Excess staff hired to the Dominican foreign service is causing major difficulties to those that are hard at work representing the Dominican Republic abroad. It is known that hundreds of staff appointed to the missions do not carry out any role, and many spend more time in the Dominican Republic than abroad. Diario Libre editorialist Adriano Miguel Tejada says that while the government knows who is who, differences haven’t been highlighted and restrictions affecting the flow of wages and expenditure allotments are affecting all in the same measure.
Tejada writes that the Dominican foreign service is paralyzed at a time when the country most needs it.
“Everyone knows that the foreign service is a bottomless pit, because politicians have claimed it as war bounty”, he writes. Thus, no one can criticize the cleaning up of the payroll mess, that some should be penalized, he explains. “What is incorrect is that those people should be made to pay for the sins of others, especially when there are more sinners than honest workers”.
Tejada makes the point that the ambassadors and consuls have sent to Santo Domingo the lists of those who truly work at the missions on three occasions. “So it is easy to know who to penalize and who not. But that has not happened, at a high cost to the service and to those who really are working.”
“The government has to clean up the foreign service (something we would be surprised if they did, because there are the sons, the wives, the mistresses and the party members of the two parties that have a hold on the Ministry of Foreign Relations). But they do not have the right to affect the service. With what enthusiasm will our diplomats stand up for the country when they are hiding from debt collectors? For these sorts of things we are called a Banana Republic.
http://www.diariolibre.com/opinion/2014/04/02/i552051_cuerpo-diplomtico.html