Inherit the Wind
Any appreciation of today's Dominican Republic must begin with two historic events: the assassination in 1961 of 30-year Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and the April War, 1965. Trujillo, as...
...45% of the workforce was employed in his companies...
...government program established in 1954 to identify and finance new markets for surplus U.S...
...7NACLU Report cessfully argued that the party should convoke a national civic strike...
...But the Dominican economy was not healthy and there was no consensus...
...The combined effect of substantial public employee salary increases, annulment of past tax debts, extension of tax exemptions and elimination of certain tax categories, all of which were approved during the legislative carnival, represented an additional burden on the state treasury of more than RD$100 million (at official rates on a par with the U.S...
...129-130...
...The easy transition was no palliative...
...He also dismissed Lieutenant General BeauchampJavier, secretary of the armed forces and Vice Admiral Rivera Caminero, head of the Navy high command...
...6. Ahora (Santo Domingo), July 31, 1978...
...financial records were destroyed...
...But it was the statements by the governments of Venezuela and the United States which persuaded the conspirators that their luck had run out...
...Thus, for example, when the "historic decision" became known, one wing of the PRIDsucSocial Indicators Land Area: 18,700 square miles Land Distribution Top 10% own 62.7% (1970 figures) Bottom 10% own 1.8% (1980 figures) Population (1980 estimate): 5.4 million Estimated urban: 55.5% 1970-75 annual growth rate: 3.0% Life Expectancy (1970): 55.4 years Infant Mortality (1975): 104.0 per 1,000 Population per Physician (1975): 1,950 Literacy Rate* (1976): 67.0% Enrolled in Secondary School (1975): 28.0% of age group Income Distribution (1970) Top 20% receive 54.3% Bottom 20% receive 4.3% Gross Domestic Product (1980 estimates) at current prices: $6.6 billion Agriculture: 20.8% Industry: 19.5% Services: 59.7% Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (1980): $1,056 *Literacy is defined as being able to read or write one's name...
...World Bank, Dominican Republic: Its Main Development Problems (Washington, D.C., 1978), p. 6 9 . 18...
...it was not a contest among equals...
...Trujillo, as Juan Bosch has written, had "substituted himself for the entire capitalist class",- on his death his vast properties passed to the state...
...Ballot boxes were removed and for 36 hours the national anthem sounded on every radio in the country, intermittently interrupted by the voice of the armed forces secretary, Major General Juan Ren6 Beauchamp: "The elections will go forth...
...By the following morning, May 18th, counting had resumed...
...It was not only that some were regrouping after the defeat of 1965, and carrying out organized actions in support of their demands...
...That Guzmin bore the presidential sash was enormously satisfying to the U.S...
...Before dawn the President was pronounced dead, the result of a bullet wound to the head...
...He was a rich landowner, a powerful political chieftain within the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD...
...He had not...
...I, No...
...The companies looked to the government to make them viable, and Balaguer was forthcoming...
...1 0 Several U.S...
...Just as threatening was the pervasive apathy and suppressed hatred which eroded the authority of the state and fueled its gradual paralysis...
...3 Why the procrastination...
...9. Hank Frundt, Gulf & Western in the Dominican Republic: An Evaluation (New York: Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 1980), pp...
...Recent migrants from the countryside to four new "free zone" towns, more than 17,000 women found work on the assembly lines, where they spent eight hours a day cutting, sewing, rolling, wrapping, pressing, plugging, pinning or packing clothing they could never buy, cigars they would never smoke, transistors they had no use for, all for export...
...IV, No...
...government, which headed its impressive delegation with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance...
...U 0e w 9NACLA Report owners were the strongest sectors, although in the long run the least dynamic...
...The results of U.S...
...Balaguer handed over a government with only $86 million in the Treasury's coffers, an external debt of more than $1 billion, and a government apparatus that had abandoned its normal labors and squandered its resources on the electoral escapade of the Reformist Party...
...Anti-imperialist, it was careful not to offend the transnational corporations...
...Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on large dam projects, but sufficient irrigation channels were never designed...
...Most 3NACLA Report important, he was a compromise candidate, one that all the tendencies within the party thought they could live with for the moment...
...Government tractors, state company inventories, even the cleaning supplies in the National Palace had disappeared...
...Neck and Neck in the Stretch At the outset, almost all analysts took a Balaguer victory in the coming elections for granted...
...The per capita gross domestic product remains around $1000...
...From the first day of his presidency, Guzmin dedicated his attention to civil liberties, not so much by guaranteeing their exercise, since his record on that score would be less than mediocre, but by neutralizing the forces that worked against them...
...Among these the most obvious were the Balaguer stalwarts who occupied the highest commands of the armed forces...
...The result was to hobble the incoming government, place the armed forces, intelligence apparatus and police virtually outside the purview of the Executive and push the government to the edge of bankruptcy...
...The PRD had sacrificed its ace card and undercut the people's will...
...The PRD did not mobilize direct popular pressure to defend its victory...
...What was more, it was the first time in a hundred years, as Guzmbn himself noted in his inaugural speech, that an opposition party had been allowed to take office peacefully...
...The last time Dominican history recorded such an event was in 1963...
...he was not distinguished for his radical ideas...
...10-11 (1979), p. 6 6 . 8. El Sol, May 9, 1978...
...By the mid-70s, the country had a net dollar outflow, between debt service payments and capital repatriation...
...The PRD response was cautious in the extreme...
...VIII, No...
...Joaquin Balaguer, center, after the '72 inauguration of a new plant...
...the vast resources inherited from Trujillo, which allowed the systematic transfer of profits from productive operations to the central government* and, less regularly, high prices for Dominican exports...
...What would come next...
...Victor Grimaldi, "La Gulf tiene por lo menos 89 empresas en el pafs," Entrevistas-Andlisis-Reportajes (Santo Domingo: Editora Cosmos, 1977), p. 3 2 2 . 11...
...Balaguer's second project was to dynamize the economy through industrial investment...
...Its main role today is in lending to importing nations...
...The previous day, GeneralJos6 deJestis Morillo, who was leading the investigation, had declared to the press that the grenade came from a member of Guzmin's own party...
...The requirements of unity limited the pace and the character of the new model of accumulation to be introduced...
...A popular party, it suffered bourgeois and pettybourgeois leaders who further aggravated this contradiction by being profoundly divided among themselves...
...the end of 12 years of austerity for most, corruption for many, privilege for the few...
...After all, he was Don Antonio Guzmin Silvestre, Secretary of Agriculture during the brief government of Juan Bosch, and the first candidate selected by the U.S...
...3. Tad Szulc, "Reflexiones sobre la crisis Dominicana," La Noticia (Santo Domingo), May 16, 1979...
...Austerity and repression had been their lot...
...World Bank, Dominican Republic: Its Main Development Problems (Washington, D.C., December 1978) and World Development Report 1981 (Washington, D.C., 1981...
...A drastic wage freeze in the public sector, the first decree enacted by Balaguer in 1966, laid the groundwork...
...Joaquin Balaguer had been "elected" in 1966 to preside over this fragile unity...
...And without the force to back our actions it will be impossible to carry out changes...
...The night seemed full of trips and duties...
...Sources: Inter-American Development Bank, Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, 1980-81 Report (Washington, D.C...
...Marines...
...The principal opponent was the PRD...
...Some sectors of the new bourgeoisie would have been willing to stick with him, but they got no hint that he could organize a national consensus that would break the deadlock...
...Over time, neither coercion, repression nor patronage was sufficing to keep him in command...
...Nor were these mechanisms any longer as acceptable to some members of the bourgeoisie as they had been during the 1966-72 period, when there were still confrontations with remnants of the 1965 popular revolution...
...Banco Central de la Republica Dominicana, Boletin Mensual (Santo Domingo, May 1982...
...The Left and the most progressive sectors of the PRD leadership had more reason for hope, but they too recognized that Guzmin did not represent the change that, for different reasons, each had anticipated...
...Robert Armstrong, "El Salvador-Why Revolution?," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...2 (1980), p:21...
...Commodity export prices generally worsened, while the food and oil bill jumped, contributing to a tripling of the nation's trade deficit between 1972 and 1976.' Furthermore, the country was no longer attracting foreign investors...
...The leadership of the PRD took pride in showing that they were the only ones capable of restraining the masses, although there were differences in how far to go in demonstrating it...
...During his first years, Balaguer did not introduce any substantive economic change...
...The armed forces were divided...
...agricultural production...
...2 (1967...
...Balaguer's decision to hold elections responded to need and was a carefully calculated risk...
...and, last but not least, backed by the machinery of the party in power, the only party that had operated freely for the previous 12 years...
...It was also the party which for the last four years had used its time to seduce Washington liberals and prominent Dominican industrial leaders...
...It still held out a glimmer of hope for the popular sectors: the industrialists were beginning to realize that the forced impoverishment of the population could no longer feed the new modes of accumulation that were appearing in the country, and that the old agrarian system was a serious bottleneck to capitalist development...
...Only the growing spontaneous mobilizations of the peasantry represented a political problem...
...But it was the party which claimed the legacy of the 1965 popular revolt and it was affiliated with the Socialist International...
...For both parties the memory of 1965 was as palpable as the force of the mobilizations which in the last months had been carried out by the PRD...
