The New Dominican Crisis

...The questions in most Dominican minds came out most clearly in a Listin Diario editorial on January 6. Entitled "Before the Crisis," it asked whether President Garcia Godoy had intended to make "more extensive and important decisions in his speech and did not meet with the obedience and support from those who had the duty to obey and support him...

...When the United States sent a massive force of Marines and paratroops into Santo Domingo last year, it took on itself the responsibility of deciding the fate of the Dominican people, or at least of establishing the conditions for deciding their fate-nothing less...

...And he disclosed that, as of January 11, a military "junta" was holding deliberations for the purpose of making "fundamental decisions...

...Early that morning, former "Constitutionalist" officers and men, headed by their former commander, Colonel Francisco A. Caama?±o De?±??, came to the cemetery to attend a memorial mass for the original military organizer of the April 24 revolt, Colonel Rafael Fern??ndez Dom?­nguez, who had been shot to death by U.S...

...One of their proteges was a tough young recruit named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, whose rise to power started as a second lieutenant fresh out of the U.S.-sponsored military academy...

...It would appear, then, that exceptionally well-informed sources in Santo Domingo did not believe that Garcia Godoy was wholly responsible for the virtual abdication in the face of a throwback on the part of the military to the worst excesses of the Trujillo era...

...Thus, instead of facing the deepening military threat and basing his regime on justice, Garcia Godoy preferred to look the other way...

...In an editorial filled with anguish and alarm, it charged that "members of the military corps are taking upon themselves a decision which should be made by the government and are arrogating to themselves such absolute functions that they signify the derogation of any system of laws and authority in the Dominican Republic...

...The root of the evil in the Dominican Republic is today where it has always been-in the Armed Forces and the paramilitary police...

...But, then, everyone knew what the Chicago Daily News correspondent, Georgie Anne Geyer, reported: "Panasco Alvim has been open about his friendship with the Dominican military and his dislike for the rebels, whom he calls 'Communists.' " No one was, of course, deceived...

...Jos?© Rafael Molina Ure?±a, and then turned against it a few hours later and ordered troops to repress it bloodily...

...The terror cannot be controlled without the Army and police which are, as matters stand, the very sources of the infection...

...One reason it went on was a U.S...

...At last Garcia Godoy was forced to take action which he had long dreaded...

...Though the remaining Constitutional officers, including Colonel Caama?±o, have left the country for their posts abroad, the Dominican Armed Forces have agreed to send out only five of their quota of 24...

...Marines organized and trained the first such force, the "Constabulary...

...I have in The New Leader and elsewhere expressed my view that the intervention was an indefensible, unmitigated wrong, and there is no need to repeat myself here...

...And if the worst comes to pass, the United States will again not be without fault...

...A general strike was called to protest against it...

...intervention in the Dominican Republic last April on the ground that Juan Bosch was a "Trotskyite" as proven by the fact that he had named his son "Leon Trotsky Bosch...

...Yet, a U.S...

...The San Isidro radio station at the chief Air Force base outside the capital broadcast an Armed Forces communiqu?© rejecting the shifts of personnel and accusing Garcia Godoy of breaking the agreement which had put him in office...

...The U.S...

...Listin Diario is a serious, responsible paper, not given to asking idle questions, and perhaps it was trying to tell its readers some things in this indirect way...

...But part of the deal evidently gave the military assurances that the government would pretend the incident had never happened and take no action against the invaders...

...It is folly and worse to think that we could arrest the natural development of Dominican political life and then let nature take its course to produce something new and good...

...That diplomat was taking the easy way out...

...But Ambassador Bunker seems to have sided with Garcia Godoy who refused to back down...

...The former U.S...

...The number of attacking troops was believed to be about 350 in the final stage...

...One of Johnson's recent silences was more eloquent than anything he could have said...

...Rivera Caminero was unfit to hold the position of Minister of the Armed Forces, Bosch said, and nothing more was heard of the charge...

...He also hinted that higher raisons d'?©tat had prevented him from "determining guilt and imposing punishment" because the facts in the Santiago case derived from such "profound roots" that a provisional government did not dare deal with them...

...It is sheer cruelty to force an afflicted people to live with a military occupation which torments their natural pride and dignity and does not even protect them from their own military persecutors...

