He constantly maintained a delicate balancing act between the military, the masses, and competing scheming groups of elites; he succeeded in forestalling military coups against him by fragmenting the military into competing groups; and he was able to inspire such fear even in military officers abusing forests and national parks that, in the sequel to a famous unplanned confrontation recorded on television in 1994, I was told that an army colonel who had opposed Balaguer’s forest protection measures and whom Balaguer angrily summoned ended up urinating in his trousers in terror.
