By Engineer Nelson Núñez
Special for El Inmobiliario
Beginning in 1996, the Dominican Republic began implementing the neoliberal, imposed by the global economic order through international lending institutions. With the implementation of this new economic system, the Dominican state was forced to divest itself of several companies, such as the CEA, CORDE, and CDE. This plunged thousands of Dominicans, who directly and indirectly received their meager salaries from these companies, into poverty. That same year also marked the beginning of a turbulent period that impacted the professional practice of liberal professions.
Specifically affecting the engineering and medical professions. From that year onward, public works contracts began to go unpaid by all Dominican state institutions, leading to an accumulation of debt with contracting engineers who depended on public works projects from the governments that came and went after 1996.
This neoliberal policy has cost dozens of engineers their lives and bankrupted this important professional sector. To such an extent that during the period 2000-2004, President Hipólito Mejía, referring to the accumulated debts owed to engineers contracted for public works projects for unpaid work, said, "New debts should be allowed to become old, and old debts should not be paid."
What a concept of a president or head of state! It was during that same period that the government gave free rein to the multinational corporations Andrade Gutiérrez and Odebrecht. And all Dominicans know how the contracts awarded to these two companies were inflated through backroom deals, and how presidents, ministers, senators, representatives, journalists, and so on were bribed.
By 2006, according to research conducted by Participación Ciudadana, thousands of construction projects were paralyzed due to lack of payment, and others were stopped due to construction defects.
It is worth noting that although the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors (CODIA) had begun the process of institutional deterioration in the 1990s, it was from 1996 onwards that the collapse of the professional practice of the public sector of Engineering began.
Precisely because the new neoliberal economic system established in the country compelled the political class to involve CODIA within that framework. That is why we have a CODIA that turns its back on Law 6160, which created it, and is ready to serve as a tool of this new system, which has enriched a few engineering companies—no more than ten—and has driven the vast majority of small and medium-sized construction companies, as well as the vast majority of engineers and architects affiliated with CODIA, into bankruptcy.
The implementation of the policy described here resulted in many engineers resorting to financing their projects with commercial loans, accessing formal and informal banking, mortgaging their properties, seeking loans from family and friends, etc. Unable to meet these commitments, many were compelled to take their own lives, become ill and subsequently die, and also saw their homes, farms, land, and other properties vanish.
Law 340-06 on public procurement, far from achieving horizontal, fair, and transparent participation, has effectively closed off all possibilities of obtaining government contracts. This is due to the obstacles and hurdles that public institutions impose in the bidding documents that all those invited to participate in public works tenders and lotteries must comply with.
These specifications, far from giving participation to the vast majority of construction professionals, as stated in the spirit of said law, are like a tailor-made suit for "the partners and party colleagues" of the officials who run these institutions.
Young engineering professionals, recognizing this decline, have chosen to pursue other activities, often unrelated to their profession, or emigrate. A few are fortunate enough to find work in their field, but the vast majority enter other activities completely unrelated to their profession. This constitutes what is known as a "brain drain," where the country invests a significant sum of money in training and educating these professionals, only to then export them to other countries where they are valued.
Everything described in this narrative has resulted in the accumulation of debt by the Dominican State and the collapse of the national engineering sector, to the point that contractors working on government projects are essentially holding a ticking time bomb. It has also led to the complete breakdown of participatory, ethical, and democratic professional practices, highlighting the institutional decay that plagues our country today.