...If the government presses for full compliance, it will run into more defiance...

...The suspicion that outside influences were weighing heavily on Garcia Godoy was also reinforced by another incident...

...On December 23, it sought to justify the incident by charging that one of the foremost Constitutionalist officers, Naval Captain Manuel Ram??n Montes Arache, had toured the provinces of Santiago and San Francisco de Marcor?­s two months earlier, accompanied by a "strong following and leaders of the extreme Left from the city of Santiago," and given them instructions for "the organization of guerrillas...

...It is a responsibility that goes back exactly 50 years...

...This was Trujillo's base for his seizure of power in 1930...

...Subsequently, 10 officers were appointed military attaches in various countries and 24 others were sent to Israel for "study and observation...

...The Dominican Republic did not have a national, professional armed force before the U.S...

...124...

...Finally, in the midst of this increasing tension, President Garcia Godoy handed down his verdict on the Santiago incident on the evening of January 3. In effect, he told the nation that he had come to the conclusion that he could not come to any conclusion...

...Joaquin Balaguer, the last President under Trujillo, also accused Garcia Godoy of evasion...

...How expedient this maneuver really is remains to be seen...

...When the group repaired to the Hotel Matum for breakfast at about 0900 hours, a large number of Dominican Air Force Troops surrounded the building and began firing heavily at the hotel...

...The new crisis has broken loose primarily because the short-term provisional government headed by Dr...

...In a New Year's statement, Bosch compared the popular disquiet to that which had prevailed before the April 24 revolt...

...On January 10, too, one of the three labor organizations, the strongly Communist influenced foupsacesitrado, called for a general strike to protest against the government's handling of the Santiago incident and its aftermath...

...And General Panasco Alvim did not like his assignment...

...and if it settles for about 20 per cent of the original demand, it will again make self-destructive compromises with the Armed Forces...

...One of the most depressing aspects of the whole situation is the relative neglect and even boredom with which it is being treated in the United States...

...Coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, Teodoro Moscoso, who was in an unrivalled position to know what went on behind the scenes, delivered an address at Mills College, California, last February, in which he hinted that we might have averted the anti-Bosch coup in 1963...

...Bosch immediately called in Dominican and foreign newsmen to show them that three officers could not possibly have been held prisoners in the house...

...Such has been the bitter fruit of the U.S...

...But is there no concern and indignation left for the poor Dominicans...

...It was not hard to detect the old pattern of the Dominican military whenever it prepares the ground for its own coups...

...Juan Bosch immediately dissociated his party from the strike on the ground that it was "inopportune" to unleash "one crisis in the midst of another crisis...

...senator recently defended the U.S...

...This gangster-like violence had become so incessant that the newspaper El Caribe of December 27 ran a frontpage story that two rare days of "quiet" had been broken by two more gun victims...

...Nevertheless, the people had to wait for word from President Garcia Godoy...

...What may well prove the fatal incident took place in the second largest Dominican city, Santiago, last December 19...

...An almost daily occurrence for some time had been the shooting of Boschist sympathizers or the bombing of their homes...

...Even liberal commentators who rashly rushed to the justification of the intervention last April have preferred to write about other crises...

...It is hard to believe that this omission was accidental, if Johnson still believes in the Communist-takeover theory which he expressed in its most extreme form on May 2, 1965...

...Since December 19," he said, "the Dominican people feel that they have been left without any kind of guarantees for their lives or their property...

...In effect, this action put the Armed Forces in a state of insubordination, if not of semi-insurrection...

...Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, head of the threeman ad hoc committee appointed by the Organization of American States (OAS), was quoted as calling it the beginning of a "creeping coup...

...But the man who is considered Bosch's chief rival, Dr...

...Two days after the Santiago bloodshed, on December 21, the Minister of the Armed Forces, Commodore Francisco Javier Rivera Caminero, suddenly launched a curious campaign against the constitutional President whom his colleagues had helped to overthrow in 1963, Juan Bosch...

...President Garcia Godoy appointed a three-man investigating committee to report on the incident...

...Rafael Herrera, considered the situation so grave that he personally signed a long editorial on January 10 in which he implored the military not to tall into another September 25, 1963, the date of the antiBosch coup...

...The Inter-American Peace Force, made up mainly of U.S...

