Santo Domingo, RD.
Dominican President Luis Abinader on Wednesday clarified that the country will not invest funds in the construction of hospitals in Haiti, as implied by a bilateral agreement whose content was revealed the day before.
“What the Dominican Republic will do and it is important to clarify this is to be a channel and facilitator of this aid,” Abinader told a news conference during a presentation of a housing plan.
The president assured that meetings with the ambassadors of the countries most involved in Haiti, including Canada, the United States, France and Germany, will begin next week to discuss the financing of these two hospitals.
Abinader’s clarification comes a day after his government issued a signed bilateral statement at a meeting between the Dominican president and his Haitian counterpart, Jovenel Moise, that took place last Sunday.
At one point in this statement, it is stated that “with the collaboration of the international community, which has shown its willingness to finance hospitals in Haiti, both leaders agree to cooperate in the construction of general hospitals in Haiti.”
Dominican authorities are interested in building hospitals in the neighboring country to prevent Haitian citizens from using Dominicans.
Abinader himself said in November last year that his country could not fund the large number of Haitian women giving birth in Dominican hospitals, a statement that caused unrest in Port-au-Prince.
According to official Dominican figures, of the nearly 167,000 births that take place each year in the country, about 20,000 mothers are Haitian, although these statistics do not specify the migrant status of women.
In addition to building hospitals, the presidents pledged to assist in the process of identifying and registering hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Civil Registry.
Haiti is trying to create a civil registry ahead of the constitutional referendum scheduled for next April and the September presidential election.
In addition, the agreements include the start of a negotiation process to delimit the maritime borders between the two countries and the commitment of both sides to monitor the border to combat illegal migratory flows, human trafficking, arms trafficking, drug trafficking and cattle theft.
Border countries also spoke of closer cooperation in the fields of energy, agricultural and industrial production, as well as the continuation of negotiations aimed at concluding a trade agreement, which never existed between these border countries, despite trade flows. significant.