US embassy cable - 05SANTODOMINGO3524

UNCLAS SANTO DOMINGO 003524 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: DR, PGOV, Dominican Politics 
SUBJECT: DOMINICAN POLITICS #33: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC -- AS A 
FAILED STATE, ACCORDING TO FP 
 
 1. (SBU) The following is number 33 in our series on the 
first year of Leonel Fernandez's administration. 
 
Does the sum of the parts add up?  Or has the journal 
"Foreign Policy" lost its mind? 
 
A comment from an Embassy colleague, July 5: 
 
I arrived home last night after two weeks of leave.  On the 
trip and at arrival I encountered nothing out of the 
ordinary.  When I arrived home my wife called me and said 
that she had read that "Foreign Policy" listed the Dominican 
Republic on its first annual "failed states" index.  I was 
surprised. 
 
On the ride home I had asked my cab driver if there was 
anything noteworthy in the news.  He mentioned the President 
had been traveling, but that was it.  No mention that the 
state had failed while I was away.  When I downloaded the 
list (see below) I was astonished that not only was the 
Dominican Republic high on the list, number 19, but that it 
was the third highest ranked nation in the hemisphere -- 
behind Haiti (#10) and Colombia (#14), two countries 
experiencing ongoing civil violence. 
 
A country's score in this exercise is determined by an 
aggregation of 12 indices, scaled 1-10.  The Dominican 
Republic's highest score was for "deterioration of public 
services," for which it received a 9.6 out of possible 10. 
That score was worse than all of the countries above it (or 
below it, depending on point of view) on the list except 
Somalia (a perfect 10 as it is not a functioning state), 
Haiti (9.8), and North Korea (9.7).  Amazingly, Liberia 
scores an 8.2 in this measure -- a country that has not, 
according to "The Economist," paid civil servants in years. 
 
The next highest (worst) score for the Dominicans is a 9.2 on 
the measure of "rise of factionalized elites."  This score is 
equal or higher than several countries that are convulsed in 
full-blown civil wars and that have UN peacekeepers keeping 
the "factionalized elites" from killing each other. 
 
Another black mark was a Dominican score of 9.2 on the 
measure of "widespread violation of human rights."  Everyone 
agrees that human rights protection can be improved here. 
But of the top 19 countries, the Dominican score is a number 
higher than those for the others except top ranked 
(worst-ranked) Cote d'Ivoire.  Yes, the index implies, based 
on score, that respect for human rights is worse in the 
Dominican Republic than in North Korea, a country with 
verifiable gulags, and worse than in several countries that 
have recently experienced full-blown genocides. 
 
I have spent considerable time studying social sciences and, 
I understand that when constructing a list such as the one in 
"Foreign Policy" one cannot possibly be an expert on all of 
the countries on it.  But having lived in the Dominican 
Republic for the past year, it seems inescapable to me that 
many of the indices for the Dominican Republic are patently 
absurd.  If so, then "Foreign Policy" and the Carnegie 
Institute for Peace should completely revamp the methodology 
for constructing the "failed states" list. 
 
On the other hand, if "Foreign Policy" is right, then the 
Department of State should reexamine whether the current 
hardship differential of 20 percent accurately reflects the 
fact that we are living in a state teetering on the brink of 
failure. 
 
2. (U) Research and drafting by Daniel O'Connor. 
 
3. (U) This piece and others may be consulted on our SIPRNET 
site, http://www.state.sgov.gov/p/wha/santodomingo< /a> along with 
extensive other material. 
HERTELL