What Next in Santo Domingo-Two Articles
HALPER, NORMAN GALL, SAM
What Next in Santo: Domingo?-Two Views The Strange Dominican Election By Norman Gall Salcedo The June 1 Dominican elections, spectacularly reversing Juan Bosch's landslide victory...
...But if, beneath his capacity for keeping matters fluid and undecided, Balaguer fails to come to grips with the grievances of the Dominican people and the problems of the country generally, the facade of stability will come crashing down, later than sooner perhaps, but with devastating effect...
...Of the officers ordered to leave the country by Garcia Godoy following the December 19 attack by Air Force tanks and troops on a Constitutionalist memorial gathering in Santiago, only the Boschists complied fully...
...Those who rushed to rejoice in the event, however, would have been wise to wait for the counting-both of the votes and of irregularities now coming to light...
...Would it not be better to let Trujillo lie at least until we rid ourselves of the Castro menace...
...In the 1962 campaign, therefore, Bosch exploited not only the conflict of the very rich against the very poor, but also the resentment of many members of the lower-middle class, which had advanced under Trujillo, against the revanchism and pathetic snobbery of many of the little Republic's "first families.' This year the Trujillistas had their own candidate in Balaguer, like Bosch a son of the provincial lower-middle class...
...Having contributed so heavily to the Dominican mess, it is too late for Washington to resolve not to take a hand...
...has been doing precisely the opposite ever since it supplied the arms that gunned down Trujillo at 10 p.m...
...An attempt to set up a democratic government (uberai) was followed by the stopgap regime of Joaquin Balaguer and Ramfis Trujillo (conservative), who subsequently were ousted in favor of a seven-man Council (liberal...
...the illiterate and religious peasantry was asked, again and again...
...and Fati Garcia, former manager of the Cuban Electricity Company...
...Of course, any decision to seek social reform opens the Dominican body politic to Communist infiltration...
...For the fact is that the electoral procedures of at least the allimportant military authoritiesclaimed to be "perfectly correct free fair," etc.-included: widespread commandeering and switching of ballot boxes...
...seizing and beating up a Boschist Congressional candidate...
...Before Rey could be put aboard a plane, though, he was whisked away by a group of Balaguer supporters, led by vice-presidential candidate Francisco Augusto Lora, who presented a Presidential order from Garcia Godoy for Rey's return to the capital...
...On May 24, the Chief of Staff wired three brigade commanders: "We have been informed that the Communists of San Pedro de Macoris have a plan that if Juan Bosch doen't win, on June 2 the taller buildings of the city such as the governor's palace and the schools will be occupied with the purpose of establishing strongpoints in these places...
...they vacillated...
...In a nation where 80 per cent of the population lives below the subsistence level, particularly one so demonstrably volatile, one cannot count on its blundering out of its problems-not after the degrading intervention of some 23,000 foreign troops has mobilized nationalist feelings...
...Meanwhile, at the end of the polling at Barrio Las Cuevas of Salcedo, Lieutenant Vega, wearing his CEFA insignia on his breast pocket, banished the poll-watchers and Election Board officials and left the ballots to be counted by a soldier and a policeman...
...The Electoral Board eked out the results piecemeal, polling place by polling place and province by province, in a two-day television marathon...
...In Santiago three ballot boxes were seized by the Army and did not reappear for three days...
...The shrewd campaign then had lured into the Bosch camp many thousands of Trujillo supporters-and some key financial contributorsbecause they were frightened by the furious anti-Trujillista campaign of Bosch's leading opponent, Viriate Fiallo of the Union Civica National (UCN...
...To begin with, importation of proBatista Cubans-with the government's connivance-contrasted unhappily with the rejection of OAS electoral aid, accepted in 1962...
...and a series of mendacious campaign practices, among them the distribution from Air Force planes of spliced photos showing Bosch and Fidel Castro embracing...
...Dearborn answered it best of all...