...If he permitted the Armed Forces to hold on to the official radio station, his position was bound to become completely untenable in short order...

...Yet the fact remains that the deterioration was critically encouraged by a decision on the part of Dr...

...They had moved toward the very edge of insurrection...

...In a report from Santo Domingo in the New York Times of January 21, Edward C. Burks vividly described the nightly terror in the Dominican capital...

...A second bomb was later also discovered before it could cause harm...

...A nation, especially a foreign intruder, can be held responsible not only for what it does but for what it does not do...

...President Johnson could not talk frequently enough about the Dominican policy last April and May, but he has not had a word to say about it for months, as if he would like to forget about it himself and wants everyone else to forget about it...

...We also cannot escape so easily from the responsibility which fell on us as a result of the landing of Marines on April 28 of last year...

...Thus a showdown was averted at the cost of again permitting the military to get away with what the Brazilian member of the ad hoc committee, Ambassador Ilmar Panha Marinho, soothingly described as "peaceful insubordination...

...But when Trujillo's era came abruptly to an end in 1961, his Army did not...

...He rightly characterized the present attitude of the Armed Forces' leaders as "insubordination" and "mutiny...

...It went marching on, virtually untouched, through the short-term Belaguer regime of 1961, the so-called Council of State in 1962, and even Bosch's administration of seven months in 1963...

...The rest of the story of that day is best told in the carefully neutral words of the official report to the Secretary General of the United Nations from the UN representative in the Dominican Republic: "While the 'Constitutionalists' were at the cemetery, a crude bomb was discovered nearby and was defused...

...In his State of the Union message on January 12, he enumerated the countries which the United States had defended against Communist aggression-Korea under former President Truman, the Formosa Straits under former President Eisenhower, Cuba under former President Kennedy, and Vietnam in his own Administration...

...soldiers in a still unsatisfactorily explained incident on May 19 of last year...

...Both sides suffered casualties and the number of killed was later reported to be 22 [the final count was 28], including Colonel Juan Maria Lora Fern??ndez, former 'Constitutionalist' Chief of Staff, who was killed by tank fire inside the hotel...

...He attributed it primarily to the effect of the still unresolved events in Santiago almost two weeks before...

...Again Garcia Godoy seemed to choose a course based less on principle than on expediency...

...One can imagine what would have happened if the pro-Bosch officers had been guilty of such a peccadillo...

...If all elements of our embassies had been equally alert against milltary plots in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Bolivia, we might still have constitutional governments there...

...H?©ctor Garcia Godoy has lost most of the moral and political authority it previously enjoyed...

...This state of mind is highly dangerous because people in this country still do not wait for death with folded arms...

...The first shots were fired, without casualties, soon after the visit of the 'Constitutionalists' to the cemetery...

...And while they waited, another shock assailed them...

...in 1925, he was made a Colonel in command of the National Police, which was renamed the National Army in 1927 and its commander raised to the rank of General by the then President Horacio V??squez...

...commander...

...In this circumstance, it went on to ask, "was it true that the President and cabinet had been on the verge of resigning...

...That same day shots were reported fired at the 27th of February military camp where most of Colonel Caama?±??'s former soldiers were being kept...

...This is cuckoo land...

...Yet, he asked, how can President Garcia Godoy talk and argue with them day after day to get them to obey his authority...

...In the early morning hours of January 7, the latter served notice that they were in no mood to accede...

...The editor of Listin Diario, Sr...

...The 'Constitutionalists' returned the fire...

...By mid-January, political terrorism raged in the streets of Santo Domingo while military terror waited in the wings...

...Captain Montes Arache pointed out that he had never been in San Francisco de Marcoris...

...A week later, the military "deliberations" were still going on without any sign of retreat on the part of the military...

...He might have come nearer the truth if he had traced the real trouble to the cuckoo-land circumstances which have been imposed on this suffering, little halfisland by the United States and a pusillanimous Organization of American States...

...A nation which prevents an infinitely weaker nation from determining its own fate should have the self-confidence and intellectual stamina to accept responsibility for how it is being determined...

...He took refuge in phrases that implied no one was guilty because everyone was guilty, or as he put it, "these military men have the same virtues and defects as all other Dominicans"-as if all Dominicans were capable of committing such an admittedly brutish crime...

