Generational Shift
MommC,
During my time living in the DR (1995-99), my wife was an officer in the DR head office of a foreign corporation. Sometime in 1997 that office gained a new chief, an American. He decided to get to know all the officers by meeting them in pairs for "chats" on how they viewed the local scene and the firm's place in it.
The American chief, enthused because he had just met President Leonel Fernandez and read about how the PLD was going to root out corruption and change how the DR government did everything in order to make it efficient, transparent and dependable, asked how my wife & her supervisor whether they thought Leonel would suceed in getting the corruption out of the DR. My wife's supervisor, an elder Dominican with PLD leanings, gave an optimistic response. My wife -- probably characteristically showing a knitted brow and clouded face -- was asked by the American how long she thought rooting out corruption would take. "A generation," she replied. "What do you mean?" he asked, puzzled. [He shouldn't have been -- he had previously served as national office head in Ecuador, whose government was known for its corruption.] "Corruption became ingrained under the Trujillos and Balaguer. We can't hope to be free of corruption before all the politicians who grew up under that system die out. Only then do some honest men have a chance of imposing clean and transparent government, and even then it won't be easy."
When she told me that story later that same day, I told her that perhaps she was being too harsh in judging her countrymen. She shook her head. "Keith, you can afford to think optimistically. You grew up in a country that had its Tammany Hall a century ago. Leonel may mean well, but he's fighting decades of tradition."
Looking back now -- especially in light of the allegations of corruption among Leonel's own government and how quickly and shamelessly Hipo took the government back to its worst habits, I'm sorry to say that I think she may have been simply realistic.
Generational change, folks. We start working to change the attitudes of the young up-and-coming politicos, but don't expect real results before the Hipo's and old-style pols like him die out.
Just my two cents worth.
Regretfully,
Keith