SANTO DOMINGO. – What can be described in the local jargon as “el loco is loose” is wreaking havoc in Dominican Republic’ ruling party, where despite its General  Secretary’s calls to address the organization’s problems within, a new round of public criticism from some of its senior members threatens to tear it in tatters.

PLD general secretary and Senate president Reinaldo Pared’s call to calm didn’t phase the also senator Charlie Mariotti (PLD-Monte Plata), who blamed president Leonel Fernandez himself for the situation in the party founded by the late writer and statesman Juan Bosch.

Mariotti said it’s up to the President to "put the noose on the dog" regarding the entities’ lack of effectiveness in disciplining it’s members’ public criticisms. " We cannot continue playing long live the king and down with the cerfs."

The legislator blamed the PLD’s internal problems on its Central Committee, calling it a “nonexistent organism,” since in his view the organization is no longer a party of organisms and instead dominated by favoritism.

He said although Fernandez is the party’s president nobody wants to refer to his person, and instead by denunciating and complaining without names which don’t describe the crude reality of the problem which he affirms isn’t new in the PLD.

And even after Pared’s insistence that internal issues must be discussed internally and not publicly, another lawmaker and member of its Central Committee today said the corrections and discipline in the PLD must begin with its top echelon, the Political Committee, which he said has closed the doors to its rank-and-file and “most of them have laid claim to the government posts they occupy.”

Ramon Cabrera, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies’ Budget Commission, said the Political Committee has lost the mystic and has forgotten its rank-and-file and its midlevel leaders.

But yet another deputy, Julio Horton (PLD-District National), asked Political Committee member and one of the PLD’s founder Euclides Gutiérrez Félix, to reveal the names of entity’s leaders who’ve become corrupt in office so they can be expelled and indicted.