Hello, and welcome to the Latin America Weekly newsletter! In this issue: Divisions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a major loss for Argentina, and the Mexican World Cup curse.
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Dominican Republic fears contagion from Haiti’s humanitarian crisis
Haiti has in some ways been an outlier in Latin America. Although the region continues to suffer from large-scale crises, nowhere have they been as deep, multi-faceted, and long-lasting as in Haiti.
- The Dominican Republic, the significantly more prosperous nation sharing a border with Haiti, fears that the current humanitarian catastrophe could spill over into its territory â a concern that brings back memories of a dark past.
- Earlier this year, the Dominican government even started building a wall that would cover nearly half the 392-kilometer-long border between the two countries, part of a plan to insulate their half of the Hispaniola island.
Divisions. The countries’ populations are of similar size, at 10-11 million each. But the World Bank shows a Dominican GDP of USD 94.2 billion in 2021, almost five times the size of...