That was only one of a host of Balaguer’s far-reaching environmental measures. Some of the others were as follows. During the eight years when Balaguer was out of office from 1978 to 1986, other presidents reopened some logging camps and sawmills, and allowed charcoal production from forests to increase. On the first day of his return to the presidency in 1986, Balaguer began issuing executive orders to close logging camps and sawmills again, and on the next day he deployed military helicopters to detect illegal logging and intrusions into national parks. Military operations resumed to capture and imprison loggers, and to remove poor squatters, plus rich agribusinesses and mansions (some of them belonging to Balaguer’s own friends), from the parks. The most notorious of those operations took place in 1992 in Los Haitises National Park, 90% of whose forest had been destroyed; the army expelled thousands of squatters. In a further such operation two years later, personally directed by Balaguer, the army drove bulldozers through luxury houses built by wealthy Dominicans within Juan B. Pérez National Park. Balaguer banned the use of fire as an agricultural method, and even passed a law (which proved difficult to enforce) that every fence post should consist of live rooted trees rather than felled timber. As two sets of measures to undermine demand for Dominican tree products and to replace them with something else, he opened the market to wood imports from Chile, Honduras, and the U.S. (thereby eliminating most demand for Dominican timber in the country’s stores); and he reduced traditional charcoal production from trees (the curse of Haiti) by contracting for liquefied natural gas imports from Venezuela, building several terminals to import that gas, subsidizing the cost of gas to the public to outcompete charcoal, and calling for the distribution without cost of propane stoves and cylinders in order to encourage people to shift from charcoal. He greatly expanded the natural reserve system, declared the country’s first two coastal national parks, added two submerged banks in the ocean to Dominican territory as humpback whale sanctuaries, protected land within 20 yards of rivers and within 60 yards of the coast, protected wetlands, signed the Rio convention on the environment, and banned hunting for 10 years. He put pressure on industries to treat their wastes, launched with limited success some efforts to control air pollution, and slapped a big tax on mining companies. Among the many environmentally damaging proposals that he opposed or blocked were projects for a road to the port of Sanchez through a national park, a north-south road over the Central Cordillera, an international airport at Santiago, a super-port, and a dam at Madrigal. He refused to repair an existing road over the highlands, with the result that it became nearly unusable. In Santa Domingo he founded the Aquarium, the Botanical Garden, and the Natural History Museum and rebuilt the National Zoo, all of which have become major attractions.
As Balaguer’s final political act at the age of 94, he teamed up with President-elect Mejia to block President Fernández’s plan to reduce and weaken the natural reserve system. Balaguer and Mejia achieved that goal by a clever legislative maneuver in which they amended President Fernández’s proposal with a rider that converted the natural reserve system from one existing only by executive order (hence subject to alterations such as those proposed by Fernández), to one established instead by law, in the condition that it had existed in 1996 at the close of Balaguer’s last presidency and before Fernández’s maneuvers. Thus, Balaguer ended his political career by saving the reserve system to which he had devoted so much attention.
All of those actions by Balaguer climaxed the era of top-down environmental management in the Dominican Republic. In the same era, bottom-up efforts also resumed after vanishing under Trujillo. During the 1970s and 1980s scientists did much inventorying of the country’s coastal, marine, and terrestrial natural resources. As Dominicans slowly relearned the methods of private civic participation after decades without it under Trujillo, the 1980s saw the founding of many non-governmental organizations, including several dozen environmental organizations that have become increasingly effective. In contrast to the situation in many developing countries, where environmental efforts are mainly developed by affiliates of international environmental organizations, the bottom-up impetus in the Dominican Republic has come from local NGOs concerned with the environment. Along with universities and with the Dominican Academy of Sciences, these NGOs have now become the leaders of a homegrown Dominican environmental movement.
Why did Balaguer push such a broad range of measures on behalf of the environment? To many of us, it is difficult to reconcile that apparently strong and far-sighted commitment to the environment with his repellent qualities. For 31 years he served under dictator Rafael Trujillo and defended Trujillo’s massacres of Haitians in 1937. He ended up as Trujillo’s puppet president, but he also served Trujillo in positions where he exercised influence, such as secretary of state. Anyone willing to work with such an evil person as Trujillo immediately becomes suspect and tarnished by association. Balaguer also accumulated his own list of evil deeds after Trujillo’s death—deeds that can be blamed only on Balaguer himself. While he won the presidency honestly in the election of 1986, he resorted to fraud, violence, and intimidation to secure his election in 1966 and his reelection in 1970, 1974, 1990, and 1994. He operated his own squads of thugs to assassinate hundreds or perhaps thousands of members of the opposition. He ordered many forced removals of poor people from national parks, and he ordered or tolerated the shooting of illegal loggers. He tolerated widespread corruption. He belonged to Latin America’s tradition of political strongmen or caudillos. Among the quotes attributed to him is: “The constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper.”
