the bracero as a free individual who is wronged when de- prived of basic liberties by agents of the Dominican secu- rity forces and sugarcane growers. There is no doubt that the bracero is wronged, grievously. What I question is the assumption that he is, to begin with, free. In assuming that the bracero is free before he falls into Dominican hands, labor and minority rights activists have uncritically ap- plied consent theory-a cornerstone of modem liberal- ism-to the case of emigration from rural Haiti. Don Herzog defines consent theory to be "any political, moral, legal, or social theory that casts society as a collection of free individuals and then seeks to explain or justify out- comes by appealing to their voluntary actions, especially choice or consent" (1989:l).

In a society like Haiti, where poverty severely con- strains many individuals' freedom of choice, consent the- ory may conceal as much as it reveals about the conditions under which the rural poor become migrant laborers. In the case at hand, the decision to emigrate is predeter- mined, perhaps to an unusual degree among human mi- grations worldwide, by forces beyond the migrant's con- trol (Martinez 1995 ch. 4). Both economically and legally, the bracero finds his freedoms narrowly restricted. It is probably not necessary to recite the negative socioeco- nomic statistics-life expectancy, infant mortality, per capita GDP, illiteracy, population density, and so on- popularly cited to "explain" emigration from Haiti. Suffice it to point out that poverty and the dearth of income opportunities and credit at home for the young, the land- poor, and the unskilled leave many rural Haitians little or no choice about whether to emigrate. For example, the prevailing wage for a six-to-eight-hour "day" of farm labor in rural Haiti is less than one dollar. Even at this wage, paid employment for poorer folk is scarce, because few Haitian farmers have the means to hire much labor. In the migrant source area where I lived in rural southeastern Haiti, local lenders are willing to advance sums over US$10 only to men or women who expect substantial returns from irrigated parcels, coffee groves, or itinerant trade, and then only at rates of interest that take a large chunk out of the earnings of petty entrepreneurs.

Faced with such daunting obstacles to economic advancement at home, a man who lacks the money, social support, and human capital to go to a more desirable urban or overseas destination may turn to the Dominican Republic, in the hope of bringing home at least a small cash surplus. The typical migrant brings home savings of US$25 to $75, but many fail to save even this much. The fact that such meager and uncertain rewards exert an important attraction suggests that most migrants leave home not so much to optimize their incomes as to grasp

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any chance that may present itself for a future less dismal than the present. Regardless of the migrants’ particular motivations, it is not too much to say that individual and structural poverty drives dependent young men and male heads of poorer households to go to the Dominican Re- public and thus opens the door to the labor rights abuses so amply documented in this case.

The case at hand is therefore a perhaps unusually clear example of the link between economic empower- ment and the protection of individual liberties under capi- talism. A theory of human rights that considers only infringements of civil liberties to be worthy of condemna- tion is inadequate to protect those same civil liberties against the survival dilemmas stemming from extreme poverty. Instead of assuming the bracero to be free before he falls into the hands of the Dominican authorities, he might be accurately said to be deprived of a basic human liberty, and therefore to be not free, the moment his economic circumstances in Haiti leave him no choice but to cross the border. He may, in short, be neither slave nor free.

The bracero’s plight suggests, further, that the link between political and economic freedoms is a two-way, mutually determinative relationship. Of course, gaining greater political and civil rights-such as unrestricted freedom of mobility and association-would be a major victory for Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. Improved labor rights would probably improve the bra- ceros’ chances of winning higher wages and less coercive work conditions. Yet, without denying or minimizing the potential economic value of civil liberties, it stands to reason that gaining some freedom of economic maneuver and economic bargaining power may be of comparable importance, especially for the very poor. Even if labor recruitment practices were reformed, crushing poverty would still drive Haitians each year to cross the border in the thousands. Any strategy of resisting coerced exploita- tion ought therefore to include creating employment al- ternatives to migratory labor, which might make it possi- ble for poor Haitians to stay at home in numbers large enough to make their absence felt by Dominican cane growers. Yet to date, human rights investigators have ignored not just the important economic causes of op- pression but the possibility of working in tandem with grassroots development organizations toward improving the bracero’s lot.

