Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
tion, clientelist practices, and infighting by PRD leaders.
Combined with the country's economic decline, these practices
helped lead to the electoral comeback of Balaguer in 1986.
The prosecution and conviction ofJorge Blanco on corruption
charges by Balaguer (a case still under appeal as of year-end
1999), further weakened the party. Factional divisions finally
led to a formal party split in the period leading up to the 1990
elections. Pena Gomez retained the party name and symbols,
while the party's 1986 candidate, Jacobo Majluta Azar, formed
the Independent Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario
Independiente—PRI). The latter party received only 7.0 percent
of the vote in the 1990 elections and subsequently
declined further.
During the 1990s, Pena Gomez gradually supplanted formal
notions of internal party democracy and assumed the role of
uncontested leader within the PRD. He failed to attain the
presidency, however. In 1994 it is likely that fraud robbed him
of the margin of victory. In 1996 the introduction of a secondround
presidential election—held because no party had
received a majority in the first round—and an effective alliance
between the PLD and the PRSC in the second round prevented
him from winning. Pena Gomez's death just a week before the
1998 congressional and local elections helped the PRD to gain
51.4 percent of the vote, which translated into twenty-four of
the country's thirty Senate seats and eighty-three representatives
in the Chamber of Deputies. The party also won majorities
in many municipalities. The PRD then successfully limited factional
infighting and maintained organizational coherence
while selecting its presidential nominee for the May 2000 elections,
something it had not been able to do leading up to the
elections of 1986 and 1990. Hipolito Mejia handily won a presidential
primary the party held in June 1999, and successfully
incorporated the two major losing candidates, Rafael Subervi
and Hatuey DeCamps, into high-level positions within the
party.
Remarkably, Juan Bosch is the founder of two of the country's
three major parties. In 1973 he left the PRD to found the
PLD, positioning it as a more radical, cadre-oriented, ideologically
coherent, and organizationally solid party. Its major initial
strength was among educated, nationalist, radicalized urban
middle-sector and labor groups. Gradually, as the country's
economic situation declined during the 1980s and the PRD was
weakened by internecine struggles, Bosch and the PLD reen-
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