标签： Dominican Republic

A tense 24-hour mid-air emergency in the Dominican Republic’s northern tourist hub of Puerto Plata came to a safe conclusion on Monday, when two highly trained cable car rescue specialists successfully extracted 17 people stranded in a suspended funicular cabin. The trapped group, which matched the cabin’s full 17-person capacity of 16 passengers and one operator, had been stuck hanging over the mountain slope since Sunday, after an unexpected mechanical failure shut down the iconic tourist attraction.

The two rescuers, Amaro García and Michael Añasco, were specially called in from the capital city of Santo Domingo to lead the high-stakes operation. Both are part of a cohort of 32 Dominican rescue workers who completed advanced high-altitude rescue training for cable car emergencies in Colombia just last year. García, a corporal and second-in-command of the Metro and Cable Car Specialized Security Corps (Cesmet), said the team only deploys after on-site teams have exhausted efforts to restart the stalled cable system, as manual extractions carry significant inherent risk.

Using specialized climbing and rigging equipment designed for aerial rescue operations, the pair reached the suspended cabin on the Isabel de Torres Mountain funicular — better known as the Puerto Plata cable car — and safely lowered each passenger and the operator to the ground one by one. Once they arrived in Puerto Plata from Santo Domingo, the team integrated with local response units from the Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the rescue effort.

Local officials praised the team’s quick, calm execution of the dangerous mission. “This emergency personnel demonstrated great technical skill and a lot of courage in making use of their training,” said government spokesperson Homero Luis Lperalta in a statement following the successful rescue.

The specialized rescue unit, which falls under the administrative umbrella of the Santo Domingo Metro (the managing body of the Santo Domingo Cable Car), has been working to expand local response capacity across the Dominican Republic. As the number of funicular and cable car operations has grown in recent years to meet rising tourism demand, the unit has been training new cohorts of local rescue workers to serve as additional skilled responders across the country.

First opened in 1975, the Puerto Plata cable car is one of the destination’s most popular tourist attractions. The eight-minute scenic trip up and down Isabel de Torres Mountain draws thousands of visitors annually, who ride to the mountain’s summit for panoramic views of the northern coast and native tropical vegetation. The mechanical failure that caused Sunday’s incident was traced to a broken axle in the upper pulley system — an original component that had been in place since the cable car launched 48 years prior. The attraction is managed by an independent board of trustees, and it remains unclear how long inspections and repairs will keep the site closed to visitors.

SANTIAGO — A regional manhunt is active across Santiago after a fatal stabbing Thursday night that grew out of a minor gambling dispute, local law enforcement confirmed this week. The Dominican National Police announced they are continuing targeted search and intelligence operations across multiple neighborhoods in the district to locate Alexander Torres Lara, who is also known by the aliases Ezequiel and El Sade. Authorities have named Lara as the primary suspect in the killing of Domingo Andrés Acevedo Peña, a local man who went by the nickname El Rubito.

The deadly attack unfolded in the La Yagüita sector of the Pastor neighborhood, according to preliminary law enforcement investigations. The fatal confrontation began during a casual dice game, when a trivial disagreement over a 50-peso bet spiraled into violence.

Witness accounts and initial investigative findings detail that Peña pressed Lara to cover a 50-peso match bet. The pair was playing for a 500-peso pot, and Peña told Lara he had already exhausted all his cash after a streak of losses. When Lara refused to put forward the required 50 pesos to match the bet, the disagreement quickly escalated into a heated argument that turned into a knife fight. Perita was fatally wounded in the altercation, and he was pronounced dead at the scene by responding emergency personnel.

Immediately after the incident, the suspect fled the neighborhood to avoid arrest. Since then, National Police teams have been carrying out coordinated sweeps and intelligence-gathering work across the Santiago region to track down Lara, with investigators confirming that they are following multiple leads to determine the suspect’s current whereabouts.

In the Los Alcarrizos district of the Dominican Republic, hundreds of families across five residential sectors have spent months grappling with two crippling basic service failures: prolonged, routine power outages and a persistent shortage of potable drinking water, local residents publicly denounced this Sunday.

The affected communities — Las Glorias, Los Cerros, Residencial Pablo, Mella and Pueblo Nuevo — report that power cuts follow a predictable, disruptive schedule, cutting off electricity consistently from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. each night. This nightly blackout window does more than just disrupt daily life: it undermines rest for working residents and inflicts measurable financial harm on local small business operators who rely on consistent power to keep their businesses running.

Gustavo Pérez, who owns a small neighborhood grocery store, explained that the combination of extended outages and the region’s sweltering high temperatures has destroyed hundreds of dollars worth of inventory that requires constant refrigeration. “Our products that need refrigeration are spoiling due to the lack of energy,” Pérez confirmed in an interview with local community organizers.

North Villa Mella, the broader region where these sectors are located, has long been framed as being on the cusp of modern development, yet decades of underinvestment have left it trapped in systemic poverty with gaps in even the most basic public services. The water crisis compounds the misery caused by unreliable power, with residents of Las Glorias reporting that consistent drinking water service has been unavailable for more than seven months.

Supply gaps are most extreme in the elevated sections of the sector, where running water rarely reaches households at all. Even in lower-elevation neighborhoods, water is only available for a few hours just once or twice a week. Forced to secure water for their households amid the chronic shortage, many families have turned to purchasing water from private tanker trucks — a service that costs between 2,000 and 2,500 Dominican pesos, an expense that local residents say places an unbearable strain on already tight household budgets.

Residents describe daily life in the area as unlivable: backup power inverters have been worn down by constant use from intermittent power, soaring heat makes indoor spaces unbearable, and booming mosquito populations have made it impossible to get a full night of sleep. “The inverters are down, the heat is unbearable, and the mosquitoes have us cornered. We can’t sleep,” community members said in a joint statement.

Mercedes Cruz, a long-time resident of the area, shared that she returns home from a full workday at 10 p.m. each night only to face another round of service failures. “Every day I get home at 10 pm, after a long day at work, and I find there’s no electricity. Between the blackouts, the lack of water, the mosquitoes, and the heat, I feel like I never get any rest,” Cruz explained.

Local community leaders have issued an urgent call for national and municipal authorities to intervene immediately to resolve the crisis and restore stable, reliable water and power service to the affected neighborhoods. Fed up with unfulfilled political pledges, leaders say residents are demanding tangible solutions that respect their fundamental right to access these core public services. “We demand respect for our right to receive electricity and drinking water. We are tired of promises and we need solutions,” leaders concluded.

In a development that brings a high-profile homicide investigation one step closer to resolution, Dominican National Police announced Saturday that Alexander Torres Lora, a suspect linked to the fatal stabbing of Domingo Andrés Acevedo Peña, has turned himself in to authorities. Torres Lora, who is known by the aliases “Ezequiel” and “El Sade”, surrendered at the regional headquarters of Cibao Central, accompanied by his family members and a representative from a local media outlet, following days of coordinated investigative tracking by law enforcement.