Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (64 page)
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Authors: Jared M. Diamond
Balaguer was out of office from 1978 to 1986, other presidents reopened some logging camps and sawmills, and allowed charcoal production from forests to increase. On the first day of his return to the presidency in 1986,
Balaguer began issuing executive orders to close logging camps and saw
mills again, and on the next day he deployed military helicopters to detect
illegal logging and intrusions into national parks. Military operations re
sumed to capture and imprison loggers, and to remove poor squatters, plus rich agribusinesses and mansions (some of them belonging to Balaguer's own friends), from the parks. The most notorious of those operations took
place in 1992 in Los Haitises National Park, 90% of whose forest had been
destroyed; the army expelled thousands of squatters. In a further such op
eration two years later, personally directed by Balaguer, the army drove bull
dozers through luxury houses built by wealthy Dominicans within Juan B.
Perez National Park. Balaguer banned the use of fire as an agricultural
method, and even passed a law (which proved difficult to enforce) that
every fence post should consist of live rooted trees rather than felled timber.
As two sets of measures to undermine demand for Dominican tree prod
ucts and to replace them with something else, he opened the market to wood imports from Chile, Honduras, and the U.S. (thereby eliminating most demand for Dominican timber in the country's stores); and he re
duced traditional charcoal production from trees (the curse of Haiti) by
contracting for liquefied natural gas imports from Venezuela, building sev
eral terminals to import that gas, subsidizing the cost of gas to the public
to outcompete charcoal, and calling for the distribution without cost of
propane stoves and cylinders in order to encourage people to shift from charcoal. He greatly expanded the natural reserve system, declared the
country's first two coastal national parks, added two submerged banks in
the ocean to Dominican territory as humpback whale sanctuaries, pro
tected land within 20 yards of rivers and within 60 yards of the coast, pro
tected wetlands, signed the Rio convention on the environment, and
banned hunting for 10 years. He put pressure on industries to treat their
wastes, launched with limited success some efforts to control air pollution,
and slapped a big tax on mining companies. Among the many environmen
tally damaging proposals that he opposed or blocked were projects for a
road to the port of Sanchez through a national park, a north-south road
over the Central Cordillera, an international airport at Santiago, a super-
port, and a dam at Madrigal. He refused to repair an existing road over the
highlands, with the result that it became nearly unusable. In Santa Domingo he founded the Aquarium, the Botanical Garden, and the Natural
History Museum and rebuilt the National Zoo, all of which have become
major attractions.
As Balaguer's final political act at the age of 94, he teamed up with President-elect Mejia to block President Fernandez's plan to reduce and
weaken the natural reserve system. Balaguer and Mejia achieved that goal by
a clever legislative maneuver in which they amended President Fernandez's proposal with a rider that converted the natural reserve system from one ex
isting only by executive order (hence subject to alterations such as those
proposed by Fernandez), to one established instead by law, in the condition
that it had existed in 1996 at the close of Balaguer's last presidency and be
fore Fernandez's maneuvers. Thus, Balaguer ended his political career by saving the reserve system to which he had devoted so much attention.
All of those actions by Balaguer climaxed the era of top-down environ
mental management in the Dominican Republic. In the same era, bottom-
up efforts also resumed after vanishing under Trujillo. During the 1970s
and 1980s scientists did much inventorying of the country's coastal, marine, and terrestrial natural resources. As Dominicans slowly relearned the meth
ods of private civic participation after decades without it under Trujillo, the
1980s saw the founding of many non-governmental organizations, including several dozen environmental organizations that have become increasingly effective. In contrast to the situation in many developing countries,
where environmental efforts are mainly developed by affiliates of inter
national environmental organizations, the bottom-up impetus in the Domini
can Republic has come from local NGOs concerned with the environment.
Along with universities and with the Dominican Academy of Sciences, these
NGOs have now become the leaders of a homegrown Dominican environ
mental movement.
Why did Balaguer push such a broad range of measures on behalf of the en
vironment? To many of us, it is difficult to reconcile that apparently strong
and far-sighted commitment to the environment with his repellent quali
ties. For 31 years he served under dictator Rafael Trujillo and defended Tru-
jillo's massacres of Haitians in 1937. He ended up as Trujillo's puppet
president, but he also served Trujillo in positions where he exercised influence, such as secretary of state. Anyone willing to work with such an evil
person as Trujillo immediately becomes suspect and tarnished by association. Balaguer also accumulated his own list of evil deeds after Trujillo s death
—deeds that can be blamed only on Balaguer himself. While he won
the presidency honestly in the election of 1986, he resorted to fraud, vio
lence, and intimidation to secure his election in 1966 and his reelection in
1970,1974,1990, and 1994. He operated his own squads of thugs to assassi
nate hundreds or perhaps thousands of members of the opposition. He or
dered many forced removals of poor people from national parks, and he
ordered or tolerated the shooting of illegal loggers. He tolerated widespread
corruption. He belonged to Latin America's tradition of political strongmen
or
caudillos.
Among the quotes attributed to him is: "The constitution is
nothing more than a piece of paper."
Chapters 14 and 15 of this book will discuss the often-complicated reasons why people do or don't pursue environmentalist policies. While I was
visiting the Dominican Republic, I was especially interested in learning,
from those who had known Balaguer personally or lived through his presi
dencies, what could have motivated him. I asked every Dominican whom I
interviewed their views of him. Among the 20 Dominicans whom I inter
viewed at length, I got 20 different answers. Many of them were people who
had the strongest possible personal motives for loathing Balaguer: they had
been imprisoned by him, or had been imprisoned and tortured by the Tru-
jillo government that he served, or had close relatives and friends who had
been killed.
