The Crisis of the Latin-American Democratic Left
Wiarda, Howard J.
THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT in Latin America, once considered the great hope of the Western hemisphere, seems everywhere in decline. Challenged by both the Right and the extreme Left, the...
...The moderate middle way of the social democrats has yielded—or been forced to yield—to a rash of conservativeoligarchic governments or outright military dictatorships on the one hand and to a growing chorus calling for violent revolution and popular dictatorship on the other...
...Bosch blames this on the Latin-American oligarchies and the Pentagonist forces that serve them...
...Only the Democratic Left seems to be capable of reconciling the diverse sectors that make up the almost inherently corporativist but increasingly complex Latin-Amercan societies, of creating the political institutions—parties, labor organizations, peasant associations, and so forth—that offer the most hopeful prospects for stable growth, and of reaching an accommodation with the U.S...
...While Bosch's statements remain ambiguous, his opponents have no doubt about his meaning...
...Bosch's explanation of U.S...
...He analyzes the "take-over" of major industries, the AFL–CIO, certain foundations and publishing houses, the universities and think tanks, indeed the entire society by the CIA-Pentagonist complex...
...This said, it is nevertheless true that Bosch's basic charges are so serious and have so many elements of truth that they deserve serious study...
...Throughout Bosch's analysis, for instance, the assumption is that a turn to dictatorship will ipso facto mean quicker modernization...
...CRISIS OF THE LATIN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC LEFT "dictatorship with popular support" is disturbing to many of his former supporters...
...These efforts have been repeatedly undermined by Bosch's insistence that he meant exactly what he said and by the demand of the left wing of the party that the PRD head up a "National Liberation Front [of all names!] of all parties opposed to the oligarchy and to U.S...
...6 Other scholars have explored these systems in greater depth than I, but for one man's attempt to wrestle with possible alternatives to development see the articles by the present author, "Revolution or Counter-revolution in Brazil...
...Bosch's thesis has received widespread support among Dominican students and leftwing intellectuals...
...Massachusetts Review, 8 (Winter 1967): 149-165...
...personal limitations (perhaps more than his share), but in themselves these were of secondary importance in explaining his fall...
...In any case, Bosch has done nothing to soften the unfortunate connotations that this phrase carries, has never sought to "clarify" it or claim that he was misunderstood...
...Bosch is not only a theoretician...
...If not the panacea for all Latin America's ills we may once have thought, only the Democratic Left seems capable of putting forth a dynamic development ideology that is in accord with the unique experience of Latin America and the wishes of its people...
...Bosch's own shortcomings as an administrator have been described in great detail (and rather scurrilously) in a book by the former Stevenson and Kennedy speechwriter and ex-ambassador to the Dominican Republic, John Barthlow Martin.' But Martin's book does not adequately come to fundamental grips with sociopolitical power in the Dominican Republic...
...Power is concentrated in the hands of minorities which possess arms, money, and the means of communications, and those minorities do not represent the will of the majority...
...intervened militarily in 1965 to prevent a Bosch-PRD comeback and more subtly manipulated Dominican affairs during the following year to make sure he would not win the presidential elections, one can readily imagine what its response would be to a Bosch-led "dictatorship with popular support...
...Certainly we must now recognize that the ultimate result of frustrated democratic revolution (Guatemala, 1944-54...
...Too often the argument that only through dictatorship can certain reforms be undertaken is a post hoc way to rationalize the destruction of democracy after it has occurred...
...CRISIS OF THE LATIN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC LEFT Following Trujillo's assassination in 1961 Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic and launched the campaign that little over a year later would carry him and the PRD to overwhelming electoral victory...
...Originally, his foes picked it out of context as "proof" that he was a Marxist-Leninist...
...would not permit a democratic social revolution in the Dominican Republic...
...The possibilities for electing a reformist government seemed bleak...
...decided —Texas style—to shoot first and ask questions later...
...The more astute politicians within the PRD recognize this and privately express the fear that Bosch's public stand may have destroyed their chances of achieving power —as, perhaps, those of the Apristas in Peru...
...This is doubly ironic, for Balaguer—an extremely clever politician— has been regaining strength by capitalizing on Bosch's slogans to paint the PRD into a corner of its own making...
