The Dominican ambassador to the United States, Sonia Guzmán Klang, revealed that her father, then-president Don Antonio Guzmán Fernández, committed suicide on July 4, 1982 (with 43 days to complete the constitutional newspaper), as a result of a deep depression She was never treated and not because she and her husband, José María Hernández Espaillat, were involved in corruption, both senior officials of her father’s government (1978-1986), as has since been speculated.
The diplomat, whose husband was administrative secretary to the presidency and she was undersecretary at the time, interviewed this Monday in the program “Entre Líderes” by journalists José Alduey Sierra and Manuel Ruíz and commentator Jorge Solano, was the subject of depression in the Dominican Republic. taboo, and especially in the case of a president, no one, including the doctors, dared to talk about it.
“Talking about a depressed person at the time was talking about someone who was half crazy who needed to go to a psychiatrist,” explains the ambassador.
“That was a situation they regretted, but it was inevitable that no one dared to say it. A lot of people say it was because of me, that we were corrupt, that I owned the hotel Lina and that me and my husband went back and forth, ”he added.
To the conspiracy theories woven and revealed about the president’s death, which said he was left behind and the shot was in the right temple, he replied that his father was right, but in an accident he broke a bone in his shoulder and he used a .38 caliber revolver, the trigger of which could be pulled gently, although it had a pistol, but it is a weapon that requires much more force to handle.
He said his revelations about his father’s suicide were presented as a first for the “Entre Lideres” program, with details not yet known.
He assured his father’s depression had been going on for a while before he committed suicide, but no one noticed.
“And if a doctor suspected that, he didn’t have the courage or dare to say it, but neither did he condemn him, far from it,” he said.
“How good to talk about a fact that has generated so much speculation right now,” he said.
“Depression is an illness that is treated with a psychologist or a psychiatrist and is caused by facts and some chemicals that are missing from the brain and, at that point, speaking of a president with depression … one as a family, I had none. idea what a depression was then, ‘he insisted.
“Over time, things are more known and today there is a lot more knowledge about this disease,” he said.
A review on Wikipedia states that former President Hipólito Mejía, Guzmán’s close friend, went to a doctor after finding President Guzmán crying next to his horse, who assured him that the president was suffering from depression, a cursed illness, but Mejía believed didn’t get the diagnosis and kept it a secret. Mejía was Secretary of State for Agriculture in Guzmán’s period.