Caribbean & Central America - March 2011 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Choosing a man who presided over the worst domestic economic debacle in recent history as a presidential candidate is not normally a recipe for success. And yet the main opposition Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) elected former president Hipólito Mejí­a (2000-2004) on 6 March to run for the party in the presidential elections in May 2012.

The PRD could possibly argue that Mejí­a had won a presidential election in the past, unlike his rival in the party primary on 6 March, Miguel Vargas Maldonado, but Vargas lost the last presidential election in 2008 against President Leonel Fernández when he was in his full pomp. That is no longer the case. Fernández received a remarkable dressing down by the auxiliary bishop of the archdioceses of Santo Domingo during Independence Day mass on 27 February, and his state-of-the-nation address was sufficiently poorly received that he decided to fire two senior ministers shortly afterwards.

Under Mejí­a the Dominican Republic's foreign debt almost doubled from US$3.65bn to US$5.9bn and its relations with the IMF became strained. Reckless spending during a global economic downturn, and the bankruptcy of three major banks, helped trigger the sharp devaluation of the peso against the US dollar, and soaring inflation (as high as 43% in 2003) slashed purchasing power. Mejí­a's mandate was also punctuated by several massive strikes as frustration boiled over at the government's failure to resolve longstanding power shortages and trade unions demanded salary increases of 100% to compensate for the collapse of the peso.

In fairness Peru's President Alan Garcí­a won a second bite at the cherry in 2006 after presiding over a similarly disastrous economic downturn in Peru during his first term in power (1985-1990), and he has proven to be far more successful the second time around. But the hiatus between Garcí­a's first and second terms was 16 years; for Mejí­a it would be just half this and memories might not be short enough.

Mejí­a won the tight primary elections for the PRD by 53% (499,000) to 47% (437,000) for Vargas. Vargas, however, is not going quietly. He argues that the decision by the PRD organising committee to stop the count, after 83% of ballots had been totted up, was premature, given the slender lead of Mejí­a. He also contends that supporters of the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) had voted in the semi-open PRD primary election to support the man least likely to pose a threat to their candidate in 2012.

Vargas has not been spectacularly successful himself, of course, as party president. Under his leadership, the PRD won just one of 32 seats in the senate in the last congressional elections in May 2010. Although the PRD managed to win 75 seats in the 183-seat lower chamber, this was 30 fewer than the PLD, and Vargas faced calls to resign. But, perhaps his most serious error of judgement was offering his backing for the constitution Fernández drafted last year: at the time he reasoned that this would project him as a national statesman, looking beyond narrow partisan interests, but the positive reforms to the 2010 constitution were overshadowed by a clause further relaxing restrictions on re-election.

Mejí­a, who turned 70 on 22 February, is running under the campaign slogan “Llegó Papá" (“Dad has arrived"). The PLD will attack “Dad" hard for his mismanagement of the “family finances". Who will be leading the attack, however, is unclear. The PLD is yet to select a candidate, although there is pressure to do so now that the PRD has defined its presidential ticket. There has been considerable speculation for the better part of a year over whether Fernández might seek to exploit loopholes in the constitution he drafted to run for a third straight term, even though this would call for semantic acrobatics of a high order as it was widely interpreted at the time to bar him from standing again until 2016. A recent poll by Gallup also suggested that this would not be well received by the public: 70% of respondents rejected presidential re-election.

The most obvious alternative to Fernández is Danilo Medina, his former adviser who he defeated in the PLD primary before the last presidential elections. Medina won 62% support in the Gallup poll. Fernández would prefer the First Lady Margarita Cedeño to win the candidacy so that he could keep it in the family but she finished a distant second in the Gallup poll on 11%.

Church goes on the attack
The Gallup poll suggests that the popularity of Fernández is beginning to wane. This was reinforced in spectacular style by the ferocious criticism levelled at him by Monsignor Victor Masalles, the auxiliary bishop of the archdioceses of Santo Domingo, during the Independence Day Te Deum and mass. “The people do not live off statistics," Masalles said. This would have stung Fernández who was not only in the congregation but also delivered his state-of-the-nation speech on the same day in which he made heavy use of statistics to underline his government's achievements.