Among this divergence of opinion, there were nevertheless numerous points mentioned independently by many of my informants. Balaguer was described as almost uniquely complex and puzzling. He wanted political power, and his pursuit of policies in which he believed was tempered by
concern not to do things that would cost him his power (but he still often pushed dangerously close to that limit of losing power through unpopular
policies). He was an extremely skilled, cynical, practical politician whose
ability nobody else in the last 42 years of Dominican political history
has come remotely close to matching, and who exemplified the adjective
"Machiavellian." He constantly maintained a delicate balancing act between
the military, the masses, and competing scheming groups of elites; he succeeded in forestalling military coups against him by fragmenting the mili
tary into competing groups; and he was able to inspire such fear even in military officers abusing forests and national parks that, in the sequel to a
famous unplanned confrontation recorded on television in 1994,1 was told
that an army colonel who had opposed Balaguer's forest protection measures and whom Balaguer angrily summoned ended up urinating in his trousers in terror. In the picturesque words of one historian whom I inter
viewed, "Balaguer was a snake who shed and changed his skin as needed."
Under Balaguer there was a great deal of corruption that he tolerated, but he himself was not corrupt nor interested in personal wealth, unlike Tru-
jillo. In his own words, "Corruption stops at the door of my office."
Finally, as one Dominican who had been both imprisoned and tortured
summed it up for me, "Balaguer was an evil, but a necessary evil at that stage in Dominican history." By that phrase, my informant meant that, at
the time Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, there were many Dominicans
both overseas and in the country with worthy aspirations, but none of them
had a fraction of Balaguer's practical experience in government. Through
his actions, he is credited with having consolidated the Dominican middle
class, Dominican capitalism, and the country as it exists today, and with
having presided over a major improvement in the Dominican economy. Those outcomes inclined many Dominicans to put up with Balaguer's evil
qualities.
In response to my question why Balaguer pursued his environmentalist
policies, I encountered much more disagreement. Some Dominicans told
me that they thought it was just a sham, either to win votes or to polish his
international image. One person viewed Balaguer's evictions of squatters from national parks as just part of a broad plot to move peasants out of remote forests where they might hatch a pro-Castro rebellion; to depopulate
public lands that could eventually be redeveloped as resorts owned by rich Dominicans, rich overseas resort developers, or military people; and to ce
ment Balaguer's ties with the military.
While there may be some substance to all of those suspected motives,
nevertheless the wide range of Balaguer's environmental actions, and the public unpopularity of some of them and public disinterest in others, make
it difficult for me to view his policies as just a sham. Some of his environmental actions, especially his use of the military to relocate squatters, made him look very bad, cost him votes (albeit buffered by his rigging of elec
tions), and cost him support of powerful members of the elite and military
(although many others of his policies gained him their support). In the case of many of his environmental measures that I listed, I cannot discern a pos
sible connection to wealthy resort developers, counterinsurgency measures,
or currying favor with the army. Instead, Balaguer, as an experienced practi
cal politician, seems to have pursued pro-environment policies as vigorously as he could get away with it, without losing too many votes or too many influential supporters or provoking a military coup against him.
Another issue raised by some of the Dominicans whom I interviewed
was that Balaguer's environmental policies were selective, sometimes inef-
fective, and exhibited blind spots. He allowed his supporters to do things destructive to the environment, such as damaging riverbeds by extracting
rock, gravel, sand, and other building materials. Some of his laws, such as
those against hunting and air pollution and fence poles, didn't work. He
sometimes drew back if he encountered opposition to his policies. An espe
cially serious failing of his as an environmentalist was that he neglected to
harmonize the needs of rural farmers with environmental concerns, and he
could have done much more to foster popular support for the environment.
But he still managed to undertake more diverse and more radical pro-
environment actions than any other Dominican politician, or indeed than most modern politicians known to me in other countries.
On reflection, it seems to me that the most likely interpretation of Bala-
guer's policies is that he really did care about the environment, as he
claimed. He mentioned it in almost every speech; he said that conserving
forests, rivers, and mountains had been his dream since his childhood; and
he stressed it in his first speeches on becoming president in 1966 and again in 1986, and in his last (1994) reinaugural speech. When President Fernan
dez asserted that devoting 32% of the country's territory to protected areas
was excessive, Balaguer responded that the whole country should be a protected area. But as for how he arrived at his pro-environment views, no two
people gave me the same opinion. One person said that Balaguer might
have been influenced by exposure to environmentalists during early years in
his life that he spent in Europe; one noted that Balaguer was consistently anti-Haitian, and that he may have sought to improve the Dominican Republic's landscape in order to contrast it with Haiti's devastation; another thought that he had been influenced by his sisters, to whom he was close,
and who were said to have been horrified by the deforestation and river sil-
tation that they saw resulting from the Trujillo years; and still another per
son commented that Balaguer was already 60 years old when he ascended to
the post-Trujillo presidency and 90 years old when he stepped down from
it, so that he might have been motivated by the changes that he saw around
him in his country during his long life.
I don't know the answers to these questions about Balaguer. Part of our
problem in understanding him may be our own unrealistic expectations.
We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously "good" or "bad," as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through
every aspect of a person's behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is dif
ficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead
