On Friday, May 10, during a political event coinciding with the 26th anniversary of the death of social democratic leader José Francisco Peña Gómez, President Luis Abinader compared himself to dictator Joaquín Balaguer. Abinader thus vindicated someone who, in addition to being a political operator of Yankee imperialism and a puppet president during the tyranny of Trujillo. He also ruled the country with an iron fist between 1966 and 1978, implementing a policy of extermination against left-wing youth.
Balaguer also perpetrated numerous electoral frauds, the last of which dates back to 1996. Abinader organized a rally with the far-right Balaguerist organizations PRSC, PRR, PANR and Convergencia Balaguerista, who announced their electoral support for the re-election Of the president. Abinader said he shared with Balaguer the idea that “ there is no Dominican solution to the Haitian problem,” a refrain he repeats whenever he can.
“(We) are united by love for our country, and this defense exclaims, not only from the border with the 54 kilometers of wall we have built, but with the completion of the 300 kilometers we have left to build. And without excess, but with the defense of Dominicanness”declared the president, in a confused speech in which he suggested that he now intended to fence practically the entire border and not just 190 kilometers as initially planned.
Fervent racism, a central element of Balaguerist thought, is resurfacing. Abinader also said he felt “identified” with dictator Balaguer because of his predilection for building infrastructure and what he said was his low spending on representation.
Dictator Balaguer claimed that corruption would stop at his office door, implicitly acknowledging that he ran a corrupt government but that to do business one had to leave his office. In reality, it is characterized not only by the promotion of corruption “from outside”, but also by brutal clientelism. During the Balaguerista and Abinaderista event, videos containing statements by the dictator were shown, to the applause of the president and the Balaguerista audience, a few dozen people, according to press information.
Abinader also signed a pact with organizations that defend the legacy of the Balaguerista dictatorship. “I reiterate my thanks to these movements of Balaguerista sentiments which support us. It’s good that what brought us to agreement were not campaign speeches or political promises, it was the facts of four years of government », insisted the president, thus admitting what left-wing organizations like the MST denounce, precisely its neo-Trujillo character.
Abinader not only continued the policy of racist denationalization of the Dominican people of Haitian origin, the theft of sugar cane workers’ pensions, undemocratic policies of surveillance and criminalization of dissent such as the new DNI law, he also imposed a de facto state of exception with thousands of warrantless raids of a racist nature against blacks, both Haitians and Dominicans, and continues to deny the right of the working class to organize unions.
The government has even targeted pregnant women and infants in its racist fury against the Haitian immigrant community. Discourses that attempt to justify these policies generally attempt to present racist persecution and xenophobic hatred as supposed attempts to preserve Dominican identity and sovereignty, which demonstrates a clear Balaguerista and Trujillist influence in the thought and action of the Dominican Republic. President Abinader.
With President Abinader’s admission of his identification with the dictator and racist ideologue Balaguer, whose fascist tendencies are clearly reflected in decades of anti-democratic, anti-worker and anti-people political practices, and even in texts such as “The Island of the other side”, there is much more in evidence and in an unsustainable situation the sector of self-proclaimed progressive intellectuality, linked at the time to the Green March or to the demonstrations in the Plaza de la Bandera, which continues today today in high positions in the Dominican government, assuming the spokesperson and representative of a neo-balaguerist and neo-trujillist government.
Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic
13 May 2024
