Juan Pablo Duarte

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Juan Pablo Duarte was born on January 26, 1813 in Santo Domingo, in what was then called New Spain. Duarte, along with Francisco del Rosario Sanchez and Ramón Matías Mella, is considered as one of the founding fathers the Dominican Republic. Recently however, he has become the subject of controversy for alleged racism toward Blacks and Jews and his push for the creation of a separate white and christian state. Duarte's secret society La Trinitaria has been said to have been the influence for the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Push for Separation

In 1822 the Haitian government annexed and liberated the lightly populated eastern part of the island in order to ward off invasion by European powers who sought to re-establish slavery. Slave labor was then eliminated and those who had profited off of the slave trade or colonialism were subsequently limited in their powers within government. Duarte, the son of White slave owners, was sent to Spain, where the Inquisition had recently been re-established and enrolled in a Jesuit University where he studied about the Crusades and Catholic conquest. He returned to the island with the idea that Catholics could not live with Jews and blacks because of cultural and religous differences and pushed for a separate territory for white spanish speaking Catholics.

On July 16, 1838, Duarte and others established a secret society based on linquistic, religous, cultural and racial separation called La Trinitaria , which pushed to undermine the unification of the islands territory. Some of its first members included children of former slave owning families who had lost land and businesses that had profited from slave labor. Taking advantage of unrest in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the Trinitarios proclamed cultural separation on February 27, 1844 However, Duarte had already been exiled to Caracas the previous year for his separtist conduct. Juan Pablo Duarte died in 1876 in exile. He is currently a subject of a movie about his life by Taina Mirabal called "Father of Racism". The film alleges that Duarte's values are the foundation for present day "black denial" within the Dominican population as well as "profound and entrenched" Dominican racism, xenophobia and de-facto aparthied toward blacks as reported by Amnesty International and the United Nations.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 22:59:17 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation