President Donald Trump’s military approach to cocaine traffickers in the Americas keeps hitting bumps. His assistance to the armed forces in Colombia – the largest source of cocaine – has slowed since October because of a feud with that country’s leftist leader. In a referendum on Sunday, voters in Ecuador – where some 70% of global cocaine flows – soundly rejected the idea of foreign bases in the country to help fight the drug trade.
And in the last three months, as the United States military has built up forces near Venezuela and conducted lethal strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats – dubbed by the White House as “narco-terrorists” – cries have grown louder that such attacks might violate international law.
Meanwhile, amid this forceful approach, one country in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, has received a largely unnoticed accolade for an alternative tactic to dealing with crime – whether it is petty theft or international drug runners coming to its shores.
A global ranking of countries on democratic rule of law found the Dominican Republic had the highest increase this year – 2.1% – in the overall scoring for areas from judicial independence to police performance to civic participation.
That was up from a 1.1% improvement the year before. While its overall rank is still No. 76 out of 143 countries, the Caribbean’s second-biggest country has become a model in how to make progress in democratic rule of law. More than two-thirds of nations, including in Latin America, saw a decline in their rankings this year.
Which country had the lowest overall score in the rankings by the World Justice Project? Venezuela, a southern neighbor to the Dominican Republic and home to one of the world’s worst authoritarian regimes.
The recent progress in the Dominican Republic began in earnest about two decades ago but picked up speed in 2020 after an anti-corruption crusader, Luis Abinader, was elected president. Before his easy reelection in 2024, he acknowledged how much citizens have achieved in government transparency and accountability. “When you work with ethics and honesty,” he said, “resources yield more and the possibilities of solving problems expand.”
In all societies, law itself is not as visible as, say, a drone attack on a boat. Yet it helps keep people away from illicit activities.
As the late American legal scholar Harold J. Berman wrote, a belief in law not only appeals to people’s finite interests, “but also to their faith in a truth, a justice, that transcends social utility.”
Perhaps the best armor against the drug trade can be found in places like the Dominican Republic, which is striving to anchor itself in qualities from honesty to equality.