...companies moved into tobacco production and cigar manufacturing, more than doubling tobacco exports and placing Dominican cigars on the shelves of the finest New York and Madrid stores...
...In response, Balaguer presented himself as the candidate of peace and evolution...
...a distinguished representative of the Santiago Group, a financial and industrial group intimately tied to foreign capital, as secretary of industry and commerce...
...1962...
...Trujillo's systematic monopoly of power had produced a weak and divided bourgeoisie, but the specter of the 1965 popular revolt had unified Dominican business interests and the decadent landed oligarchs...
...The radio announcement called it an accident...
...Repudiation of the coup was practically unanimous...
...XVDec...
...He based it in part on the import substitution model which had already had such detrimental results in the rest of Latin America...
...government...
...To call the outcome import substitution is misleading...
...A movement to reinstate Bosch was gaining strength, led by the PRD and Constitutionalist elements within the Army...
...On his way to the presidency, Guzmin and his party had had to find a way around multiple roadblocks...
...The main vehicle for the change was the Agrarian Laws...
...In February, the PRD's first official mobilization had brought out 500,000 people-one-tenth of the country's population-in Santo Domingo...
...But the internal demand for such items as plastic bowls, linoleum squares or metal tubing was not enough, given wage levels, to entice much private risk capital...
...involvement lent prestige to Carter's Latin American policy at the same time that it assured, through the Embassy's role in negotiating the transition, that the PRD would come to power with its wings clipped...
...The government could not continue plundering the state companies...
...Rather than encourage such development in the countryside, the easy PL-480* credits were used to import cheaper substitutes from the United States...
...2 2 The contracts allowed the companies to market the country's nonrenewable resources, returning only 10% of their worth to the state...
...The foreign debt, mostly such loans as these, rose from $158 million in 1966 to $1.1 billion in 1977...
...Academia de Ciencias, Economia Dominicana 1977, pp.189-190...
...Socialist, it went overboard in expressing its respect for private property...
...The people of Santo Domingo-workers, students, barrio poor and unemployed-suddenly moved beyond the grasp of their parties, PRD and left alike...
...The first surprise came in 1978 when Balaguer announced that there would be elections in which opposition parties would be relatively free to campaign...
...The organized popular movements and the Left were in disarray...
...But it would not be easy, because, also unlike Balaguer, the PRD could not count on the military...
...Balaguer was still hanging his suits in the National Palace in 1966 when Gulf & Western dosed a deal for controlling interest in the company which owned La Romana, the largest sugar mill.e...
...But by April 1979, the political panorama was rapidly shifting...
...The investigating commission for the "accident" had the good grace to postpone announcement of its findings until Guzmin's body had been accepted by the Catholic hierarchy into the cemetery...
...Local agricultural inputs were seldom used, even where available...
...Had Guzmin been killed...
...As long as the capital inflow stayed larger than repatriated profits and debt servicing, foreign investment would be the main impetus of growth-however skewed in terms of long-range development...
...It was just after 11 p.m...
...Publicly and privately Guzmin had offered sufficient guarantees to capital...
...INHERIT THE WIND 1. See NACLA's earlier publications on Dominican politics, in particular "The Dominican Republic," Vol...
...If in May it had vowed to defend the popular will, in June it called for harmony and unity: neither conquerors nor conquered, declared Guzmin...
...2. El Sol (Santo Domingo), May 16, 1979...
...occupation of 1916-26...
...But if there was little reason to think back then that Guzm.n would be killed, there was ample reason to contemplate his ouster...
...Unlike Balaguer, the PRD owed no debt to the oligarchs and could count on popular support...
...What had happened...
...the implicit support of the U.S...
...A.I.D...
...4NovIDec=192 The deck was clearly stacked...
...negotiators was necessary to unify the dominant bloc...
...11NACLA Report S. . Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig Balaguer's economic model began to lose its sparkle after 1973...
...They also developed "free zones" for assembly operations...
...G&W set about "promoting the Dominican Republic," secure in the knowledge that its own hotels accounted for nearly a quarter of all private rooms, that it controlled the Dominican tourism offices in major U.S...
...the space for third parties closed...
...The most dynamic forces, those tied to finance and industry and allied with foreign capital, were obliged to seek new forums for political debate in which they could gain the upper hand...
...It would include an ex-vice president of Gulf & Western Americas Corporation (G&W's local subsidiary) as governor of the Central Bank...
...he had pulled out in 1974 to organize a radical alternative, the Dominican Liberation Party...
...the Socialist International did its utmost...
...But by 11 p.m., the margin unexpectedly widened as results came from places the PRD had written off...
...In fact, he was not distinguished for his ideas at all...
...Nonetheless, days before the elections, the majority of observers conceded the advantage to the PRD...
