Dominican Republic today

Interview with Narciso Isa Conde

By Berta Joubert-Ceci

Narciso Isa Conde is a Marxist political analyst, writer and veteran of the struggles against the Trujillo dictatorship and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. During the 1965 April Revolution, he represented the Communist Party in the political command of that revolution led by Coronal Francisco Caamaño. His long political career includes political imprisonment, persecution and exile during the government of Joaquín Balaguer. Isa Conde is now a leader of the Caamañista Movement (MC) and part of the collective presidency of the Continental Bolivarian Movement.

Isa Conde spoke with Workers World’s Berta Joubert-Ceci about the socioeconomic and political framework of the 24-hour work stoppage that paralyzed commerce and traffic in the Dominican Republic on July 11. The action was called by the Alternative Social Forum, which includes about 50 organizations. The action was a response to the acute disaster produced by the worldwide capitalist economic crisis and the so-called corrective measures being taken by the Dominican government. The following is from Isa Conde’s responses.

Overview of the situation in the D.R.

In the Dominican Republic we are suffering the consequences of the neoliberal impositions for the last several decades. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S.A. have intervened in this country at all levels. The U.S.A. exerts its control through economic and financial mechanisms.

All aspects of the national life are touched. Even the recent constitution approved last January was enacted to fulfill that neoliberal strategy. It is a privatizing constitution that concentrates power in the hands of the president and negates collective social rights.

Between 35 to 40 percent of the national budget is committed to paying external debt. The government has resolved the very serious fiscal deficits by taking on more debt, which will very seriously jeopardize the national economy in the future. We can expect years of still more economic and social deterioration.

Besides, the D.R. has suffered the consequence of a privatization process that touched everything that was part of the national heritage from Trujillo’s tyranny. The concentration of economic power in Trujillo, which was expressed by the State Sugar Council, the Corporation of Industrial Enterprises and the Dominican Electricity Corporation, has been privatized with terrible consequences. The sugar sector has been completely dismantled. Now the enormous land wealth that the SSC accumulated is being sold very cheaply. There was tremendous robbery around this as neoliberalism combined with corruption.

We also have the [bourgeois] political parties’ establishment [partidocracia] that has been formed around the practices of embezzlement, corruption, appropriation of state resources and the country’s natural wealth, trafficking of influences, etc. An elite of these parties has established a two-party system, a kind of institutionalized bipolar dictatorship, with the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) on the one hand, profoundly turned to the right — this was [former President] Juan Bosch’s party — and the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), the one of [former Afro-Dominican candidate for President] Peña Gomez, also equally turned to the right, corrupted, neoliberalized. I’m talking about the leadership of these parties, who have converted their rank-and-file members into political clients.

They also join in a partnership with different oligarchic groups, with new economic groups and also, in terms of process by which they turn with total openness to foreign capital, to transnational corporations.

There is a process of plunder in the framework of a model of accumulation that now puts great emphasis on the appropriation of the mining wealth of the country by major mining consortiums. Especially significant is the case of Barrick Gold and Unigold that are behind the large deposits of gold here and in Haiti’s border area.

But there are many territorial concessions along the coast of the country masked as mining concessions. It is estimated that 60 percent of the beach-accessible coastline of the country has been granted special mining concessions without any mining being done. This indicates a mechanism to evade some regulations regarding what are called forest reserves, or protected areas. They evade them through the mining concessions.

Now the Dominican state, with the measures of a neoliberal character like what they call the flexibility of labor in the free-trade agreements with the U.S.A. and Central America, called the RD-CAFTA, has seriously reduced the possibilities of expanding domestic production. Domestic producers have been co-opted.

On the other hand, they have created an extremely impoverished society. Certainly 60 percent of the population will be living in conditions of poverty. Official figures present 16 percent unemployment, but that is based on a misleading calculation. That refers to absolute unemployment, while 53 percent of the population is in what is called the marginal economy, temporary, unstable work with no security. Therefore, real unemployment is around 25 to 30 percent.

All the basic services are damaged. On health, the Dominican Republic ranks among the bottom; I think it is surpassed only by Haiti, also in the field of education. Now with the appearance of cholera, the entire health system is flooded, lacking the capacity to respond.

There is privatization of Social Security under which the so-called RS — private intermediaries administering the health system — keep most of the money, along with the banks that manage pensions. There are about 130 billion [Dominican pesos] in the hands of private banks from the workers’ pensions, and the banks operate with that capital.

The same thing happened with the Occupational Hazard Administration, which recently tried to pull a scam by using about 10 billion pesos of those funds. Protests by the people stopped it. The yellow trade union leadership, the state and the employers had wanted to divide the booty among themselves, alleging that it was not being used at the moment.

In this context, with all the fundamental services deteriorated, the case of the privatization of the electrical system, the national energy system, has indeed been catastrophic, because the Dominican state has had to multiply the subsidy by 16 times what it was when the state owned the system.

The rate paid for power has risen significantly; the officials claim that it is because fuel costs have risen. Fuel is really a source of revenue for the government. More than half of the price of fuel in the D.R. is taxes that the government keeps. The tax system has been increasingly modified toward taxes on consumption rather than taxes on property or income.