...In the end, the U.S...
...Balaguer had served as President during the tense six-month interregnum from the dictator's May 1961 assassination to the Trujillo clan's evacuation, and during this period had pleased the poor by lowering the prices of rice and cooking oil...
...On election eve in the barrio Fanchito de las Vargas, in the nearby provice of Puerto Plata, five soldiers appeared to warn the peasants of the pro-Bosch community that if Bosch won there no one would remain alive the following day...
...fears...
...Miguel Suarez Fernandez, Senator from Santa Clara in the Batista period and expert in electoral problems...
...The final results-their erratic and delayed release, curious discrepancies with the 1962 figures, and the huge increase in the overall vote-raise further questions...
...A total of 1,321,693 votes was officially recorded...
...Food for Peace in the area, gave it to the Army for distribution during the campaign...
...No less dramatic perhaps, when broken down, is the overall increase in the vote...
...What Next in Santo: Domingo?-Two Views The Strange Dominican Election By Norman Gall Salcedo The June 1 Dominican elections, spectacularly reversing Juan Bosch's landslide victory of 1962 with a similar landslide for Joaquin Balaguer, have been greeted with unstinting praise from near and far...
...Yet he, too, could provide no possible solutions...
...Ambassador at the time of the April 1965 intervention was the unfortunate W. Tapley Bennett, a supporter of the Dominican Right, both his predecessor and successor -John Bartlow Martin and John Crimmins, respectively-cannot possibly be described as Right-wingers...
...Most striking was the shift in Dajabon, near the Haitian frontier, where in 1936 Trujillo's troops slew between 10,000 and 30,000 Haitian squatters according to varying estimates...
...President Johnson apparently concurring, wired him congratulations for "bringing the Dominican people from the turbulence of a civil war to the peace of free elections.' And, indeed, the actual balloting in the principal towns was very orderly and quiet...
...U.S...
...The five soldiers stayed to supervise the voting until the polls closed the next day...
...Angel Yergo, one of Batista's many hired journalists...
...And a few days before the voting, a Dominican military plane landed at San Isidro to discharge a group of Spanish-speaking civilians...
...In the final years of the Trujillo Era, Salcedo became a focus of activity of what is now the 14th of June Movement...
...Many persons in the town complained about this obvious fact...
...With the capital flooded by reports of fraud and repression in the interior, two Canadian reporters and I decided to make a spot check of some towns of the Cibao valley, though we clearly risked missing a major outbreak of violence in the capital...
...The attempt to use them to mediate the little civil war failed because of opposition inside the Organization of American States from the Right-Wing governments of the "little colonels...
...But the risks should certainly be taken...
...The towns we visited seemed under martial law...
...The police, too, participated in the campaign of intimidation...
...Balaguer took 66 per cent of the vote, with the Social Christians-the country's third party-getting only 10 per cent of their 1962 total...
...imposed on the country the regime of Garcia Godoy, whom Theodore Draper has described as "a man of good will and democratic purposes...
...The task of poll-watching was complicated this year by a new ruling allowing voters to cast their ballots anywhere in the Republic, not just in the place of residence listed on their cedilla...
...virtually every step to the Right was countered by one to the Left...
...From our own observations, it seems fair to conclude that the election was dominated by the military, and that the military justified all of its actions in the name of "anti-Communism.' A half-hour before the polls closed, the Army Chief of Staff in Santo Domingo sent a coded telegram to all bases in the Cibao saying: "We have been informed that the Leftists, as soon as they know Juan Bosch has lost the election, will attack the Army camps...
...Said one team of U.S...
...If this pause is taken simply as a breathing spell, as respite from a trying experience, and is allowed to pass negligently, the effect may be to insure the very crisis the U.S...
...He should last longer with the Army than did Bosch, and may in fact be able to coexist with it...
...Arriving as foreign editor of the Spanishlanguage newspaper El Tiempo of New York-run by former Trujillo press agent Stanley Ross-Rey spent almost two months at the Hotel Embajador before being deported by Dominican Immigration officials for "intervening in political affairs...
...There is no tenable case, however, for portraying the U.S...
...If we wait, there is almost a dead certainty that they will...
...Many, he said, were picked up at the airport by vehicles from the San Isidro Air Force Base, then swept away without passing through customs...
...The Cuban influx, in fact, was so large and systematic that it suggested overall planning...
...Then vote for Balaguer...
...Angel M. Liz, who was appointed president of the Dominican National Electoral Board by Reid Cabrai shortly after the 1963 coup, explained the exclusion of the OAS teams by citing his opposition to foreign interference...
...On June 6, troops in Barahona, near the Haiti frontier, surrounded the home of a PRD leader Yuyu Mitchel Severo, who had found a discarded ballot box and brought it to his house as evidence of fraud...
...The old dictator's apparatus of repression is still largely intact, and Bosch's mission of reform, essential to ultimate stability, remains unfulfilled...
...The soldiers were officially confined to their barracks after Bosch threatened to withdraw from the campaign if the military intimidation didn't stop, but in the final weeks soldiers circulated around the countryside in civilian dress to campaign for Balaguer...
...There was no sign of the celebrations a foreigner would expect after a leading politician had received an overwhelming popular mandate in a critical election...
...intervention...
...But the U.S...
...and foreign observers for the Dominican Human Rights Commission about what they saw before the polls closed in the Western frontier province of Bahoruco: "In general we should say that there was an extremely close collaboration between the police and the Partido Reformista...
...After helping to return Balaguer to the presidency, the military was out in the streets taking over...
...The American Committee for Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, headed by Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin and generally favorable to Bosch, has testified to the fairness of the voting...
...In a radio speech on May 16, Balaguer had made the astounding declaration: "If approximately 1.5 million voters do not participate in the elections, the results cannot be admitted as satisfactory...
...He was one of several officers sent before the election to vital points of the Republic by the Armed Forces Instruction Center (CEFA), comprising the elite tank and infantry units of the San Isidro Air Force Base outside Santo Domingo...
...When the plan ran into trouble, the fear -that the operation might open the door to Communists and Fidelistas -took over...
...Case in point: President Kennedy's dispatch of Arthur Schlesinger and Adolf Berle to deal with the imprisoned, embittered Cuban Exile Council after the failure of the Bay of Pigs...
...Nonetheless, the original, and subsequent Johnson policies in the Dominican Republic were not exclusively Rightist...
...diplomat on the scene in the last six years...
...American intervention in the form of an ultimatum to a would-be strongmanthe by-now forgotten Air Force General Pedro Rodriguez Echavarria-saved the Dominican Republic from another Rightist-Peronist dictatorship in February 1962...
...Dominican policy...
...This choice presumes a control over the military which Balaguer has yet to demonstrate...
...soon deposed Wessin and tried to replace him with Boschist Antonio Guzman (liberal), and when that failed it set up and supported the provisional regime of Antonio Imbert (conservative...
...But this resolve may not survive the repression occurring now...
...The day after the election several of the sugar complex's ballot boxes were unaccounted for, its manager was arrested, and a machine gun was set up by the Army in the central office building...
...On the contrary, conditions in the Dominican Republic were quite unfavorable for Bosch and his Partido Revolutionario Dominicano (PRD...
...intervention, for exampleincluding the dispatch of a naval flotilla and a fly-past of Marine jets over the waterfront of Santo Domingo-saved the Dominican people from a Rightist bloodbath on November 16, 1961...
...In the 1962 elections, Bosch won 13,000 of the province's 25,000 votes...
...There are unavoidable risks in the unleashing of popular social forces...
...Most of the others stayed, contributing to the atmosphere of lawlessness and intimidation that so hampered the Bosch and PRD campaign...
...It was here that the three Mirabal sisters, members of the Castroite 14th of June Movement, were bludgeoned to death on an isolated stretch of road under the supervision of a man in a red Mercedez-Benz wearing a cowboy hat...
...It is a lucky break, a second chance-not a breathing spell...
...Yet as the surprise Balaguer landslide was slowly announced, it seemed that the 1.5 million figure might actually be reached...
...The increase is especially remarkable, since voting is mandatory in the Dominican Republic and conditions were much less turbulent in 1962...
...The fact is that in recent years Washington has intervened more often in support of the prodemocratic and honorably motivated Dominican elements...
...And if the U.S...
...Ever since then, the U.S...
...Bosch, who campaigned even less in this election than he did in that of 1962 (when he at least went out to the people, albeit only rarely and unannounced), was a reluctant candidate-"a man" said one of his friends, "who feels called by destiny to a job he doesn't really feel suited for...
...Not only were the policemen never punished, but after the shooting troops from the town's Army fort-every town in the tiny Republic has a fort, and the Commander is traditionally the chief figure in the area-were posted at critical points in the town and on its highway approaches, preventing PRD leaders from reaching Luper??n to investigate...
...The 1.5 million vote would have represented an incredible increase of nearly onehalf over the large 1962 turnout after a 14-month campaign...
...May 30, 1961, on the road that runs westward past the Santo Domingo Fairgrounds...
...Bosch and Balaguer met after the election for two hours in the house of a mutual friend...
...Provisional President Hector Garcia Godoy-formerly Bosch's Foreign Secretary, later Vice-President of Balaguer's Partido R?©formiste!-called it "an example for all the Americas...
...Washington would be wise not to sit back and congratulate itself on Balaguer's election...
...Although computers were used this time, the counting of ballots and announcing of returns proceeded much more slowly than in 1962, when the counting was done by hand...
...We saw 14-year-old girls voting with fake identity cards...
...In the urban zone of Salcedo, the ballots from three of the seven voting places, once in the hands of the Army and police, took 22 hours after the closing of the polls to reach the Electoral Board office three blocks away...
...On one pretext or another, the September 1963 ouster of Bosch probably would have been repeated, this time accompanied by a civil war that would make last year's bloodletting seem like a rehearsal...
...On election day the soldiers wore civilian dress and got in line to vote, though the law prohibits military personnel from voting...
...murdering Boschist supporters and preventing investigation or punishment of the offenders...
...Whether Balaguer chooses to act or to use his talent for survival merely to survive, however, depends to a large extent on Washington...
...Other Cuban visitors-some of them reportedly on the CIA payroll -included the commander of a CIA-financed training base for Cuban exiles in Nicaragua...
...Finally, Imbert was cast aside for Bosch's former foreign minister, Hector Garcia Godoy (liberal...
...Take extreme measures accordingly...
...In the city of Puerto Plata there was a power failure election night as the ballots were being counted, though a new electricity plant had recently begun operation...
...This gave way to the ouster of Bosch and his succession by relatively conservative Donald Reid Cabrai (a Pentagon-assisted move that caught the State Department unaware...
...support for Rightist Colonel Wessin y Wessin...
...When they reached poll Number 27 in the rural barrio of Las Cuevas, according to witnesses, he pointed his machine gun at the line of voters and shouted, "Viva la Democracia...
...This procedure, of course, violated Dominican electoral law, which prohibits the military from approaching within 50 yards of the voting place unless summoned by election officials to keep order...
...While itself changing very little, Balaguer's victory does increase the chance for change...
...On the same day Army posts were advised that "Colonel Joslin, Lieutenant Colonel McGinn, Captain Santori, and Senor Miguel A. Perez of the North American military mission, which has been openly hostile to Bosch-and in 1963, according to Sam Halper in The New Leader of May 10, 1965, provided the "wink from the Pentagon" that led to his overthrow -would be visiting the cities of Santiago, Moca, La Vega, Bonao, Villa Bisono, Monte Cristi, Dajab??n Restauraci??n, Lomas de Cabrera, San Juan de la Maguana, B??nica, and Las Matas de Farf??n...
...Unfortunately, no one else among the dozens of newspapermen at the Hotel Embajador attempted such a check...
...On the same afternoon, Justo Rafael C??ceres, PRD Congressional candidate in the neighboring town of Moca, had his nose broken by a soldier who hit him in the face with a rifle butt, was brought under arrest to the town's fort, and there beaten again...
...The economy is in a shambles, with foreign companies pulling out and the huge nationalized Trujillo sugar mills and plantations producing at three times the world price, thus threatening to become the kind of economic burden that the Bolivian tin mines have been since nationalization...
...this year they were still being counted and the results were being revised five days after the election...
...Later, all of this, plus Balaguer's winning the same 60 per cent majority Bosch won in 1962, reminded one of Batista's fraudulent 1940 election victory over Ramon Grau San Martin-which was marked by much military intimidation of voters in peasant areas, the use of phantom polling places to produce huge Batista majorities, substitution of ballot boxes after the polls closed, and multiple voting through mass forgery of voters' identification cards...
...Among the critical questions still to be answered are the following: How can the long-delayed revolution that the Dominican Republic requires-after living under the dark rock of Trujillismo for nearly a third of a century-be accomplished...
...The conflicts and pressures of the campaign were virulently evident in Salcedo...
...But regardless of the cumulative impact of the offenses on the election, the undoubted ability of Rightist soldiers and policemen to terrorize the population and dominate the electoral procedures in many localities does not bode well for the much-expressed hope that Balaguer will now be able to subject the military to effective civilian authority...
...These men, leaders of the Latin American democratic Left, were critics of U.S...
...role be viewed exclusively in terms of the intervention of April 1965 with Marines and infantry, a large, unpleasant milestone...
...To build this gigantic sugar production complex, Trujillo drove thousands of peasant families oft the land, doubling the population of Santo Donrngo between 1950-60...
...military mission or the Embassy staff...
...The law also entitles representatives of each party to witness the counting and receive tally sheets before the ballots for each candidate are placed in separate bags and taken-in the company of party delegates if they wish-to the municipal Electoral Board office...
...a second chance...
...The result has been a confused, pendulum-like course...
...How can the Dominican Army-whose residual Trujillista ties and training make it an obstacle to the growth of democratic institutions-be sent permanently back to the barracks where it belongs...
...A pro-Fidel takeover was less likely last August than now and will be more likely next August than now...
...At that time, Trujillo's greedy, bloody family tried to retake power and only the American presence defeated the Trujillo revival and averted a night of the long knives...
...There were sentries inside and outside the cemetery guarding against desecration of graves where discarded Bosch votes had been found and were reportedly buried...
...Suspicious, too, was the manner in which the Dominican election results were disclosed...
...But Embassy sources said Perez was not a member of the U.S...
...It is inaccurate, therefore, to suppose on the basis of the April '65 expedition that the U.S...
...One of the most obvious things we noticed was the organized way in which the the voters were transported from one place to another...
...Under great pressure he is bound to revert to his earlier training, unless Washington takes a hand...
...Confused, devious, flabby, fumbling-one can make a case for any of these in analyzing U.S...
...Our party was disorganized and afraid and Balaguer's people were well-financed...
...True, it is an old Washington practice to delegate liberals to do a cleanup job after the original policy founders...
...For example, in San Cristobal, Trujillo's birthplace, where Bosch had registered a thumping 7-1 majority in 1962, Balaguer won by a decisive 3-2 margin-though this province, a PRD stronghold, contains the giant Haina sugar mill whose payroll was padded in 1963 with Bosch followers...
...representative in the Dominican Republic and probably the clearest-thinking U.S...
...favored, it subsequently supported a liberal...
...Attacks are contemplated against houses of military men and civilians to obtain a violent reaction in these places...
...The pause that appears to have been brought about by the June 1 election, together with Balaguer's political cunning, gives the U.S...
...And the investigation promised by PRD leaders was designed more to appease an indignant following and improve the party's position in political negotiations than to change the result...
...We never even got the tally sheets from many of the polls in rural areas...
...One possible explanation for this drop may have been the presence of Lieutenant Francisco Antonio Vega, a tall, tough man with muscular arms and shoulders and a bulging belly...
...Another telegram dated May 27, from the General Staff, said that "according to reports received an uprising will occur May 30-31 in Santiago and La Vega...
...The Army is in the streets because they know the people will not easily accept this," said a grayhaired physician who is a member of the Social Christian splinter faction that opposed Bosch's candidacy...
...On Sunday May 15 at 8 p.m., in the nearby town of Luper??n, Luis Santos Reynoso-mother of six children-was shot dead by two policemen, Francisco Escalante Santana and Juan Acosta, as she shouted "Viva Juan Bosch...
...vacillation...
...For every reactionary the U.S...
...importing, in defiance of Dominican law, Cuban experts in vote fraud formerly high in Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship...
...If any clear picture emerges from Washington's Dominican actions, it is that of a tragically confused figure caught between a vision and a fear: Starting with the assassination of Trujillo, it hoped to bring off a controlled social revolution...
...Even the electronic computers used in the headquarters of the National Electoral Board were operated by Cuban exile employes of IBM...
...For the moment, following a long period of brutal killings, personal instability and economic uncertainty, it may seem to be...
...On the afternoon following the election, sullen crowds of slum dwellers and other PRD and Social Christian militants massed around the headquarters of both parties in Santo Domingo...
...Balaguer's winning margin of 237,000 votes corresponded almost exactly to the huge increase of officially-reported voting...
...The trouble was that our votes never appeared...
...He remains a Stevenson-type failure: attractive, intelligent, but no more able to give the Dominican Republic its delayed revolution than when he was first elected four years ago...
...The voter's finger is dipped in indelible red ink to prevent people from voting several times, but while the ink they used could not be washed away with soap and water, it came off easily with clorox, beer or cucumber juice...
...Although this careful patriot, if free and untrammeled, might do the right thing for his oppressed people, the Army and what passes in the Dominican Republic for oligarchs will not leave him to himself...
...There, a 2-1 Bosch majority of 1962 was converted into a 4-1 endorsement of Trujillo's former President and Foreign Minister...
...Indeed, the U.S...
...On the second night after the polls closed, infantry troops from San Isidro attacked the Santo Domingo house of Hector Aristy, a leader of the pro-Bosch 1965 uprising, killing Aristy's cook and one of his bodyguards...
...This year election officials declared that he won barely one-fourth...
...Nor was the general political climate the same as in 1962...
...It is possible that this plan will be carried out in all the cities of the country...
...In El Seibo, taken 3-1 by Bosch four years ago, Balaguer triumphed by 2-1...
...The PRD, 14th of June and Social Christian leaders in Salcedo told me that the town's two parish priests, responsible for distributing U.S...
...Had he won, it is unlikely that the Army would have accepted him...
...The longer the Dominicans have to wait, the stronger the extremists will become.' " That is perhaps even more true today...
...The new President-suspicious, cautious and reticent by training and inclination-is a prime believer in Tallyrand's advice to budding statesmen: "Above all, no zeal...
...In Santo Domingo, where Balaguer cut Bosch's 80 per cent avalanche of 1962 to a more modest 63 per cent, voting increased by 87 per cent...
...The man was later identified as Antonio Imbert, then Governor of neighboring Puerto Plata Province, later the lone surviving assassin of Trujillo, and after the 1965 revolt the U.S.-backed champion against "Communism"though over the previous three years he had been blandishing the extreme Left with arms and money...
...Passing through La Vega after midnight, two nights after the voting, we found that the Army had set up sandbagged strongpoints in the streets, guarded by barbed wire and 50 caliber machine guns...
...general intimidation of the peasantry...
...How can the still largelyundivided property of Trujillo-the largest single holding of the nation's resources-be disposed of without handing it over either to free-enterprise boodlers or to politicians who would then entrench their parties in state-owned porkbarrels...
...Democracy" (Balaguer...
...A small municipality set among the populous savannahs and banana plantations of the northern region of the Cibao, this had been one of the major centers of resistance to the Trujillo tyranny...
...The first national results were not available until June 4. According to these figures, Balaguer had annihilated Bosch's popularity in areas where the PRD had won overwhelmingly four years ago...
...and Angel Miol??n, longtime PRD Secretary-General, broke with Bosch as a result of quarrels during and after their seven months in power...
...There was no Leftist uprising, perhaps because of the extreme measures taken by the Army, which apparently anticipated great trouble over the election results...
...The liberal Constitutionalist-Bosch revolt of April 1965 was countered by U.S...
...He said: 'If we help overthrow Trujillo now, it is possible, yes, that the Fidelistas will take over the Dominican Republic...
...Changes in the military further contributed to the unfavorable conditions for Bosch...
...The former President's understandable fear of leaving his house-after the killing of over 200 of his supporters since September-forced the substitution of added radio broadcasts for the effective countryside campaigning of 1962...
...The distressing upshot of these past 14 months is that all the violence has brought no change: The country is still being run, to the extent it is being governed by Dominicans, from the San Isidro Air Force Base, where the tank and infantry and jet fighter units were assembled by the dictator's son Ramfis nearly a decade ago...
...Not, it should be stressed, that many observers, including myself, thought it impossible for Balaguer to win an honest contest...
...conniving at mass forgery of identification cards...
...Dominated by the whiteskinned oligarchy that was subdued or shoved aside by Trujillo, the UCN since the dictator's death has coveted Trujillo's $800 million economic empire (now considerably depreciated after four years of nationalization...
...Lieutenant Vega was evidently assigned the job of electoral management and intimidation for the district of Salcedo...
...Nor should the U.S...
...For many, if not most, of the peasant-born slumdwellers there is still no work...
...Refusing to take them increases the danger of trouble from the Communists and the Fidelistas...
...has always acted in the Dominican Republic solely to buttress the Rightists, install the military in control, and deprive the people of freedom...
...The total vote of the interior provinces alone exceeded the entire national balloting for 1962...
...Here is the exchange from a Ciudad Trujillo dispatch of mine, dated January 7, 1961: "Inevitably, the question becomes: Does overthrowing Trujillo mean inviting the Fidelistas in...
...Since neither this nor any of the other anticipated uprisings actually occurred, it would seem that the April 1965 revolution has created the same kind of paranoid hostility toward Bosch's supporters on the part of the Dominican military that developed between Peru's Army and the APRA party of Victor Raul Haya de la Torre after the 1931 revolution in the city of Trujillo Peru...
...The election of Joaquin Balaguer promises a period of relative calm...
...In addition, the absence of two leading lieutenants also hurt: Sacha Volman, a Rumanian Socialist refugee from Nazi and Communist persecution, left Bosch after becoming a principal target of the bogus "anti-Communist" crusade of the extreme Right that drove Bosch from power in 1963...
...Yet the Board did not object to the presence of Santiago Rey, Minister of Government in the Batista dictatorship and known in Cuban political circles as a master of electoral manipulation...
...They chanted political slogans, blocked traffic and brushed tensely against jeeps armed with automatic weapons, that began patrolling the slums and downtown area controlled last year by rebel forces...
...We knew we were strong in some places and that Balaguer was strong in others," said a PRD leader from the area...
...The decision to resist General Pedro Rodriguez Echavarria's Rightist coup and restore the Council was followed by Bosch's Presidency (liberal), which was most heartify supported by the State Department...