lndiff ecence within Indignation

The neoslavery thesis makes a contradictory appeal to the public, an appeal for indifference within indigna- tion. Even as the charge of neoslavery elicits indignation about the oppression of Haitians in the Dominican Repub- lic, it implicitly confirms that we may, perhaps even

should, remain indifferent to the severe economic depri- vation experienced by most of these migrants. When hu- man rights investigators foreground the testimony of braceros who were told lies by recruiters and omit the stories of men who were driven to emigrate by dire need and a scarcity of employment at home, they project an unintended message about whch kinds of injustice qual- ify as “oppression,” and which do not. The braceros suffer much the same fate on the sugar estates, regardless of whether force, fraud, or dire need sealed their decision to emigrate. Yet the silence of human rights investigators about the economic plight of the braceros implies that we ought to regard the coerced exploitation of deceived sub- jects as more reprehensible morally than the same set of abuses perpetrated against people who knowingly “con- sent” to this exploitation, even if the victims’ poverty effectively gives them no choice but to consent. The neoslavery thesis thereby breaks down walls of silence surrounding coerced exploitation only to erect silences of its own about major economic and social dimensions of oppression. This conclusion points to a dark side of the neoslavery thesis and the liberal human rights agenda generally as it concerns issues of exploitation. It suggests that liberal reform narratives such as the neoslavery ex- poses have contributed to diverting public attention from the economic causes of unfreedom under capitalism.

The case at hand suggests that we cannot indict the indifference to economic injustice of the ruling elites in Haiti and the Dominican Republic without also turning the critical spotlight on our own society. Like the spectacle of New World slavery in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the plight of the bracero raises important questions about European and North American categories of thought and habits of compassion. Why should evidence of severe ecmomic restraints on individual freedom produce less public indignation than testimony of severe state-sanc- tioned restraints on freedom? Why is it that economic unfreedom may generally seem less obvious and less unjust to us than other forms of unfreedom, even though poverty may take just as great a toll on human liberty as other conditions that we do not hesitate to call oppres- sion? Why should freedom from dire want be perceived as any less a necessary condition for democracy than a free electoral process or freedom of expression?

Virginia Leary remarks that it is essential for

human rights scholars and activists to examine our own cul- tural tradition, to recognize not only its values but also its limitations and obstacles to a full perception of human dignity. The Western liberal tradition of rights has made substantial contributions to the concept of civil and political rights. But one of its limitations is the inadequate recognition of what economic inequality and deprivation signify for human dig- nity. [1992:107]

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Few examples could illustrate these limitations more clearly than the case of the Haitian braceros and the human rights activists who have taken up their cause. It shows that individual and structural poverty may not only have a devastating direct impact on human dignity but indirectly erode the very civil liberties that liberalism claims to defend. The uncomfortable truth behind the plight of the braceros is that severe poverty and a dearth of employment alternatives may oppress just as remorse- lessly as bullets and batons.

That said, as much as I agree with Leary's call to deconstruct the liberal human &ts paradigm, I wonder how valid and useful it is to think of liberalism as just one cultural tradition among many in the world. At least two important things tend to be concealed when we conceive of international human rights controversies as a clash of cultures. The first is what Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (1992) calls the "internal cultural discourse" on human rights. Disagreements among people within any particu- lar culture about what is and is not a "right" may be obscured by the debate about the crosscultural relativity versus universality of human rights, if this debate assumes a one-to-one correspondence between cultures and ethi- cal perspectives. Secondly, and more closely related to the case at hand, viewing human rights debates exclusively through the lens of culture risks ignoring the transnational dimension of both human rights discourse and capitalism. Even though liberalism and Marxism are philosophies of Western origin, both have an influence that extends far beyond the West.

