The Dominican Republic's new strict abortion law forces mothers to carry to full term, even if sonograms show the fetus has no brains, Ortíz said.

``It was alarming,'' Ortíz said, noting that his own wife miscarried before their first child was born two years ago.

WASTE BROUGHT IN

The alarms started ringing here in 2003, when 10,000-ton barges showed up at the port loaded with black rocks.

The rocks were the moistened residue from a coal-burning plant in Puerto Rico owned by AES. The Puerto Rican government was pressuring AES to rid the island of the mounds of ash that had stockpiled, so AES hired Delray Beach contractor Roger C. Fina to get the ash off its hands.

``He brings this rock ash into the country without any kind of controls or anything. A good portion of it fell to the sea,'' said Andrés Chalas, the Dominican Republic's top environmental prosecutor. ``They got permissions to bring it in and said it was to do renovations of the port, but we investigated and there was no such project, not at Public Works or the Port Authority.''

Chalas said the Dominican Republic wants Fina to face charges that he illegally brought pollutants into the country and dumped them on the shore. Although accusations flew that Fina bribed officials to let the material in, no such charges were ever filed, Chalas said.

Fina says the case ruined his life.

``We came in there with 10,000-ton barges and went through Immigration, Customs, the environment folks, permits, everything,'' Fina told The Miami Herald. ``They acted like we brought it in the middle of the night.''

The ash was supposed to be processed for what's called ``beneficial use'' such as asphalt and shipped to Fort Lauderdale, Fina said.

``It was supposed to be a 90-day turnaround,'' he said. ``But it was right in the middle of a presidential election, and it became such a political hot potato that there was no controlling it. They shut us down. They killed me. It was never supposed to sit there for two years.

``Why didn't someone clean it up?''

Fina said he lost everything in the deal and is out of work. He and AES were sued by the Dominican Republic in federal court. AES paid $6 million to clean up the site and settle the claim.

The same year, Fina was accused in a civil lawsuit of luring workers to America with promises of working on his vessels, only to hold them in slave-like conditions at a quarry.

Fina said the vessels were stalled because of the rock ash case, and so employees who were put to work doing something else tried extorting him. The case was settled.

``It was the worst time in my life,'' Fina said. ``I thought it was over.'' He insists he was never notified of charges pending in the Dominican Republic.

Coal ash is filled with metals, but not anything that would make people sick, Fina said.

Héctor René Ledesma, the former deputy environment minister -- still fighting to overturn a six-month sentence -- agrees.

``In the settlement with AES in Virginia, the government of the Dominican Republic agreed that the material wasn't toxic and it did not hurt anyone. So what are we talking about?'' Ledesma said. ``Health statistics in that area are exactly the same as they were in past years. Unfortunately, we live in a country with a lot of health problems and deformities, so there is really no telling what is causing those problems.''