Abinader Takes Haiti and Organized Crime to the Vatican

On a European tour, President Luis Abinader met the Vatican's top diplomats, part of a sustained effort to internationalize the crisis next door that the Dominican Republic cannot solve alone.

President Luis Abinader met the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher in Rome, with Haiti, Cuba and transnational organized crime among the topics discussed (CatholicCulture.org and Dominican Today, October 15). The meeting was part of a broader European trip that also took in the Rome World Food Forum and encounters with Italy's President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. A Vatican statement noted 'particular attention to the repercussions of conflicts and transnational organized crime.'

Haiti is the subtext of nearly every Dominican foreign-policy move, and this one is no exception. The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and Haiti's collapse into gang-driven chaos has become the defining security and migration challenge for its larger, more stable neighbor. Abinader has built much of his presidency around a hard line on the border, including a controversial border wall and mass deportations, while simultaneously pressing the international community to do more to stabilize Haiti itself. Taking the issue to the Vatican, an institution with unique moral reach and a long history of engagement in Haiti, fits that strategy of internationalization.

The logic is that the Dominican Republic cannot fix Haiti and cannot insulate itself from Haiti's problems, which leaves internationalizing the crisis as its main lever. Every forum in which Abinader raises Haiti, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European Union, now the Vatican, is an attempt to keep the world's attention on a crisis that the world is prone to forget between atrocities. The United Nations Security Council's renewal of Haiti sanctions earlier in the same week, and the extension of the mandate for the force confronting Haiti's gangs, are the kind of international engagement Abinader has been pushing for, even as their effect on the ground remains limited.

The organized-crime theme connects the Dominican case to the wider Caribbean. The same trafficking networks that move cocaine from South America through the islands toward North America and Europe operate across Hispaniola, exploiting Haiti's absence of state control, and they do not respect the border the Dominican Republic has worked so hard to harden. A president raising transnational organized crime at the Vatican is implicitly acknowledging that walls and deportations address the symptoms his voters see while the networks themselves require cooperation far beyond any single island's reach.

The Dominican Republic has been one of the Caribbean's economic success stories of the past decade, with strong growth, booming tourism and significant foreign investment, and that relative strength is precisely what makes its Haiti dilemma so acute. A prosperous, stable country sits beside a failed state, bound to it by geography and unable to wall the problem away entirely. Abinader's European tour, with its stops in Rome and its meetings with Mattarella and Meloni, is the diplomacy of a leader trying to make his neighbor's crisis everyone's responsibility. Whether the attention he wins translates into the stabilization Haiti needs is the question that has defeated every such effort so far. Until it is answered, the Dominican Republic is left doing what it has done throughout the crisis, hardening its border, deporting those who cross, and carrying its neighbor's emergency to every capital that will listen, in the hope that someone with more leverage than a country of eleven million will finally be moved to act.