The Armed Forces Minister, Lt. General Jos? Miguel Soto Jim?nez, warned that Haiti constitutes a very serious threat to the Dominican Republic, not in military terms, which he said would be ?absurd,? but rather in terms of social and economic pressures. As reported by Ivonne Ferreras of the List?n Diario, Soto Jim?nez, while giving the keynote address at the seminar titled ?The Frontier: A Priority in the National Agenda for the XXIst Century?, said that the nation of Haiti represented the ?gravest threat ever presented to the State and the Dominican Nation.?
Soto Jim?nez said that the new policies regarding the shared border should be based on the application and modernization of the concept of security, and yet free of all racial and cultural prejudices. He considered that to ignore the existence of Haiti would be ?a stupidity that would cost dearly.? While presenting a vivid picture of modern day Haiti, Soto Jim?nez also accused the Dominican oligarchy of taking advantage of the porous frontier to employ Haitians in agriculture and other jobs, which, as he put it, ?Dominicans no longer want to do.? Soto defined the role of the Armed Forces as being the control of the flow of immigrants across the border, thereby impeding the physical reality of illegal immigration. The general also pointed out that the international drug cartels use the loosely patrolled border to send narcotics into the Dominican Republic.
El Caribe carries the response of Haitian Ambassador Guy Alexander, who said that Haiti is neither a threat nor a burden to the Dominican Republic. While recognizing the reality of the inward flow of Haitians, the ambassador said that part of the problem is the lack of organization and the lack of a multilateral vision of what is going on. He pointed out that there was a RD$25-million commercial exchange in trade every week in the area of Dajab?n alone, and that 6% of the Haitian population lives in the frontier region.