Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Caudillo Redux
Elections were held in July 1966. Balaguer defeated Bosch. Many voters had feared a
Bosch victory would lead to civil war. Bosch would go on to contest elections in 1978,
1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994, always losing. Balaguer, meanwhile, would outlast every Latin
American ruler except Fidel Castro. Not the typical authoritarian dictator, Balaguer was a
poet and a writer - in one book he argues against interracial marriage - who lived in the
servant's quarters of his female-dominated home.
Taking a page from Trujillo's playbook, Balaguer curtailed opposition through bribes
and intimidation and went on to win reelection in 1970 and 1974. Despite economic
growth, in part fueled by investment and aid from the USA, who saw Balaguer as a staunch
anticommunist ally, Balaguer lost the 1978 election to a wealthy cattle rancher named Sil-
vestre Antonio Guzmán. The transfer of power wouldn't come easily, however; Balaguer
ordered troops to destroy ballot boxes and declared himself the victor, standing down only
after US president Jimmy Carter refused to recognize his victory.
After losing power to revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista led
to Trujillo City.
As a result of plunging sugar prices and rising oil costs, the Dominican economy came to
a standstill under Guzmán's administration; he committed suicide shortly before leaving of-
fice in 1982. His successor, Salvador Jorge Blanco, adhered to a fiscal austerity plan under
pressure from the International Monetary Fund, measures that were far from popular with
many ordinary Dominicans. (Blanco, who passed away in 2011, is the only president in the
DR to have been prosecuted for corruption.) But old dictators don't go easily and Balaguer,
80 years old and blind with glaucoma, returned to power in the 1986 election.
For the next eight years Balaguer set about reversing every economic reform of the
Blanco program; the result was five-fold devaluing of the Dominican peso and soaring an-
nual inflation rates. With little chance of prospering at home, almost 900,000 Dominicans,
or 12% of the country's population, had moved to New York by 1990. After Balaguer won
the 1990 and 1994 elections (amid accusations of electoral fraud), the military grew weary
of his rule and he agreed to cut his last term short, hold elections and, most importantly, not
be a candidate. But it wouldn't be his last campaign - he would run once more at the age of
92, winning 23% of the vote in the 2000 presidential election. Thousands would mourn his
