The Minister of the Environment of the Dominican Republic, Orlando Jorge Mera, died this Monday, shot by an old friend he received in his office in Santo Domingo. Thanks to the bond he shared with the minister, the assailant, Miguel Cruz, 56, had no trouble getting past the security measures.
The Dominican press speculates that the murder was motivated by a dispute, possibly a debt. Along the same lines, Fausto Rosario Adames, director of the digital newspaper Acento, told El País that the spark was the closure of a Cruz company for not complying with environmental regulations.
After the murder, as reported by the Dominican Attorney General’s Office, Cruz fled to a church and handed the weapon to the priest. Once located, the deputy prosecutor Yeni Berenice Reynoso called the author of the crime by phone, and “told him that he would turn himself in if the Public Ministry guaranteed his life.” This has been detailed by the Prosecutor’s Office in a press release after Cruz was handed over to the authorities.
The current President Luis Abinader, who was flying to Los Angeles for the Climate Summit, has lamented the death of what he considered “a good friend”. The Ministry of the Environment has also expressed its “dismay” at the tragedy.
Mera was born 55 years ago in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the North or Cibao region of the Dominican Republic. Consecrated beekeeper and environmentalist of ore, he lived politics closely since he was young, since his father, Salvador Jorge Blanco, was president of the Caribbean country between 1982 and 1986.
Three decades after graduating, he founded, along with Abinader and other former leaders of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), the new Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM). Under these acronyms they won the presidential elections in 2020, when Jorge Mera assumed the Environment portfolio.
A passion for politics that he shared with his wife, the Dominican ambassador to Brazil, Patricia Villegas, and with his sister, Dilia Leticia Jorge Mera, deputy minister of Innovation, Transparency and Citizen Attention, and whose legacy he passed on to his two sons, one of them , Deputy Orlando Salvador Jorge Villegas.
It has been the latter who has expressed in a statement that the family trusts the authorities to clarify what happened and do justice. Also, they forgive Cruz: “One of the greatest legacies of our Orlando was not to hold a grudge.”
