Jacobo Majluta, one of the Dominican Republic’s most outstanding politicians of all time, died on Saturday, 2 March in the Lee Moffit Cancer Center & Research Institute of Tampa, Florida. The charismatic former President of the Republic was 62 years old. He died of complications resulting from the chemotherapy treatment he was undergoing for pulmonary cancer. He was well-known as a chain smoker of cigarettes.
Born in Santo Domingo on 9 October 1934, Mr Majluta was elected Vice President, as the running mate of Silvestre Antonio Guzmán Fernández of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano which, by a large majority, defeated President Joaquín Balaguer in the 1978 election.
When President Guzmán committed suicide on 4 July 1982, Jacobo Majluta took over the presidency for 43 days, until handing over power to Salvador Jorge Blanco on 16 August 1982. Jorge Blanco later placed many obstacles in the path of Mr Majluta’s aspirations to the presidency in 1986, resulting in the PRD losing to the PRSC and Dr Balaguer.
Jacobo Majluta was also director of the state conglomerate of businesses, Corde, after having worked as its administrator, under-administrator and in other posts at several of Corde’s companies at the start of his career. He was elected senator for Santo Domingo and presided over the Senate on two occasions. In 1954 he graduated as an accountant from the Escuela Superior de Peritos Contadores and four years later received a masters degree in finances from the state university, UASD. He was also Minister of Finance in 1963, when he was only 26 years old, in the seven-month Juan Bosch government.
Mr Majluta had been a member of the PRD since 1961. He separated from the party after disagreements with José Francisco Peña Gómez over who would be the presidential candidate in the 1990 election. As a result, Dr Peña Gómez stayed with the PRD and Mr Majluta left to found another political party, the Partido Revolucionario Independiente (PRI). He refused to make alliances and fought unilaterally in the 1990 and 1994 elections, coming in fourth place on both occasions.
While acutely ill, he made a pact with José Francisco Peña Gómez and the Acuerdo de Santo Domingo, which was confirmed in the PRI convention on 26 January.
The seriousness and details of his illness were kept a secret and only revealed after his death.
He is survived by his wife, Ana Elisa Villanueva, his daughter Consuelo Elena and her husband Martin Cantisano.