...Within government agencies, threats of dismissal hung over the heads of all who did not vote Reformist...
...In less than.six years, the number of dead, disappeared, exiled and jailed activists surpassed 3,300.' Institutionalized terror ran the land...
...There were changes to be made, but Balaguer was not destined to make them...
...They preferred Guzmfn to Joaquin Balaguer, whose long service to Trujillo made him politically too hot for Washington...
...World Bank, Dominican Republic, Table 3.1, p. 1 4 3 . 22...
...Ministerial portfolios in the hands of known PRD members were fewer in number and of less importance...
...2 The president rejected their plan but, retiring to his bedroom, did nothing to stop it...
...There were surely those who participated with less enthusiasm...
...10NovIDec12 Despite the brake this put on the multiplier effects of import substitution, the law did create several hundred new factory owners, providing up to 25,000 new jobs, which, for a time at least, stimulated demand for both this production and imported commodities...
...XIV, No...
...a man of little charisma, he had been nominated thanks to the control of delegates who owed him one for their positions within the party machinery...
...With polarization came increased violence in all its manifestations...
...In the end, the Guzmin government augered well despite its inauspicious beginnings...
...Balaguer had bequeathed no such legacy...
...7 (1970...
...1 In this way Balaguer helped create a capitalist sector, but the buck stopped there...
...It would be just a question of time, and time seemed to be working in their favor...
...Within seven months the Army had rectified the error, but political stability eluded its grasp as well...
...The United States was putting its money on both horses, recognizing implicitly the possibility of a PRD triumph...
...With 60% of the labor force chronically out of work or underemployed, strikes illegal and wages frozen, Balaguer could offer a cheap labor pool to firms which would import their raw materials and export the finished products...
...It was the moment to unite forces to challenge the Balaguer regime's economic policies, its corruption and mismanagement of resources and its political consequences...
...Jacobo Majluta, Guzman's vice president, was quickly sworn in as his successor, and within hours the armed forces and police announced their support for the new government...
...To Market, To Market...
...IX, No...
...dollar), equivalent to 17% of the fiscal revenues in 1978...
...El Sol, August 9, 1978...
...Most of what Trujillo didn't own, foreign investors did...
...On the day of his inauguration, four years earlier, no one could have imagined that Guzmin's presidency would end in suicide...
...Early Saturday evening, July 3, 1982, Antonio Guzmin left his official residence at Juan Dolio beach for the National Palace...
...Balaguer himself had inherited an unstable situation, at least politically, 12 years earlier...
...impartiality and its interest in "free" elections, left no further doubt...
...The military high command used every opportunity to press its preference for Balaguer, and in the streets troops sported red swatches on their rifles as symbols of their support...
...In fact, profit margins were down due to declining productivity, and the companies were forced to turn to foreign loans since their own capital funds had already been siphoned off...
...May 16 was election day...
...The strength of the protest and the forceful reaction of the landless peasants caused enough alarm among the other propertied classes that they sided with the landowners to keep the government in check...
...With relative success, Guzmin managed to restructure the leadership of the military, throwing the different Balaguer factions off balance...
...An astonishing capacity for popular mobilization and political maneuvering had shown that the party deserved this judgment...
...The last factor is that to which analysts have given their greatest attention: international pressure...
...Pairing retirements with promotions, he moved officers up the ladder who favored the new institutionalization...
...equating the PRD notion of change with social war he tried to drive a wedge into their multiclass front...
...Ibid., pp.32- 3 3 . 19...
...In the last three years of the Balaguer regime, for every dollar of new foreign investment, $1.60 left as repatriated profits.' Balaguer's economic plan was suffering a serious reversal...
...After 19 years of struggle, persecution and vicissitudes, their party had taken over the government...
...Now they just worked the mines 24 hours a day to "get the metals and run" lest their favorable contracts be renegotiated...
...This was not the President's custom...
...policy...
...After implicitly acknowledging the victory of the PRD, he announced the new contest: the Reformist Party would challenge the electoral results through other means...
...The domestic market was saturated, plantation agriculture was looking less attractive and the mining companies had completed their construction phase...
...It was a unique experience-one of those which, like the Paris Commune of 1871, or Portugal of 1974, converts what had been only a remote dream of power into concrete reality...
...A political alliance 2nOtID.l92 8 was forged behindJoaquin Balaguer that would prevent a renewal of the 1962-65 conflicts and resulting power vacuum...
...A domestic market could not grow if potential consumers were kept in penury...
...Dominican Republic-Military 'Democracy'," NACLA's Latin American & Empire Report, Vol...
...But following a petition from industrial, commercial and religious leaders, the minority position prevailed, and the action was called off...
...The act provided a tax incentive package, tariff exemptions for imported inputs and other operating subsidies for new investments...
