The Bosch Pendulum
Fox, Robert & Kamber, Michael
Dominican historian Roberto Cassd, has observed Juan Bosch for most of the latter's checkered career. In this excerpt from a longer interview, Cassd discusses Bosch's evolution from a...
...But this was a Bosch for the 1990s, unlikely to offend the UnitedStates and, according to Cassd, to the right of even his former antagonists...
...The 1965 military revolt that he planned and directed from Puerto Rico was not intended to be a popular insurrection, only a coup d'etat...
...He spoke more of national liberation than of socialism...
...Bosch thought the coup would go off as planned and he would return to power to do basically the same things he had tried to do in 1963...
...And by the 1990 elections, the PLD's program was actually to the dropped...
...The state, formerly support for the Left...
...When the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1965 U.S...
...invasion...
...Old leftists like Pefia G6mez and [Jacobo] Majluta were pulled along by the rightist drift of the PRD, and Bosch withdrew [in 1973] to form the Partido de la Liberaci6n Dominicana (PLD...
...Once in power, however, the PRD lost support and was weakened by infighting...
...So, inspired not so much by ideology as by an intelligent evaluation of what was happening at the time (the Left was the only force capable of sustaining him), Bosch became its leader, gradually displacing the leftist political parties...
...He knew how to win people over by offering immediate solutions to pressing problems...
...Bosch, on the other hand, had the skill to propose social reforms...
...The Left didn't participate in the 1962 elections because it was still caught up in the idea of organizing a guerrilla foco like Fidel Castro's movement in Cuba...
...Such has been the stranglehold of the two political veterans on their respective parties that a smooth succession appears unlikely...
...Why do they work for the PLD, with a rightist program...
...For one thing, they are faithful followers of Bosch...
...The new, more conservative PRD won the presidency in 1978, while Bosch stayed in the leftist camp...
...however, he never claimed to be a Marxist-Leninist...
...In 1981 then, with an eye toward the 1982 elections, he veered noticeably to the right...
...If the upper class had any political sense, it would be behind Bosch, but he has only been accepted fully by a sophisticated sector of the elite...
...Once in exile, Bosch became very theoretical and proclaimed himself a Marxist...
...By 1971, the United States was linking up with members of the PRD in order to isolate Bosch, and an intense power struggle was underway within the party...
...The Venezuelan elite accepted Betancourt in 1960, but the Dominican elite would not accept Bosch, even though there was basically no difference between Bosch's platform and the other currents of Latin American populism...
...Bosch has been a key actor on the Dominican political scene since 1939, when from exile in Puerto Rico he founded the left-leaning Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) to oppose the Trujillo dictatorship...
...A year after Trujillo's assassination in 1961, he won the presidency only to be overthrown seven months later...
...Because they believe that at the moment there is nothing else to do...
...Bosch did flirt with Marxism...
...The tourist industry was outraged by Balaguer's attempt to force all foreign visitors to change $100 at the official exchange rate, a move that was quickly his radical discourse, but more than that he wanted to keep control of the PRD against an opposition sector led by [Jos6 Francisco] Pefia G6mez...
...He went to Cuba and received an award from Fidel...
...The main political leaders date from the Trujillo period," observes sociologist Vanna lanni, "and they hardly appeal to voters who were born in the 1 9 70s...
...The PLD and the PRSC have become synonymous with Bosch and Balaguer and will lose much of their identity when the caudillos are forced to retire...
...What happened next is well known: an insurrection and the U.S...
...There is another important point: Many in the PLD, people on the Left, feel strongly that the time has come to take power, that they have spent too much time out of power and that for the party to survive it has to get back into office...
...On the one hand, there are the local popular movements which sprang up during the anti-IMF protests of the early 1980s...
...The PLD continues to be a social democratic-style alternative...
...This is not something he decided unilaterally: The popular resistance to the 1963 coup generated its own momentum that propelled it-closer and closer to the Left...
...He remained politically marginal for several years, and this isolation made him even more disposed to try to create a base among the old guard Left...
...So they got rid of him...
...He admitted to accepting Marxism as a tool of analysis, but he never systematically advocated socialist revolution...
...In 1963 he had been ready to govern on behalf of the elites, to modernize Dominican capitalism...
...Bosch is a caudillo leader, and they trust that what 'eljefe' does is correct...
...There is no party in the country that represents the interests of the private sector," one leading businessman remarked...
...invasion rolled around last April, Bosch was aspiring to return to the presidency...
...He had to face the obvious truth that the United States had shut him out of power...
...In the early 1970s, Bosch was faced with a dilemma: He wanted to maintain Trujillo's private domain, is still an important economic actor, holding interests in sugar, utilities and several large construction and manufacturing firms...
...It is also questionable whether the PLD will retain its momentum with the departure of the charismatic Bosch...
...Despite its record of mismanagement and financial insolvency, the public sector remains a pillar of Balaguer's economic program, providing ample territory for political appointments and favoritism...
...The Dominican Republic is gradually moving away from dependence on sugar to the new foreign exchange earners of tourism, offshore manufacturing, and remittances from the Dominican community in the United States...
