Dominican Ambassador to Washington, Flavio Dario Espinal, has rejected the “failed state” status awarded to the Dominican Republic by US magazine Foreign Policy, and protested to the magazine by saying that the report caused stupor and incredulity in the government and people of the DR. Clave Digital reports that Espinal calls the classification “scandalous” and asks whether it is believable that the DR has a worse human rights record than Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Haiti. He also asks whether the DR could be compared to Rwanda and the Ivory Coast regarding refugees and displaced persons, and believes it is strange that those two countries scored better than the Dominicans. He also rejected that the DR was placed as the fourth worst country on the list in terms of public services. Foreign Policy replied to the ambassador by stating that the Failed States Index establishes the susceptibility to armed conflicts by observing a broad fan of economic, military, political and social factors. Most of the states on the index have not yet failed and many will never, the magazine hopes.
Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) expressed its support of the Failed States Index published in the July-August edition of Foreign Policy, in which the DR is placed among the first 20 states under the highest risk of failing in the world. A letter from USAID Director Andrew S. Natsios in the September-October edition of Foreign Policy says the international political community is in debt to the magazine for publishing the first Failed States Index as well as with its producer “Fund for Peace”. Natsios states that this index calls to the attention of readers a problem which before was only of concern to the highest levels of international politics in the US.