Joaquin Balaguer, who has died aged 95, ruled the Dominican Republic for most of the past 40 years. Elected president six times, the last three when almost blind, he held power by making surprise army promotions and demotions, dishing out land to peasants and ensuring he won the count in elections he narrowly lost.
The diminutive caudillo survived years of his country's economic near-collapse because his rivals were unwilling seriously to challenge the flawed democracy he had built. His subjects occasionally rioted and were then shot, but Balaguer always kept a few inches from the precipice and got a free hand from the establishment.
He came to politics during the ferocious dictatorship of Generalissimo - "El Benefactor" - Rafael Trujillo, whom he slavishly served as diplomat, minister, vice-president and finally puppet president in 1960. It fell to the bookish and hitherto unremarkable Balaguer to hold the regime together after CIA-backed assassins dispatched Trujillo in 1961 as he was driving to a rendezvous with his mistress. Eight months later, squabbling generals and Trujillo's sons sent Balaguer into exile in the US.
But five years on, after the briefest spell of democracy, coups, civil war and a US military occupation, Balaguer was back again as the most reliable politician Washington could come up with to resist what President Johnson insisted was "communism".
His 1966 election was engineered by preventing his fellow man of letters, leftwinger Juan Bosch (obituary, November 2 2001), ousted victor of the country's first free elections in 1962, from campaigning. Balaguer let loose the old regime's thugs, who murdered thousands of his real or supposed enemies. He claimed he was powerless against what he called "uncontrollable elements". Although his land reform programme won him rural support, the social democrats defeated him for the presidency in 1978. Generals stopped the vote-counting when he fell behind, but Balaguer declined their help after an angry phone call from President Carter.
Corruption, incompetence and division among the victors allowed him to recapture the presidency at the 1986 elections, even though by then he was nearly blind from glaucoma: "I will not be asked to thread needles while in office," he said.
A steady economic decline began, because the US decided to buy less of the country's main export, sugar. Balaguer worsened the decline by a huge, wasteful public works programme whose centrepiece was the Faro de Colon, a massive illuminated cross intended to shine out across the Caribbean to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discoveries. Anger grew as nearby slums were razed and the cross was blamed for water and electricity cuts and soaring food prices. A dismayed Balaguer, snubbed by the King of Spain and the Pope, cancelled the opening ceremony in 1990.
By 1994 the economy had improved and he again claimed a narrow poll victory. He saw to it that racist slurs harmed his chief rival, the Haitian-descended José Francisco Peña Gomez, whose following among blacks alarmed him. Among Balaguer's many books was one which scorned the neighbouring Haitians as contaminators of Dominican blood and society. As he had after the 1990 elections, when he was first fraudulently declared the narrow winner, he agreed to serve only half his term. He broke his 1990 promise but stepped down as agreed in 1996.
But he kept on running for the top job. In 1996, he and his Reformist Social Christian Party were the key that got Léonel Fernández elected over Peña Gomez. In 2000, he was pipped into third place by just 0.3%, but his party still held the congressional balance after elections two months ago and the mighty kept trudging to his house to seek his approval. His lip-service to democracy had helped the country keep its balance and advance as its plantation economy was battered by the global market. The country turned to mass tourism.
I last saw him, tottering out of the capital's cathedral, where Columbus's bones are said to lie, a shrivelled figure in a suit and hat half a cen tury out of fashion. He was being almost carried along by a huge, scar-faced, heavily-braided general, sole survivor of the gang that murdered his mentor Trujillo, and that month's armed forces minister. The deep, rasping voice that issued from Balaguer's feeble body always surprised.
Balaguer never married, though he reportedly fathered children with some of his housemaids. For two years in the 1980s, he allowed his life to be ruled by Mina Torres, a young campaign worker he had made his private secretary, and enjoyed the saucy speculation about their relationship.
But he lived alone with his books and poetry and, until they died, his two sisters, one of whom, Emma, he made the capital's mayor. Together they would go faithfully each Sunday to put flowers on their mother's grave.
· Joaquin Balaguer, politician, born September 1 1906; died July 14 2002