Dominicans warily eye end of Balaguer regime Barred from re-election, popularity still high

He is 89 years old, blind, and walks with a tiny-step shuffle that is almost a parody of frailty. El Viejo, The Old Man, he is called in the land that he has ruled for 22 of the last 30 years.

Yet he retains the astuteness that made him one of Latin America's last and most intriguing caudillos, the ``men on horseback'' whose rule both stained and spiced so much of the region's history.

``They don't come any more cunning,'' historian and former Central Bank governor Bernardo Vega said.

Balaguer ruled the Dominican Republic with a brew of autocracy and eccentricity worthy of Macondo, magical home of the aged tyrant in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Though his security agents repressed opponents during his early years in power, he usually permitted opposition parties and a free press, and ruled through intrigue, patronage and Pharaonic-level pork-barrel projects.

He kept the armed forces on a tight leash but never used them for a coup, even when he lost elections. He has won six of the nine presidential contests held since dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was assassinated in 1961 -- all but one through massive and often brazen fraud, his critics say.

Yet he remains popular among farmers and bureaucrats, and polls show he could win 40 to 45 percent of the presidential vote Thursday if the constitution did not bar re-election.

``Look at Latin America, and you see this old man has done good,'' said grammar school teacher Marcelo Serralles, 32. ``No wars, no coups and a good government for the people. We want him to stay on forever.''

A phalanx of foreign electoral observers has begun arriving in Santo Domingo to ensure he doesn't. Balaguer is scheduled to step down Aug. 6.

A favorite of Trujillo

Born in 1907 to a well-off family in the Dominican Republic's agricultural heartland, the Cibao Valley, Balaguer was the youngest of eight children. All his siblings were girls.

He was sent to religious schools and got a doctorate in law and political economy from the University of Paris.

Quickly spotted as an unusual intellect, he won a foreign service appointment to Madrid from 1932 to 1935 -- amid the chaos of pre-Franco Spain -- and grew into a hair-shirt Catholic with a bedrock belief in order and discipline.

Trujillo soon spotted the young conservative and in quick succession named him a presidential aide, ambassador to Colombia and Venezuela, Mexico and Honduras, foreign minister and secretary of education.

In 1957, with Trujillo pulling the strings, Balaguer was elected vice president. Three years later, he became the dictator's puppet president.

Yet five months after Trujillo's murder, Balaguer helped force the dictator's family into exile.

Amid charges that he was a ``Trujillista,'' Balaguer resigned in 1962 in favor of a caretaker junta. Leftist Juan Bosch won the 1963 elections but was toppled in a coup seven months later. Two years of civil strife erupted into full-blown war in 1965, and U.S. troops invaded. With CIA help, Washington shoehorned Balaguer into the presidency in 1966 elections.

He had finally seized power. And he would not let go, except for a period from 1978 to 1986 when he lost two elections -- both despite clear fraud -- to the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party.

But he made a comeback in 1986, won again in 1990 over a badly divided opposition -- the only election that even critics accept he won fairly -- and again in 1994, this time with a narrow margin and clear deceit.

Reaction to the 1994 fraud was so strong that while Balaguer managed to stay in the presidency, he was forced to agree to cut his four-year term to two, and to a constitutional amendment banning re-election.

Helped in his twilight years

Over the years, Balaguer lost his sight to glaucoma -- it's indicative of his reserve that no one seems to know exactly when -- and grew increasingly reliant on a small knot of old friends and young aides known as the ``palace ring,'' who help him govern and protect his privacy.

Balaguer still works long hours, with the help of a niece and three secretaries who read him documents and take dictation. One of his longtime aides, Rafael Bello Andino, handles his confidential documents.

But the president dropped his traditional Thursday news conferences some months back and has since refused all press interviews. He has looked feeble in some recent public appearances, clear-headed in others.

A teetotaler in a nation of beer and rum drinkers, he lives in the former servants' quarters of his family mansion, a Spartan five-room apartment over the garage. His one surviving sister lives in the main house.

Never married, he used his favorite sister, Emma, as first lady until her death in 1992. He is rumored to have had some illegitimate children, but the topic has never appeared in any of his biographies.

Balaguer still takes a daily constitutional -- in suit and fedora, regardless of the heat -- while aides steady him around the elbows and talk him through obstacles he cannot see.

Since his mother died in 1973, he has visited her grave every Sunday and worn a black tie every day as a sign of mourning.

His politics can be just as peculiar, sometimes racist.

In one of his 25 or so books -- on everything from law to poetry -- he wrote that blacks, deprived of the order and discipline of European culture, revert to ``primitivism'' and having too many children.

On the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in America, when the politically correct stance was to spotlight Native American cultures, Balaguer stunned a summit of Latin American leaders with a groveling paean to Spain's civilizing influence over its colonies.

More recently, he has been alleging that Washington wants him out of office so a pliant successor can open the western border to Haitians and thus ease the United States' own Haitian migration problem.
Eye on posterity

But to dwell on his peculiarities is to miss Balaguer's driving force -- a passion to build that has given the Dominican Republic one of the most extensive road networks in the hemisphere.

Critics say his public works projects combine the opportunity for patronage and graft with Balaguer's deep-seated mistrust of average citizens and distaste for corruption he cannot control.

``Money for social welfare can be stolen, but not a physical structure,'' Vega said. ``He doesn't trust people, so he builds.''

Balaguer himself gives his Pharaonic passion a higher meaning in one of his books. ``You must leave your name written in stone,'' he wrote.

Every time he has won the presidency, he has gone on a building spree, ordering up everything from roads to schools and clinics to dirt-strip airports.

Every Thursday, he leaves the presidential palace to inaugurate some highway or building. And every Friday, newspapers carry ads with photographs showing the beaming president snipping a ribbon or handing over keys.

Right now he has thousands of workers using almost nothing but hand tools to build a cement culvert down the middle of the 100-mile highway between Santo Domingo and the nation's second largest city, Santiago.

But his grandest project was an 11-story lighthouse on the eastern outskirts of Santo Domingo that projects an 8,000-foot beam of light, in the shape of a Christian cross, directly up into the skies.

The building, laid out in the shape of a reclining cross, houses the alleged remains of Christopher Columbus, brought over from the Santo Domingo cathedral. A church in Spain also claims to have the remains.

To pay for his projects, Balaguer used to simply order the Central Bank to print more money. But as his economists complained about inflation, he began simply refusing to pay the companies that performed the work.

The government now owes huge sums to the firms, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars but kept secret by the companies themselves out of fear of not being paid or losing future government contracts.

As Thursday's elections approach, some Dominicans have started to write Balaguer's political obituary.

Radio commentator Ramon Colombo would inscribe Balaguer's tomb with the epitaph: ``He fooled us all.''

Vega, reflecting Balaguer's not-quite-dictatorial but certainly not-quite-democratic demeanor, favors a more subtle indictment: ``He made the transition from Trujillo to democracy unnecessarily long.''

But others note that Balaguer will technically be able to run in the next presidential election, in the year 2000.

He will then be 93, four years younger than his mother when she died in 1973.