The US ambassador to the Dominican Republic has accumulated a series of interventions that a prominent Dominican columnist says cross the line from diplomacy into interference, evoking an older era of imperial power.
Writing in Diario Libre, columnist Clotilde Parra draws on Marx’s dictum that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce to frame the ambassador, who arrived in November of last year, as a Trump-era proconsul: a figure who treats sovereign governments as manageable subordinates and local officials as domesticable functionaries, with little regard for national law.
Parra cites three examples. The ambassador rebuked Justice Minister Antoliano Peralta for attending a meeting in Madrid convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. She publicly criticized provisions of the Dominican Penal Code as a threat to press freedom. And, most recently, she pressed Dominican health authorities to adopt what Parra describes as the anti-scientific and conspiratorial agenda of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.
That third intervention draws the heaviest scrutiny. The ambassador posted on Instagram presenting a visit by Vice President Raquel Pena and Health Minister Victor Athallah to Kennedy as centered on an autism “treatment” promoted by a practitioner named Ernesto Fadul. Dominican authorities had already submitted a report with strong criticism of the practice, a fact conspicuously absent from the ambassador’s account, Parra writes.
Journalist Nuria Piera investigated further. Piera obtained a copy of the Washington meeting agenda, which contained no reference to Fadul’s treatment, and she noted that the Vice Presidency’s own website described the gathering differently from the ambassador’s Instagram post. Piera also contacted the University of Zaragoza, where Fadul claims to have earned his doctorate and completed several specializations, and received a response stating the institution has no record confirming those credentials. Parra says the findings oblige the government of President Abinader to respond publicly.
She closes with a historical parallel: 111 years ago, US ambassador William Russell conditioned recognition of the government of Francisco Henriquez y Carvajal on an absolute surrender of sovereignty, a step that preceded the military intervention of 1916. What was tragedy then, Parra argues, is farce today.
