Hipólito Mejía
former president of the Dominican Republic
Rafael Hipólito Mejía Domínguez (born 22 February 1941) is a Dominican politician who served as President of the Dominican Republic from 2000 to 2004.
During his presidential term in office the country was affected by one of its worst economic crises, generated by the bankruptcy of three major commercial banks in the country, which resulted in high inflation, high country risk rating, currency devaluation and increasing local poverty. Mejía sent 604 Dominican troops to fight in the Iraq War.
In the presidential election of 2004, he ran for a second term as the candidate of the Dominican Revolutionary Party but he was defeated by Leonel Fernández, whom he had succeeded as president in 2000, from the Dominican Liberation Party.
Early life
Mejía Domínguez was born on 22 February 1941 at the José María Cabral y Báez Hospital in Santiago de los Caballeros, as the first child of Hipólito de Jesús ‘Polín’ Mejía Díaz and María Josefa ‘Marina’ Domínguez Viñals, both native of La Chichigua in Gurabo, place where he was raised. In his hometown he is known as Cabuyita, diminutive for cabuya (Latin American Spanish for "Agave twine"), because of the long blond straight hair that he had during his youth.
Mejía received a high school diploma from the Loyola Polytechnic Institute in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic, graduating in 1962. Two years later, he attended special programs at North Carolina State University in the United States. On 4 July 1964 he married Rosa Gómez Arias, his third cousin. They have four children, among them, Carolina Mejía de Garrigó, a 2016 vice-presidential candidate.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q653611. VIAF identifies the subject as 51343460. The Library of Congress control number is no2001069535. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1941, 2000, 2004 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hipólito Mejía” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.