...Three hours before the coup Nivar and Beauchamp, accompanied by Vinicio Castillo, a top leader of the PR, met with Balaguer...
...4 Nor did the conspirators find significant support in any other sector of the population...
...The government boasted the lowest free zone wage rate in the Caribbean...
...The other component of Balaguer's oxygenation of the domestic economy was a billion dollar government construction program...
...In this same period the gross earnings of the industrial sector grew from $172 million to $814 million The importers, commercial interests and landFalconbridge president Marsh Cooper, i., toasts Pres...
...According to the leading Dominican technical institute, "The subsidy to the employers for jobs created, for example, was in fact more than the salaries paid...
...Within a decade the company had doubled sugar production and invested the surplus in an estimated 89 new and existing companies...
...U.S...
...Amid growing contradictions, Balaguer ruled the country until 1978 when, in another electoral surprise, he was defeated by PRD candidate Antonio Guzmdn...
...There remained questions about whether the elections would be "clean," how the vote in the countryside and small towns would go and, above all, should the PRD win, whether it would be allowed to govern...
...Balaguer calculated that his backing within the armed forces combined with very generous compensation for the owners whose idle lands would be expropriated would silence their protest...
...Numerous declarations by trade unions, civic groups, religous and professional organizations had appeared in the newspapers, putting clearly on record their repudiation of military action and the demand for respect of the election results...
...When the armed forces issued a communique offering "unlimited support to the judgment delivered by the Election Board," and linking its guarantee of a peaceful transfer of power to PRD acceptance of the Board's decision, the PRD leadership, overriding the opposition of one of the factions, acceded...
...On the other hand, and this too figured in U.S...
...7. Isis Duarte and Jose Perez, "Consideraciones en torno a la political represiva y asistencial del estado Dominicano, 1966-1978," Realidad Contemporanea (Santo Domingo), Afio II, No...
...5NACLA Report Early in the evening, the first results from Santo Domingo were broadcast, and rumors circulated about attempts at fraud by the Reformist Party...
...1 " The small importer class, already diversified into finance, began to invest directly in production...
...To Buy a Fattd Pig By 1972, Balaguer tried to introduce significant changes in his regime...
...investment...
...Was this a prelude to a coup...
...Fifteen minutes later a shot was heard, and when Hernrndez managed to push his way through the door he found Guzmfin in agony on the floor...
...Without their concurrence the possibility of sustaining the initiative was doomed...
...It was known that preparations had been underway for some time to defend the triumph of the "popular will" if necessary...
...After meeting with his son-in-law, Jos6 Maria Hernindez, chief presidential aide, he went to his private bath...
...Ultimately half of the national budget went directly to Balaguer's office, where he personally managed the reins of fiscal administration and patronage...
...Yet in a radio interview that same day, Jos6 Francisco Pefia G6mez, secretary general of the PRD, prophesied the events of the coming weeks: "We are going into the government, but we don't have power...
...Substitute importation would be a better term, for what occurred was a shift from imported finished goods (such as canned milk) to imported semi-processed materials (powdered milk solids) to be packaged locally...
...There has been no coup...
...1 " To the small Dominican economy, the impact was monumental...
...An extremely measured man, he was the most conservative of the possible candidates in contention at the PRD convention of 1977...
...4 (1974...
...Banco Central de la Repiblica Dominicana, Boletin Mensual, May 1982, pp...
...Balaguer Tips the Scales The presidential and vice presidential count, announced by the Central Election Board a week later, gave the victory to the PRD...
...To gain the solid support of the commercial importers and the new domestic manufacturers, Balaguer planned to transform the countryside by encouraging the production of food and industrial inputs, thus incorporating the rural sector both as suppliers and as new consumers...
...Revolutionary, it embraced elections as the principal weapon of struggle and sought accommodation with the armed forces...
...The Election Board was the obvious mechanism to right this wrong...
...Now it returned and fanned out through the country's economy...
...By any definition, the PRD was rife with contradictions...
...This, at a moment in which falling export prices and the economic paralysis produced by the transition period already were.reducing the foreign exchange and income receipts of the government...
...The PRD was no longer the party of Juan Bosch...
...Finally, generous legislation drew some $325 million in tourist investments by Loew's, Sheraton and, above all, Gulf& Western...
...For their part, workers and peasants threw themselves into the task of gaining the rights and liberties brutally denied them for so many years...
...Through the agrarian reform encompassed in the laws, Balaguer hoped to bolster his patron image among the peasantry, eliminate the land takeovers and win popular support...
...All told, agricultural exports, including coffee, cocoa, fruit and vegetables, rose from $110 million to $580 million during the Balaguer period, serving as an important, but unstable, source of foreign exchange, expanding the rural capitalist class and displacing thousands of acres of small holdings formerly dedicated to staple food production...
