Dominican Republic - The Empire's Democracy and Corruption Showcase -By Ariel Fornari
The
Empire’s Caribbean Democracy and Corruption Showcase: The Dominican Republic
By: Ariel Fornari
Strategically located in the central Caribbean, rich
in natural resources, ,
, ideally positioned with the Mona Passage on its eastern side, funneling about
eighty percent of maritime traffic towards the Panama Canal from Europe; ‘Quisqueya’,
meaning
the ‘entrails of Mother Earth’ to its native Taino peoples, seemed
destined to play a key role in the region known as the “Imperial
Frontier”, by Professor
Juan Bosch. Dominican Republic’s relationship with the ‘Colossus of the North’ was tortuous
from its beginnings, during the era of
Gunboat Diplomacy, with the
first occupation by the U. S. from 1916-1924.
During the second U. S. invasion and occupation of 1965,
some sources maintain less than 50 U. S. servicemen died, while as many as
5,000 Dominicans
perished, many of them civilians, in the armed conflict known as the “Constitutionalist
Revolution”. The political system installed today in Dominican
Republic, hails back to the aftermath of that second occupation, with the
election of U. S. puppet President Joaquin Balaguer, whose first campaign in
1966 was secretly financed by the State
Department’s 303 Committee. There’s a line of revisionist thinking
within the Dominican Republic, claiming Balaguer was ‘the father of modern
Dominican democracy’, but New York Times
journalist Tim Weiner who wrote a
book on the FBI, made a FOIA request disclosing that Balaguer
was actually an FBI informant, who was escorted from New York City to San Juan by an FBI agent, and
later brought to Santo Domingo after the 1965 Revolution, groomed as a key U.
S. puppet in the Caribbean at the height of the Cold War.
The neoliberal and institutionally corrupt “Partido de la Liberación Dominicana”
(PLD) party government, which ruled the
country almost continuously since 1996, originated from an electoral alliance
that year, fostered by the cunning Balaguer.
The Dominican Republic today is at
another historical
crossroads through its recent elections, compared to the latest hemispheric crises; in Venezuela, Bolivia,
Haiti, etc. It enjoys an apparent
political and economic stability, which according to some claims boasts the highest
GNP growth regionally. But typical of its contradictory history, we
could define the Dominican Republic’s current status, as a balkanized
capitalist-consumerist model,
rife with institutionalized corruption in tandem with impunity, guaranteed
by a judicial branch mostly beholden to the outgoing PLD party.
The country is unable to resolve its myriad deep challenges, due to this
rampant corruption. Some of its grim
statistics are: Over
700,000 youth which neither work nor study (known as the "ninis"), a spine
chilling high rate of murders of women by their partners which the government mostly
ignores,
an endemic
rate of child marriages, rampant
poverty in large sectors of society, a public
health system on the edge, and
large
sectors of the population without running water, as well as constant
blackouts which particularly affect the commercial sector.
But since the outgoing PLD government had an impressive
media propaganda machine, including many colloquially known "bocinas", or parrot
journalists especially on TV, these stenographers constantly bombarded the neurons of the hapless
population, with corporate media connected to big business in the country, and
some financed ‘under the table’ by the outgoing government; the ruling PLD
party's image of Dominican society, had been
utopic bliss and relative progress, while underneath the rot of
corruption bled the country dry.
The Dominican Republic has the dubious honor of being the
second most corrupt country in the hemisphere, scoring 137 out of 180, in
Transparency International's race to the bottom in corruption.
(Though Transparency International, funded by the U. S. State
Department, has come under serious criticism itself.) The country’s tailor made judicial branch, has further helped to
reproduce the country’s corrupt political scene, granting immunity, especially
in cases of flagrant violations of corruption laws, and even gross
violations of electoral campaign finance.
The most festering to date, of all the corruption cases in the country, is
the one by the internationally renowned Brazilian Odebrecht construction
firm. A household name throughout Latin
America on government corruption, Odebrecht
was fined a cool $2.6 billion by a U. S. federal judge in 2017, in a plea deal with U. S., Brazilian,
and Swiss authorities, with $93 million going to the U. S., $2.39 billion going
to Brazil, and $116 million to Switzerland.
In Latin America, Odebrecht has been involved in corruption cases in Argentina,
Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and Panama, and even crossing
the pond into Portugal.
Photo: Punta Catalina industrial
complex with docking facilities in background-ElCaribe.com
The Punta Catalina coal-fired power plant, was built by an Odebrecht
consortium in
the southern coastal town of Bani. Among
the most egregious findings (by no means exhaustive) of Dominican Republic’s
Odebrecht/Punta Catalina dossier are the following: A bribes scheme of at least $39 million dollars involving government officials. Since the trial started in September,
2019, the scope of the bribes has widened to $92M. The Punta Catalina highly unorthodox contract
award procedure in 2013, which Dominican Republic’s state power monopoly the “Corporación
Eléctrica de Empresas Eléctricas Estatales” (CDEE) approved in a sizzling 48 hour period, awarding an eye popping U.
S. $2.040 billion contract to Odebrecht, was particularly shocking. In
this YouTube interview of whistleblower journalist Marino Zapete’s TV show past
6:00, the rigged bidding process could reasonably be inferred.
President Medina’s central role
in the project’s mismanagement, was likewise highlighted while he was campaigning for reelection in early
2016, when he virtually perjured himself in public, by making the demagogic claim
that Punta Catalina would be operational by late 2017, as
shown in this video past 3:00, further stating after that…’the entire country
would have power service 24 hours a day.’ Journalist Ariel
Fornari’s tweet below, denounces President Medina’s false electioneering
promise of early 2016, which he never kept.
Not content with lying profusely in the early 2016 campaign regarding
Punta Catalina, President Medina pronounced a bombastic
speech at the country’s version of the State
of the Union, on February 27, 2017. Medina’s demagogic rant past
1:38:00 above, before the Dominican Congress, commenced with a dramatic …”You
have my solemn promise”… he went on to say…”I will decide according to the
interests of our Fatherland and no one else”….”If
it’s demonstrated beyond any doubt, that the price was lower than the average, and that all international firms acted
as it was expected of them, with responsibility, if that is so, I’m not going
to allow that the progress of this country is halted, to feed the interests of
a few, to whom it’s convenient that chaos and backwardness will ensue in Dominican
Republic.”…After those euphoric remarks by Medina, the joint PLD-majority
Congress seemed electrified, and gave
Medina a standing ovation, as though struck by the gods that their leader had
spoken like Moses from Mount Sinai.
Medina’s mention of “chaos and
backwardness” in D. R., in his speech to Congress on February, 2017, was a
veiled reference to the recently massive anti-corruption popular protests, of
the civil society Marcha Verde movement, which had gained
headlines in Dominican media, worrying the power structure of the corrupt ruling PLD party, to the
point where some party leaders were designated as media boom boxes, attempting
to discredit Marcha Verde, with all
sorts of conspiracy theories. In the summer of 2017 Interior Minister
Carlos Amarante Baret,
made spurious comments to the press, alleging Marcha Verde was being used by ‘leftist
radicals’, and that the protest movement would turn into a ‘political party’, and that they would ‘face off’ (with the PLD) ‘in the 2020 elections’, and as we now know
all those bizarre allegations fizzled out into thin air.
Photo
Marcha Verde protests: NoticiaLibre.com
As part of its labyrinthine Odebrecht plot, the institutionally corrupt
PLD party knew, that without a demonstration trial, it couldn’t whitewash what
seemed like one of the worst corruption cases in the region, besides Haiti’s
notorious “Kot
kób Petro Caribe A?” scandal, which helped propel recent
political convulsions. Staging
a sort of ‘demonstration trial’, of some token suspects of the Odebrecht/Punta
Catalina corruption and bribes scheme, seemed like the ideal PR theatrics.
It could help assuage the transnational business community’s concerns,
about Dominican institutional corruption, which has been a disincentive for
direct investment in this country. In
fact, U.
S. Ambassador to Dominican Republic Robin Bernstein, a Trump friend and
campaign fundraiser, and Mar-a-Lago founding member, who helped Trump with the South
Florida vote in 2016; in a public speech on
February, 2019, commented that ”Public
procurement processes of the Dominican state must be done in a democratic
manner.” This was diplomatically couched language,
referring to Punta Catalina’s apparently rigged contract award procedure. Ambassador
Bernstein’s predecessor, James Brewster, on the other hand, delivered a more
scathing speech
during a seminar on corruption in Dominican Republic, on April, 2015,
mentioning among others that corruption "discouraged
foreign investment”.
The
Odebrecht/Punta Catalina demonstration trial, was carefully choreographed,
to appease the U. S. Ambassador, and present a façade to international businesses, that Dominican Republic
is a modern state that can redress complex corruption cases within its national
territory, and
is stable enough for direct investment. However, even the most cursory
observations of this so-called anti-corruption trial, reveal some highly
unusual features that stick out like a sore thumb.
