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Dominican Republic Crime
The government did not publish statistics on the
national
incidence of crime, but the daily newspapers of Santo
Domingo
regularly reported criminal acts. The crimes enumerated
ran the
gamut from murder, rape, and robbery to fraud,
counterfeiting,
and extortion. According to the newspapers, rural crime
accounted
for only a small portion of the total. Crime in urban
areas was
believed to have risen during the 1980s as a result of
growing
unemployment, pervasive underemployment, and migration
from rural
to urban areas
(see Dominican Republic - Urbanization
, ch. 2;
Dominican Republic - Labor
, ch. 3).
One
manifestation of urban crime was criminal activity by
juvenile
street gangs. This problem was deemed sufficiently serious
in
1988 to merit a campaign that targeted juvenile
delinquents for
detention.
Crimes associated with narcotics presented a growing
problem
in the 1980s, as drug traffickers attempted to use the
Dominican
Republic as a transshipment point between various Latin
American
countries and the United States. The police were on the
front
line of the war against drugs, but elements of the
military took
part as well. The navy, for instance, intercepted several
boats
carrying cocaine and marijuana during the late 1970s, and
air
force patrols were given the task of spotting seaborne
drug
traffickers. In 1988 the government created the National
Economic
Council for the Control of Drugs to coordinate domestic
and
international narcotics programs and to integrate the
efforts of
all police and military elements involved in antinarcotics
activities.
Corruption among government officials was another
problem
given special attention by the government, as well as by
the
press. This attention reflected a widespread public
perception,
buttressed by documented accounts in the press, that
corruption
was pervasive in several spheres of official life.
Successive
governments had stated their intention to bring offenders
to
trial. Although several such proceedings had resulted, the
perception persisted that corruption continued unabated.
The government's prosecution of some former officials
had
itself been tainted by charges that political persecution,
not a
desire for justice, was behind certain indictments. Such
charges
were made most forcefully in 1987, when former president
Jorge
and several top members of the armed forces leadership in
his
administration were charged with fraud in connection with
weapons
purchases. Jorge, in the United States for medical
treatment at
the time, was sentenced in absentia to twenty years in
prison and
was fined several million pesos. He returned to the nation
in
late 1988 to appeal his conviction. His trial was still
underway
as of mid-1989.
Data as of December 1989
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