...Is survival enough...
...A close look at the swing is especially instructive...
...In Moca, most PRD and Social Christian leaders were being sought by the police and had fled...
...Such a contention must ignore, among other things, President Johnson's fascinating attempt last summer to install Puerto Rico's ex-Governor Luis Mufioz Marin, Venezuela's ex-President Romulo Betancourt, and Costa Rica's ex-President Jose Figueres as interim caretakers in the Dominican Republic...
...First, Washington favored Trujillo (conservative), then it decided to assist in assassinating him (liberal...
...help to contrive its own downfall by pushing further sanctions against Trujillo...
...His victory is not a vindication of U.S...
...With tension mounting throughout the country over the result, Balaguer's margin of victory diminished and the increase in voters finally turned out to be around 25 per cent...
...In Bosch's 1962 landslide, all the 1,055,000 ballots were counted and the results known the day after the vote...
...has osculated between the desire for change and the fear of its consequences...
...If so, why should the U.S...
...Bosch has been calming his followers by talking of staying in the country, reorganizing his party, and carrying out "constructive normal political activity such as was never known in Santo Domingo.' If Bosch does convert from a professional exile to a national politician, it will be a significant change...
...The Air Force conveyed its more minatory message by buzzing low over several towns of the Cibao region, while other Air Force planes, more subtly, dropped photographs spuriously composed to show Bosch and Castro embracing...
...Do you believe in God...
...Stability has not returned to the Dominican Republic, only an opportunity once more to seek it...
...Having served Trujillo for a quarter century and saved his head, he is a skillful practitioner of the art of survival...
...ironically, a leitmotif of the Trujillo dictatorship...
...The Army, police, and Spanish-born parish priests had been telling the peasants that the main issue was "Communism" (Bosch) vs...
...as the champion of black reaction...
...STILL, despite all the circumstances favoring Balaguer, there is strong reason to doubt the validity of his apparent mandate...
...The reports from other areas, though inadequate, tended to corroborate what we learned on our trip through the Cibao...
...The Immigration director revealed he had a list of 310 Cubans who entered the country without the required visa...
...Though Rafael Trujillo has been dead for five years and Juan Bosch was defeated, both will continue to affect this wretched country for many years to come...
...It is still impossible, of course, to judge the full extent, provenance, and consequences of the various electoral malfeasances in the Dominican Republic...
...Bosch reportedly told Balaguer that he could govern with the mailed fist of San Isidro or the acquiescence of the PRD, but not with both...
...Balaguer also won in Bosch's birthplace, La Vega, where in 1962 the PRD and the Social Christians (PRSC)-the two parties backing Bosch this year-won 65 per cent of the vote...
...If this meeklooking, soft-voiced bachelor with the mien and downcast eyes of a parish priest is anything, he is evasive and shrewd...
...The key element in every coup attempted since Trujillo's death and in the efforts to crush the 1965 revolution, these units were commanded until last year by General Elias Wessin y Wessin...
...But it does not solve the basic problems that make the tiny Caribbean country an area of political volatility...
...Juan Bosch, of course, posed all these familiar problems...
...A Second Chance By Sam Halper A pause appears to have been reached in the frenetic life of the Dominican Republic...
...On voting day, Vega proceeded with a detachment of soldiers among the rural polling places...
...An observer's mission from the Organization of American States (OAS) declared itself "unanimous in affirming the perfect correctness of the authorities' procedure," and said the polling took place in "perfect order and full freedom...
...Either the electoral officials and the soldier refused to provide them or our PRD pollwatchers, mostly peasants, did not dare to demand them, since all Dominican peasants are terrified of the Armed Forces...
...Back in 1961, some four months before Trujillo's assassination, I discussed what was essentially the same situation with Henry Dearborn, then the top U.S...
Vol. 49 • June 1966 • No. 13