There
are six accused figures on this trial, but we’ll focus on two particular defendants, which are emblematic not
only of the trial, but also offer us a glimpse of the complexities of the country’s
social fabric. Undoubtedly the most
picturesque and folksy character in this trial, is none other than Mr. Angel
Rondon, a typically Dominican rags to riches living legend, who hails from the
rugged and destitute province of La Altagracia, on the east of Hispaniola; the same
area where the last of the feared “gavilleros” or bandits, as they were derisively called by
the U. S. Marines, operated in guerrilla groups during the first occupation. Mr. Rondon’s extremely precarious childhood,
forced him to get up daily before dawn, to obediently toil in the family’s
tree-cutting charcoal business, as their only means of sustenance. Seemingly
chosen and anointed by the Taino gods of his ancestors, Mr. Rondon appeared supernaturally
endowed, with a Caribbean Midas touch early in life, when as a teenager he
moved in with an aunt in Santo Domingo, where he underwent university studies,
and later became financially independent, after buying some farmlands in his
hometown area. A few years back, before
his pre-trial confinement at the dreaded La Victoria prison, (where inmates can
choose between an
occasional deadly riot, and
the currently deadlier
Covid 19 pandemic,
for a common inconvenience); Rondon
would at times visit his depressed hometown of Macao in La Altagracia province, escorted by a handful of bodyguards,
warmly socializing with relatives, and in keeping with old family traditions,
he would generously hand out some cash to his less fortunate relatives, and by
one account, he wouldn’t think twice about financially assisting his extended
family, whenever they were ill and were stuck with medical bills. With the passage of time, Rondon became a
very adroit political campaign financier, whose career began in the latter Balaguer
era, evolving through the eighties. A
capsule photo collection of Rondon, shows him with such Dominican powerbrokers as former President
Fernandez, former Vice-President Jacobo Majluta, and outgoing President
Medina,
Rondon
family dwelling in Macao, La Altagracia – Via El Tiempo.com
As part of his prolific financial wizard resumé, Rondon
was implicated in the Renove & Baninter corruption cases, and was known among the populace as
the ‘man with the briefcase’ (“el hombre del maletin”), which is a
Dominican idiomatic expression, depicting the itinerant bagman, who depending
on the political winds of the moment, would carry a bloated briefcase loaded
with cash, who on occasions disburses generous amounts of monies to
congressional deputies, in order to sway their votes for favorable rulings. In the current Odebrecht/Punta Catalina
proceedings, Dominican Republic’s Attorney General Jean Alain Rodriguez,
conveniently looking
for a scapegoat to pin the principal blame of the bribes scheme, named Rondon
as the main defendant.
Diametrically opposed to Mr. Angel Rondon’s rural proletarian rugged origins,
in the historically rebellious eastern side of Hispaniola, and his mercurial rise
as financier of political power brokers, we have dapper and finely educated Senator
Tommy Galan,
our other peculiar defendant in this surrealist legal proceeding of Dominican
Odebrecht suspects. Galan’s enviable academics,
include a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration at a local university,
moving on into postgraduate studies at uppity Iberoamerican
University in Dominican Republic, with cushy seminars
in Canada, Mexico & Costa Rica, and he happens to come from San Cristobal, which is legendary dictator
Trujillo’s
birthplace. Senator Galan’s convoluted
twist in this odd case, are allegations
by his defense attorney, that the presiding judge in the Odebrecht corruption
trial, Supreme Court of Justice President Luis Henry Molina, had been Galan’s
campaign manager during the 2016 electoral campaign.
If this wasn’t sufficient cause for recusal of the presiding Odebrecht
trial judge, as Galan’s attorney raised in a procedural motion, it was also
openly known that both
Molina and Galan worked jointly in President Medina’s campaign in 2016, and
Molina was provincial coordinator in San Cristobal for Medina’s reelection bid, thus compounding the ethical
and conflict of interest questions, which overtly tainted Molina’s key role as presiding judge, in what is
arguably the most complex corruption trial, in contemporary Dominican history.
Tommy
Galán y Luis Henry Molina durante la inauguración del comando de campaña del
PLD. (DIARIO
LIBRE/ JOHN ESCALANTE)
Regarding
President Medina’s possible role, in the Odebrechet/Punta Catalina corruption scandal, let’s remember that
Dominican Republic’s Attorney General Jean Alain Rodriguez named legendary
Dominican political financial wizard Mr. Angel Rondon, as the main defendant in
those proceedings, and that Rondon’s close relationship with President Medina
goes back years, as the below photo shows, sternly reminding us of President
Truman’s historic motto for ultimate political
accountability ”The buck stops
here”.
