Here are three stories from Latin America from the last two years
1. A few months back, the high prices charged by power companies, combined with city-wide blackouts relating to poor infrastructure investment led to demonstrations and riots. The police then shot 7 unarmed protestors dead.
2. Last year there was a prison riot in an overcrowded jail. During this a fire broke out, and 140 prisoners burnt to death.
3. A captain in the army was arrested, on the request of the US, on drugs charges. He was caught with 1,380kg (that is not a typo) of pure cocaine. Because of the bribes he had been passing out, including funding local hospitals and schools with drugs money, locals tried to break him out of jail. As the army is heavily involved in the arms trade, and because he had donated large sums to the two main political parties, this man had been known about at the highest level for a long time, but no one did anything until the US forced them to.

Now, if story 1 had been Bolivia, story 2 had been Brazil, and story 3 had been Colombia, then the BBC and the major newspapers would have mentioned it, if not covered it in detail.

All three occured in the last 2 years in the Dominican Republic

There seems to be a complete blackout of reporting of Dominican Republic stories. Numbers 1 and 3 weren't even mentioned on the BBC website, and number 2 had only a short story, half of which was taken up by references to smaller prison riots and fires in Brazil that killed fewer people. There is a great deal of fascinating stuff going on here, more interesting than much of Latin America, but the DR just isn't on people's radar. There isn't an image in Europe of what the DR looks like, other than a tourist destination, so it is difficult to communicate. We all have multifaceted images of Brazil, combining football, good looking women, beaches, the Amazon, favela slum-towns, violence etc. Our image of it is such that we can cope with top footballers and slum-town violence coming out of the same country, but with the DR it is a cheap holiday destination with all inclusive resorts, and we don't know much more about it. The European media couldn't manage to talk about rampant army-run drugs trafficking in a country rarely mentioned outside of a Thomas Cook brochure.

I reckon most people who go on holiday to the DR from the UK couldn't point it out on a map, and that is sad, because it is a fascinating place with lots of crazy things for geographers to get stuck into.