Chapters 14 and 15 of this book will discuss the often-complicated reasons why people do or don’t pursue environmentalist policies. While I was visiting the Dominican Republic, I was especially interested in learning, from those who had known Balaguer personally or lived through his presidencies, what could have motivated him. I asked every Dominican whom I interviewed their views of him. Among the 20 Dominicans whom I interviewed at length, I got 20 different answers. Many of them were people who had the strongest possible personal motives for loathing Balaguer: they had been imprisoned by him, or had been imprisoned and tortured by the Trujillo government that he served, or had close relatives and friends who had been killed.
Among this divergence of opinion, there were nevertheless numerous points mentioned independently by many of my informants. Balaguer was described as almost uniquely complex and puzzling. He wanted political power, and his pursuit of policies in which he believed was tempered by concern not to do things that would cost him his power (but he still often pushed dangerously close to that limit of losing power through unpopular policies). He was an extremely skilled, cynical, practical politician whose ability nobody else in the last 42 years of Dominican political history has come remotely close to matching, and who exemplified the adjective “Machiavellian.” He constantly maintained a delicate balancing act between the military, the masses, and competing scheming groups of elites; he succeeded in forestalling military coups against him by fragmenting the military into competing groups; and he was able to inspire such fear even in military officers abusing forests and national parks that, in the sequel to a famous unplanned confrontation recorded on television in 1994, I was told that an army colonel who had opposed Balaguer’s forest protection measures and whom Balaguer angrily summoned ended up urinating in his trousers in terror. In the picturesque words of one historian whom I interviewed, “Balaguer was a snake who shed and changed his skin as needed.” Under Balaguer there was a great deal of corruption that he tolerated, but he himself was not corrupt nor interested in personal wealth, unlike Trujillo. In his own words, “Corruption stops at the door of my office.”
Finally, as one Dominican who had been both imprisoned and tortured summed it up for me, “Balaguer was an evil, but a necessary evil at that stage in Dominican history.” By that phrase, my informant meant that, at the time Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, there were many Dominicans bo
th overseas and in the country with worthy aspirations, but none of them had a fraction of Balaguer’s practical experience in government. Through his actions, he is credited with having consolidated the Dominican middle class, Dominican capitalism, and the country as it exists today, and with having presided over a major improvement in the Dominican economy. Those outcomes inclined many Dominicans to put up with Balaguer’s evil qualities.
In response to my question why Balaguer pursued his environmentalist policies, I encountered much more disagreement. Some Dominicans told me that they thought it was just a sham, either to win votes or to polish his international image. One person viewed Balaguer’s evictions of squatters from national parks as just part of a broad plot to move peasants out of remote forests where they might hatch a pro-Castro rebellion; to depopulate public lands that could eventually be redeveloped as resorts owned by rich Dominicans, rich overseas resort developers, or military people; and to cement Balaguer’s ties with the military.
While there may be some substance to all of those suspected motives, nevertheless the wide range of Balaguer’s environmental actions, and the public unpopularity of some of them and public disinterest in others, make it difficult for me to view his policies as just a sham. Some of his environmental actions, especially his use of the military to relocate squatters, made him look very bad, cost him votes (albeit buffered by his rigging of elections), and cost him support of powerful members of the elite and military (although many others of his policies gained him their support). In the case of many of his environmental measures that I listed, I cannot discern a possible connection to wealthy resort developers, counterinsurgency measures, or currying favor with the army. Instead, Balaguer, as an experienced practical politician, seems to have pursued pro-environment policies as vigorously as he could get away with it, without losing too many votes or too many influential supporters or provoking a military coup against him.
Another issue raised by some of the Dominicans whom I interviewed was that Balaguer’s environmental policies were selective, sometimes ineffective, and exhibited blind spots. He allowed his supporters to do things destructive to the environment, such as damaging riverbeds by extracting rock, gravel, sand, and other building materials. Some of his laws, such as those against hunting and air pollution and fence poles, didn’t work. He sometimes drew back if he encountered opposition to his policies. An especially serious failing of his as an environmentalist was that he neglected to harmonize the needs of rural farmers with environmental concerns, and he could have done much more to foster popular support for the environment. But he still managed to undertake more diverse and more radical pro-environment actions than any other Dominican politician, or indeed than most modern politicians known to me in other countries.
