DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
 
                   SANTO DOMINGO.— Although anticipated due to his
                   deteriorated state of health, the Dominican people were
                   grief-stricken at the sad news of the death of their former
                   president Juan Bosch on November 1.

                   The most honorable Dominican politician, acknowledged as
                   such by his adversaries, passed away in the Abel González
                   clinic, where he was admitted on September 15. An intestinal
                   hemorrhage led to the death of one of the greatest Dominican
                   writers and a maestro of the short-story genre.

                   Without abandoning literature, Bosch was one of the founder
                   members of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), which
                   emerged in Havana in 1939.

                   Nominated by the PRD he was elected president in February
                   1963 but a military conspiracy, sponsored by the Catholic
                   church and the most powerful economic groups, deposed him
                   on September 25 of that year.

                   Bosch went into exile for the second time — the first being in
                   1938 during the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship — and
                   lived in Europe.

                   In 1965 he traveled to Puerto Rico, where he was in contact
                   with officers from the Dominican army which, in April of that
                   year, tried to reinstate him in office through an armed
                   movement that had wide popular support.

                   The intervention of 42,000 U.S. naval troops put an end to
                   the triumph of the Dominican forces led by Colonel Francisco
                   Caamaño.

                   He traveled again to Europe after losing the 1996 elections in
                   a country occupied by invading forces, returning in 1970, and
                   in 1973 founded the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), to
                   which he devoted all his energies.

                   For 23 years he worked on consolidating the PLD and was at
                   the point of returning to the presidency in 1990, but an
                   electoral fraud in favor of Joaquín Balaguer, then president,
                   prevented this.

                   His final attempt came four years later, but he was relegated
                   to a trailing third place. That event marked his withdrawal
                   from political life.

                   From that time he remained the symbol of a party which,
                   overlooking the events of 1990, accepted Balaguer’s backing
                   in order to instate Leonel Fernández, the author of a book
                   exposing the fraud, as president in 1996.

                   Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and subsequently other
                   health problems, Bosch’s admissions to hospital was frequent
                   in recent years.

                   Over the last few days, the Dominican press and television
                   news channels have devoted their coverage to the merits of
                   the writer and politician. Dozens of television viewers have
                   called in to express their grief at Bosch’s death.

                   His remains were interred in La Vega city, 120 kilometers
                   northeast of this capital, where Bosch was born on June 30,
                   1909. With his death comes the loss of a leader who
                   advocated integrity as a politician’s principal virtue. (PL)