WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 21: Award winning writers Junot Diaz (L) and writer Edwidge Danticat (R) talk after meeting with members of Congress on Capitol Hill, October 21, 2015 in Washington, DC. The renowned writers called on Congress and congressional staff to push the U.S. government into applying pressure to end this human rights crisis in the Dominican Republic that is wreaking havoc on hundreds of thousands lives. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) (2015 Getty Images)
New York – Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz is persona non grata at the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York after he came under fire for criticizing the Caribbean country’s immigration policies.
Eduardo Selman, the Consul general for the Dominican Republic, called Diaz “anti-Dominican” and stripped him of an Order of Merit medal he was given in 2009.
Diaz and Selman did not immediately respond to request for comment from Fox News Latino.
The Dominican-born author, whose novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, has been highly critical of the country’s deportation of Haitian migrants and has called for protests, travel boycotts and political pressure against the island nation.
Last week, Diaz went to Washington with Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat to urge the U.S. government to take action against what they said was the persecutor of large number of immigrants. They said the situation on the island represents a “human rights crisis” after the Dominican government ordered the immediate deportation of all undocumented immigrants who failed to register.
The authors have linked the deportations to violence against blacks in the U.S., as well as migrant surges at Mexico's border with the U.S., across the Mediterranean into Europe and in Asia.
In a statement in Spanish late last week, Selman denied any and all human rights violations by his government.
“We declare emphatically that the Dominican Republic has acted with transparency to the world in the implementation of the migratory measures and there has been no case of violation of human rights or of statelessness with Haitians or any other foreigner, contrary to what the writer Junot Diaz, who has proven to be anti-Dominican,” Selman said.
This is not the first time Diaz has been criticized by Dominican officials for his comments.
In 2013, Jose Santana, the then executive director of the country’s International Advisory Committee of Science and Technology, told Diaz to be mindful of what he tells the press. He called him a “fake and overrated pseudo-intellectual” who “should learn to speak Spanish better before coming to this country to talk nonsense.”
At the time, Diaz took to Facebook to answer his critics.
“All these attacks are bulls--t attempts to distract from the real crime – the sentencia (ruling) itself which has been condemned widely. All of us who are believers need to keep fighting against the sentencia and what it represents and we need to keep organizing and we need to show those clowns in power in the DR that there is another Dominican tradition – based on social justice and human dignity and a true respect for the awesome contributions that our immigrants make everywhere.”
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