Chamber of Deputies Border Issues Commission chairman Rafael Mendez has described the destruction of the forests on the border with Haiti as disastrous. He attributed the problem to the low level of patrolling by the Ministry of Environment rangers and complicity between the state security agencies and exporters of charcoal made from Dominican trees to Haiti, as reported in El Caribe.
He said that several Haitian communities lived off the charcoal trade and that boats laden with charcoal crossed the Azuei Lake to Haiti every day in broad daylight.
Mendez said that until the government gets tough with the charcoal manufacturers the country would continue to witness this ecological disaster on the border.
“Everyone says that the border needs to be developed, but there are no targeted actions that are genuinely geared at stopping the decline and the extreme poverty that affects these communities,” said the legislator.
He said that these illegal activities on the border are in complicity with the military personnel at the checkpoints. “It is a complete traffic, human, of charcoal, of goods, of everything. It is a really chaotic situation, disastrous in general terms,” he said, as reported in El Caribe.
Mendez said that laws are in place to impose order on the border that has been studied in “a thousand ways” and the 2010 Constitution declared the border as a high-priority area for the national development, but this has not been fulfilled.
Legislator Victor (Ito) Bisono said that the laws on migration, border incentives, trade, environmental protection and the Constitution clearly establish what has to be done at the border. He said control of the border revolves around drugs, immigration, trade and phyto-sanitary issues. “Irreparable damage is being done, as has happened in Haiti,” he warned.