Dr. Joaquín Balaguer is the president of the Dominican Republic in 1966, named by the oracular voice called Archimedes as the one who “will know what to do with the stone” brought from the Malvinas, and as the fulcrum “where America concludes”.
| Type | Character (historical) |
| Office | President of the Dominican Republic (1966) |
| Place | Santo Domingo |
| Spanish entry | Dr. Joaquín Balaguer |
The oracle’s dictation
The group does not know Balaguer; his name reaches them from beyond waking hearing. It is spoken by the voice that calls itself Archimedes, which claims to have a lever to move the world. According to it, Balaguer is the one who will know what to do with the stone: the blue thing the island kept like a sleeping organ, taken from the lighthouse already turned into something else, the yellow egg that whistles and opens an eye.
Balaguer is also the fulcrum, the place where, in Archimedes’ words, America concludes and five hundred years of the first light are fulfilled. The count starts in Santo Domingo, on the coast where the Genoese made landfall. If the hijacking of the plane was the threshold of the descent, the rift opened by Operativo Cóndor, Balaguer is the other end of the thread.
The president
In 1966 Balaguer governs a country just out of bloodshed. Behind him lie Trujillo, who held the island from 1930 until he was killed in 1961; Juan Bosch, the elected president who was overthrown; the civil war of 1965; and the forty thousand marines landed by the United States. In the oracle’s logic, the stone pointing to the place where America began, and to a country marked by dictatorship, war and foreign intervention, does not appear to be chance.
Status
Balaguer is a promise rather than an encounter: Santo Domingo is the next destination the stone asks to be taken to, but the group has not yet set foot there.