...the former president of the G&W hotel network as minister of tourism...
...Now such mechanisms were just cumbersome baggage dragging down the Balaguer regime...
...in the Dominican Republic-An Inside View," Vol...
...On July 7, the Election Board announced what became known as the "historic decision," stripping the PRD of four Senate seats and one in the House by awarding the PR a high percentage of "abstentions" in four districts...
...i The water distribution facilities constructed were outmoded and inadequate before completion...
...With the sudden and unexpected removal in mid-March of U.S...
...The recipients of such contracts and favors were few: no more than six companies received 95% of the value of all public works during some years...
...As the elections approached, the contest became polarized...
...Not surprisingly, Guzmin was leading in the capital, a PRD bastion...
...They were sure that the PRD leadership had acted ably and wisely so as to take power and that, once there, their party would go forward with its program and its tradition, satisfying the yearnings for democracy and social justice...
...Quickly developing new organizations and leadership, they took up arms and, with surprising ease, overpowered the military forces that had allied with the oligarchy...
...Between 1968 and 1973, state aid to these factories equaled twothirds of the value of their total output...
...He insisted that he would be the president of all Dominicans...
...Beginning with the 1966 elections, the dominant classes, Balaguer at their head, had persuaded the main opposition parties, by naked use of force, to stay on the sidelines of the electoral contest.' But by 1978, President Carter was extolling Balaguer as an "inspiration" and an "example...
...Guzmin, however, had never been a firebrand...
...The night of the 17th, President Carter issued a strong statement and General Dennis McAuliffe, head of the U.S...
...The bulk of these projects were made possible by the convergence of three factors: the massive foreign investment in this period...
...The Guzmin interlude was to be full of surprises...
...A "healthy" economy could recover from these abuses if there were political consensus...
...Instituto Dominicano de Tecnologfa Industrial (INDOTEC), "Analysis and Evaluation of the Present Situation of the Agricultural and Industrial Sectors of the Dominican Republic," draft document, October 18, 1976, p. 1 5 4 . 17...
...Foreign capital controlled roughly 25% of Dominican industry...
...For a brief moment, popular power reigned in Santo Domingo...
...and "Smoldering Conflict: Dominican Republic 1967-1975," Vol...
...International pressure was too great to deny the PRD its electoral victory, Guzman, center with glasses, speaks at a '78 rally...
...They had faced incumbent president Balaguer and his Reformist Party in a bitter electoral contest...
...Army Southern Command in Panama, called Beauchamp, warning him of the consequences of a military coup...
...an exdirector of Falconbridge Dominicana as director of the State Sugar Council...
...When all was said and done, it was unclear whether one party or several with the same name had entered the elections...
...government to head the so-called Conciliation Government in 1965, after the popular revolt had been put down by U.S...
...Guzmin would be an ally while the fragile and unstable equilibrium that permitted him access to government was bolstered...
...The correlation of forces did not favor the conspirators...
...On the contrary, it engaged in negotiations that turned the transition of power into a palace affair behind the backs of the people...
...The declarations of the new ambassador, Robert Yost, upon his arrival April 28, in which he stressed U.S...
...Two-thirds of the nation's sugar production came from his companies...
...Intervention of a more political sort by U.S...
...Their interests prevailed...
...banking giants had been expressly invited to the inauguration...
...The festering rivalry that Balaguer had assiduously cultivated between cliques prevented them from acting jointly, much less improvise military coups...
...poorly planned and politically motivated...
...He would give a contract to one friend for a six-mile section of the Duarte highway, award the Valdesia Dam to another, the national stadium to a third...
...To Balaguer, certain that his party would emerge victorious, elections seemed like the ideal mechanism to draw these various discontented classes back into the fold...
...Some urgent business required his attention, probably related to the grenade that had exploded two weeks before in the Santo Domingo offices of the Central Election Board, killing five and wounding others...
...Together with luminaries of the Socialist International, numerous U.S...
...calculations, Balaguer and his Reformist Party had mounted an impressive show of force...
...Right now, this 16th of August 1978, Guzmin was, in fact, the president of almost everyone...
...The political power of the landowners, on the other hand, was waning and the new industrial and financial sectors yearned for political participation...
...Defending his record, he sought the support of those who had benefited from his rule...
...4. This position was stated in separate NACLA interviews with officials of the PRD and various left parties in Santo Domingo, February 1982...
...Near midnight on the 18th, Balaguer, in his first public action in two days, appeared on television to inform the Dominican people that the tallying had resumed and the troops were withdrawing...
...The disaffected popular classes needed to be dealt with as well...