PHOTO- Political financial wizard Mr. Angel Rondon on the left &
President Medina on the right, in happier times. Photo credit:
SomosPueblo.com
“The
BUCK STOPS here” sign Courtesy: Truman Library
There
is a plethora of photos, where President Medina and Mr. Rondon happen to
coincide in public, including one in particular where Medina
is awarding a medal to Rondon, in connection with Rondon’s activities in the cattle
industry. In addition, the civil society
anti-corruption movement Marcha Verde,
requested before the Dominican Republic Attorney General’s office in 2017, that an investigation be conducted
into President Medina’s campaign finances.
Obviously, since the institutionally corrupt PLD party, virtually controlled
all the legal instrumentalities of the nation, up to and including the Attorney
General’s office (“Procuraduria General
de la Republica”), instead of conducting serious oversight and
investigations of corruption, the Dominican Republic Attorney General’s office
would instead allow a dark ominous cloud to hang over President Medina,
regarding his campaign finances and his possible connection with corruption and
bribes, in the Odebrecht/Punta Catalina scandal. In this regard, in June 2019, D. R.’s local
chapter of Transparency International, Participacion Ciudadana,
publicly requested an explanation about the Odebrecht/Punta Catalina bribes, further
charging that the Attorney General’s office was suppressing evidence, on the
rigged Punta Catalina bidding process, as well as other questionable government
projects by Odebrecht. Participacion Ciudadana emphasized President Medina’s
sepulchral silence, regarding this widespread scandal, pointing out that
notorious Brazilian political campaigns consultant Joao Santana, was one of
those implicated in distributing the bribes, and Santana had also been Medina’s
campaign advisor, operating from an office at the National Palace in Santo
Domingo.
Joao Santana, the internationally renowned Brazilian
political consulting guru, known as the James
Carville of Latin America, was political advisor of President
Medina’s campaigns in 2012 & 2016, who in 2014 alone received in his
Swiss bank account, $5 million dollars for his services to Medina. In 2017 Santana & his wife were declared
innocent of corruption in Brazil, but sentenced
to four years of house arrest for money laundering.
Regarding Santana’s consulting services to Medina, a scandal broke out when PRM party
deputy Faride Raful, while in the opposition, publicly denounced in a TV interview,
irregular disbursements of about RD 1,400 Million Pesos (over U. S. 24 Million
dollars), to Santana & his wife Monica Moura, for services rendered to the
Dominican government from 2012-2017, which Deputy Faride was quick to point
out, such disbursements to Santana & Moura occurred after both had been
declared guilty in Brazil. The tweet
below from Vladimir Vargas contains Deputy Faride’s disclosure,
which in Faride’s
typically detail-oriented and finely researched methodology, contains copies of
official government documents, which prove by the standard of beyond reasonable
doubt, that such disbursements occurred, implicating an instrumentality directly
under President Medina. Notice
specifically the two names mentioned in the tweet…”Roberto
Rodriguez Marchena” and “Jose
Ramon Peralta”, the Director of Communications
and Presidential Spokesman, and the Minister
of the Presidency respectively, which D. R.’s Comptroller’s Office
certified, that they both authorized the contracts & disbursements to Joao
Santana, as per Faride’s whistleblower disclosure, and after being convicted of
money laundering in Brazil.
An issue even more ominous and
dangerous, than the extensive corruption schemes surrounding Punta Catalina,
recently surfaced impacting the safety and lives of personnel, operating inside
the plant. On June 23, videos surfaced
of a “class bravo fire” igniting inside unit 2 in
Punta Catalina. The official cover-up
story was…”unit 2 was taken offline, in order to remove a rubber gasket which
controls gases and air”. However, the videos clearly contradicted this
cover story, as black smoke was emanating from inside
the plant, clear evidence of a “class bravo fire”, meaning some type of fuel ignited inside unit 2’s facilities. As result of this serious industrial accident
at Punta Catalina, Dominican Republic’s National
Committee for the Struggle Against Climatic Change (CNLCC), delivered to
the President of the “Confederacion
Nacional de la Unidad Sindical” (CNUS), the labor organization which the
majority of Punta Catalina’s workers union belonged to, a request urging an
investigation into this incident. The
letter from the CNLCC, mentioned that the black smoke came from the
boiler. The CNLCC further stated, that “Punta Catalina’s workers are at risk
to be affected by a grave event, which would be the explosion of the boiler,
which could cause the loss of life.” CNLCC
went on saying, they had received eyewitness accounts from workers, disclosing
they had seen a fire break out in the area of the accident, contradicting the
plant management’s pretextual version of the event. CNLCC concluded, …“that what was at stake, was not just money, or corruption, or a scam,
but the loss of human lives, which would be irreparable.”…
Adding to life-threatening issues,
impacting Punta Catalina’s workforce by an apparent boiler fire (pretextually
denied by plant management), the firm which conducted the operational
restrictions verification test (known as “VEROPE”
in Spanish), also revealed some disconcerting findings, regarding Punta
Catalina’s purported maximum power generation capacity. Grupo Canario SRL, a reputable Dominican firm, with extensive experience in this field, was
contracted to perform the VEROPE test
for Punta Catalina’s units 1 and 2, but due to discrepancies with plant
management, only unit 1’s test was conducted.
