It might depend on the officer, PA'S nationality, who knows! Some nationalities go faster than others. From what I have seen, the process is slow for the DR but for other countries such as Argentina (Argie got PPR in 5 months) or maybe even Chile might be faster. Maybe there are different officers to handle the different countries, for example officer A handles argentina, chile, costa rica and panama while officer b handles the DR, honduras, Mexico and venezuela or maybe any officer can handle any nationality. Maybe some officers send the email, others don't send it, most officers might update the application and reflect the change for the background check from "next step is to conduct" to "in progress" but others might not do this. I have heard people going straight to DM without their background checks never changing!
No idea how they handle things down there.
