The Justice and Transparency Foundation (FJT), a Dominican civil organization, has filed for an injunction against a contract the government signed with the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation for the Pueblo Viejo gold mine in Cotuí in the Dominican Republic’s central province of Sánchez Ramírez. The mine, a joint venture of Barrick and the Vancouver-based multinational Goldcorp Inc., opened last August despite strong opposition from environmental groups. It is set to begin exporting gold in February.
According to the FJT, the company expects to make $2 billion from the gold it exports this year, while the Dominican government will only receive $53 million. Over the next 25 years Barrick Gold will get back something like $50 billion on its $3.7 billion initial investment, FJT president Trajano Potentini said on Feb. 4. The country will receive just $1.3 billion, while it will have the sole responsibility for dealing with the mine’s damage to the environment. Potentini called legislators who approved the contract “traitors to the country.” In addition to the legal filing, the foundation was planning a national day of consciousness-raising around the issue. (Hoy, Santo Domingo, Feb. 4; Adital, Brazil, Feb. 8)
From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 10.
Carne & Co. is where gourmets can find good, local meat, great charcuterie, and all sorts of delicious stuff in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. It was the perfect place for me to give a talk about food in movies to a small group of food professionals, from producers to restaurant owners, including the publisher of the beautiful magazine Gastroteca. The talk soon turned into a very animated round table about Dominican food traditions, the Dominican Republic’s future, and the cultural and social issues that influence (or limit) the country’s development. As a visitor, the conversation gave me a better understanding of a culinary world that is rich, complex, and in transition. Of course, we just got to scratch the surface.
This was my second visit to Santo Domingo. With 34.4 percent of the population under the poverty line, I was stunned by the number of elegant and upscale restaurants. With a population of around three million people (a huge percentage of the over nine millions of Dominicans living in the country), the city has developed an interesting food scene, although many cannot afford its prices and, among those who can, few even consider the cultural aspects of the culinary scene.
The participants in the round table all agreed that most Dominicans of means have no interest in eating traditional Dominican food when they go out. They prefer imported ingredients, refined environments, and international dishes. Everybody at the table had a different opinion on why this is. Some hinted at provincialism within the local elites, who consider everything from abroad as better and more prestigious. A restaurateur even said that, at times, she needs to give English names to the dishes on her menu for patrons to be interested. Others blamed a lack of good ingredients on the local market.
Everybody was fast in underlining that the problem is not insufficient production, but rather the fact that the best fruits and produce are all exported, as the local buyers do not ensure enough volume of trade. Moreover, producers make more money by exporting. This is particularly true when it comes to organic food. For example, the Dominican Republic has become a major producer of organic bananas, but most of the crop is exported, mostly to the European Union and Japan.
The participants were well aware that they are catering to a minority of the population, and that their preferences and taste might be influenced by their exposure to the global trends in world cuisines. They all admitted to feeling an emotional bond with crops and dishes that constitute the core of Dominican culinary traditions. However, those dishes belong to the domestic sphere, and most people have easy access to them at home. So what would be the point to pay more in a restaurant for the same food you could have at home? Unless you play with it, make it sexier, more contemporary and, why not, ironic…
This kind of approach could be particularly interesting in restaurants, hotels, and resorts with large numbers of foreign customers. Many international visitors still prefer to stick to familiar food, which justifies the presence of global mainstays such as pizza and hamburgers — at times quite bland and non-descript — in tourist destinations all over the world, from Thailand to Tunisia. (The impact of tourism on food systems and the potential of food to develop forms of sustainable tourism, deserves its own discussion and will be addressed in a future course for the Food Studies program at The New School.) However, a growing segment of high-end tourism is showing interest in food and eating as an essential element of traveling, and more and more visitors want to enjoy local fare as part of their experience. Media has changed the perception of the role food now plays in establishing one’s sense of cosmopolitanism and cultural capital.
Of course, revisited traditional food should also be presented in ways that respond to the expectations and standards of high-end travelers. This move would require a lot of rethinking and experimentation, and institutional investments would be necessary to sustain and promote such initiatives. At the same time, this new approach would imply deep changes in social relationships on the islands, so that the foods of the majority of the population — and not its richest part — are reevaluated and not just left aside as leftovers of an embarrassing and unglamorous past.
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Ever since the allegations first made in November that Dominican-born eye doctor Salomon Melgen provided prostitutes for Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), a favor that appeared to be gravy on top of his large campaign contributions, the obvious question for us has been, “What has Menendez done for Melgen?”
We believe that we have answer. After an extensive review of publicly available documents that link the two men, the answer relates to unusual actions on behalf of a port security company known as ICSSI.
Ray Hernandez and Frances Robles detail in a New York Times story how Menendez sought to help ICSSI “in ways that could bring the doctor a highly lucrative windfall.” From the article:
Two years ago, Dr. Melgen, despite an apparent lack of experience in border security issues, bought an ownership interest in a company that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security. Mr. Menendez, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that holds sway over the Dominican Republic, subsequently urged officials in the State and Commerce Departments to intervene so the contract would be enforced, at an estimated value of $500 million.
Menendez even convened a special hearing on the matter. Although he was the only Senator present, it had the full force of a Senate hearing. He dragged administration officials up to the Hill for questioning about why the deal had not gone through. The New York Times quotes Menendez:
“You have another company that has American investors that is seeking to – has a contract actually given to it by the – kind of ratified by the Dominican Congress to do X-ray of all of the cargo that goes through the ports, which have been problematic and for which in the past narcotics have been included in those cargo,” the senator said at the hearing, according to a transcript provided by the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.
Also from the article:
…Ken Boehm, the chairman of the government watchdog group, called the actions troubling.
“At a minimum, the public is entitled to know more about this relationship,” Mr. Boehm said. “It’s a matter of transparency and accountability.”
The New York Times article was posted online this evening and will likely be published in tomorrow’s print edition. As interesting as some of the details of the previous allegations have been, the real scandal is the appearance that a U.S. Senator tried to help a donor make a lot of money at the same time the donor was pouring hundreds of thousand into the campaigns of Menendez and his allies. The New York Times provides a good overview of the situation but there are several aspects of the Menendez-Melgen relationship that deserve much more scrutiny.
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Quisqueya Now II 