...an immediate polarization and a flood of NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS E 0 ta 6social and economic features have changed enormously...
...Secondly, they are looking for a way to survive politically, to be able to form a democratic, reformist government: privatize, but then improve living conditions through state programs in education, health, housing and welfare...
...This dislocation between the archaic political model, based on paternalism, and the new socio-economic realities of massive urbanization and emigration, the informal sector and export-led manufacturing, makes the electoral ritual irrelevant to increasing numbers of Dominicans...
...At the same time, while the cast of political characters has remained much the same over the years, the country's 1962, but was ousted seven months later, with the help of the army, the Catholic hierarchy, and the United States...
...Policy shifts of this sort led many industrialists to support Bosch during the election campaign, but others continued to be skeptical of all the candidates...
...Generally focused on struggles for better services in poor barrios, they have shown a militancy absent in the main opposition parties...
...And Bosch was pulled along...
...By the time he returned to the Dominican Republic in 1961, after the fall of Trujillo, he was already an cessfully applied a radical gloss to the party's traditional populism, arguing strongly in favor of improved wages and living conditions for the majority of Dominicans...
...The business community has been openly critical of government policy, particularly the handling of the country's foreign exchange shortage...
...If Balaguer's political style is archaic, say his critics, so, too, is his economic policy...
...After his overthrow, Bosch started to distance himself even more from the powerful groups in Dominican society...
...Bosch realized that it was the right time for a comeback, but that the leftist option was no longer viable...
...The power-struggle within the PRSC is reputed to be intense, with Jacinto Peynado, elected senator for Juan 5oscn: s sll campaigning, now as a neoliberal anticommunist, a replica of Venezuela's R6mulo Betancourt...
...A number of organizations have surfaced outside the discredited party system...
...On the other, a group called Moderno, founded in late 1989 by younger entrepreneurs and technbcrats, provides a mouthpiece for the modernizing curright of all the other major political parties, advocating economic privatization...
...In the late 1960s, Bosch published a document entitled "Dictatorship With Popular Support," aprogramto establish himself at the head of a leftist government...
...Again, Bosch couldn't avoid being swept along and, in fact, he became rapidly radicalized...
...Of course, the Right was not that far off the mark when it called Bosch a communist, because his discourse really was very close to that of the communists, and he did try to persuade communists to join up with him...
...The struggle between a post-Bosch PLD and Pefia G6mez's PRD will be particularly intense, since the two parties appeal to largely the same constituency, even if Balaguer's slim majority does encourage a short-term tactical alliance...
...Some political commentators now place Pefia G6mez, 53, as the frontrunner for the 1994 presidential elections, despite the handicap of being a descendant of Haitian immigrants in a largely racist society...
...The Next Generation The question of age is now uppermost in many Dominicans' minds...
...But the elites couldn't comprehend this...
...Within the PLD, there are still many people who consider themselves leftists...
...even without the theoretical philosophy of social democracy...
...In 1982, the PLD was still somewhat of a leftist party, but by 1986 there was virtually no substantive difference between the platforms of the PRD and the PLD...
...The president is happy to take credit for the boom in tourism and the Free Trade Zones during the last twenty years, although economists and business leaders insist the government's Draconian fiscal policies are a disincentive to investment...
...Whether the PRSC will continue to defend the role of the state against the PLD's more neoliberal stance remains to be seen...
...Because of our caudillos, a whole generation of qualified and competent Dominicans has been excluded from the political process...
...There is nothing leftist anymore about the PLD's platform: Bosch has returned to his anticommunist populism, and his electoral program is really the most coherent plan for restructuring Dominican capitalism...
...In this excerpt from a longer interview, Cassd discusses Bosch's evolution from a "pro-Marxist populist," to the candidate "with the most coherent plan for restructuring Dominican capitalism...
...Yet Balaguer's instincts remain rooted in the paternalistic bureaucracy of trujillismo...
...Bosch felt wounded (here, we have to add a bit of psychology to the analysis), and to recoup he was forced to depend on an increasingly radical popular movement...
...Later, when Latin American populism turned anticommunist, Bosch followed suit...
...Even so, what Bosch really wanted was an agreement with the army, the United States and the elites...
...By that time, given the relative stability of the political situation, the United States had begun to make contact with groups outside of Balaguer's clique...
...He lost to Balaguer [in the 1966 elections], then went into exile, as part of a series of informal agreements with Balaguer...
...Juan Bosch started out as a proMarxist populist, during his first exile in the early 1940s...
...As a result, he won large sectors of the country's poorest voters to his cause, even if the PRD was pushed into third place for the first time in its 50-year history...
...He won the presidency in Santo Domingo, said to be a favorite...
...They equated Bosch's platform-social reforms, agrarian reform, industrialization-with communism...
...It seems unlikely that either Balaguer or Bosch will run again, but as yet no heir to either of the two leading parties has appeared...
...They see the PLD as an arena for social action...
Vol. 24 • November 1990 • No. 3