...the investments themselves were often unproductive, *On his death, Trujillo's properties passed to the state, creating the anomaly that the state suddenly acquired 65 % of the national production...
...U.S...
...Force accompanied legal recourse in the form of threats, firings, the dismissal of the Board's president, arrest of the computer manager and suspension of the director of electoral registration...
...It was the end, so the people believed, of police as the answer to any protest...
...Enormous investments in nickel by Falconbridge and in gold by Rosario Resources took their place beside Alcoa's bauxite holdings...
...A rash of meetings with military and business leaders soon made clear where the accent on "all" fell...
...Storage warehouses built for INESPRE, the state food distribution agency, were unreachable for lack of roads.2 Up to a quarter of construction expenditures went to private housing, much of it to shield the traveler's eye from squatter shanties, and most of it destined to Reformist Party hacks...
...That they might try to kill him did seem a little wild...
...Within a few hours, his limousine was headed back home, but halfway there he changed his mind and ordered his driver to return him to the palace...
...The Agrarian Laws were vehemently denounced as a violation of the "sacred" right of private property...
...In the end, they made their point...
...Even though Washington had contingency plans for just such a possibility, it let the full day pass before taking definitive action...
...The landowners, Balaguer's Reformists and the military could find little cause for optimism...
...Celebration for a Pyrrhic Victory Inauguration day was a celebration for nearly everyone...
...El Nuevo Diario (Santo Domingo), June 29, 1982...
...5. La Noticia, May 27, 1978...
...3 (1975...
...Agricultural commodities were not the only attractions to foreign capital...
...Breaking with what history teaches us is a "natural" process of events, it transformed the consciousness of all participating classes...
...The intervention of 22,000 U.S...
...Ex-president Rafael Bonnelly characterized the avalanche of new laws as a "virtual coup d'etat...
...Hispano-American Report, Vol...
...In his inaugural speech GuzmSn had identified the depoliticization of the military as one of the goals of his government...
...Any remaining doubts that their interests were represented at the top were assuaged by the announcement of Guzmin's government team...
...10% of the productive land was his...
...and reconfirmation of Balaguer's minister of foreign relations to the same post...
...They were definitely going to the government, but they were not taking power...
...To professionalize was to purify and that same day, in an act as surprising as it was brilliant, Guzmin took advantage of the presence of the influential U.S...
...Public employees were told not to show up for work after the election if they could not turn back their unused white ballots to their supervisors...
...Nor was he a popular leader...
...Rumors ran through the city: What had really happened...
...Hoping to transcend the old power constellation, Balaguer discovered he was in fact its prisoner...
...Many speculated that he might not complete his term, but apart from those few who thought he might be killed, the most common line of reasoning ran that he would have the luck of the 1963 government of Juan Bosch...
...Had Trujillo's right-hand man suddenly discovered his democratic vocation...
...The government even cancelled the PRD's closing act of the campaign in Santo Domingo...
...More definitive still was the refusal of a considerable number of middle and high level officers to support the coup...
...Although the plan to alter the elections by force had been under consideration for several weeks, it appears that an overestimation of Balaguer's chances had led to a neglect of preparations...
...He had never asked for their understanding and it was too late to do so now...
...8 - 1 0 . 10...
...Academia de Ciencias de la Repdblica Dominicana, Economia Dominicana 1977 (Santo Domingo: Fondo para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales, 1978), p. 2 2 1 . 13.Bienvenido Alvarez-Vega, "Abri6 de par en par las puertas de esta 'tierra de oportunidades' al capital extranjero," El Sol, August 9, 1978...
...True to Balaguer's threat, the PR alleged that 6NovlDec 1962 the count had been marred by massive fraud in favor of the PRD...
...A weak and divided bourgeoisie, whom Trujillo had systematically denied any exercise of political power, tried to pick up the reins of the now well-endowed government...
...Its old rhetoric did not fully reflect its new character...
...delegation to retire Neit Nivar Seijas from his command of the most powerful military unit in the country...
...His first task had been to settle accounts with the revolutionary and popular movements which had come so close to taking power...
...Although there was dancing in the streets for the first time in 15 years, no one forgot that Guzmin and the PRD had taken possession of a government on the road to bankruptcy, an economy in crisis and a political hornets' nest...
...First there was popular power: no one was going to sweep away, by force, what the people considered their victory...
...The growing political crisis finally disgorged itself in the April War...
...It was part of G&W's strategy to fill the void in the U.S...
...The landowners, while profiting from the generous compensations offered by Balaguer, managed to raise a storm...
...Between 1969 and 1978, real wages dropped from $80 a month to $54, the difference accruing to the accounts of foreign companies and the country's own bourgeoisie...
