Senator José Ignacio Paliza, who represents Puerto Plata in the Dominican Senate, confessed to reporters that initially he took a hardline position in his job but as time has passed he has had to adapt his positions in order to move legislation through the chambers that, in his view, the country requires.
José Ignacio Paliza is the youngest deputy in the 2010-2016 legislature, and now as the senator from Puerto Plata (2016-2020) he shared his views with reporters from Diario Libre newspaper on his experience as an opposition party legislator that is a minority representative in the Senate.
Among his many activities he told the reporters that he had voted “no” on the Odebrecht contract saying that he thought that the company had had “too much luck.” He noted that he thought it was strange that in such a competitive arena such as construction in the Dominican Republic one company should win so many contracts. Continuing on the theme of Odebrecht, Paliza noted that Odebrecht has betrayed us and the country should no longer have any relationship with them. He said he supported the latest statements by Ruben Jiménez Bichara, executive vice president of the Public Electricity Corporation. Jiménez Bichara has stated that the government would not pay the sums that the company is now requesting for the termination of the work at Punta Catalina.
Paliza also said that being a member of a minority party in the past had obliged him to be creative and to form alliances. He noted that as a very young member of the Chamber of Deputies his hardline position often brought him into conflict with other deputies, and he noted that complaints such as that the deputies were approving legislative proposals without reading them, such as the law of public salaries, caused him to lose respect of many deputies. Paliza said that with more experience you learn to appreciate the give-and-take of politics especially the forging of political alliances.
Among his latest efforts as a senator is his renewal of the legislative proposal to reimburse the ITBIS tax to overseas tourists. His latest proposal seeks to create an autonomous national statistics bureau for more transparency in national data. He noted that anyone thinking about investing in the Dominican Republic wants access to recent statistics.
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
31 August 2017
