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Priest blasts Mejía government El Caribe newspaper reports that, only five days after President Hipólito Mejía was met with clanging empty pots in the La Ciénaga slum area, where he chose to begin his campaign for re-election, he was subject to a critical sermon by the priest of his native Gurabo community in Santiago while on his second campaign event this Sunday. The priest spoke up, despite being face-to-face with the President during the mass held at the church. Present were key officials of the Mejía government, accompanying him on his visit to Santiago. During the sermon, Priest Milton Amparo Tapia of San Bartolo Gurabo Church stated that the Mejía administration had been the worst Dominican government in the past 42 years. “The people are desperate, tired and fed up with the economic situation and the inflation levels,” he said, adding that between all the jokes made by the President, poverty, inflation and unemployment have increased. He also mentioned the continual rises in the price of fuel, basic foodstuffs, medicines, power and tolls. The priest did not limit his disapproval to current economic woes, as he went on to say the current government has shown totalitarian and dictatorial tendencies, intolerance with the press and all those who have been critical of Mejía. He said proof of this could be seen by the monument lifted in Constanza to honor the military of the Trujillo dictatorship and also by the transfers of funds from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Armed Forces. The sermon also attacked the law promoted by the PRD-majority Senate that calls for the construction of a statue to former President Joaquín Balaguer with the reference of him as “father of Dominican democracy.” As reported in the Listín Diario, Tapia said the President forgets that Balaguer, despite his overwhelming loss to the PRD in 1978, conditioned the relinquishment of power on his party’s retaining control of the legislative and judicial branches of government, the fraudulent elections under his control and the violence of the then-named “banda colorá” that killed many who opposed the Balaguer regime during its first 12 years. While the priest spoke, President Mejía observed with fixed eyes, but the priest continued to read on. He said that to the government, anyone who complains is a “tiguere”, and thus the people have only been able to express their discontent via the Internet and polls such as the legendary survey in which the people of Monte Cristi said they would rather vote for the devil than for Hipólito. He mentioned that the professional organizers of strikes are on the government’s payroll and no longer promote such action. President Mejía commented on the sermon: “He is of the same group as Rogelio [Cruz], but in addition is enrolled in the PLD. The paint of the church is purple. I knew he was going to speak that way, but I went, and I stayed, even though the letter he read was disrespectful.” |
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Proposal to elect PRD presidential candidate President Hipólito Mejía has made public his proposal to his PRD adversaries also seeking the party nomination for the May 2004 presidential elections. Mejía suggested the party hold a primary vote with a second round in the event that he does not receive 50%. He invited all other aspirants to select one candidate amongst themselves to face him in the primary. Mejía has rejected the options of allowing three independent companies hold polls to determine the party’s official candidate according to the highest ranking, and also that of a plebiscite. Instead, Mejía favors a party convention, but his adversaries fear that fraud could corrupt the results of a convention vote. |
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PPH to direct US$100 million social program The general coordinator of the Proyecto Presidencial Hipólito (PPH), Agriculture Minister Eligio Jáquez said that the PPH and the economic team of the Mejía administration would manage a US$100-million (RD$3.4 billion) loan-funded social program during the next 12 months. The funding would reportedly come from the National Budget and contributions made by the International Monetary Fund and the Inter American Development Bank. The PPH backs President Hipólito Mejía’s aspirations to a second term of office in the May 2004 election. El Caribe reports the decision was made during a meeting of the economic and political teams of the government. Jáquez stated that they are not playing games and want to replicate the success garnered with similar programs that led to their sweeping victory in the 2002 congressional elections. Jáquez said priorities will be to subsidize power and medicine and make low-cost food products available to the residents in the poorer barrios. Jáquez is quoted as saying that everyone, including the IMF, knows that social peace is necessary for the government to be able to repay the loans received from multilateral organizations and the governments they represent. Jáquez also announced that the political team would hold weekly meetings on Thursdays with the government’s economic team. Key members of the political team are Jáquez, legal advisor to the President Guido Gómez Mazara and Supervisor of Public Works Hernani Salazar. For the economic team, the central figures are Central Bank Governor José Lois Malkum, Finance Minister Rafael Calderón, Industry & Commerce Minister Sonia Guzmán, Technical Secretary of the Presidency Carlos Despradel, and Budget Director Luis Ernesto Pérez Cuevas. |
