Everyone knows about Hitler and how he killed six million Jewish people during the Holocaust. But not as many people know about the Parsley Massacre that happened just a few years prior. Why is it called the Parsley Massacre? Such a random name, right? Well, not really, but it is. This event is called the Parsley Massacre because the word parsley was the sole reason more than twenty thousand people died, and it was the word that General Rafael Trujillo, the person who ordered the massacre, chose. Such a simple word, yet it led thousands of people to their deaths.

To start, General Rafael Trujillo chose a word that would single out Haitians, the people who were killed in the Parsley Massacre. That word is parsley. Lines 13 and 14 state, “El General has found his word: parsley./ Who says it, lives.” He chose a word and named his rules and conditions to live. …show more content…
In fact, it was estimated that there were possibly around thirty thousand. In line 8 it says, “We cannot speak an R-,” and in lines 13 through 14 it states, “El General has found his word: perejil./ Who says it, lives.” These lines show that the Haitians can’t pronounce the sound of an “R”, and the word the general, or Rafael Trujillo, chose was perejil (or parsley in English). The word perejil has a hard “r” that needs to be pronounced for parsley to be considered pronounced correctly, like how the Dominicans pronounce it. But if you couldn’t say it correctly, or couldn’t pronounce the “r” in the word, then you will be killed. As stated in lines seventy, seventy one, and seventy two it says, “He will/ order many, this time, to be killed/ for a single, beautiful word.” These lines state that General Rafael Trujillo is crazy enough to kill people who can’t say a word normally. This shows that he believes that the Haitians are a lesser species of humans, or people below him that need to be