Peña Gomez, 61, Three-Time Candidate for President of Dominican Republic
 

          By LARRY ROHTER

              Jose Francisco Peña Gomez, a three-time candidate for president of
              the Dominican Republic who rose from a childhood of extreme
          poverty to become one of the most prominent black political figures in
          Latin America, died on Sunday night at his home outside Santo Domingo.
          He was 61.

          Peña Gomez had been battling pancreatic and stomach cancer for years,
          but refused to give up his passion for politics. At his death, he was running
          for mayor of Santo Domingo, the country's capital, in municipal and
          congressional elections scheduled for Saturday, and polls showed him
          with a comfortable lead.

          President Leonel Fernandez, who narrowly defeated Peña Gomez in
          1996, on Monday decreed a suspension of all campaigning and declared
          three days of national mourning "in recognition of the contribution Peña
          Gomez made to democracy in the Dominican Republic."

          The campaign will then resume and the election will proceed as
          scheduled, government officials said.

          No politician openly acknowledging African ancestry has ever been
          elected president of any Spanish-speaking Latin American nation in this
          century, though a few of mixed race have held power. But Peña Gomez
          came extremely close to achieving that feat, and even without occupying
          his country's highest office came to be known throughout the hemisphere
          as an eloquent spokesman for and defender of political, social, and racial
          equality and justice.

          "He was a great man, one of the very few people I have known who at
          critical moments put democracy ahead of his own personal interests,"
          Robert Pastor, the director of the Latin American and Caribbean program
          at the Carter Center in Atlanta who knew Peña Gomez well, said on
          Monday.

          Peña Gomez was born on March 6, 1937, in Valverde to parents of
          Haitian descent. As an infant, he was orphaned when Rafael Trujillo, the
          military dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered a massacre in which
          more than 10,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the
          border area were killed and additional thousands fled across the border.

          A peasant family took in the foundling, raised him as their own child, and
          gave him their name. In one of the ironies that marked his public life and
          illustrated his appeal to the poor, Peña Gomez's running mate in 1996
          turned out to be none other than Fernando Alvarez Bogaert, scion of the
          family that owned the ranch where he was raised.

          "I am a human being who has experienced many vicissitudes," Pena
          Gomez said in an interview in 1996. "I was born in an era of conflicts. I
          have two sets of parents and two families. One is by blood, and the other
          is the result of cohabitation. But both are dear to me."

          As a result of his upbringing, Peña Gomez relied on his voracious
          intellectual appetite to supplement a tenuous early education. At 8, he
          worked in a grocery store and at a bar, and by the time he was a
          teen-ager, he had taken jobs as a shoemaker's and a barber's apprentice.

          At 15, he became an instructor in a literacy program for poor children in
          his native province and later worked as a teacher in rural and night
          schools. By 1960, he had moved to Santo Domingo, where he enrolled in
          a broadcasting course and proved so natural a talent that a radio station
          quickly hired him to announce baseball games and other sports events.

          At the same time, Peña Gomez was making his first forays into politics.
          After an interlude when he studied political science at universities in Costa
          Rica and Puerto Rico, he became first the press secretary of the leftist
          Dominican Revolutionary Party, or PRD, and then its secretary-general.

          The PRD was the party of Juan Bosch, the radical firebrand who for 20
          years had led the opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship. By the time
          Bosch was elected president in 1962, Peña Gomez had emerged as a
          protege. Bosch was ousted by a coup in 1963, however, and that led to a
          civil war, and, in April 1965, an American invasion of the Dominican
          Republic.

          Peña Gomez took his oratorical skills to the streets and the airwaves to
          head the opposition to that intervention, which led to Joaquin Balaguer's
          becoming president and the PRD's being cast into the political wilderness
          for 12 years. Repression was intense throughout that period, and Peña
          Gomez eventually had to leave the country.

          Taking refuge in France, he studied political science and constitutional and
          labor law for two years at the University of Paris. Earlier, Peña Gomez
          had earned a law degree from the Autonomous University of Santo
          Domingo and had also studied political science in courses at Harvard
          University and Michigan State University.

          In exile, he also was involved in efforts to obtain international
          condemnation of human rights violations in the Dominican Republic,
          forging relationships with groups that were important for the rest of his life.
          It was also during that period that Bosch and Peña Gomez had a falling
          out that resulted in Bosch's breaking with the party that he had founded
          and setting up a new one.

          In 1982, Peña Gomez was elected mayor of Santo Domingo, which
          automatically made him a strong contender for the presidency. But his
          party passed him by in 1986, with some of its leaders arguing that it
          would be impossible for a black man, especially one of Haitian descent,
          to defeat Balaguer, who was foreign minister at the time of the 1937
          massacre and was notorious for his disdain for blacks.

          The PRD lost to Balaguer anyway, and in 1990, Peña Gomez finally won
          the nomination. He finished third in a vote marred by widespread
          accusations of electoral fraud after a campaign that was full of racial
          innuendo, but he vowed to try again.

          In 1994, he won his party's nomination for a second time, but had to
          contend with what electoral observer-groups described as race baiting
          and vote fraud that was even more blatant. The widely questioned final
          official results showed him losing by 30,000 votes, and though many
          political observers expected Peña Gomez to order his followers into the
          streets to challenge the tally, he chose restraint and negotiation.

          His first bout with cancer followed soon afterward. But the disease went
          into remission after treatment in the United States, and, with Balaguer
          barred from succeeding himself, Peña Gomez finished ahead of two
          strong competitors in the first round of a special presidential vote in 1996,
          receiving 47 percent of the vote. But he fell short of the majority that he
          needed to avoid a runoff, and was narrowly defeated by Fernandez in the
          second round.

          Shortly thereafter, the cancer reappeared, and Peña Gomez spent most of
          the rest of his life shuttling back and forth between Santo Domingo and
          New York, where he underwent medical treatment.

          In January, a factional dispute led him to jump back into the political arena
          in the hope that his personal popularity and fiery oratory would enable his
          party to make gains in the voting on May 16.

          Surviving are his wife, Peggy Cabral, and eight children and stepchildren.

          With his admirers converging on Santo Domingo from all corners of the
          country on Monday, the Dominican government agreed that his body
          would be displayed at the national baseball stadium to accommodate the
          huge crowds that are expected.