...Political Forces in Latin America (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, revised edition forthcoming...
...intervention are all-too familiar...
...would permit a "dictatorship with popular support" to come to power...
...It might also be remembered that the Dominican people seem profoundly to believe that representative democracy is the best form of government and that, after the Trujillo experience, they are unwilling to entertain the idea of any kind of dictatorship, "popular" or not...
...democratic social revolution...
...HOWARD J. WIARDA Equally damaging is the fact that many of the PRD's former supporters and allies— within the press, the labor leadership, the bureaucracy, other reformist parties, etc.— have become disillusioned...
...He was overthrown, basically, because the policies he pursued were a threat to the country's established interests—the armed forces, the Church, the wealthy...
...the showcase for the Alliance became a broken shop window...
...But it also happens that the Dominican Republic lies within what the U.S...
...Bosch's bitterness has not been assuaged with the passage of time, but his impassioned cries soon gave way to a more reasoned assessment of what the intervention meant both for the U.S...
...in Costa Rica Figueres is given no better than an even chance of winning the forthcoming elections...
...Once all the arguments are scrutinized, the most efficacious way toward these changes remains the program of the Democratic Left...
...Now, however, it begins to appear that Balaguer is vulnerable to the charge of continuismo (a fear whose origins can also be traced to the Trujillo dictatorship) and just may be beaten in the scheduled 1970 elections—or that he may decide not to run at all...
...the party's voices of reason and moderation have been largely silenced...
...Bosch has been criticized by his former friends in this country as being politically inastute and irresponsible— which may be true...
...4 Bosch may also see a solution a la Castro, which implies roughly the same goals as Nasserism but achieved through guerrilla warfare and under civilian rather than military leadership...
...N OFFICE, Bosch began to organize the ' machinery for implementing the reforms he had promised...
...is a politically underdeveloped nation: its political structure has failed to adapt to the immense postwar social and S Pentagonism as a Substitute for Imperialism, New York: Grove Press, 1968...
...Frei's nationalization of the copper mines in Chile, which after all was quite a radical step, indicates that profound changes can be initiated without necessarily destroying democracy...
...This experience severely shook Bosch's faith in the efficacy of democratic politics, but—at least at this point—his faith was not destroyed altogether...
...and a number of faculty panel discussions of the Marxist-dominated school of economics and newly-created social science department have supported Bosch's position...
...The power of the oligarchy prevents any real democracy in the country...
...Bosch's analysis parallels recent arguments concerning the growth of the "militaryindustrial complex"—and in his preface Bosch quotes from Senator Fulbright on these themes...
...But if the crisis of the Latin-American Democratic Left is a profound and difficult one, then so is the crisis of transition which Latin America as a whole is experiencing...
...seems to feel it is preferable to move against revolutionary movements before they have a chance to consolidate their position...
...Challenged by both the Right and the extreme Left, the democratic radical reformers and their parties seem to have lost their mystique...
...The fear that Donald Reid might have been trying to extend his mandate illegally, was, after all, one reason the 1965 revolution won so much popular support...
...What is required is long-term commitment, the ability to absorb setbacks and disappointments, and yet the perseverance to keep the goal of more just and humane societies in Latin America firmly in perspective...
...It is, however, a long step—and one he does not adequately explain—from this analysis of Latin America's ills to the conclusion that the only solution is a "dictatorship with popular support...
...Bosch wrote a long series of bitter articles at the time, demonstrating that the Alliance for Progress was a total failure, the Organization of American States merely an agency for maintaining U.S...
...The Latin-American Democratic Left is surely not deserving of the euphoria that surrounded it in the early 1960s, but then neither have the Castro revolution and the technocratically-inclined military regimes done so marvelously either...
...he is also a practicing politician...
...Clearly the abuses and ill-conceived policies Bosch attacks need to be corrected, but the cause of reform will hardly be served by the verbal overkill Bosch employs...
...In Guatemala, Chile, and Colombia, Democratic Left presidents remain in power, though they are limited by internal pressures and unable to carry out adequately the goals of a peaceful and Special acknowledgment is due Dr...
...considers its sphere of influence and, like it or not, the U.S...