Future international dialogue about the meaning and extent of human rights will surely continue to have a cultural dimension to the degree that it responds to differ- ences between beliefs and practices adhered to in the West and those particular to one non-Western people or faith. Yet just as often, I suspect, opinion about what constitutes human rights will also diverge along either side of the global divide between the affluent and the poor. For the foreseeable future, the global human rights debate will continue to oppose those who advocate liberty in the form of minimal state interference and those who wish first for bread, potable water, medicine, and education. After the failure of the command economies, private solu- tions to social problems seem to be everywhere in favor, and we may now be said to inhabit apost-Marxist age. Yet, as long as ours is a world in which economic deprivation and social inequality pose a threat to individual liberty, Marxism in some form will bear relevance to debates about the meaning of freedom and human rights.

Within anthropology, more criticism should perhaps be directed at ethnographers' purported hesitancy to talk about human rights abuses as abuses, rather than as cul- turally specific and structurally determined modes of in- equality. Yet critical exchange between anthropology and human rights need not cut only one way. Ethnologists can

and should focus critical scrutiny on human rights dis- corns and practice. Our intimate involvement as field- workers with oppressed peoples worldwide may not only impose a responsibility to denounce flagrant abuses. It may also reveal important divergences in priorities be- tween activists, scholars, and the people among whom we do fieldwork and thereby raise questions about the very meaning of human rights.

SAMUEL MARTINEZ is Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY 12901.

Notes Acknowledgments. The field research upon which this essay

is based was carried out in the Dominican Republic and Haiti from January 1985 to March 1987 under fellowships granted by the Doherty Fellowship Committee, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I pre- sented a preliminary version of this essay at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Novem- ber 30 through December4,1994, in Atlanta. Reviews by Charles Camegie, Martim Murphy, Stephan PalmiC, Alex Stepick, and one anonymous reader, along with comments from Monica van Beusekom and audiences at SUNY CollegePlattsbUrgh, the University of Vermont, Yale University, and Lewis and Clark College, are gratefully acknowledged. Unless otherwise noted, all fmdings, opinions, and other statements in this paper are mine, as is responsibility for any errors or distortions.

1. On cultural relativism, see American Anthropological As- sociation Executive Board 1947; on antirelativism, see Jarvie 1983.

2. Even though nine of ten of the migrants are men, tens of thousands of Haitian women also reside on the Dominican Republic's sugar estates, surviving as the domestic partners of cane workers and through prostitution and other informal em- ployment. In the sugar company compound where I did field- work in the Dominican Republic, 44 percent of adult permanent residents are women, and nearly half of the total year-round population are children under the age of 15. One of the most glaring omissions in a literature full of telling ellipses is the almost complete absence of reference to women and children in human rights reports on Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. The invisibility of Haitian women to human rights investigators is hard to explain, given that the rights abuses committed against female immigrants are as severe as and in some ways more callous than those committed against male immigrants (Martinez 1995 ch. 6).

3. Cranston 1983:6-7; Donnelly 1993:6-10; and Farer 1987556-557.

4. Stepick 1984:341,1992:153. 5. In preparing this essay, I have consulted the reports of

several human rights advocates concerning the situation of Haitian migrant cane workersin the Dominican Republic, as well as social research publications. See Americas Watch 1989,1990, 1992; Lawyers Committee 1991; and Plant 1987. I provide a more complete list of relevant works in Martinez 1995.

24 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 1 M A R C H 1 9 9 6

6. For example, Baez Evertsz 1986:86 and Martinez 1995xii. The exception is Murphy 1991:94-97.

7. For example, Cast310 1981; Corten 1985; Grasmuck 1983; and Jansen and MWn 1991.

8. On the equilibrium theory, see Vargas-Lundius 1991: ch. 8. On historical-structural perspectives, see Corten 1981 and Gras- muck 1982.

9. See Castor 1983 and Latortue 1985. 10. Here I draw mainly upon my own field observations and

the earlier work of Baez Evertsz (1986), Corten (1985), Corten et al. (1976), Hemfindez (1973), Moya Pons et al. (1986), and Murphy (1991).

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