2004 – Page 294

Among those who received Presidential pardons last month was the “King of Ecstasy”, Juan Carlos Ozuna, a convicted drug dealer sentenced to serve five years. According to Diario Libre, members of the pardons review committee said that several pardoned convicts were not screened by the committee and their pardons were therefore a surprise. Ozuna was …

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The police announced that charges would be filed against the four patrol agents who murdered 25-year-old Arlene Perez as she sat in a parked car talking with her boyfriend, Juan Jose Herasme Alfonso, outside her home in Cuesta Brava of Arroyo Hondo, in the early hours of last Thursday. The boyfriend’s father, journalist Silvio Herasme …

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Headline news in all of today’s press is the classification of the Dominican women’s volleyball team for the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, this summer. The team defeated the previously unbeaten Peruvians three sets to none (25-20, 25-18, and 25-21) to secure their trip to Greece. Previously, the Dominican women had defeated the host Venezuelan …

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President Hipolito Mejia travels to Monterrey, Mexico on Monday to take part in the Special Summit of the Americas on the 12 and 13 of this month. With attendees such as United States President George Bush expected, the gathering will unite representatives of 34 member nations of the OAS (Organization of American States). The heads …

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President Hipolito Mejia said yesterday on the TV program “El Dia”, produced by Huchi Lora and Ramon Nunez, that if his party needs to impose the Ley de Lemas, it will do so, because power is made to be exercised. “If it has to be imposed, it will be imposed, because that is your role …

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When questioned on the TV program “El Dia” about the possibility of electoral fraud, the head of state said: “I am convinced that nothing is going to happen. That phase has been overcome in this country, fortunately.” He mentioned that the government has allotted the Central Electoral Board a budget of RD$1.83 billion to organize …

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In a television interview yesterday, President Hipolito Mejia said he hoped the country would not fall into the hands of civil society, because, in his words, they were “only looking for employment.” Mejia gave the example of other Latin American countries such as Brazil and Peru, which had experimented with solutions to political crises by …

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Participacion Ciudadana, a leading civic society group, publishes a paid advertisement in the press alerting against the perils of the Ley de Lemas in Congress today. The organization highlights that the bill is impossible to implement with only four months to go before the election; violates articles 17, 49, 90, 91 and 119 of the …

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The dean of the School of Law of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra explains today in his contribution to El Caribe that the so-called Ley de Lemas (Law of Parties) boils down to a formula that would combine the votes of the leading PRD politicians against those of the single PLD candidate, Leonel …

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The Fuerza Nacional Progresista political party of lawyer Marino Vinicio (Vincho) Castillo and his son Deputy Pelegrin Castillo alerted today in a paid advertisement that what lies behind the Ley de Lemas proposal, only 126 days before election day, is a desperate plan in the face of the insurmountable advantage in the polls of the …

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