Antonio Guzman, whose 1978 election as president ended decades of rightist rule and marked the first peaceful transfer of power in the Dominican Republic, led his nation firmly toward democracy in his four-year term.
The highlight of his presidency undoubtedly will be the orderly transfer of power to the elected government he nurtured.
Guzman's body was found Saturday night in his office with a single bullet wound in the face. Officials said his death was a suicide.
His term in office would have ended next month.
During his administration, Guzman depoliticized the armed forces, adding to the country's political stability and stature of the elected presidency.
He freed political prisoners, lifted bans on all exiles and scrupulously respected freedom of the press.
Guzman also resisted calls for massive social reform and refused to re-establish ties with Cuba upon taking office in a landslide election victory in 1978 -- the first peaceful government transition in the nation that had produced dictators such Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
Guzman, a millionaire businessman and cattle rancher from the fertile Cibao valley in the northern part of the country, was regarded as more conservative than the left-of-center Dominican Revolutionary Party that lifted him to power.
In 1979, the Dominican Republic suffered its greatest natural disaster -- the twin onslaughts of hurricanes David and Frederic that left 5,000 people dead and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
Guzman's bid to assume emergency powers to cope with the disaster was rebuffed by his own congress but his friendship with the United States paid off. U.S. military helicopters carried out a massive food airlift to isolated, flood areas.
He was an astute businessman but a dull speaker with a slight lisp.
Born the son of a textile merchant Feb. 12, 1911, in the northern city of La Vega, Silvestre Antonio Guzman Fernandez studied agronomy in Florida and California but held his first job in his own country as a store manager of the Dutch-owned Curacao Trading Co.
Political activity was impossible under Trujillo, who ruled the nation with a cruel hand between 1930 and 1961. But in the first elected government after Trujillo's assassination, the short-lived administration of Juan Bosch of 1963, Guzman was agriculture minister.
In the 1965 civil war quashed by U.S. Marines, Guzman was offered the provisional presidency but reportedly turned it down because the U.S. occupying forces insisted he jail suspected communists.
The following year he ran for vice president on the Dominican Revolutionary Party ticket headed by Bosch but was defeated by Joaquin Balaguer, who ruled the country for three terms.
Soon after Balaguer was installed for a third term, Guzman declared his opposition candidacy. On election night 1978, when it was apparent Guzman would win, the armed forces stopped the vote counting.
Guzman declared himself president-elect and successfully appealed for pressure from the human rights-conscious Carter administration and oil-rich Venezuela on Balaguer to concede defeat.
Guzman married Renee Klang in 1939 and they had two children -- a son, Ivan, who died in a car accident in 1970, and a daughter, Sonia, who served in his government as administrative undersecretary of the presidency. He also had a daughter by a previous marriage.
