Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which it shares with Haiti to the west. A small country with a large economy and a great income inequality among its population, the Dominican Republic is also a significant exporter of illegal narcotics, and Dominican drug cartels have been prominent in the American narcotics scene for decades.

Most of the drugs trafficked through the Dominican Republic originate in Colombia. The Republic's banking system makes money laundering easy, and many Colombian drug traffickers use the island to clean their money while shipping cocaine to North America and Europe. Perhaps a 10th of the cocaine in the United States comes through the Dominican Republic, and some estimates have placed it much higher. Much of the heroin in the United States comes through the Republic as well, although heroin production in South America is too low to match American demand. Recently, the Dominican Republic has become a transit point for ecstasy on its way from the Netherlands and Belgium to the United States and Canada.

There is a large Dominican diaspora, and throughout the northeastern United States, Dominicans have since the 1990s occupied what is called the middle echelon of the drug trade: the middle management between the Colombian providers (who may traffic drugs all the way to the United States or only as far as the Republic) and the street-level dealers. This is an arrangement that reduced risk for the Colombian cartels as flashy, violent cartels like the Medellín went into decline, and risk-averse businessmen like the Cali mafia took their place. These arrangements came about at a time when the Colombians were dissatisfied with the Mexican groups they worked with, while at the same time street-level Dominican dealers in New York City were showing greater success and ambition than other groups, saving their profits and bidding for greater and greater shares of distribution, particularly throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions.

As a result, the traditional drug trafficking routes to the United States shifted, with routes through the Dominican Republic waxing as the overland [Page 204]routes across the U.S.-Mexican border waned. Over the next 15 years, Dominicans and Dominican Americans became the overseers of Colombian cartel operations throughout not only the United States, but also Haiti and much of the Caribbean. The Colombians had the networks and connections in place, from Colombian military personnel who would reveal the coordinates of patrol vessels for traffickers to avoid, to friendly judges, to airport personnel who would disable X-ray machines to let drugs through undetected; the Dominicans had the manpower and the ambition to do the work.

The Dominican Republic has a harsh anti-narcotics policy, as is common in countries through which drugs are trafficked. The president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez (1996–2000, 2004–present), was born in the Republic capital of Santo Domingo, but spent his childhood and teen years in New York City, where he witnessed the 1960s drug culture firsthand. Better-equipped and more willing than many Caribbean leaders to deal with the problem of drug trafficking and to cooperate with American agencies, Fernandez has done his best to avoid the “Colombianization” of the Republic—the development of a synergistic and symbiotic relationship between the crime lord and the state, in which the lawmakers, judges, media, and banking system are too dependent on drug money to make a sincere effort to stem the tide.

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