Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez speaks at Brown University this afternoon, on "The Transformation of the Dominican Republic."

By Tom Mooney
Journal staff writer

PROVIDENCE -- While Congress wrangled over a plan to rescue the country's financial industry today, the president of the Dominican Republic told about 400 people gathered at a Brown University auditorium that "in order to save democracy in Latin America we also need a rescue package.''

President Leonel Fernandez said he wasn't looking specifically to the United States to help the region, where some countries are so weary of poverty and joblessness their citizens express "some dissatisfaction with democracy.''

Rather, he said, he was looking for the developed world in general to live up to a specific pledge it made back in 2000.

That year at a United Nations assembly, Fernandez said, 189 developed countries promised to devote less than 1 percent of their annual gross domestic product to developing countries, but so far only 5 countries have come through with any money.

"If more countries had lived up to the pledge, we would be further along.''

In some Latin American countries, the president warned, social and economic problems are so immense, people grumble that perhaps it would be better to live under a totalitarian regime that promised jobs and better living conditions "instead of a democracy that has failed us.''

Fernandez, however, was not speaking about his Caribbean country. Twice the size of New Hampshire with about 10 million people, its citizens, he said, have seen a transformation in living conditions since the late 1970s under a stable, peaceful democracy.

Still, he said, there are tremendous challenges facing his country, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Fernandez's talk in the Salomon Center was part of Brown's Stephen A. Ogden Jr. '60 Memorial Lecture series, named for a student who died in 1963 from injuries he sustained in a car accident. The lecture series attempts to improve international relations through better understanding.

One-tenth of the Dominican Republic's population lives in the United States, and Rhode Island hosts one of the largest Dominican populations in the country. (Some studies put the number at more than 30,000). Many turned out to hear the man now serving his third non-consecutive term as president.

 Tags  Brown University

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