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Big debt at the Chamber of Deputies In a recent editorial, Hoy newspaper questioned the management of taxpayer’s funds by the Chamber of Deputies. The newspaper highlights a statement made by the new president of the Chamber of Deputies, Alberto Pacheco, who said the Chamber was handed over to him with RD$287,000 in the bank but with short-term debts of RD$23 million. The Chamber of Deputies manages a monthly budget of RD$480,000, not including the million-peso funding of the renovations at the Chamber. “It is a matter of concern that the controls and surveillance of the national accounts are so week that adequate follow-up of State financial matters cannot be given,” states the newspaper. |
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2% surcharge levied on all imports President Hipólito Mejía modified Decree 646-03, established on 30 June 2003 and exempting certain items from the 2% surcharge on imports. According to Hoy newspaper, the government subsequently issued Decree 693-03 on 16 July 2003, ordering that imports of medicines, raw materials, equipment and capital goods of the farming sector also pay the surcharge. |
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The big question HCentral Bank Governor José Lois Malkum explained in an interview with El Caribe newspaper that he made the decision to convert private debt to public in order to prevent a major collapse of the banking system, despite having to violate Monetary Law provisions. Malkum told the newspaper: “Many have said that if we had not intervened, nothing would have happened. Some write about this. But I cannot know if I was wrong or not. I assumed the responsibility and made the decision, otherwise we would not have the International Monetary Fund, or a deficit… We would have simply applied the law and those who lost their money would have lost it.” Malkum told El Caribe that the dilemma was not only to save Baninter. “Once we intervened in Baninter, there would be three more banks in line,” he said, explaining his hunch they would fall like dominos. “I have asked myself the question many times, if one involved this country in this mess, thinking that something was going to happen that didn’t, or could have happened, the cost would not have been RD$55 billion, but rather RD$200 billion,” he said. Malkum stated that a big question mark would always remain on his conscience. |
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CAFTA = high cost medicine Hochi Vega, spokesman for the Federation of Idustrial Associations (FAI), said that the Dominican Republic would have to abandon the rights to produce low-cost generic medicines using expired US patents under World Trade Organization agreements if it docks to the Central American Trade Agreement. He said Dominican legislation Law 20-00 authorizes local manufacturers to produce the generic medicines, which result in as much as 500% reductions to the cost of medicines sold to the Dominican people. The Mejía administration, however, in its courting of the US and the free trade agreement, has ignored the provisions in the law in favor of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. Vega told Hoy newspaper that the global trend is to reduce intellectual property protection of patents. But, he said, with this treaty the US also has plans to oblige the DR to extend patent protection to 30 years, up from 20 years at present. He said the CAFTA agreement also would eliminate the mandatory licensing of expired patents, despite this being in compliance with WTO and legal in the Dominican Republic. Ignacio Méndez, another spokesman for FAI, told Hoy newspaper that as things are going, it looks like the DR is not negotiating a free trade agreement with the US, but simply signing whatever it is offered. As reported in the newspaper, during the process the Dominican Republic has seemed misguided. Méndez said that if the country accepts what the US wants, there will immediately be a FTA because nothing will have been negotiated. Méndez and Vega agree that the country would have mortgaged its future in exchange for keeping the free trade zone jobs. Méndez said that he does not understand why, if Chile spent 11 years discussing a bilateral agreement with the US, the Dominican Republic is being forced to accept one in four months. Méndez also said that the DR had previously been the leader of the Central American and Caribbean negotiating team, up until the FTAA meeting held in Panama one year ago, at which time the country did an about-face in its negotiating strategy and began to accept any terms the US wanted, thus dismantling all the work that had been accomplished in trade negotiations to that point. |
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Jim Meek to head DR Scotiabank Scotiabank has appointed Jim Meek as its new general manager in the Dominican Republic. Meek will be responsible for supervising the acquisition by the Canadian bank of government-intervened Baninter assets. On 8 July, Scotiabank announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Dominican financial authorities, whereby the company would purchase as many as 35 branches and select financial operations of the bank, such as credit card operations and personal and commercial bank loan portfolios that meet Scotiabank standards. At the time of the announcement, Meek was vice-president of international banking and based in Toronto, where he was responsible for the operations of Scotiabank 10 countries in Central America and the Caribbean. |
