The current wellbeing of Haitian migrants and ethnically Haitian citizens of the Dominican Republic is an ongoing issue. Historically, the political elite of the Dominican Republic have used the Haitian minority as a scapegoat for their national ills, with a United Nations Human Rights Council report on the 'elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance' claiming the existence of a 'profound and entrenched problem of racism and discrimination in Dominican society”. This systematic scapegoating has been attributed largely to historical colonial relations between the colonists of Santo Domingo and the black Haitian population, and the anti-Haitian sentiment used to galvanise the ethnic Spanish population into supporting the independence of the Dominican Republic following Haiti's 1822 annexation of Santo Domingo. This sentiment, also referred to as antihaitianismo, underpinned the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, with the 1937 massacre of between nine and twenty thousand Haitian labourers near the national border, commonly known as the Parsley massacre, kickstarting the development of violent Dominican nationalism and the retroactive historiographical endeavours of Dominican elites to demonise the Haitian minority. Notable Dominican intellectual Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle once stated: