The Crime At Santo Domingo
Plastrik, Stanley
This intervention is an act that must be repudiated.—Romulo Betancourt, former president of Venezuela. No matter how one looks at it—politically, morally, tactically— the American armed...
...into the policeman of the world...
...will never tolerate anywhere in the world the overthrow of a dictatorship which sets in motion revolutionary forces that cannot be controlled...
...The internvention was rapid, but the John son administration lacked a clear policy for what to do afterwards: so that it oscillated between supporting the junta completely, for a day or two seemingly supporting the "rebels," and more recently, trying to patch up some sort of dubious compromise...
...After that, Trujillo took over the job and an arrangement of almost forty years duration was worked out...
...Johnson, however, reverses this policy, as part of a larger shift from the social reform promised by the Alliance for Progress to the traditional support of military regimes...
...The history that is to happen can, at least in part, be shaped by those who would change its present course...
...the record is ominous...
...Part of what happens depends on the kind of protest and pressure that is mounted against the administration's shameful policy in the Dominican Republic...
...he had failed or been unable to rid the nation of the Trujillo generals, and now they rid themselves of him...
...action...
...nor of their political relationship to the rebels who proposed to restore the constitutional regime first initiated under Juan Bosch...
...What needs most to be stressed is the fundamental and unanswerable question: By what moral right does the U.S...
...The poet Robert Lowell had the only suitable moral reaction when he rejected a White House invitation as a way of dissociating himself from those who had launched this criminal act against an innocent people...
...But now, no matter what else happens, the position of the United States has been profoundly changed by this return to the hated policy of unilateral police interventionism...
...2) What should we urge the U.S...
...No pretense has even been made of examining the nature or extent of their influence...
...If that possibility becomes the determining factor in U.S...
...Theodore Roosevelt's famous "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States took to itself the unilateral right to intervene in the affairs of all Latin American nations, came into being in 1905, precisely over the Dominican Republic...
...government, in violation of the OAS charter which it signed, decide to set itself up as policeman of the Western hemisphere...
...As for the United States, the Kennedy administration contents itself with a mild rebuke, but does have the decency not to extend formal recognition to the unspeakable junta...
...It has given implied approval to the military coup in Guatemala that kept Juan Jose Arevalo from the presidency, to the military ouster of President Ramon Villeda Morales in Honduras and President Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, and to the military leaders in Argentina...
...In 1934, the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt promised an end to intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin American nations...
...The Dominican people have good reason to fear American intervention...
...has not acted, or been able to act, with similar resolution...
...In April they rose up in arms and with surprising ease overthrew the Trujilloist junta, clearly as a continuation of a struggle begun long before...
...It is entirely clear, both from the preceding history of the Dominican Republic and from the reports of newspaper men, that the threat of a Communist take-over—later reduced by Secretary of State Rusk to the level of "possibility"— was the product of hysteria and misinformation...
...That it has become a settled policy, it seems somewhat premature to claim...
...can now do, by way of moral recompense, would be to launch a substantial, even lavish program of economic aid to help this beleaguered people—beginning with payment for the war damages we have inflicted...
...that the U.S...
...foreign policy...
...forces, and the return of the Dominican Republic to its people—perhaps through a rapid election supervised by the UN or by such unimpeachable spokesmen of Latin American democracy as Betancourt, Figueros and Munoz...
...And it also provides a justification in advance for a policy of indiscriminate and large-scale intervention—for, rest assured, there will be no shortage of revolts against military regimes in Latin America during the coming years...
...will be committed to a policy of instantaneous intervention wherever there is, or is said to be, a possibility of Communist power...
...Consider the outcries that would ensue if several Latin American countries sent an expedition to Mississippi to rescue the beleaguered Negroes...
...This intervention is an act that must be repudiated.—Romulo Betancourt, former president of Venezuela...
...That such a possibility is very real, it would be foolish to deny...
...Now it is quite true that in any democratic revolt against a military regime, be it in Latin America or elsewhere, there is a possibility that the Communists will try, through disciplined participation and manipulation, to assume the leadership or take control...
...Even the astonishing ineptitude of our intervention in the Dominican Republic indicates that we are dealing not so much with a long-planned and deliberatelyconceived policy as with an act of panicky impulsiveness and fright...
...No such situation existed in the Dominican Republic...
...It is quite possible that the U.S...
...Kennedy...
...And the very least the U.S...
...Today, in the midst of a pool of blood for which the United States bears the primary responsibility, the Dominican Republic is politically and militarily stalemated...
...Consider the Dominican crisis in its essential terms: A people, numbering only 3,000,000, inhabits part of a poor and economically backward island, largely without significant resources and largely dependent on the United States...
...This means, first of all, the immediate withdrawal of all U.S...
...But thus far we have a mixed situation: some instances of outrageous intervention, and other instances (Venezuela, Bolivia) of not intervening...
...It has set the U.S...
...mocracy, this study seemed to us so valuable that we recently mailed out the reprint to all DISSENT subscribers.] But the Dominican people refused to accept this return to Trujilloism...
...against the progressive regimes in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Venezuela, among the best friends of the United States in the developing American system envisaged by Mr...
...A creature named Wessin y Wessin, operating out of an airbase, becomes the new power behind the facade of the military junta...
...We believe that the probable outcome would be a return to office of the friends and supporters of Juan Bosch...
...Richard Dudman writing in The New Republic sums up the damage: Intervention has aligned the United States with the military juntas of Latin America and against the constitutional democracies...
...foreign policy, then in effect it sanctions the survival of every military dictator...
...Then it was a matter of failure to pay off debts...
...In theory, then, the Monroe Doctrine became a multilateral doctrine...
...It has encouraged the conservative military leaders and oligarchies that through the years have played footsie even with Communists to spite progressive democracy under the anti-Communist left...
...The first president is Juan Bosch, honored with 60 per cent of the vote, a man of great personal integrity, and spokesman of the democratic left who sets out, against insuperable odds, to recreate a democratic nation...
...to do now...
...This tragic story is fully and brilliantly detailed in Theodore Draper's "The Roots of the Dominican Crisis," which first appeared in the May 24, 1965 issue of the New Leader...
...No matter how one looks at it—politically, morally, tactically— the American armed intervention in the Dominican Republic cries out for the sharpest condemnation...
...The one conceivable situation under which, I think, a form of intervention might be justified would be an attempted armed overthrow by Communists or fascists of a democratic republic led by a figure like Bosch or Betancourt, who, in the name of a democraticallyelected government, asked the U.S...
...Published as a pamphlet by the League for Industrial De...
...3) Will there now be a new "Johnson Doctrine" making the U.S...
...But one thing can be said in principle: the strongest predisposition of socialists and liberals ought to be against interventionism, and we should look with the greatest suspicion upon any rationale in its behalf...
...We must defend the right of selfdetermination for the Dominican and all other Latin American people, who should be able to choose for themselves the kind of political system under which they wish to live...
...This time the U.S...
...Worse...
...will settle into a "Johnson doctrine" of global or hemisphere interventionism...
...The Wilson administration occupied the Dominican Republic again in 1916, after a conflict between Dominican and American officials...
...as a token of this promise, American marines and forces were everywhere withdrawn...
...The only evidence thus far proposed for this notion was a list of 58 names of alleged Communists active in the Dominican Republic...
...In discussions we have held among ourselves, some DISSENT editors have expressed the view, which is of course shared by political observers elsewhere, that the Dominican intervention is a serious turning-point in U.S...
...The very minimum is what Betancourt has proposed: some gesture or act repudiating the intervention...
...In any case, these matters are not foredoomed, not links in some chain of fatality...
...government presume to throw its military support to a junta which had destroyed an authentic democratic regime...
...When Theodore Roosevelt thought up his notorious "corollary," he smashed straight into the Dominican Republic and "cleaned up the mess...
...It was at this point that the reactionary American intervention began, with the inidsputable effect of salvaging the almost-beaten generals...
...for help...
...that henceforth the U.S...
...A few problems remain to be men tioned, though we shall surely have to return to them later: 1) The claim that there was a danger of a Castroile-Communist take-over in Santo Domingo...
...The problem of interventionism is very knotty, and not to be solved by proclaiming some simple formula...
...And American troops were stationed in the republic from 1921 to 1924 to protect American financial interests...
...Only seven months after taking office, Bosch is overthrown by a military coup...
...In my view, even if the uprising in the Dominican Republic had been led by Communists, that still would not have been sufficient ground for intervention...
...Finally, the dictator is destroyed by assassination, and a rejoicing people, showing a degree of selfcontrol that is little short of miraculous, peacefully installs a democratic regime...
...By what moral right does the U.S...
...Furthermore, the United States intervention has been a direct affront to the entire anti-Communist left in Latin America, of which Juan Bosch was a prominent member...
...This was followed by the development of the inter-American system which supposedly substituted collective action by the American republics for unilateral U.S...
...For nearly forty years they are victimized by one of the world's vilest dictatorships under the sinister Trujillo— a dictatorship that sums up everything detestable in Latin American politics...
Vol. 12 • July 1965 • No. 3
