Former revolutionary and Marxist scholar Regis Debray paid a visit to President Hipolito Mejia at the National Palace yesterday, accompanied by the French ambassador to the Dominican Republic Jean Claude Moyret. Debray is en route to Haiti, having been commissioned by French President Jacques Chirac as a special envoy to carry out a study on Franco-Haitian relations. Debray opined that the Haitian situation could not be analyzed without taking the Dominican Republic into consideration, due to the complex historical relationship between the two countries. For this reason, he sought the opinions of President Mejia and found that “relations between the two countries were more cordial than he had expected,” describing the meeting with the Dominican President as “very frank and sincere.” As well as his writings, Debray is famous for having fought alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia in the 1960s and was captured in the same ambush in which the Argentinean revolutionary was killed. For his part, the French ambassador expressed hope that the Dominican government and the IMF would reach an agreement, and he regretted that trade between the two countries had suffered in recent months, with a slight decline in imports from France as a result of the economic turmoil. Moyret said he hoped the peso would stabilize and that the economic situation would improve soon.