The Administrative Secretary of the Presidency, Diandino Peña, promised that with his new Eventual Minimal Employment Plan (PEME), refuse piled up in the streets in Santo Domingo will be cleared by Tuesday, 2 October. At the time of going to press, Mr. Peña said that 3,600 cubic meters of refuse per day were being collected by 4,000 government workers using 60 trucks and nine front-end loaders. Beginning 26 September, employees of the central government, through PEME, collected accumulated rubbish from the streets in such suburbs as Villas Agricolas and Capotillo, with the help of local residents. In the following days PEME was expected to clean up the sectors of Villa Juana, Villa Maria and Villa Consuelo.
Residents in the areas most affected by the poor refuse collection service provided by the city council and their contractor, Attwoods Dominicana, complained to newspaper El Nacional about what they claim is the lack of attention given to the problem by Mayor Rafael Subervi Bonilla. Mr. Bonilla defended himself by saying that several piles, or improvised dumps, of refuse have been cleared by city council workers in the very areas where the complainants were resident.
The “La Basura al Zafacon” campaign sponsored by television producer Roberto Salcedo did not have the results expected. On Sunday, 22 September, Mr. Salcedo, with the participation of the Armed Forces and the city council, led an operation to clean up the streets of Santo Domingo. When people heard about the campaign, however, they put all of their accumulated rubbish in the street in the hopes that Mr. Salcedo’s team would collect it, inundating the capital with an amount of refuse that was too much for “La Basura al Zafacon” brigade.