On reflection, it seems to me that the most likely interpretation of Balaguer’s policies is that he really did care about the environment, as he claimed. He mentioned it in almost every speech; he said that conserving forests, rivers, and mountains had been his dream since his childhood; and he stressed it in his first speeches on becoming president in 1966 and again in 1986, and in his last (1994) reinaugural speech. When President Fernández asserted that devoting 32% of the country’s territory to protected areas was excessive, Balaguer responded that the whole country should be a protected area. But as for how he arrived at his pro-environment views, no two people gave me the same opinion. One person said that Balaguer might have been influenced by exposure to environmentalists during early years in his life that he spent in Europe; one noted that Balaguer was consistently anti-Haitian, and that he may have sought to improve the Dominican Republic’s landscape in order to contrast it with Haiti’s devastation; another thought that he had been influenced by his sisters, to whom he was close, and who were said to have been horrified by the deforestation and river siltation that they saw resulting from the Trujillo years; and still another person commented that Balaguer was already 60 years old when he ascended to the post-Trujillo presidency and 90 years old when he stepped down from it, so that he might have been motivated by the changes that he saw around him in his country during his long life.
I don’t know the answers to these questions about Balaguer. Part of our problem in understanding him may be our own unrealistic expectations. We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad,” as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.
We may also be troubled that, if we really acknowledge Balaguer as an environmentalist, his evil traits would unfairly tarnish environmentalism. Yet, as one friend said to me, “Adolf Hitler loved dogs and brushed his teeth, but that doesn’t mean that we should hate dogs and stop brushing our teeth.” I also have to reflect on my own experiences while working in Indonesia from 1979 to 1996 under its military dictatorship. I loathed and feared that dictatorship because of its policies, and also for personal reasons: especially because of the things that it did to many of my New Guinea friends, and because of its soldiers almost killing me. I was therefore surprised to find that that dictatorship set up a comprehensive and effective national park system in Indonesian New Guinea. I arrived in Indonesian New Guinea after years of experience in the democracy of Papua New Guinea, and I expected to find environmental policies much more advanced under the virtuous democracy than under the evil dictatorship. Instead, I had to acknowledge that the reverse was true.
None of the Dominicans to whom I talked claimed to understand Balaguer. In referring to him, they used phrases such as “full of paradoxes,” “controversial,” and “enigmatic.” One person applied to Balaguer the phrase that Winston Churchill used to describe Russia: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The struggle to understand Balaguer reminds me that history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
In light of that history of environmental impacts in the Dominican Republic, what is the current status of the country’s environmental problems, and of its natural reserve system? The major problems fall into eight of the list of 12 categories of environmental problems that will be summarized in Chapter 16: problems involving forests, marine resources, soil, water, toxic substances, alien species, population growth, and population impact.
Deforestation of the pine forests became locally heavy under Trujillo, and then rampant in the five years immediately following his assassination. Balaguer’s ban on logging was relaxed under some other recent presidents. The exodus of Dominicans from rural areas to the cities and overseas has decreased pressure on the forests, but deforestation is continuing especially near the Haitian border, where desperate Haitians cross the border from their almost completely deforested country in order to fell trees for making charcoal and for clearing land to farm as squatters on the Dominican side. In the year 2000, the enforcement of forest protection reverted from the armed forces to the Ministry of the Environment, which is weaker and lacks the necessary funds, so that forest protection is now less effective than it was from 1967 to 2000.
Along most of the Republic’s coastline, marine habitats and coral reefs have been heavily damaged and overfished.
Soil loss by erosion on deforested land has been massive. There is concern about that erosion leading to sediment buildup in the reservoirs behind the dams used to generate the country’s hydroelectric power. Salinization has developed in some irrigated areas, such as at the Barahona Sugar Plantation.
Water quality in the country’s rivers is now very poor because of sediment buildup from erosion, as well as toxic pollution and waste disposal. Rivers that until a few decades ago were clean and safe for swimming are now brown with sediment and unsw
immable. Industries dump their wastes into streams, as do residents of urban barrios with inadequate or non-existent public waste disposal. Riverbeds have been heavily damaged by industrial dredging to extract materials for the construction industry.
Beginning in the 1970s, there have been massive applications of toxic pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides in rich agricultural areas, such as the Cibao Valley. The Dominican Republic has continued to use toxins that were banned in their overseas countries of manufacture long ago. That toxin use has been tolerated by the government, because Dominican agriculture is so profitable. Workers in rural areas, even children, routinely apply toxic agricultural products without face or hand protection. As a result, effects of agricultural toxins on human health have now been well documented. I was struck by the near-absence of birds in the Cibao Valley’s rich agricultural areas: if the toxins are so bad for birds, they presumably are also bad for people. Other toxic problems arise from the large Falconbridge iron/nickel mine, whose smoke fills the air along parts of the highway between the country’s two largest cities (Santo Domingo and Santiago). The Rosario gold mine has been temporarily closed down because the country lacks the technology to treat the mine’s cyanide and acid effluents. Both Santo Domingo and Santiago have smog, resulting from mass transit using obsolete vehicles, increased energy consumption, and the abundance of private generators that people maintain in their homes and businesses because of the frequent power failures of the public electricity systems. (I experienced several power failures each day that I was in Santo Domingo, and after my return my Dominican friends wrote me that they were now suffering under 21-hour blackouts.)
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