On Oct. 29, Dominican and Haitian transport unions will set up picket-lines and barricades to shut down all motorized traffic between Haiti and the Dominican Republic until Haiti’s ban on 23 Dominican products is lifted. The ban is hurting their livelihoods, the drivers’ unions say.

Since the beginning of October, the daily buses of the Dominican-owned Caribe Tours and Haitian-owned Capital Coach Line, which carry thousands of people between Haiti and the Dominican Republic each week, have not been running due the repercussions created by the Haitian government restriction on trucked imports.

The majority of overland travelers move between the two capitals, Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo.  To do so now, one must either drive by private car (rental cars are impossible or costly to take across), or travel by bus to the border, then walk for 200 yards through a hot, dusty, chaotic no-man’s land of merchants, hustlers, and customs and immigration officials. Then one must take a motorcycle to get a public bus from Jimani to Santo Domingo or from Malpasse or Fond Parisien to Port-au-Prince.

Instead of the seven to eight hours it takes on one of the international bus lines, which are somewhat expedited through immigration and customs, an individual’s journey over the 154 miles can take as long as 10 or 12 hours.

The journey becomes particularly arduous when traveling by public transportation from the border toward the Dominican capital. For example, on Oct. 27, Dominican Army checkpoints stopped a crowded public bus, on which a Haïti Liberté journalist was traveling, 10 times to check passports and baggage. The bus’s passengers were almost exclusively Haitian.

At every single checkpoint, the Dominican bus driver inconspicuously slipped some folded bills to the commander conducting the search as he boarded the bus. Sometimes, the checkpoints were less than five miles apart.

In August, the Dominican truckers’ union FENATRADO union blocked all transport of freight between the DR and Haiti, saying that about 60 of their drivers’ trucks had been pelted by rocks in Haiti due to tensions that have arisen between the two countries over the Dominican government’s stripping citizenship from Dominicans born to undocumented Haitian parents retroactive to 1929. On average, some 200 Dominican freight trucks cross the border to Haiti every day.

Now the Dominican drivers’ union has joined with its Haitian counterpart to stop all border crossings at Ouanaminthe/Dajabon, Belladère/Elias Pina, and Malpasse/Jimani until the lifting of the Haitian government’s ban on overland transport of products such as wheat flour, laundry soap, drinking water, butter, noodles, PVC pipes, beer, and mattresses.

Presently, such products can only be shipped by sea or air, which the Dominican and Haitian drivers say is hurting them and their families.