“Migrants who survived on a small wooden boat for nearly two weeks described … how they watched passengers attack a woman for her breast milk and how others died from dehydration on a journey that left 55 dead,” reported the Associated Press in August. Fishermen found the survivors just off the coast of the Dominican Republic, only 30 miles from where they had departed. Citing survivor testimony, the article further recounted how “some on the trip simply began to lose their minds after food and water ran out” and how the living debated nourishing themselves on the dead.
An unprecedented number of Dominicans are risking such horrors and tragedy as they flee their homeland, heading for “wealthier Puerto Rico in search of work or a better life,” as the article described, and perhaps a backdoor to the United States. While the phenomenon is not new, its scale certainly is. Migrants have traveled illegally to Puerto Rico by flimsy sea craft since the 1980s, but as the country’s economic crisis has deepened the numbers have surged. In just the first nine months of 2004, the U.S. Coast Guard picked up more than 5,000 Dominicans from the waters off the Puerto Rican shore, more than triple the total intercepted during the entire previous year and the numbers show little sign of abatement.
This exodus brings to stark relief what many Dominicans have long known: a profound political and social crisis engulfs the Dominican Republic, which has become an economic basketcase of the first order. The current state of affairs is partly the legacy of decades of corrupt authoritarian rule, and partly due to the political betrayal and moral bankruptcy of the country’s national elites who failed to bring to fruition the promises of democracy.
When the Dominican Republic’s gross national product grew by 7% to 8% annually in the 1990s, the media heralded the country as a “Caribbean Miracle,” but events in the first years of the millennium would dispel that myth with dizzying speed. Surrounded by the rubble of the Dominican catastrophe, recently elected President Leonel Fernández now boldly claims to have the cure for the country’s malaise with what he calls “liberalism with a human face.” But with what degree of hope should disillusioned Dominicans receive his promises?
Enter any one of the poorest barrios of Santo Domingo and you will encounter the same sights: drug dealers, knots of unemployed youth, older men whiling away their hours of forced leisure outside bodegas playing dominoes, crowds of shoeless children too poor to attend school and fetid trash piles awaiting the elusive garbage truck or to be burned by weary residents. You are unlikely to hear televisions or radios, or to see much light at night, as foreign-owned utility companies routinely cut power to these neighborhoods for up to 20 hours at a time.
The broader economic backdrop to these daily indignities is just as bleak. More than 16% of the population is officially jobless and an estimated 50% of the labor force is underemployed. The country’s foreign debt has reached a historic high of $7 billion: an estimated 50% of the national budget will be required to meet the payments. The inflation rate for 2003 reached a staggering 42%, up from only 9% the year before. The peso has devalued by more than 200% in the last two years while average incomes have drastically declined. Currently, 62% of the population lives below the official poverty line of $86 per month and 34% subsist in what is called “extreme poverty” on incomes of $43 or less. At the same time, phone, electricity and gasoline prices have skyrocketed. It is not difficult to understand why so many are choosing to leave in search of better prospects.
Those who gamble their lives on the open sea are from the nation’s impoverished majority, for whom the macroeconomic statistics translate into grinding privation. A minority of Dominicans experience the crisis with less intensity. As political economist Esther Langston points out in her 2000 report, grotesque inequality divides “the 5 percent of the population who enjoy wealth, status, and power, and the 80 percent who live in abject poverty.” Moreover, this social divide is drawn largely along racial lines. Langston notes that while “the Dominican social elite is mostly white of European background,” the lower classes “tend to be black descendants of the original slaves or more recent arrivals from Haiti.”
The migrating poor are not only trying to leave behind economic hardship and injustice, they are also escaping the violence increasingly used to maintain the status quo as social disorder has grown along with the crisis. A 2004 report by Amnesty International observes that a large proportion of killings by security forces in the Dominican Republic are concentrated in poor neighborhoods. The report goes on to state that such “police violence is best understood as a social control mechanism used to maintain ‘order,’” which has become necessary because “the government is not meeting the population’s basic needs or responding to legitimate social demands.”
State violence, the report concludes, is an ongoing feature of Dominican society despite the proclaimed commitment of successive governments to human rights. Between 1996 and 2002, the security forces—primarily the police—killed at least 200 Dominicans each year. Police killings dropped to around 40 in 2003 after the government replaced Pedro Jesús Candelier, the notorious chief of police, in response to pressure from the U.S. Ambassador. But the government’s human rights record remained uneven, especially as the economic crisis deepened and the sporadic outbursts of frustration by barrio residents became more organized.
The country’s current crisis is rooted in the highly skewed character of Dominican society and the blind self-interest of its corrupt elites. Through a number of interlocking business partnerships, the “six families” (León-Jiménez, Bermúdez, Bonetti, Grullón, Corripio and Vicini) of the Dominican oligarchy and the Roman Catholic Church own and control an amount of wealth that has yet to be accurately calculated, so hidden are their assets from public view. Their political influence has forestalled any attempt to redistribute wealth or to develop infrastructure based on a vision of economic or environmental sustainability. The conjoined interests of these domestic elites and foreign capital—nearly always brokered by the U.S. government and its various agencies—are the basis for most if not all trade, banking and foreign policy decisions. These decisions have consistently prioritized the profit of powerful private groups above national development or public need, most recently through the implementation of the standard package of neoliberal reforms.
