Sweet And Lowdown

The hidden suffering behind America’s sugar habit

- Sandy Tolan with Euclides Cordero Nuel

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.

Just days before, soldiers had abducted Lulu at a market on the Dominican– Haitian border, thrown him into a pickup, and dumped him at the camp in the middle of the night. “If you want to eat,” the bosses told him, “you have to cut the cane.”

But Lulu couldn’t do it. He’d given up and turned to fishing in pesticide-ridden ditches beside the fields. “My mother and father don’t know where I am,” the child told us. “I want to go home.” Alan Weisman, then my reporting partner, and I gave a Catholic relief worker the equivalent of about $80 to try to get him back to his family.