U.S Role in Dominican Republic Spurs Nacla founding
Rosen, Fred
In April 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sent some 22,000 U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic to crush a military and popular uprising that sought to restore the constitutional rule of President...
...Goff, Thomas' translator, remembers the interview: "Thomas said 'I am going back on the flight today and people are going to ask me about the elections.' And Bosch said 'I have some very bad reports coming in from the countryside...
...The Johnson administration, fearful of a Caribbean regime with friendly ties to the Cuban Revolution, had sent an unmistakable message to any independence-minded governments: The Caribbean still belongs to us...
...Lowenstein was organizing a group called the Commission for Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, an independent effort to monitor the fairness and legitimacy of the upcoming election...
...The group would maintain a resolutely independent profile with no stake in the outcome...
...He took on the job of being the Commission's on-the-ground coordinator in Santo Domingo...
...The center-left government of Bosch was overthrown by a rightist military coup in September 1963...
...It was an extremely disillusioning experience...
...He had studied Spanish in Spain and was keen on knowing more about Latin America: "So I got people to help me pay my way to the Dominican Republic to be an observer for, I thought, free elections...
...Peace is the way...
...And our view at the time was that there was no entity that one could go to for independent information about Latin America...
...While in the country, Goff became friendly with another young election observer named Procter Lippincott...
...In fact the statement was issued before most of us had submitted anything...
...In April 1966, two months before the scheduled election, Fred Goff, a young activist working for the San Francisco chapter of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, the Quaker social action organization), got a call from a then-prominent liberal activist named Allard Lowenstein...
...The son of Presbyterian missionaries, Goff had grown up in Colombia and spoke fluent Spanish...
...He had been born into a cooperative community in North Carolina where his father ran the general store, the land was shared by everyone and there was, he says, "a mix of carpetbaggers and utopians who were trying to make a different kind of life...
...Concerned that its findings be credible to critics of U.S...
...There were a lot of irregularities and some of my people have been beaten.' And he listed a bunch of complaints and told Thomas it was premature to say anything about a fair count and lack of coercion...
...Thomas, the best known member of the Commission, arrived in Santo Domingo the day before the voting, inspected a number of polling stations on election day and met with Bosch, the apparent loser, on the day following the election...
...That's where I met Fred Goff and the two of us came together over our disillusionment with the exercise when Norman issued a statement to the press saying that [the U.S.-supported candidate] Joaquin Balaguer had won free and clear and that there were no violations...
...So Thomas said 'OK, I won't say anything until I hear more...
...Goff and his co-workers were stunned...
...Goff remembers that the front page news in the following day's edition of the country's main paper, the Listin Diario, was about Norman Thomas declaring the elections to be free and fair...
...policy, Lowenstein told Goff, the Commission's most prominent member would be the moderate socialist-and perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate---Norman Thomas...
...My parents, utopian socialists, would say: 'There is no way to peace...
...It was a tremendous blow to everyone who had been working with us," he says, "and certainly to Bosch...
...A social democrat with leftist alliances, Bosch had been elected in December 1962, just a year and a half after assassination had ended the 30-year rule of U.S.-installed dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo...
...The problem was that none of our reports had been received yet...
...Lippincott, now a public relations executive, was a Quaker conscientious objector doing his alternative service for a lobbying group called the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL...
...The marines, whose presence was officially sanctioned by the Organization of American States (OAS), would occupy the country, "keeping order" until the June 1966 elections between Bosch and Joaqufn Balaguer, an old Trujillo crony and favorite of the United States...
...Marines to the Dominican Republic to crush a military and popular uprising that sought to restore the constitutional rule of President Juan Bosch...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
