In an opinion column published August 24, 2026 in the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, Martín Valerio Jiminián, executive director of the Cámara Minera Petrolera de la República Dominicana (the Dominican Chamber of Mining and Petroleum), said he used the artificial intelligence tool Grok to study how supporters and critics of mining in the Dominican Republic argue with each other on X, and concluded that the two sides speak different languages but do not start from incompatible worldviews.
Valerio Jiminián wrote that he asked Grok to identify five accounts favorable to mining and five critical of it, chosen for their visibility and participation in the Dominican Republic's public debate on X, and to compare their recurring arguments, the sources of evidence each side considers trustworthy, their views of development and sustainability, and any points where they might agree. In a second stage, he said, the exercise stripped the arguments of the identity of whoever made them so they could be judged by a common standard. He noted the exercise was not meant to statistically represent the national debate.
Two different measures of success
According to the analysis, the pro-mining camp builds its case around measurable variables such as exports, investment, employment, tax revenue, geological potential, institutional modernization and technical capacity, and defines sustainability through standards, regulation, oversight, mine closure and environmental monitoring. Critical voices, he wrote, use a different unit of measurement altogether: not GDP or foreign investment but the territory itself, meaning water, agriculture, watersheds, communities, food sovereignty and the survival of local livelihoods.
Evidence that convinces one side, not the other
Valerio Jiminián said the divide deepens over what each side accepts as reliable evidence. Pro-mining discourse trusts official data, scientific studies, technical monitoring, public institutions, academia and international standards, he wrote, while critics give more weight to the territory itself, communities, churches, courts, independent scientists and accumulated experience of environmental harm. He said this means a company's technical study, presented to show a risk can be managed, can be read by skeptics as further proof of the problem, while a photograph or a community testimony can carry great social and political weight without proving a specific project's environmental impact on its own. National figures on mining's benefits do not prove a specific deposit is viable, he wrote, and local anecdotal evidence alone does not prove an operation is technically unviable.
Points of agreement that go unnoticed
Once identities are stripped away, Valerio Jiminián wrote, several points of agreement emerge. Both sides treat water as the main test of a mining project's legitimacy: the industry talks about recirculation, monitoring and technology, while critics answer with the phrase water yes, gold no, yet both agree that a project unable to offer credible guarantees on water is socially indefensible.
He said both camps also agree that not all territory should be treated the same, since the existence of a mineral deposit does not automatically create a right to extract it, and both value what he called social license, with industry emphasizing dialogue, territorial benefits and transparency, and communities emphasizing popular will and the right to participate. Perhaps most significantly, he wrote, neither side believes the current institutional framework resolves these conflicts well: some want a new mining law and greater legal certainty, while others want territorial exclusions and protected areas, but both are pointing at the same regulatory gray zone, which he said produces uncertainty for communities, insecurity for investors and conflicts the state ends up resolving politically instead of preventing institutionally.
Who decides what risk is acceptable
Valerio Jiminián argued the real question beneath the Dominican Republic's mining debate is not development versus the environment but who has the authority to decide when a risk is acceptable: the company that spent years studying a deposit, the state agency responsible for overseeing it, the community living on the land, a university, an independent laboratory or a court. He said the analysis found a shared blind spot, in that almost no one on either side specifies in advance what objective conditions would change their mind, and that science is frequently invoked without saying what measurement, by whom, over what period and under what protocol should count as sufficient.
Replacing labels with rules
Without verifiable thresholds, he wrote, terms like responsible mining and ecocide risk remaining opposing labels rather than becoming rules. He proposed that public policy should attach known consequences in advance: if independently verified water quality indicators exceed set parameters, consequences should follow automatically; areas with environmental sensitivity incompatible with certain activities should be identified before large investments are committed; the share of mining benefits a producing province receives should be set institutionally rather than left to corporate goodwill; and a project that meets requirements defined in advance by the state should have certainty about the consequences of that compliance. That, he wrote, is the rule of law.
Valerio Jiminián concluded that societies do not need every citizen to agree, but they do need institutions able to manage disagreement in a civilized way, and that Dominican regulation should focus less on persuading opponents and more on establishing in advance which territories can be evaluated, which must be excluded, which risks are tolerable, how benefits are distributed and who decides when disagreement persists. The column was the first of a two-part series.