Fernández, for instance, pointed out that despite the global economic slowdown, the Dominican economy had grown by 7.8% in 2010 and extreme poverty had decreased from 11.8% to 10.4%, as a result of the government's social protection measures. Masalles said it beggared belief that that the country could grow by an average of more than 5% a year since the end of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1961 (well above the Latin American average of 3.4% over the same period), and yet perform so woefully in international league tables assessing key social indicators. He also called on Fernández to abide by his own constitution, which he frequently trumpets as the best in the last century.

Masalles said the Roman Catholic Church was duty bound to hold the government to account and would continue to do so. The Church has thrown its weight behind a campaign by civil society groups over recent months to force the government to comply with a law approved in 1997 (during Fernández's first administration) committing the government to spend either 16% of the budget or 4% of GDP on education. The government has not met this requirement, but Fernández devoted a large chunk of his speech maintaining that it was quality and not quantity that mattered in the field of education. He said the government had made enormous strides on education: distributing millions of free textbooks; expanding the school library programme; better equipping science laboratories; and becoming one of the first countries in Latin America to install computer labs and technology sections in most public schools.

The results, however, do not bear this out. Masalles pointedly referred to a discouraging report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) last year showing the parlous state of education in the country as a major obstacle to development in the Dominican Republic. The country was one of the worst performers out of 139 countries worldwide in several different tables related to education in the WEF Global Competitiveness Index (GCI).

Fernández gave the first hint of backing down to pressure from the Church and civil society in the days after his address when he fired his education minister, Melanio Paredes. He brought in Josefina Pimentel, who was director of the institute of professional and technical training (Infotep), to replace Paredes. Her appointment was well received by civil society groups but, unless she manages to persuade Fernández to increase state resources for education, protests are likely to continue.

• Haiti prepares to vote

With Haiti's presidential run-off due to take place on 20 March between Mirlande Manigat, of the opposition Rassemblement des Démocrates Nationaux Progressistes (RNDP) and pop-star Michel Martelly ('Sweet Micky') of Repons Peyizan, the provisional electoral council (CEP) is putting measures in place to prevent a repeat of the chaos which marred the 28 November first round. These include setting up a 24-hour call centre to provide information for confused voters unsure as to where to vote; firing some 500 poll workers and supervisors from the 1,500 voting centres; increasing education requirements for electoral officials and providing additional training; cleaning up the list of 4.7m voters by matching information from the CEP with the office of national identification. A strengthened Joint Organisation of American States/CARICOM [Caribbean Community] Mission made up of approximately 200 observers" (up from 120 first round observers) will also be dispatched to voting centres. This has done little to assuage local civil society groups' concerns. They cite the CEP's failure to release the breakdown of the final results of the first round, more than three months on from the vote and over a month since it reversed its preliminary results under international pressure [RC-11-02], as reason for low confidence. The decision resulted in giving Martelly, rather than Jude Célestin of President Rene Préval's ruling Inité, a place in the run-off [RC-11-02]. Pierre Esperance, of the human rights coalition Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), which sent an election observer group, said he had “no confidence in the electoral machine".

• Reshuffle

The interior and police minister, Franklin Almeyda, was also dismissed by President Fernández in his mini cabinet reshuffle. He was replaced by the industry and trade minister, Ramón Fadul. Almeyda is an aspirant for the presidential candidacy of the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD). A replacement for Fadul has yet to be announced.

• Ideological similarities

Neither Manigat nor Martelly have distinguished themselves in ideological terms during the second campaigning period in Haiti. Both socially and economically conservative, the two agree on the need to establish a national security force, (disbanded in 1995), primarily to provide jobs. Another point of agreement is the issue of dual nationality. Both advocate lifting constitutional restrictions on dual nationality - a clear attempt to court the ex pat community. These similarities suggest that the choice is likely to hinge on personality. Manigat, a septuagenarian former First Lady and academic, claims to be more of a political heavyweight, while Martelly, a popular former wild-child musician, is billing himself as a political “outsider" and separate from the perceived corruption of the political establishment.