The National Police prevented the celebration of a peaceful protest against alleged corruption in the Office of Supervisory Engineers of the State (OISOE) in Santo Domingo yesterday afternoon, Wednesday 21 October 2015. The demonstrators are calling for the shutdown of the office that has been associated with major corruption scandals, especially affecting its two former directors, senator Felix Bautista under former President Leonel Fernandez and Miguel Pimentel Kareh under President Danilo Medina. The office operates as a parallel Ministry of Public Works reporting directly to the Presidency.
The protestors had a resolution from the Higher Administrative Court that granted them the right to carry out the protest, but it was ignored by the police contingent.
The protest, organized by the Coalition for Empowered Citizens, gathered momentum after the recent suicide of a contractor, engineer David Rodriguez, exposed evidence of a mafia that extorted engineers who had received government works contracts. Three lower-ranked individuals linked to the OISOE have been sent to pretrial detention at Victoria Jail in connection with the case.