The Dominican Army has seized two trucks carrying 3,000 acacia poles cut and moved without legal documentation, stopping the loads at Casabito in Santiago province before handing the timber, both vehicles, and three detained men to the country’s environmental protection service. That is according to a statement from the Ejército de República Dominicana, which counted the seizure among twin operations across Santiago and the border province of Dajabón.
One thousand poles rode on a blue Daihatsu truck driven by Juan Carlos Beato Pérez, with the remaining 2,000 on a white Isuzu carrying Rafael García Minaya and a passenger. All of it now sits with the Servicio Nacional de Protección Ambiental, the armed environmental service known as SENPA.
Acacia across the Dominican market supplies fence posts and the fuelwood trade, and the army’s statement named no destination for the load, leaving open whether the poles were cut for farm fencing or for the island’s charcoal economy.
“To combat the illegal entry of people and prevent environmental crimes” is how the army described the twin missions of its patrols, in a statement translated from Spanish, pledging reinforced surveillance on the border line and in the interior. The same day’s operations across Dajabón detained 108 Haitian nationals, among them women and children, at crossings including the Nene Checo farm and the army’s post on the Massacre River, with all of them handed to migration authorities.
Checkpoint seizures are part of a wider campaign, with SENPA and the Environment Ministry running joint operations that impound equipment, seize timber, and dismantle charcoal kilns within protected areas. Soldiers pulled 125 cambrón posts from a truck on the Duarte highway in June; the same undocumented-cargo profile stopped at a Valverde checkpoint.
The seizure lands amid a wider regional tightening on undocumented timber, weeks after Colombia’s navy recovered more than 1,040 cubic metres of timber moved without permits from the rivers of Chocó. Across Latin America, forestry agencies and border patrols are checking movement paperwork more closely, and the Dominican campaign folds timber controls into the same operations that manage the country’s border.
On the army’s own account, everything stopped at Casabito, 3,000 poles, two trucks, and three men, now sit in SENPA’s custody, with the environmental service to decide what charges the missing paperwork brings.