...He appealed to the only force at his disposal, the so-called Inter-American Peace Force, to retake the Santo Domingo radio station and the national telecommunications center...

...He declared that the President had committed a constitutional violation by having replaced the heads of the three branches of the Armed Forces without the previous recommendation of the former Minister of the Armed Forces, namely, himself...

...If the U.S...

...It is blindness or deception to expect the Dominicans to respect an election next June which, even if it can be held, may not be worth the effort put into it...

...For the next 31 years, the Army was Trujillo's sadistic instrument of power...

...But every policy, even a wrong one, has its own logic, its internal implications...

...We cannot disclaim our responsibility for the present plight of this centuries-tormented people...

...It is hard to judge severely a man who agreed to take on a thankless task under extremely inauspicious circumstances...

...They now see the handwriting on the wall again, and they are reacting as they have always reacted-with their guns...

...According to the best available information, the Brazilian general, on orders from his government, took the position that the Inter-American Peace Force could not be used to force the Dominican military to do anything-which raised the interesting question why the United States and Brazil had bothered to send soldiers rather than, let us say, Boy Scouts or anyone at all...

...military occupation...

...Army troops moved in and illegally took over the official Santo Domingo radio and television station and the national telecommunications center...

...It is perhaps also not a coincidence that Nehemkis was, in 1964, a registered foreign agent for the former Reid Cabrai government...

...they had prepared the "legal" ground for carrying through...

...When Garcia Godoy took this step, however, he ran into another snag...

...military attach?©s had passed the word that the United States was willing to accept the return of Juan Bosch to power, or had merely held their tongues instead of, in effect, urging the Rivera Camineros "to get in there and fight," the Dominican Republic would be a very different place today...

...civilians caught in the hotel...

...On the same day, the other big Santo Domingo newspaper, El Caribe, ran a front-page editorial entitled "Where Is the Country Going...

...Despite their misgivings, six of the Constitutionalist officers obeyed the President's orders to leave the country...

...On January 3, the newspapers came out with a paid communiqu?© to the effect that officers and enlisted men of the Armed Forces and the police (which is a paramilitary force in the Dominican Republic) had taken a holy oath that they intended to combat the new threat of Communism "by all means that may be necessary, against anyone and whatever the consequences...

...the son of Juan Bosch and his first wife, Isabel Ofelia Garcia de Bosch...

...Rivera Caminero himself was one of the officers who went to the National Palace on April 25 to swear allegiance to the new constitutional government headed by Dr...

...Rivera Caminero accused Bosch of having illegally "imprisoned" three military officers in a "cell" in his house outside Santo Domingo...

...article of faith that the Army represented the ultimate bulwark against Communism in the Dominican Republic, and in a country so dependent on the United States, no government could afford to antagonize the United States on this issue...

...intervention last April...

...On January 4, the newspaper closest to the Catholic hierarchy, Listin Diario, immediately recognized that this communiqu?© signified another military bid for power...

...That convenient and familiar commentator, a "veteran diplomat," provided him with the answer: "That's easy...

...Yet Rivera Caminero was invited on January 13 to a farewell party for the departing U.S...

...Only Colonel Caama?±o and three others waited to see whether the President's orders would also be obeyed by Rivera Caminero (now reduced to his regular rank of captain) and his group...

...The breach between Garcia Godoy and Juan Bosch, which had been widening for some time, may have become irreparable...

...But not a word about having saved the Dominican Republic from a Communist takeover...

...The document was dated December 24, 1965, five days after the Santiago slaughter, indicating that all the comings and goings noted in the military headquarters in this period had not been wasted...

...In a private communication listing some of the numerous falsehoods and misrepresentations in this book, Juan Bosch provided a copy of Le??n Bosch's birth certificate, which, of course, showed that the "Trotsky" had been one of Nehemkis' more imaginative fabrications...

...After disposing of the Santiago problem in this manner, he immediately announced that a number of military on both sides would leave the country "as a gesture of comprehension of the national reality, and he shook up the top commands of the three armed services...

...In Vietnam, the conditions are so complex and the stakes are so high that all of the United States' enormous power is not enough to enable us to extricate ourselves gracefully and without disastrous repercussions...