...A largely self-educated writer-intellectual-politician, Bosch founded the Dominican Revolutionary party (PRD) in exile in 1939, and during the 1940s and 1950s came to know intimately the leading Democratic Left politicians of those timesBetancourt, Figueres, Mufloz, Prio...
...now has, in effect, a civilian government for domestic affairs and a military government with almost free reign in foreign affairs...
...Pentagonism, in Bosch's view, is the product of an alliance of science, technology, industry, and the armed forces...
...rhetoric in favor of democratic development in Latin America nothing but empty lies...
...In Washington these were the heady early days of the Kennedy administration and in Santo Domingo of a great outpouring—so long bottled up by the Trujillo dictatorship—of democratic sentiment...
...Both the April 1965 Dominican revolution and the U.S...
...Obsessed by the fear—based on the Cuban experience --that "unknown" quantities such as Bosch or Castro may be impossible to dislodge once they have come to power, the U.S...
...Bosch therefore began laying the groundwork for his own return to power by other than electoral means...
...15-17...
...But in the intervals between elections—even in those Latin-American countries which hold elections—political power is held by oligarchic groups and the military forces which they manipulate to protect their own special interests...
...His analysis fails to take into account, however, that by now-150 years later—.constitutional, representative democracy is deeply imbedded in the Latin-American psyche as a system of government which in this context may not always function as intended but is nevertheless an ideal to strive for...
...and for developing nations like the Dominican Republic...
...What had begun as a revolt to oust the corruption-ridden and illegitimate triumvirate headed by Donald J. Reid Cabral and to restore Bosch to power became a civil war overnight...
...And nowhere is the crisis of the Democratic Left more poignant than in the Dominican Republic...
...There are some ironic twists—and none of them augur well for the future of the PRD in the Dominican Republic...
...Is it conceivable that the U.S...
...This phrase first appeared in a long argument by Bosch concerning the irrelevance of elections in the Dominican Republic...
...forcibly snuffed out a popular democratic revolution in this small Caribbean nation...
...but the very vagueness of such a loaded slogan as 4 But see Jose Nun, "The Middle Class Military Coup," in Claudio Veliz (ed...
...He has been driven to the wall, and he is now saying some things that seem irresponsible and at times downright foolish...
...At the very least it should not simply be taken for granted...
...Ieda Siqueira Wiarda, whose comments on this manuscript have been most helpful...
...Bosch's most complete attempt to explain the phrase "dictatorship with popular support" was recently published in the Dominican magazine Ahora...
...To give this movement a greater air of legitimacy, it was launched not in the name of revolution or rebellion but in the name of a return to constitutional government...
...But in the end he failed, and with the overthrow of his government the hopes for a peaceful democratic revolution in Santo Domingo collapsed as well...
...The choice of words, I think, is a sign of a conflict that has always raged within Bosch, rendering him ineffective as a president and perhaps destroying him politically...
...intervention and systematic oppression by the armed forces— but is also disintegrating from within, largely as a result of bitter factionalism stemming from Bosch's divisive leadership...
...in Mexico the PRI is being challenged...
...Surely no one— including the United States Embassy—could object to such lofty aims...
...It is impossible to convey the despair and bitterness that set in as the U.S...
...This is particularly true in the Dominican Republic where, since Trujillo, a blind faith in constitutionalism—almost a cult of democracy— has emerged...
...Bosch's intellectual affinities are here closer to C. Wright Mills, the SDS, and perhaps even Marcuse than to Senators Fulbright or McCarthy...
...Cuba", in Ben B. Burnett and Kenneth F. Johnson (eds...
...interventionism but a pseudo-Marxist albeit sophisticated theoretical explanation of how this country's recent foreign policy can be explained in terms of the kind of society the U.S...
...imperialism...
...One need only read his The Shark and the Sardines and Anti-Kommunism in Latin America to find the despair and frustration Bosch now expresses...
...Bosch spent over a quarter century, the bulk of his middle years, as an exile from the bloody dictatorship of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo...
...Castro, seeing his promising political career frustrated by Batista's coup of 1952, became convinced that the revolution he was leading could not succeed by gradualist reformism...
...Castro too, though more a man of action than a pensador, was previously a radical-nationalist in the tradition of the Ortodoxo party...