...He had corrupt military leaders to support, voracious importers and angry oligarchs to placate and, most serious of all, he had no political capital with the working class and had lost much among the peasantry...
...Balaguer had stopped at nothing in pursuit of victory, including a coup attempt as incoming electoral results showed that Guzmin was firmly in the lead...
...This gift was enough to swing the Senate majority over to the PR, which also got indirect control of the judiciary...
...Beyond these milestones, the reasons for jubilation were varied...
...The Banda Colorada (Red Band), a group of thugs associated with the Reformist Party, broke up PRD meetings and physically threatened party members...
...Foreign capital had been the original impetus to the sugar enclaves, in particular following the U.S...
...After a two-year interregnum in which landed oligarchy, importers and financial interests vied unsuccessfully to establish a new political order dominated by one but satisfying the others, elections were held...
...They didn't stint in pressuring the Board for a favorable decision...
...The inauguration was also the people's festival...
...The inherent contradictions which helped propel it into crisis were becoming apparent...
...In less than two years he would retire more than 600 officers, including some 80 that had been in the high ranks of Balaguer's Army...
...To this traditional picture was added a new element, the encouragement of greater U.S...
...Power was slipping through his fingers...
...The logical conclusion is that the various protagonists, including Balaguer and Carter, were feeling things out, measuring forces, gauging consequences...
...It was the end of the Balaguer regime...
...The most advanced business sectors demanded a new mode, one that would give the state greater legitimacy and them more space for battling with the old dominant elites...
...Balaguer's Reformist Party did not serve...
...A Touch of Coup Before dawn the next day, military detachments occupied the Central Election Board, municipal government offices and radio stations...
...control of state resources...
...investors and the Dominican bourgeoisie also had cause to celebrate...
...Granted, Guzmin had refused the offer, unwilling to expel presumed communists from the country as requested or to become in other ways the puppet of Washington...
...Results by district indicated that the party would have the majority of both legislative houses when those votes were tallied...
...Marines was required to frustrate, by force, the perpetuation of what was for some a dream andfor others a living nightmare...
...a GWAC advisor as secretary of finance...
...Juan Bosch and his newly formed Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) surprised them all with a strong popular victory...
...The record prices for exports and the massive mining investments that had spurred economic growth between 1970 and 1974 evaporated as quickly as they had come...
...cities, and that the brother of GWAC's chairman was Balaguer's director of tourism.' 2 In all, by 1976 the Dominican Republic claimed over $1 billion in foreign investments, the bulk of which came in during the early Balaguer period.' 3 If the figure was small by comparison to overall foreign investment in Latin America, it was considerable compared to El Salvador, with a similar population of roughly five million and little more than $100 million by the same year...
...market created by the Cuban trade embargo...
...construction contracts and service agreements had been invoiced and paid years 8Nov/Dec182 ahead...
...Balaguer entered the campaign with enthusiastic support from the old dominant classes, the armed forces and police and the Catholic hierarchy...
...The government spied, wiretapped, illegally altered the text of the electoral law and falsified pertinent congressional acts...
...The gambit failed...
...The country waited, seemingly paralyzed, preparing itself for whatever might come...
...Dominican political experience justified skepticism, since the last experience of its kind, when the dictator Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, had ended badly...
...Given high illiteracy, voting took place with predistributed color-coded ballots (red for the PR, white for the PRD, and so forth...
...Public Law 480, also known as Food for Peace, is a U.S...
...The agrarian project was abandoned...
...Ambassador Robert Hurwitch, an intimate collaborator of Balaguer's, there was the hint of a possible change in U.S...
...The 1968 Industrial Incentive Act was designed to transform importers and lucky members of the middle class and military into manufacturers for the domestic market...
...The PRD, abandoning many of the theses and the radical language that had formerly characterized it, began to attract these groups...
...Almost everyone agreed that the coup, directed by National Police Chief Neit Nivar Seijas and General Beauchamp, had been a hasty, almost improvisational action, born of desperation...
...See John Deverell and the Latin American Working Group (LAWG), Falconbridge: Portrait of a Canadian Mining Multinational (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1975...
...To tip the scales even further, the PR, in an extraordinary lame-duck session of Congress, held a "legislative carnival," in which it pushed through a spectacular number of scandalous projects...
...La Noticia, October 5, 1979...
...Behind the slogan "Change without violence," the PRD had managed to put together a broad anti-Balaguer front which attracted everything from the implicit support of the revolutionary Left to the direct backing of business groups and professional associations...
...They were confident that the moderations, negotiations and political maneuvers of the past months had been necessary, that the governing team which had been formed was only a tactical step...
...But it had emerged from its national assembly seriously weakened by a factional struggle and with landowner Antonio Guzmin as its presidential candidate...
Vol. 16 • November 1982 • No. 6