And all this has resulted in the impoverishment of the people and theft of the natural resources of the country. The resources have been appropriated by a powerful small sector. In these conditions social tensions have grown, and this is what explains the reaction of the Dominican people to the call to strike.

All the conditions are given and even more — there is a degree of outrage, a degree of discontent that at some point can even grow and explode in multiple ways.

The problem is a problem of the political system, of the neoliberal model, of capitalism in crisis. The responses given to the crisis of capitalism are the ones that work on behalf of global capitalism. And that is why all are to the detriment of the working population, of the most disadvantaged sectors. They try to accentuate all oppressions, not only class oppression, but also the oppressions of gender, racism, youth versus old, and anti-Haitian sentiment in order to super-exploit Haitian men and women.

A two-party system

The PLD is the same thing as the PRD. They are both wedded to the neoliberal policies, to the same dependent capitalism, and on the issue of corruption they are complicit in the system of impunity. Both dominate the system which is very undemocratic, very exclusive. Between the two, they control practically all institutions of the country. In the electoral system, the ruling PLD now dominates, but it shares control with the PRD.

The national police are criminal, discredited, a Mafia organization. The anti-drugs national leadership is the same. It is mixed in all the shady businesses. The armed forces are also infiltrated and associated with different aspects of the drug trade. There is widespread corruption.

Transnational corporations exploit gold

Barrick Gold presents itself as a company based in Canada, but the Bush family has a lot of power in it and the most powerful economic groups from Chile linked to [former criminal dictator] Pinochet as well. Barrick is the most aggressive mining company worldwide on the subject of gold, cobalt and titanium, a highly criminal enterprise located in the center of the country.

Unigold is virtually a subsidiary of BG. The contract with this company is an extremely onerous, embarrassing one that the legislators approved without reading it. It was an agreement between Fernández and the political leader of the PRD at the time.

Gold is always associated with other strategic minerals. That is what these companies are looking at. Unigold is established at the border with Haiti, and that site is Haitian and Dominican at the same time. Unigold has strong border control with the army that is occupying Haiti.

U.S. presence

The U.S. military has also intervened here, recently carrying out an operation. [The Pentagon program] “Beyond the Horizon” deployed U.S. troops in Mao, in the province of Valverde in the northwest. They stayed for almost four months, doing reconnaissance work. They talk about building schools, some bridges, but the reality is that their presence is linked to the mining issue, to exploring the terrain.

The U.S. military go from province to province exploring, also for strategic purposes which have to do with future plans of occupying the island. They have already occupied Haiti, so the threat against us is permanent. The country is an area of strategic military rearguard for the United States, and the island also has potential in the field of gold and other minerals.

Role of Dominicans in the U.S.

There is a very active group of Dominicans living in the U.S. who are following the situation here through the various media and through ongoing communication with their families. This Diaspora is very supportive of the internal and national struggles, and it expressed its solidarity with the strike in many ways.

Caamañista Movement’s political proposal

These conditions are capitalism’s answer to its systemic, structural crisis of major dimensions, perhaps the largest in its history. It is a response that impoverishes even more of these societies in order to save capital. It is in this context that the major social tensions happen in the Dominican Republic, and that is why it is a system that deserves much more than a one-day strike. It requires a process of continuous mobilization.

Seventy percent of Dominican society strongly rejects the government. A recent Central American survey puts Leonel Fernández among the most unpopular presidents right now in Central America and the Caribbean. He is even less popular than [Honduran President Pepe] Lobo.

Naturally, this favors the PRD in terms of electoral competition, but there is a large part of society that does not want either of the two, but does not have a political channel to expresses it in a consistent and forceful manner. That is the great challenge of this period. To build that alternative transformative force able to awaken hope and win the confidence of the large part of society who want a change in direction for the country.

Although generally all the discontent or much of the discontent is aimed against the government of the day, we are really committed to increasing awareness, to deepening our reflection.

And instead of PRD or LDP governments, both looking to alliances with the old Balaguerismo [repressive style and figures tied to ex-president Joaquín Balaguer], now largely discredited, very disorganized and polluted, but contaminated with authoritarianism, there is a need to discard this in favor of the power of the people, a government of the people that can rise from the grass-roots insurgency in the country.

The failure of those in power to respond to these popular demands shows that the crucial issue in the country is the question of power. We are working intensively toward rebellion, to generalize the rebellion through multiple forms — civil disobedience, expression of social outrage, stoppages, strikes — in short, to use all possible modalities to point in the direction of taking power.

What the progressive movement in the U.S. can do

It is very important to expose the reality of the Dominican Republic and clarify that it is not only a subject of Fernández and the LDP as the ruling party, but that the problem is the system. That we are against an institutionalized dictatorship with two poles, the PLD and the PRD. Also showing solidarity with our struggle, mobilizing against the symbols of Dominican power in the U.S.A. like the consulates, embassy and representatives of the dominant forces here, is very important to us.

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