Noticias

La Mina is a rural area within the El Cedro Municipal District in Miches. Along with Hicaco Blanco, it is the closest community to the Playa Esmeralda tourist zone, a key area for hotel and real estate development in this emerging tourist destination.

Its name derives from the presence of gold in the area. The elders recount that, during the Trujillo era, the Dominican state profited significantly from gold mining in this region. Every Friday, a schooner would travel to Miches to collect the week’s cargo, and the Miches coast had a captain assigned for its security, even though the highest-ranking military officer in the province was a lieutenant, as Jorge de León, a friend from the town, shared with me.

Currently, gold mining is limited to the individual efforts of a few community members who, in a very rudimentary (and dangerous) way, dig deep tunnels to wash the earth, hoping that one day they will find a small nugget that will ease their monthly needs. It doesn’t happen very often, however.

Little by little, the attention of the residents of La Mina is shifting away from the gold mining reality of their land, which is also dedicated to agricultural activities such as livestock, cacao, yam, and rice production, and to a lesser extent, fishing in Laguna Redonda, and is focusing on the tourism development of their area. Today, we can even find an aparthotel and a roadside inn in the heart of the small town, with quality levels as high as any other in the municipality.

One billion one hundred and sixty million dollars is the projected private investment for the area over the next few years, along with the necessary public investment for improving access, security, water supply and management, and solid waste management. Despite this, the general population of La Mina does not seem hopeful. They are worried about the precarious state of their elementary school, where teachers, students, and parents no longer feel safe, as leaks cause pieces of the ceiling to break off and fall during lessons.

They are also concerned about the deterioration of their streets and the lack of spaces for social recreation for children, young people, and adults. They would like a children’s park and an improved sports field.

They are most concerned about the uncontrolled population growth, a product of immigration to the area to work in construction, and the difficulty the local government has in organizing the territory, which threatens to reduce the quality of life of its inhabitants and depress the value of their properties.

One would think that, given such widespread concern, citizen self-organizing bodies would be holding emergency meetings and planning solutions to these problems. That community leaders would be empowered to draw the attention of authorities with proposals for collaborative work, and that, through political participation structures, plans would be prioritized that address the issues affecting the way of life in these communities.

In our country, and this is a widespread situation, community social empowerment has been promoted very little, if at all. Few structures for civil participation function in the municipality of Miches, let alone in the small community of La Mina. Partisanship nullifies any capacity to act in favor of collective interests, limiting itself to applauding when in power and criticizing when in opposition, without the slightest sense of what is best for the group, for the community. It is the hijacking of social interest by the very political system that is meant to uphold it.
However, the most serious issue is the involvement of the community members themselves in the problems that afflict them. It is true that greater investment from the national and local governments has been needed, but it has been the Miners themselves who have decided to set up businesses on public sidewalks, or cram 10-15 people into a tiny two-bedroom house with only one bathroom, seeking the meager rent this generates. Or they build haphazardly, without respecting the spaces designated for access roads, streets, and highways. These are the same people who were absent for years from parent-teacher meetings at the school, meetings meant to support the solution to a growing problem that brought the infrastructure to the brink of collapse.

This inability to identify and accept the role of communities in their own development, or the lack thereof—a legacy of how we as a nation have organized ourselves politically and socially, coupled with a deficient public education system—is the main obstacle to achieving the necessary social empowerment. Communities, and their leaders, adopt a passive stance toward their development, relegating the solution to problems they have largely created to the public and private sectors. They feel that organizing and making decisions collectively is impossible because there is no culture of participation and mutual trust, which erodes the social capital where community strength for positive change resides.
It is also the easy way out. It is simpler to surrender to the future than to empower oneself and generate change. It is easier to complain about what others don’t do than to propose viable solutions. To shout populist slogans and calls for social unrest is easier than to design a coherent and viable development plan. In short, to find the causes of everyone’s situation in the actions of others, and not in one’s own omissions. The truth is that no outsider, public or private sector, has the capacity to generate development and well-being in La Mina until the community itself decides to assume responsibility for its future and defend, even from itself, the collective interest.

Authors like Nicolas Carr have warned about how the internet has conditioned us to expect quick results, causing us to lose the ability to delve deeper. It’s a kind of “fast knowledge” that, like food, makes us addicted to fleeting emotions, but without substance. The same thing happens with communities, which turn away from the root of their problems and their potential solutions, instead identifying the most readily available scapegoat on whom to blame their wrongdoing or inaction.

Thus, much collective effort is invested in pursuing the path of denunciation, complaint, and demand, which could be used to promote, through action, the solution to the problems that are so urgently needed. However, without social capital based on citizen participation and mutual trust, it will be impossible to generate the actions that lead to solving these problems.

And faced with the inability to work together, the complaints, slogans, and burning tires will continue, and amidst the dissipating smoke of the protest, the sad reality will make it clear that we were unable to put the common interest before the individual opportunism that pocketed the promising future of our children; however, we still have time.