THE NEWS THAT DISAPPEARS…
On May 27, 2025, the news outlet led by journalist Alicia Ortega de Hasbun published a report implicating the Dominican Republic as part of an international scheme to evade United States sanctions in the hydrocarbons sector. The story, tied to a Spanish investigation, carried considerable weight: it placed a Caribbean nation inside a network that, according to the European inquiry, operated with Venezuela, Iran, and Hezbollah as background actors.
The original URL of the article was:
https://noticiassin.com/rd-implicada-en-trama-de-hidrocarburos-para-evadir-sanciones-internacionales-segun-investigacion-espanola-1738378
That link no longer loads any content. The story was deleted. There is no correction, no editorial note, no statement from the newsroom. Only silence.
As Selena once sang: just photos and memories.
When the article was originally published, it went virtually unnoticed. The Dominican Republic is a country where the culture of journalistic amnesia is nearly institutional. A story that in any other context would have sparked days of public debate was buried beneath the relentless pace of the local news cycle.
But the world kept moving. The operations launched by the Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio against Venezuela and narco-terrorism began revealing a more complex architecture than many had imagined.
The capture of Nicolas Maduro, investigations into tankers linked to Hezbollah financing, and growing pressure on the logistical networks of the Venezuelan regime began illuminating something the Caribbean had long known but preferred to ignore: the Dominican Republic had been functioning, whether or not its elites were fully aware, as a node within that machinery.
The ghost tankers visiting Dominican ports in open defiance of U.S. sanctions against Hezbollah and Venezuela were not a nautical coincidence. They were part of a pattern.
The relationship between the Dominican government and certain figures within the Spanish political establishment was no secret in power circles. In Santiago de los Caballeros, the country’s second-largest city, those ties were openly flaunted for years. It was part of a narrative of modernity and transatlantic connection that suited both sides.
What was far less convenient was the direction in which the investigations of the Unidad Central Operativa, the UCO, the investigative arm of the Spanish Civil Guard, were pointing. The UCO inquiries began uncovering networks that connected Hispanic-Dominican interests with actors linked to Venezuela and irregular financing structures.
Spain holds, within the global standoff between the West and Iran, a position that many analysts describe as favorable to Iran. Its relationship with Arab and Muslim communities in Europe, combined with diplomatic tensions with Washington over the Venezuelan file, placed Madrid in an uncomfortable position on the geopolitical board.
It was not an unreasonable conclusion, then, that a triangulated scheme existed among the Dominican Republic, Spain, and Venezuela, designed to circumvent sanctions and feed financing networks simultaneously benefiting Caracas, Tehran, and Hezbollah.
The Miami-based OSINT journalist known as Kapulett began publishing analyses connecting threads that mainstream media had been unwilling or unable to join. On February 5, 2026, Kapulett released a video tracing the links between Alex Saab and the Dominican Republic.
The analysis was disturbing in its precision: Saab, a Colombian national of Lebanese origin, identified by both the United States and Israel as Nicolas Maduro’s front man and as the operational link between the Venezuelan regime and Hezbollah’s financing networks, had managed to conceal a significant portion of the regime’s assets on Dominican soil: mansions, financial holdings, and at least one aircraft, all without triggering any alarm from local authorities. Kapulett’s February 5 video was the missing link that no one had wanted to find.
On February 22 of the same year, Kapulett published a second video expanding the map: this time he connected Dominican and Spanish political figures, all of them under active investigation in Spain, through a systemic common denominator that binds them together: their ties to the Arab diaspora and its networks of influence on both sides of the Atlantic.
The pattern was consistent. The names were different, the flags were different, the languages were different. But the connecting thread was the same.
Approximately one year after publishing that article on the hydrocarbons scheme and international sanctions evasion, and notably following the publication of Kapulett’s analyses, Alicia Ortega de Hasbun or someone on her team removed the article from the digital platform.
There was no press statement.
There was no retraction.
There was no editorial explanation of any kind.
The question must be asked: why?
Common sense offers very few possibilities, and none of them are reassuring. Either the article was removed under external pressure, which implies that someone with sufficient influence over a newsroom decided that information could no longer remain in circulation. Or it was removed by an editorial decision from the outlet’s leadership, which would still require an explanation that never came.
Neither of those options reflects well on what is happening to Dominican journalism.
PRESS FREEDOM AT ITS LOWEST POINT
Since 2020, the Dominican Republic has been experiencing what several international press freedom organizations have described as the most severe period of media repression in decades. The persecution of independent journalists, the shuttering of critical outlets, legal proceedings designed to financially exhaust news organizations, and the progressive self-censorship of newsrooms that were once standards of reference together paint a troubling picture.
Dominican government officials openly boast on social media about having passed a new criminal code that could send independent journalists to prison for up to ten years, which is itself an indication that something significant is being concealed.
But something is particularly alarming that goes beyond direct censorship: the silent disappearance of content from established media outlets, with no explanation, no editorial trace, no accountability. This is not the crude censorship of someone pulling a signal off the air. It is the surgical censorship of someone deleting a file and hoping no one notices.
That mechanism is, in many respects, more dangerous than open repression. It leaves no obvious footprint, it generates no immediate reaction, and it normalizes the idea that uncomfortable stories simply vanish.
DOES THIS UNDERMINE KAPULETT’S ANALYSES?
The answer is no. And the logic is straightforward.
The deletion of a news article does not delete the facts that motivated it. The tankers continue their routes. The UCO investigations in Spain remain active. The connections between Saab, Maduro, Hezbollah, and their nodes in the Caribbean and Europe do not dissolve because a news portal chooses to erase a hyperlink.
If anything, the disappearance of the article adds an additional layer to the analysis: it suggests that the interests operating within that scheme have the capacity to influence, directly or indirectly, the editorial agenda of major Dominican media outlets.
What has been demonstrated is that something makes powerful people uncomfortable. And what makes powerful people uncomfortable in the Dominican Republic tends to disappear.
Worse things are coming. And the historical record is already taking note.