Canario pointed out to Punta Catalina’s General Manager, Jaime Aristy
Escuder, that “the plant could collapse
if both generator units were operated at a gross output of 386 megawatts (MW)”. Canario further warned, that if the “irrational decision” was put into practice of operating at that
power level (386 MW), that the power plant “could
collapse in less than 15 days”. - Canario further stated that Punta Catalina did not pass the VEROPE tests,
& that the real gross capacity of each unit was 356 MW each.
Amply known for fanatically following
in his fearless leader’s footsteps, outgoing President Medina, & himself a bright
luminary in Dominican academic and entrepreneurial circles, Jaime Aristy Escuder, was appointed General Manager of the
corruption-plagued Punta Catalina coal-fired power plant in 2017. Among the blinding stars in
Escuder’s luminescent resumé, was his participation, in the de facto rubber
stamp commission, which had recently granted a perfunctory thumbs up, to Punta Catalina’s aforementioned rigged
bidding process. The PRM party while in
the opposition, in July 2017, gave a press conference, pointing out among
others, to the violations in selection criteria of
the bidding process which unduly favored Odebrecht. Regarding the infamous Punta
Catalina commission, of which Aristy Escuder was part of, before his assignment
as the plant’s General Manager, renowned Dominican TV and radio journalist
Andres L. Mateo, eloquently criticized the cosmetic findings of the commission,
manifesting that “the commission didn’t investigate anything”, thus confirming public opinion, reflected in the mass social protests,
& the many other prominent critics of the Punta Catalina scandal.
After running a tough anti-corruption campaign, Luis Abinader, a U. S. - trained economist, won Dominican Republic’s presidential elections on July 5, and his PRM party won the majority in both
the Senate and Congress of Deputies. It remains to be seen, If President-elect
Abinader and the PRM-controlled legislative branch, will have the political
will to institute the requisite reforms and changes of the judicial branch, and
the renewal of the prosecutors corps, which have perpetuated Dominican Republic’s
institutionalized corruption, and has aroused deep social discontent, like
never seen in recent history.
An avowed social democrat, President-elect Abinader will apparently continue Washington’s diktat, recognizing
coup mongering and unpopular Juan Guaidó,
as self-proclaimed President of Venezuela, which the Dominican delegation subserviently
supported at the neocolonial OAS meeting, in January,
2019. By exchanging a cordial tweet with
Guaidó, Abinader has sent an early signal
before assuming power on August 16, 2020, where he stands on U. S. regional
policy, disregarding the historic memory of the Dominican nation, and the two
bloody U. S. interventions of the Twentieth Century.
Continuing his affability with
Washington’s minions in the hemisphere, Abinader also exchanged cordialities,
with coup monger Henrique Capriles, responsible for the 2002 violent assault
of the Cuban embassy in Caracas. In Capriles’s case however, Abinader appeared
to be on friendlier terms, employing the familiar “tu” instead of the more formal “usted”
pronoun, thanking Capriles for his “good wishes”, and sending him a warm “saludos”.
The cavalcade of stars, of Abinader’s
diplomatic skills with regional coup mongers however, wouldn’t be complete
without an exchange with the notoriously self-proclaimed President of Bolivia,
Jeanine Añez Chávez, whose government is attempting to disqualify the popular &
leftist MAS movement in the impending “democratic”
Bolivian elections.
The Empire’s Caribbean Democracy and Corruption Showcase, will thus merit continued close study and observation, transitioning into
a new evolutionary phase with a recently elected congress, and an avowed “social democrat” President who will hold
hands with the hemispheric coup-mongering right, maintaining close ties with an
Empire in Decline, the onetime “Colossus of the North,” with which it has had a historically tortuous
relationship, and was once the undisputed master of the entire hemisphere, but is
now slowly agonizing with its own internal crises in the Trump Era.