...Some PRD leaders are arguing that Bosch's statements do not rule out elections as one possible means to power, but Bosch is not the sort to recant, and it may already be too late for the PRD...
...Despite these surface parallels, however, it is difficult to conceive of Bosch as really an authoritarian at heart...
...Juan Bosch has long been the leader— almost personification—of the Democratic Left in the Dominican Republic...
...Given the theory of Pentagonism, what, then, in Bosch's view, is the solution to the problems of nations like the Dominican Republic...
...originally published in Spanish, Santo Domingo: Publicaciones AHORA, C. por...
...Under this new domination, the mother country exploits its own people in order to insure the aims of an economy permanently geared to war...
...In the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo the pro-Bosch student group, campaigning on a platform of "dictatorship with popular support," won the university elections for the first time...
...In the December 20, 1962, elections, largely on the basis of lower-class support, Bosch and the PRD won by a 2 to 1 margin...
...objections as three or four years ago...
...In the face of strong challenges from both the extreme Left and the Right (frequently working in alliance), the reformist course of the social democrats still represents the most viable way to meet the challenge of contemporary Latin America...
...From a political point of view—given the immense U.S...
...The old arguments in favor of the Democratic Left, if once oversold, are thus still valid...
...In deadly seriousness but with a touch of irony, Bosch states that the U.S...
...and in Peru the grandfather of them all, Haya de la Torre, head of the Aprista movement, has never been permitted to exercise power (even though the influence of Aprismo on the thinking of the present military leadership has been considerable...
...but let us also remember the forces pushing him to desperation: the failure of democracy in his own country, repeated United States intervention, a sense of frustrated nationalism, thousands of dead Dominicans, and many more hundreds of thousands whose hopes for a decent life have been repeatedly thwarted...
...As one reviewer has stated, Bosch provides little more than "new myths for the new left...
...Santo Domingo, 1963, 1965) is likely to lead to more violent popular explosions later...
...If the U.S...
...HOWARD J. WIARDA the time it is impossible...
...The great vision collapsed...
...What exactly Bosch has in mind by "dictatorship with popular support" as the answer to the problems of developing nations has never been quite made clear...
...It flourishes in a society where the profit motive and the desire for international dominance top the scale of values, and where a military-corporate establishment operates outside the traditional network of checks and balances, responsible to no one...
...intervention not only in the Dominican Republic but also in Vietnam is his theory of "Pentagonism as a Substitute for Imperialism...
...It was especially unfortunate because the Dominican Republic had so long suffered under the Trujillo dictatorship—in fact, Bosch had first risen to prominence as a foe of all kinds of dictatorship...
...The Autenticos in Cuba, Arevalo in Guatemala, Frondizi in Argentina, Bosch in the Dominican Republic, and Villeda Morales in Honduras have long since been deposed...
...He and the PRD launched a clever campaign to lure Dominican professionals, intellectuals, students, labor leaders, and other opinion-makers to his cause...
...It can be argued, however, that in contrast to the American system, with its capacity to change and adapt, the system Bosch dropped out of may not be worth saving...
...At precisely the time Bosch wrote on the failure of representative democracy and the need for "dictatorship with popular support," the PRD, as the "loyal opposition," seemed to be disintegrating, and middle-oftheroad President Joaquin Balaguer securely in power and assured of winning another term of office...
...Democracy is possible in the Dominican Republic once every four years— on election day," he said, "but the rest of 2 "Why I was Overthrown," The New Leader, October 14, 1963, pp...
...To these groups John F. Kennedy seemed the embodiment of their ideals—a return to the Good Neighbor policy, an updated version of the New Deal, and a renewed liberal outlook toward Latin-American affairs...
...THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT in Latin America, once considered the great hope of the Western hemisphere, seems everywhere in decline...
...HOWARD J. WIARDA The development-modernization process is long and difficult, full of setbacks, frustrations, and tragedies...
...Bosch has sought to document his case...
...After only seven months in office, the Dominican Republic's first democratic and constitutional government in over three decades was ousted...
...is overwhelmingly powerful in this hemisphere...
...the old generation of Democratic Left spokesmen is fading away...
...This is a legitimate position to take, it seems to me, though I am of two minds about it...
...for biological reasons" is simply ludicrous...
