Day: April 11, 2006

I am still not exactly sure what we were thinking. I was honestly picturing a little hall where we would see some voodoo demonstrations dumbed down for tourist consumption and some local crafts. The flyer for the trip mentioned visiting a market. Now, we are not dingbat travellers. I spent a fair chunk of my youth with a backpack bouncing around Europe. I have been to the DR before and I grew up close enough to the Mexican border towns to have experienced some real poverty. We have been to Japan a couple of times and are planning a trip to China later this year. We are not travel newbies. But nothing could have ever prepared us for what we saw a couple of miles across the border. When we came over the hill and saw the village, my first words were “You have got to be fucking kidding”.

A “dictator” is a head of state who exercises arbitrary authority over the lives of his citizens and who cannot be removed from power through legal means. The worst commit terrible human-rights abuses. This present list draws in part on reports by global human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. While the three worst from 2005 have retained their places, two on last year’s list (Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan) have slipped out of the Top 10—not because their conduct has improved but because other dictators have gotten worse.