People sqeeze past the new internationally funded market hall



returning with goods from the informal market at the back of the building

Until the cholera scare of 2010 the ‘international fair’ in Dajabón occupied the streets of the town spreading across nine blocks of the centre



The market has now been moved to the new border crossing with vendors initially setting up stall on the fields at the back of the new market hall

Market at the back of the new market hall 









spreading into adjoining wood land


Trade along the perimeter of the new market hall        
  
   

Informal market infrastructure








Goods are carried across the new bridge into Haiti
 
Approach to the new border crossing



International compound next to the market

On the banks of the Massacre river


toward Ouanaminthe, Haiti
 

International aid

Initially, the market in Dajabón took place right in the city centre spreading across nine blocks with informal trade also emerging along the Haitian approach to the border bridge. In 2005 the United Nations Development Programme and the European Union decided to fund a new market building comprising 2.264 internal and external vendor modules, a customs house and a new bridge across the Massacre River. In 2010, following a major earthquake in Haiti and the subsequent onset of a cholera epidemic, the existing street market was pushed to the area of the then still unfinished new market building. Market activities spread out along the back of the market building into fields and wood land, many of which have remained there in the open even after the opening of the new market hall.

The main activities at the border are commercial and for many of the Haitians and Dominicans living along the border these trade operations represent the main form of income. Tens of thousands of products enter and exit through its various points, with the most distinctive quality of this form of commerce being its transactional character. An impressive amount of capital (in the form of goods and labour) passes through the region but doesn’t get accumulated in it. Those who engage in the exchanges can only survive through the commerce but they do not get involved in long-term development projects.

To no small extent, the character of the border is affected by the intervention of multiple agents that operate from a global context as well as from a bi-national one (that is from the Dominican Republic and/or Haiti). The border thus becomes a series of sites with a strong multinational character, comprising the interests and struggles of various institutional and economic entities as well as a multiplicity of social groups.


Melisa Vargas
Santo Domingo