Caribbean & Central America - 17 February 2004

President Hipólito Mejí­a was as good as his word. After months of internal wrangling within the ruling Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), Mejí­a has been designated the official candidate. He infamously remarked on national television that 'power is to be exercised. Whoever speaks to the contrary should become a hairdresser's apprentice'.

Mejí­a outmanoeuvred his credible rivals at the party convention on 20 January so their names did not appear on the ballot slips. His one opponent, Frank Joseph Thomen, was a personal friend, who garnered less than five percent of the votes cast. The national daily Diario Libre revealed that many delegates for Thomen did not even know his name. In one embarrassing case a PRD delegate ostensibly representing Thomen at a voting centre even got his name wrong, referring to him as 'José Augusto Thomen'. 

Mejí­a was officially proclaimed the party's candidate on 31 January. On the same day the executive committee of the PRD sacked party president Hatuey De Camps, a strident critic of Mejí­a. De Camps insisted that Mejí­a's decision to run for re-election contravened party statutes. He argued that the PRD would be sure to lose the election if it backed Mejí­a. De Camps will be replaced by Vicente Sánchez Baret, a party bigwig and a leader within Mejí­a's influential faction of the PRD, the Proyecto Presidencial Hipólito (PPH).

The convention was held directly after a two-day strike, which paralysed the country, during which seven people died and more than eighty were injured. The strike was called by an alliance of popular movements and was supported by the national business council (Conep) as well as the two main opposition parties, the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) and the Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC), and trade unions. Protesters demanded a reversal of the government's economic policies, wage rises, reduced food and fuel prices and the severing of links with the IMF. Seven people died in the protests.

The head of the Catholic Church in the Dominican Republic, Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodrí­guez, a man renowned for his uncompromising views, lashed out at Mejí­a at a religious service on 1 February. He said that that the country had been 'totally abandoned, unprotected and exposed,' and he called on the public to 'express their views' in the May elections. 'You must ask the government what it is doing, creating a country with no fuel or electricity: there is no hope or light, the government has been told what it has to do, but one tires of talking to them,' he added.

Electoral reform
Mejí­a's initial enthusiasm for changing the electoral process by introducing the so-called Ley de Lemas, under which each political party could present up to five candidates with the foremost among them accumulating the votes of the others, has dampened since he engineered it so that he is the sole official candidate of the PRD. The electoral reform bill came under fire from opposition political parties and the business sector. It failed to make it through the chamber of deputies after all 104 PLD and PRSC deputies and PRD sympathisers of Decamps boycotted the vote, leaving the session without the required quorum of 75 deputies. The leader of the private business association Conep, Elena Viyella de Paliza, also condemned the last ditch reform of the electoral system: 'This is like baseball, the game has started and it is not the moment to change the rules in the sixth or seventh inning.'

Meanwhile, the latest opinion poll conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates predicts a sweeping victory for PLD candidate Leonel Fernández in the first round with 65% of voter intentions compared to just 13% for Mejí­a, who also trails PRSC candidate Eduardo Estrella, on 16%. 

• One positive piece of news is that the government has paid the US$74m owing to foreign creditors. Central Bank Governor Jose Lois Malkun said that the sum included the interest payment due on the US$600m dollar sovereign bond emission, whose belated payment caused several credit assessment institutions to lower their ratings on Dominican Republic bonds and banks. It was also a prerequisite of the stalled US$600m credit agreement with the IMF. IMF deputy managing director Agustin Carstens said 'rigorous implementation of the (economic) program, together with a strong political commitment to further reform, will be critical to overcoming the current crisis in the Dominican Republic'.