...When asked whether he thought elections would take place in the Dominican Republic in 1965, as then scheduled, Bosch shrugged and stated that even if they did they would be meaningless...
...The "League of Popular Parties," an informal union of Latin-American social democratic parties, has broken up...
...There is some speculation that he sees a "Nasserist solution"—that is, a military group (perhaps led by the "missing" Colonel Caamano, who directed the "constitutionalist" forces in the 1965 revolution) whose objectives would be the reconquest of national identity and social progress...
...but what is required of the intellectual community is a measure of precision and realism in their thinking, and this Bosch's thesis does not provide...
...THE BOSCH BOOK is marred by a host ofH factual errors and dubious or specious reasoning...
...Bosch is only stating a truism when he points out that representative democracy in Latin America originally reflected a grafting of inappropriate constitutional arrangements derived from North America onto societies where they would not "take...
...and this development—if it can be accomplished at all—will largely have to be accomplished by the LatinAmerican nations themselves, on their own terms...
...And if the prospects for the Democratic Left in Latin America are at the moment not very bright, that simply means that the immediate prospects for the Hemisphere as a whole are not very encouraging either...
...The Politics of Conformity in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp...
...I have studied the Dominican Republic in detail and I am very skeptical of the system's capacity to reform itself gradually, to respond at all adequately to press ing social and economic problems, to adapt to the modern twentieth-century world, and to achieve development and modernization through evolutionary, incremental means...
...dictatorship with popular support," tragically, is where our own blindness may lead...
...The accomplishments of Betancourt, Leoni, Lleras, the PRI, Munoz, Figueres, and Frei are impressive...
...True, the majority has influence every four years...
...Should the elections take place as scheduled, the PRD may well hold the balance of power...
...Presumably with the invasions of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and now Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union could also be characterized as a "Pentagonized nation" (though a different label would clearly have to be used), but such an analysis is outside Bosch's purposes and he does not go into it...
...In the new climate that prevailed, he provided freedom to all groups —including the Communists and Fidelista sympathizers...
...Bosch, carefully fashioning his campaign in accord with the temper of these times, proved to be an effective candidate, filling his speeches with promises of social reform and calling for a peaceful and democratic social revolution...
...The Democratic Left in the Dominican Republic is not only being destroyed from without-that is, through U.S...
...Despite the recent revelations concerning Defense Department machinations, for example, it is preposterous to conclude that this represents a sinister conspiracy to take over the national government...
...The solution Bosch is now calling for— and insisting on making PRD official policy —is that of "dictatorship with popular support...
...He has also written favorably of both Tito's softer and more open form of popular dictatorship and of the present Peruvian junta...
...Recognizing that only a military movement could restore him to office, Bosch took pains to recruit younger and more liberal armed-forces officers, and soon a fullfledged conspiracy was under way...
...Nor does he spell out the mechanics of the regime he has in mind or say who shall control it and how it will acquire power...
...A recently published annual report of the Dominican armed forces states that Bosch has been visiting the Communist nations and has reached an agreement with them "to implant in our country a dictatorship with popular support like that which Fidel Castro maintains in Cuba" whose goal is the destruction of the armed forces...
...influence in the Caribbean region...
...Crisis Coming in Brazil" The New Republic, September 14, 1968, pp...
...The position of the Democratic Left has now been made even more difficult than it was before, however, because it now faces not only the powerful opposition of entrenched status quo-oriented interests, the hostility of the extreme Left who demands a violent revolution, and frequently the innate suspicion of the United States government, but also the disillusionment of some Democratic Left leaders themselves, such as Bosch...
...6 On the other hand, military-oligarchic regimes are disinclined to and clearly incapable of creating the institutional infrastructure that Latin America so sorely needs, and I am equally skeptical that Nasserism, Castroism, or Titoism necessarily represent the wave of the future.6 It is extremely presumptuous for affluent North Americans to tell a people living in misery, starvation, oppression, and frustration that they should be patient, that they must wait and sacrifice now for a distant and uncertain future...
...He liked to say that he was "spiritually attuned" to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the New Frontier of President John F. Kennedy...
...he may well have been the most articulate spokesman for that position in the Hemisphere...
