Caribbean & Central America - March 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

With campaigning well under way ahead of the 15 May general elections, the main opposition Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM) is seeking to exploit President Danilo Medina’s links to a corruption scandal in Brazil as part of efforts to try to undermine his re-election bid for the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD). While the case against Medina looks rather tenuous, the PRM is determined to milk it for all its worth by seeking to bring a legal case against him in the local courts.

Medina’s suspected links to corruption in Brazil emerged on 22 February when Brazil’s federal police issued an arrest warrant against João Santana, a renowned Brazilian publicist and political campaign strategist, who was advising Medina on his campaign. Santana was behind the campaign that first brought Brazil’s ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores to power under former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) in 2002, (subsequently re-elected in 2006), and the campaigns which produced victories for President Dilma Rousseff in 2010 and 2014. However, he is now wanted for questioning in connection with ongoing investigations into widespread corruption at Brazil’s state-owned oil firm, Petrobras. Investigators suspect that Santana received US$7bn in payments from Brazilian construction firms under investigation for their involvement in the Petrobras scandal.

Immediately after the arrest warrant for Santana was issued, a local anti-corruption civil-society organisation, Alianza Dominicana Contra la Corrupción (Adocco), called on the authorities to detain and extradite Santana who was believed to still be in the DR. In a press conference, the PLD promptly responded by announcing that Santana had resigned as Medina’s campaign advisor. The PLD’s general campaign coordinator, Francisco Javier García, said that Santana, who has also worked on campaigns in El Salvador, Panama and Venezuela, quit in order to prevent the accusations levelled against him from impacting on Medina’s campaign. All of this was confirmed in a separate statement by Santana who said that he would return to Brazil to clear his name.

However, the PRM, whose presidential candidate, Luis Abinader, has attacked the Medina government for its weak efforts to combat corruption, wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to attack Medina and the PLD over their links to Santana. Jesús Vásquez, the PRM secretary general, publicly called for the PLD and Medina to explain these links and clarify whether the party had received any money through Santana’s contacts. The call was dismissed by the PLD which insisted that Santana was exclusively wanted for alleged crimes committed in Brazil. But the PRM was not convinced. On 2 March, the party presented a formal request before the Dominican Republic’s national district attorney general’s office calling on it to launch an investigation into Santana and his links to the PLD.

The PRM wants the authorities to investigate whether Santana was involved in money laundering and/or received irregular payments from the Dominican government through its contractual link to the PLD. The request also calls for investigators to clarify whether Santana has any contracts with state institutions and notes that Santana’s PR company, Polis Caribe Comunicación y Marketing, is registered as an approved government contractor. While it seems unlikely that a solid case can be built against Medina, the PRM is no doubt hoping that an investigation could tarnish the president’s hitherto unblemished reputation by linking him with the kind of corrupt practices that have increasingly been associated with the PLD since it came to power in 2004.

• Polls

While polls continue to give President Danilo Medina a commanding lead in the presidential race ahead of the election, these surveys also show that support for Luis Abinader, the main opposition challenger from the Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM), is steadily growing. A Gallup-Hoy poll released on 4 February gave Medina 51.8% of voting intentions to 35.7% for Abinader, sufficient for Medina to secure a first-round victory (50%+1 of the vote). However, the previous July poll gave Medina 62.6% and Abinader 17.4%. The same 4 February Gallup-Hoy poll also showed that 45.7% of respondents believed that there was more government corruption under Medina than previously (compared with 28% in the previous July survey), while only 19.2% believed that there was less.