well, well... what happened with the super tucanos bought by Leonel
Fernandez? are they patrolling or they were used for spare parts, as
usually happens in DR armed forces?
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Dominican Republic sees surge in drug smuggling
Thu May 1, 2008 6:32pm EDT
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By Tom Brown
KEY WEST, Florida (Reuters) - Drug smugglers are flying with impunity
into the Dominican Republic and have turned it into a far more
important transshipment point for South American cocaine than its
largely lawless and impoverished neighbor, Haiti, U.S. officials said
on Thursday.
"This country has lost the control of its airspace," Lt. Col. James
Love of the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force South in Key West told
Reuters in an interview.
Cocaine-laden flights from Venezuela, in particular, are soaring as
the Dominican Republic becomes the main Caribbean transit route for
drugs to the United States, the officials said.
It takes about only seven hours for a single-engine Cessna to take off
from Venezuela, drop its tightly packed bales of cocaine onto
Dominican soil from the air, and return to Venezuela for another load.
The Joint Interagency Task Force, where Love serves as director of
planning and policy, tracks drug trafficking through the Caribbean and
Central and South America.
A recent U.S. State Department report said the Dominican Republic and
Haiti, which share the island of Hispaniola, both saw a 38 percent
increase in drug smuggling flights last year.
That followed a 167 percent surge in flights to the Caribbean island
from Venezuela in 2006, the report said.
The Dominican Republic -- far wealthier and more stable than its
neighbor -- is now getting the lion's share of the business.
In 2005, when Love and other officials say Hispaniola first started
grabbing U.S. attention as a narcotics transit point, there were 26
suspected cocaine flights into Haiti and 33 to the Dominican Republic.
By last year, suspected drug flights into Haiti totaled just 18, while
the number to its neighbor jumped to 107.
'EASIER, CHEAPER'
"The drug traffickers are having trouble doing business in Haiti,"
said Lt. Col. James Patterson, an aide to Love, when asked why the
smuggling business had shifted in favor of one country over another.
"It's easier, it's cheaper," he added, saying there were any number of
reasons why traffickers might prefer doing business in one country
over another.
In its report in March, the State Department said both Haiti and the
Dominican Republic suffered from the corrosive effects of corruption
and weak government institutions.
But one U.S. counternarcotics official, speaking on background, said
the notorious lawlessness in Haiti was bad for business of all kinds,
including the drug trade.
"It's not a very stable environment to do business in," the official
said.
Adding to its relative attractions, the Dominican Republic is a hub
for international shipping and sits across the Mona Passage from the
U.S. territory of Puerto Rico -- an easy springboard for shipments to
the U.S. mainland.
"At some point, there's got to be a peak here," said Patterson, when
asked about possible limits to the Dominican Republic's expanding role
in the drug trade.
"At some point, they're going to go somewhere else," he said of the
smugglers.
(Editing by Michael Christie and Peter Cooney)
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