...Hung up by such psychoses as the "second Cuba complex" and fearful that Bosch was not astute enough to deal with the Communists, the U.S...
...Leading politicians within the PRD who disagree with Bosch's position have been expelled...
...W. Tapley Bennett has long since ceased to be am bassador in Santo Domingo...
...It may be that only a violent revolution led by a "dictatorship with popular support" is capable of making more than a dent in the immense problems of the Dominican Republic...
...Embassy personnel, Bosch's latest pronouncements seem to confirm what they had long suspected: that Bosch has all along been a Communist and that the result of his return to power would almost certainly mean a "second Cuba...
...Though from afar, Bosch still domi HOWARD J. WIARDA nates PRD councils and his word is almost holy writ to the rank and file...
...The book closes with an apocalyptic vision of Pentagonism's march toward total power...
...Embassy...
...Clearly the Dominican Republic sorely needs a new development ethic that can mobilize the country, and only its intellectuals can provide that...
...Here he eloquently describes the frustrated development most of the Latin-American nations have experienced in the last decade: despite all our aid, the lot of the poor grows worse...
...The development of Latin America will not come overnight, regardless of the means used...
...they have clearly demonstrated that it is possible to carry out fundamental social reform in Latin America within a democratic framework...
...To representatives of the Church and the wealthy as well as some U.S...
...But Bosch also is the visible evidence of our own failures...
...He discusses its doctrines (such as "anti-Communism"), political strategies, and methods of justifying its actions...
...5 See Howard J. Wiarda, Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in Trujillo's Dominican Republic (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968...
...The Maoists have been more sympathetic...
...Indeed, many of the same charges that were once leveled against Mills and are now used in disputing Marcuse or the SDS could also be leveled against Bosch's theory of Pentagonism: they all ignore pertinent facts that fly in the face of their theoretical constructs, they all gloss over the possibilities for change, and they all (to my mind) fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the American system...
...Pentagonism, as Bosch sees it, has taken over to such an extent that the U.S...
...L L ET US REMEMBER some caveats...
...But this is an assumption far from proved, and in the Latin-American context almost certainly wrong...
...Surely we know now that military dictatorships, oligarchic regimes, and U.S...
...Its own people become the Pentagonist country's best "colony" and are systematically exploited in a manner which assures that human beings and economic wealth will be deliberately wasted abroad, as part of an endless cycle profiting only the military establishment and the institutions tied up with it...
...To urge upon these people gradualism is now particularly difficult—and may no longer be possible...
...he reacted bitterly against the 1954 U.S.-sponsored interven CRISIS OF THE LATIN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC LEFT tion in Guatemala and then gravitated to the Left...
...now is...
...Not that the Latin-American Democratic Left is in full rout...
...and it is just possible—had not Bosch said what he did —that now a PRD administration would not meet with the same U.S...
...Arevalo too was an intellectual "spiritual socialist" whose political perspicacity was open to question...
...Surely as the Vietnam war drags on, seemingly by its own momentum, and as decisions are made as those on ABM, it is difficult to believe that there are adequate checks on the military-industrial complex...
...Still, can one visualize any other solution...
...Through these speeches, among the clearest and simplest expressions of the democratic credo ever devised, Bosch brought the masses into national life for the first time...
...His answer is "dictatorship with popular support...
...But two post-Kennedy administrations have since come to office, and neither under Johnson nor Nixon has the Democratic Left had the sympathetic ear it once enjoyed...
...is a "nation of warriors," that German immigration during the 19th century has determined our aggressive, militaristic outlook, that only a few liberals have survived in the U.S...
...He traces the birth of Pentagonism, its expansion during the Cold War decades, and its consolidation under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...To assert—as Bosch does—that the U.S...
...But Bosch goes far beyond the arguments of those like Fulbright who still see possibilities for reform within the system: Bosch sees Pentagonism as inherent within the American set of values and as the inevitable result of the kind of industrialtechnocratic, dehumanized, "Pentagonized" society that America has become...
...Eventually he gravitated to a "Marxist-Leninist" position...
...It is a conflict between Bosch the intellectual, who has the obligation of speaking the truth no matter what the costs, and Bosch the politician, who has not learned that there are times to compromise and exercise restraint...
