Vice President and former pre-Presidential candidate Milagros Ortiz Bosch has spoken about the internal divisions within the ruling PRD party. She said that the PRD was not promoting the political integration of all the party’s factions, now that the President’s supporters have control of the party presidency and the Presidential candidacy. She felt the 18 January party convention, at which former party president Hatuey Decamps was ousted and President Mejia’s nomination for the Presidency was validated, was destructive and went against the PRD’s historical traditions. She said that the lack of democracy in the party went so deep that it prevented the government from working in tandem with the PRD. As a member of that party, she did not exclude herself from these criticisms, but did however say she had done all she could to fight for the party’s unity over the last year. She also claims to have drawn President Hipolito Mejia’s attention to the situation in Argentina, where an electoral model similar to the “Ley de Lemas” (controversial, now-defunct proposal to reform electoral law in order to allow each party to field up to five candidates) had created more political divisions within the ruling party but had allowed the country to emerge from an economic crisis far worse than that being experienced by the DR. The Vice President and Minister of Education said that the country’s attention was diverted from more important matters during the two months dominated by the contentious surrounding the Ley de Lemas.
She said that the President now faced “a huge challenge” to confront. Milagros Ortiz Bosch was one of the top contenders for the party’s Presidential nomination, but was out-maneuvered, as were Rafael Subervi Bonilla and the other Presidential hopefuls, by President Mejia and his unstoppable electoral ambitions. Ortiz Bosch was speaking on TV Channel 11’s “El Dia” program, and said she would reveal her future political plans later this week.