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Cardinal washes hands of discredited priest On his TV program “Fe y Acontecer”, Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez criticized the press coverage given to the case of Domingo Espinal, the missing priest of the Parroquia Inmaculada Concepción in the INVI neighborhood of the Prolongación Avenida Independencia, accused of the rape of a 14-year-old boy, and other boys. The Archbishop of Santo Domingo said that the press should seek information on the matter from the government and not the Church. He said the priest was disassociated from the Church as soon as the first report on a similar case was received. According to the Cardinal, Espinal then left the DR but returned after the death of a brother. The Cardinal criticized the fact that, despite his removal from the Church, the government chose to promote him through military ranks, assigning him to the second most important post at the Vocational School of the Armed Forces. The case against Espinal was aired recently by investigative journalist Nuria Piera on her Channel 9 show. She interviewed the child and his relatives, and presented a taped conversation between the boy and the priest. On the tape, the priest urged the boy to forget what had happened between them. The Cardinal said on his Sunday’s Televida Channel 41 TV program: “Everyone is the owner of his own acts. The same goes for other priests that could also be involved in such weaknesses.” El Caribe reports that the Roman Catholic Church in Santo Domingo received a letter in June 2000, in which a Catholic mother wrote to the Cardinal and Bishop Amancio Escapa, regarding the attempted rape of her 17-year-old son by the priest. The Church never responded directly to the concerned parents, but it now appears that it did take the action of releasing the priest from his duties at the school. At the time, the mother of the 17-year-old took him to the Instituto de la Familia, where he received two sessions of therapy. The family did not pursue the issue any further, claiming that the clergyman held too much influence and it would have ultimately been his word against the boy’s. When Piera aired the show about the 14-year-old victim, however, the mother of the first teen was watching. She said she felt the more courageous family of the 14-year-old also represented her family when they brought their claims to the Attorney General’s office. Espinal has been requested to appear at the Attorney General’s office but his current whereabouts are supposedly unknown. He is believed to be abroad. |
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Former Ecuadorian president arrives Gustavo Noboa, president of Ecuador 2000-2003, arrived in the Dominican Republic on Saturday and was received by President Hipólito Mejía at the presidential residence in Juan Dolio, where Noboa was housed temporarily over the weekend. Noboa arrived with his wife, Maria Isabel Baquerizo, after being granted political asylum by the Dominican government. Noboa told the press he would rent a furnished apartment in Santo Domingo. Noboa, 65, claims he is a victim of political persecution in his country, where he is accused of misusing government bond money while in power. News reports say that with his petition for asylum, Noboa seeks to avoid a judicial probe by state prosecutors into his government's use of bonds worth US$126 million designated to aid weak state-run banks. Noboa joins former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez, who also resides in the Dominican Republic following sentencing for corruption while in office in Venezuela. |
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New York Times focuses on assets laundering An unnamed high-ranking Dominican official is under investigation by US Federal officials, according to a report in The New York Times, based on investigations by the moneylaundering.com website. The US Federal officials have allegedly formed a plan to seize financial assets laundered into the US by foreign officials they suspect of public corruption. The case of Mejía’s former security chief, Colonel Pedro Julio (Pepe) Goico, under investigation for major Baninter credit card fraud and later reinstated to the military in a high-level post by President Mejía, has been in the press since a hefty amount of cash was found stashed in an airplane bearing the seal of the presidential advance team in Florida and Goico was detained. According to the story, the Miami task force is investigating a widening scandal over allegations that Dominican banking officials embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars and gave lavish gifts and payments to government officials. Lawyers for Ramón Baez Figueroa, former president of Baninter, responded to the story, stating that their client is cooperating with the US authorities. According to the Swiss-based Bank of International Payments, Dominicans have US$3.77 billion deposited in banks abroad. To read the story, see http://www.moneylaundering.com/NewsArticles/NewYorkTimesaug22.htm |
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