Christopher Hartley

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Christopher Hartley is a British-Spanish Catholic priest who has been laboring from 1997 to 2006 among the Haitian sugar cane workers of the bateyes in Los Llanos in the municipality of Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic to bring more humane conditions to their lives and work.

1 Life
2 Activism in the Dominican Republic
3 Criticism
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Life

Father Hartley, born in 1960 and having grown up in a wealthy family in England, choses to become a priest at the age of 15. He worked for many years with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and with Latino immigrants in the Bronx.

[edit] Activism in the Dominican Republic

Father Hartley's work in the Dominican Republic is portrayed in the award-winning documentary The Price of Sugar produced and directed by Bill Haney. His activism to improve living and working conditions of Haitian immigrants has brought him into confrontation with the Vicini family that owns the sugar plantations in Los Llanos, and is one of the wealthiest and most influential families of the Dominican Republic.

After having received death threats, Hartley left the Dominican Republic in mid-2006. In September 2006 he returned with a delegation of US congressmen to assess the living conditions of the Haitian migrants.^[1]

[edit] Criticism

The work of Christopher Hartley in the Dominican Republic has been subject of a campaign of denunciation, alleging that the father "sought to pitch the Haitian emigrants against the Dominicans in the sugarcane communities where they lived together". Members of the House of Representatives of the Dominican Republic maintained that the movie "The Price of Sugar" was part of "a smear campaign toward the Dominican Republic".^[2]

The movie has been prohibited in the Dominican Republic. According to the Haitian newspaper "Le Nouvelliste" the public relations firm Patton Boggs (New York) that works for the Vicini family tried to impede the projection of the movie in France. According to the same source the Vicini family has hired the public relations firm Newlink Communications (Miami) of Sergio Roitberg, specialized in the reputation management, to protect the Vicini business interest in the United States, where most of the Dominican sugar is being sold.^[3] ^[4]