...The Dominican people have been caught up in the "revolution of rising expectations," and it is doubtful whether now the clock can be turned back...
...Cuba, 1933, 1944-52...
...From his selfimposed exile, first in Spain and now Paris, he is still the great caudillo of the Dominican Revolutionary party, the only real grass-roots political organization in the Dominican Republic, and his study of Pentagonism, like others he has written, is as much a political manifesto as a scholarly tome...
...Given the fact that even the most skilled Democratic Left leaders cannot accomplish miracles overnight, they have nevertheless succeeded in the extremely difficult task of "develop-mongering" within the framework of relatively open societies...
...The Democratic Left remains a major force in these countries, but throughout Latin America and in Washington as well, the bloom is off...
...Bosch's "dictatorship with popular support" flies in the face of this tradition...
...hegemony in the Western hemisphere, and U.S...
...As the pro-Bosch "constitutionalist" forces seemed on the verge of winning and possibly destroying the system of privilege and special interest on which the old regime was based, the United States intervened militarily...
...2 Shortly thereafter, in an interview at his exile in Puerto Rico, Bosch echoed the same themes...
...His personal experience, it will be recalled, had already led him to conclude that elections in oligarchy-dominated societies are a sham, that representative democracy and gradualist reform are not capable of coping with the immense problems of the developing nations, and that the U.S...
...Instead, he has returned to this theme again and again, and one may reasonably conclude that Bosch is satisfied to have "dictatorship with popular support" stand as the one shorthand phrase summarizing his position...
...By pursuing his current reasoning, Bosch has, in effect, dropped out of the system...
...Clearly, he keeps his program purposely vague, so as to keep open as many options as possible...
...presence in that part of the world and the manifest feeling of most Dominicans for at least the formal structure and symbols of democratic government— this was an unfortunate choice of words...
...The weak peasant, labor, and student groups, which had initially supported Bosch (but had also become disillusioned by his failure quickly and dramatically to implement his reform promises), stood little chance of counterbalancing the forces defending the status quo...
...At the time he wrote: In Latin America the will of the majority does not represent true political support because the majority is really powerless...
...the fundamental transformations that modernization entails will require two or more generations...
...Like many others in recent years he has become disillusioned with the liberal democratic credo and opted for a more radical solution...
...T T HE EVOLUTION of Bosch's thought over the years is in some ways parallel to that of Arevalo in Guatemala and Castro in Cuba—more like the former than the latter...
...the Colorados in Uruguay, AD in Venezuela, and the Populistas in Puerto Rico have recently been voted out of office, while in Paraguay and Nicaragua long-term dictatorships have suppressed the Democratic Left...
...and Wiarda, The Dominican Republic: Nation in Transition (New York: Praeger, 1969...
...But Johnson and his "one voice in Latin-American affairs," Thomas Mann, are no longer making policy in Washington...
...113-118...
...When the spiritual arm of the Church, the economic might of the oligarchy, and the armed power of the military were mobilized in unison against him, the government quickly fell...
...3 He argues that classic imperialism in the Leninist sense—that is, a system in which the imperialist power exploits its colonies as a source of raw materials and an outlet for finished products—has been superseded by Pentagonism...
...Given these reactions, it is ironic that the traditional, Moscow-oriented Communists in the Dominican Republic have also denounced the Bosch thesis...
...A. CRISIS OF THE LATIN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC LEFT economic changes...
...Bosch had his 'Overtaken by Events: The Dominican Republic from the Fall of Trujillo to the Civil War (GardenCity: Doubleday, 1966...
...Bosch's call for a "dictatorship with popular support" seems wholly unrealistic, not only in the context of the existing power structure of the Dominican Republic but also in view of overwhelming U.S...
...intervention cannot altogether contain the sweep of sociopolitical change but can only slow it down temporarily...
...This is not just a critique of U.S...
...Bosch's diatribes, for instance, were directed primarily against the Johnson administration —and in many ways rightly so...
...In an effort to keep the party and its coalition of supporters from total disintegration, PRD Secretary General Jose Francisco Pena Gomez has frantically tried to hold all the loose ends together, to explain "what Bosch really meant," to allay the fears of the military and other conservative interests and of the U.S...
Vol. 16 • November 1969 • No. 6
