US BLAMES DR FOR DRUG SMUGGLING SURGE

The Dominican Republic is now the main Caribbean transit route for drugs to the United States, say U.S. officials.
In an interview with Reuters news service, Lt. Col. James Love of the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force South in Key West was highly critical of the DR, when he said, "This country has lost the control of its airspace."
Lt. Col. Love is director of planning and policy at the Joint Interagency Task Force which tracks drug trafficking through the Caribbean and Central and South America.
The U.S State Department in a recent report announced that the Dominican Republic and Haiti saw a 38 percent increase in drug smuggling flights last year, with the bulk of the increase happening in the DR.
Most of the drugs are coming from Venezuela, say officials, using small, single-engine Cessna airplanes. It takes around seven hours for a plane to reach the DR from Venezuela, drop off tightly packed bales of cocaine onto Dominican soil from the air, and return to Venezuela for another load.
Lt. Col. Love said in 2005, they identified 33 suspected drug flights to the Dominican Republic, and 26 into Haiti. In 2007, Haiti had just 18, while the DR had 107.
In 2006, flights from Venezuela to the DR surged 167 percent.
"The drug traffickers are having trouble doing business in Haiti," said Lt. Col. James Patterson, an aide to Love, when asked why the drugs transhipment was increasing in the DR rather than Haiti.
"It's easier, it's cheaper," he added, saying there were any number of reasons why traffickers might prefer doing business in one country over another.
Another U.S. counternarcotics official concurred that the unrest in Haiti made it more difficult for drug smugglers, adding, "It's not a very stable environment to do business in."
The State Department’s report in March this year was also critical of the government indicating that both Haiti and the Dominican Republic suffered from the “corrosive effects of corruption and weak government institutions”.
The DR’s proximity to Puerto Rico also makes it an easy springboard for shipments to the U.S. mainland, and the fact that it is a hub for international shipping.
"At some point, there's got to be a peak here," said Patterson, when asked about possible limits to the Dominican Republic's expanding role in the drug trade.
"At some point, they're going to go somewhere else," he said of the smugglers.