When I first heard of sword fights in the Dominican I was very skeptical. I thought maybe I was hearing about a freak occurrence or a story that was blown out of proportion. But, then I heard another story…and another. All of them about machete fights. Not just one person with a machete attacking some unarmed person either, these were stories of two people wielding machetes. Two people dueling with real, live swords.

Then, I actually went there and met people who had been in machete fights and had the scars to prove it. When I heard of these stories, I immediately thought of the ancient Samurai of Japan who often dueled to the death.

At the heart of the martial arts was real life-and-death combat. In the case of swords and dueling, this information is very old because nobody has been in sword fights for ages. At least that's what many people thought.

Sword fights do happen in the modern world. They happen in the Caribbean…in Latin America…specifically in a place called the Dominican Republic. This isn’t the same Dominican Republic that tourists often see. These fights happen in the neighborhoods and countryside rarely ever seen by the non-local. The following are accounts of modern-day sword fights, fights involving the Machete Fighters of the Dominican Republic.