Through his role in implementing these reforms, President Leonel Fernández, now at the helm once more, was an engineer of the present disaster. During his previous term in office from 1996 to 2000, he and his Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) presided over the so-called “liberalization” of the Dominican economy. His administration privatized the production of electricity, the sugar industry, the management of the country’s main airports and a major flourmill. It also reduced subsidies on a host of basic foods and medicines and set up “enterprise zones” in which industries pay no taxes, electricity is guaranteed, security is ensured and cheap, non-unionized workers are abundant.
The results have largely been catastrophic. Spanish and U.S. energy giants, including Enron, have stripped the power sector of its assets and forced ever-increasing government bailouts. These companies have welched on promises to invest in the nation’s power grid and provide an expensive, inadequate and inconsistent supply of electricity. This nation that was largely built on sugar has now become a sugar importer, because the private investors who took over the state refineries consider them to be “uneconomic.” The enterprise zones have produced needed jobs, but in nowhere near sufficient numbers and at wages that bring few employees significantly above the poverty line.
While Fernández’s economic record does not bode well for distraught Dominicans, neither does his past handling of the country’s social deficit. During his first administration he promised to modernize the nation and professionalize its work force, but public funding for education languished under his watch. He similarly neglected health. In fact, Hipólito Mejía and his Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) trounced Fernández in the 2000 elections, running on the slogan “la gente primero” (“the people first”). The slogan implicitly contrasted the PRD’s proclaimed concern for public welfare with Fernández’s proven indifference to the basic needs of the population.
Fernández’s success in the May 2004 elections had little to do with his personal or political merit, although some desperate voters associated him with the brief period of relative economic prosperity and social stability during the late 1990s. Instead, the electoral outcome was a clear rebuke to Mejía, whose turn in office earned him widespread resentment.
Under Mejía, the government joined Washington’s misnamed “coalition of the willing” against the will of the majority in his own party and the general populace. Dominicans have little appetite for U.S. interventionism; memories of the 1965 U.S. invasion, which left hundreds of Dominicans dead, have not yet faded. The Banco Intercontinental (BANINTER) scandal was also fresh in the minds of voters. This extreme example of financial skullduggery involved the collapse of the country’s third largest bank in May 2003. Ramón Baez, the bank’s president, siphoned off $2.2 billion—equal to nearly 67% of the Dominican Republic’s annual national budget—while distributing about $75 million to government officials and other influential people in return for “favors.” The prosecution charged him and his accomplices with fraud, money laundering and tax evasion, yet these well-heeled, politically connected perpetrators—after openly mocking the toothless judicial system—were swiftly released, further eroding Mejia’s popularity.
What probably most swayed public opinion, however, is the fact that life got harder during the Mejía years: the energy crisis worsened, poverty increased and inflation soared. In the lead-up to the 2004 election, the chant, “¡Es pa’ fuera que van!” (“You all are outta here!”), directed at Mejía and his closest cohorts, became the mantra of a broad sector of Dominican society, including dissenters from his own party.
The alternation between these two main parties, although they are equally compromised in public opinion, reflects the absence of meaningful electoral choice. The country’s third major political formation, the Social Christian Reformist Party (PRSC), is associated with the corrupt and bloody rule of U.S.-installed Joaquín Balaguer, while the country’s left-wing parties—such as the Force of the Revolution (FR, an expanded version of the old Dominican Communist Party) and the Dominican Popular Movement (MPD)—have opted for highly sectarian positions that leave them outside of public debate and much of the present groundswell of grassroots organizing.
Now back in the Presidential Palace, Fernández has not shown any sign that he plans to move the country in a different direction. In August he declared his government would fight corruption, but then announced his cabinet, which included at least four former ministers awaiting trail for their role in a multi-million dollar corruption scandal dating from his previous administration.
Of greater importance, Fernández has not presented a convincing set of program initiatives to address the nation’s drift into social and economic chaos. Instead, his plan for “liberalism with a human face” includes a stringent austerity program. The details of the plan remain murky, but its general gist follows the familiar International Monetary Fund prescriptions and will require the usual sacrifices from the country’s already overburdened poor and working people. In the ensuing months it is almost inevitable that social unrest (and its repression) will persist and the flood of people forced to leave their homeland will continue.
With the return to power of Fernández and the PLD, nothing has essentially changed in the Dominican Republic. The two dominant right-wing parties continue to alternate in office while the population endures economic uncertainty and political hopelessness. In countries such as the Dominican Republic, the contest between political parties is supposed to reflect a new commitment to democracy. Instead, it serves to expose a dependent national elite that is unable and unwilling to challenge the de facto dictatorship of its own oligarchy or to make good on its nationalist claims.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Luis Barrios, a psychologist and Anglican Priest, is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. David C. Brotherton, a sociologist, is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. They are coauthors of The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang(Columbia University Press, 2004).