...To prove that Juan Bosch was a "romantic revolutionary" at heart, Peter Nehemkis in Latin America: Myth and Reality (Knopf, 1964) wrote: "It is not a coincidence that Bosch's first child was named Leon Trotsky Bosch" (p...

...As a result, Panasco Alvim put maximum pressure on the Dominican military to evacuate the two buildings which were occupied for 48 hours...

...While the country was still waiting for the results of the Santiago investigation, the Ministry of the Armed Forces returned to the attack...

...In this heated atmosphere, President Garcia Godoy continued to hold the country in suspense as he bided his time studying the reports of the Santiago incident...

...It is brutal insensitivity to force Garcia Godoy to bear a burden which he has neither the strength nor the means to sustain...

...The shooting reached its climax when two truckloads of Dominican troops, with four tanks, arrived from Santiago Air Base...

...Our embassies are always watching against the threat of a Communist plot and that is all to the good," he said...

...they had exposed the unwillingness or the inability of the civilian government to punish or even to reprimand the most flagrant and sanguinary infractions...

...Lieutenant General Bruce Palmer Jr...

...And if Garcia Godoy left, "will the country fall under a complete military dictatorship...

...From the two bombs that were first discovered at the cemetery to the point-blank firing of tanks at the hotel in a busy thoroughfare, the entire operation bore all the marks of the worst military atrocities of the former Trujillo tyranny...

...If Inter-American Peace Force troops had not been rushed to the scene by road and air, the massacre would have gone on to a bloody end, including U.S...

...who drew one in London...

...This time Garc?­a Godoy could not overlook the nature of the threat...

...The evidence is now overwhelming that the pro-Bosch revolt of April 24 would have been a total, bloodless success in the first 36 hours if only it had been left alone...

...They have, for at least threeand-a-half decades, given the Dominican people little more than a corps of licensed killers...

...But that same day an ominous congregation of all the top-ranking military officials was noted in the press...

...As if to remind the Dominicans who really made the decisions, the editorial inquired: "Has the United States decided that Garcia Godoy should still remain...

...The strike lasted two days and considerably increased the already explosive tension...

...Garcia Godoy, or perhaps those who influenced him to make it...

...When the occupation came to an end in 1924, he had jumped in five short years to the rank of Major...

...No doubt the war in Vietnam vastly overshadows the Dominican agony in scope and horror...

...What may be called the Left and Center of Dominican politics were plainly appalled...

...Meanwhile, Rivera Caminero took the offensive against Garcia Godoy...

...The editorial courageously told the military that, in the name of fighting Communism, they pledged themselves to impose their will on the people just as the Communists would do...

...troops, is commanded by Brazilian General Hugo Panasco Alvim, representing another military regime...

...Among the 10 were the former Minister of the Armed Forces Rivera Caminero, who was given a post in Washington, and Colonel Caama?±o De...

...Le??n Bosch Garcia was born in 1936...

...Behind and beneath all the windowdressing, this was inherent in our interposition of overwhelming power...

...occupation of 1916-24...

...President Garcia Godoy has put himself in the position of possibly coming out of this tragedy heaped on tragedy as the chief scapegoat, but the blame will really belong with those who had the power and did not use it-or used it for the wrong ends...

...Thus we bear some measure of responsibility for a military force which we founded, which we have nurtured, and which we have shielded from the popular wrath...

...One can only watch this process of deterioration, precipitated by Garcia Godoy's failure to deal firmly with the Santiago military killers, with the gravest foreboding...

...But the workers of Santo Domingo were sufficiently aroused to make the strike a partial success, and the press the following day reported that a large portion of the capital had been paralyzed...

...But in the Dominican Republic, something can be done of no small import to all of Latin America, and even to the world, if only we have the mind and the will to do it...

...Its first sentence read: "A feeling of profound discouragement grips perceptive Dominicans in this moment of grave national crisis...

...The Marines cannot, of course, be blamed for all he was to do, but Jesus de Galindez, one of his most notable victims, was undoubtedly right when he wrote: "In its origin, Trujillo's career is the fruit of the U.S...

...The former culminated on January 19 in the shooting of former President Bosch's son, Le??n,* and in the smearing with red paint of the words "Communist Embassy" on the wall outside the Papal Nuncio's residence...

...The change in the attitude of most of the military leaders came about when they realized that the United States did not want them to submit...