Eduardo Selman, the New York consul to the Dominican Republic, should have thought twice before calling Junot Díaz “anti-Dominicano” and stripping him of the Order of Merit medal awarded in 2009, because Pedro Martínez has sided with Díaz. Martínez, who is not afraid to knock an old man down to the ground, agreed with Diaz’s critical views on the immigration crisis.
“I want us Dominicans to stop and think about who we are when we arrive in the U.S. or Puerto Rico and we need legal status, in Europe, in other places, how the doors were opened to us … understand that others need us and we need to respect the rights of those human beings looking for better opportunities,” Martínez said in a TV interview, according to the New York Daily News. All good points and actually very similar to what Díaz said, except the writer was a little stronger with his language when he called government officials “those clowns in power.” Hopefully, Martínez won’t be called anti-Dominicano, because look at this suit.
Last week, Díaz, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, and a group of activists asked members of congress to condemn the DR for how they handled the recent mass deportations and the abuses that Dominicans of Haitian descent faced. Selman denied this was true and said that there had been “no case of violation of human rights.”