The Parsley massacre (Spanish: el corte 'the cutting'; Creole: kout kouto-a 'the stabbing') (French: Massacre du Persil; Spanish: Masacre del Perejil; Haitian Creole: Masak nan Pèsil) was a mass killing of Haitians living in settlements and occupied land in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier and in certain parts of the contiguous Cibao region in October 1937. Dominican Army troops from different areas of the countrycarried out the massacre on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
As a result of the massacre, virtually the entire Haitian population in the Dominican frontier was either killed or forced to flee across the border. Many died while trying to flee to Haiti across the Dajabón River that divides the two countries on the island; the troops followed them into the river to cut them down, causing the river to run with blood and corpses for several days. The massacre claimed the lives of an estimated 14,000 to 40,000 Haitian men, women, and children, out of 60,517 "foreign" members of the black population in 1935 meaning one to three fifths of the Haitian population of the country or more may have been killed in the massacre. While the range of deaths is very wide, scholars generally agree on an estimated 20,000 deaths. The exact number of victims is impossible to calculate for several reasons. The Dominican Army carried out most of the killings in isolated areas, often leaving no witnesses or few survivors. Furthermore, many bodies were either disposed of in the sea, where they were consumed by sharks, or buried in mass graves, where acidic soil degraded them, leaving nothing for forensic investigators to exhume.
