Passage of New Law Could Jeopardize Protected Areas in the Dominican Republic

At the request of Dominican President Hipolito Mejia, a majority of his fellow congressmen passed a bill this week that will pave the way for Spanish company Globalia to build a hotel in a protected area inside a national park.

President Mejia greenlighted Globalia’s CEO Juan Jose Hidalgo to start breaking ground for the Higuey Hotel in the province of Altagracia, a move that has made Mr. Mejia take considerable flak from both local hotel and environmental groups.

The public beatings come from nearly two dozen environmental and hotel organizations that strongly believe the project “is riddled with technical drawbacks and will do nothing but put a couple of national parks to rest.”

The draft bill entitled Protected Areas Act was unanimously approved by the Senate last April 20. The bill’s critics claim the new piece of legislation will rule out significant chunks of the East and Jaragua national parks.

Among the “project’s biggest problems,” –the committee points out- the most worrisome of all is the intention to give the nation’s Tourism and Mining Department more leverage to use protected areas, when they should be instead under the management of the Department of Environmental Protection.

“In addition to this, the new law would disrupt the Biosphere Reserve in the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo area that covers over half a million acres of land in the southeastern side of the country by mapping new limits to the Jaragua National Park,” the committee’s statement points out.

The project foresees the exclusion of some 37 square miles of vital areas and little more than a mile of beaches at the East National Park. The new ecological “gerrymandering” has been done without letting environmental experts have a say in the issue.

The committee is made up of members of the National Hotels & Restaurants Association, the Dominican Tour Operators Association and the National Council for Tourism Promotion.