Struggle in Santo Domingo

...We know he hates crime, but he has not had sufficient courage to confront the criminals...

...There followed the United States involvement in the area beginning around a century ago when Dictator Buenaventura Baez, encouraged by a group of American carpetbaggers, avidly sought to become an American colony...

...In the five months since President Joaquin Balaguer was inaugurated amid hopes of healing the wounds and hatreds of the 1965 civil war, there has been a renewal of political terrorism and military factionalism...

...The most spectacular terrorist killing occurred last August 12 and involved a former merchant marine captain known as Pichirilo (Ramon Mejias Castillo), leader of the prd street forces in 1965...

...The civilian associates of this group are Luis Amiama Tio, the other survivor of the successful plot against Trujillo's life, and former Provisional President Rafael F. Bon-nelly (1962-63), holder of several cabinet, ambassadorial and university posts during the Trujillo Era and even in those days a political rival of Balaguer...

...Melido Marte, one of Trujillo's last ministers of defense...

...Nor does Balaguer's service as an ornamental functionary throughout the Trujillo era indicate an ability to muster that strength...

...Colonel Soto Echavarria, the last East"), one of the crudest figures of the Trujillo period...

...Santo Domingo The Dominican Republic may be moving toward a re-enactment of its historic tragedies...

...Raised by various Dominican families and in orphanages, he spent many years in the streets of Santo Domingo, earning a living as a shoeshine boy and a lottery-ticket seller...

...Bernardino was implicated in the 1956 disappearance of Jesus de Galindez, the anti-Trujillo Basque exile believed to have been kidnapped and murdered by Dominican agents in New York, and he was involved in numerous other assassinations abroad...

...Typical of the incidents taking place is one related by a high-ranking diplomat: "My chauffeur had a very religious son...

...An expert gunman, a shrewd political maneuverer, and a self-styled anti-Communist crusader who nevertheless has supplied arms and money to the extreme Left over the past four years, he is part of a military revival that threatens to reduce the President to a confused and passive captive...

...Haitians first came here in force in 1822, shortly after the bloody African slave revolt in what was France's richest colony and a year after the Dominican Republic won independence from Spain...

...His presence has been the main obstacle to renewing the revolution...

...A few days later another stream of Pena Gomez's radio accusations was cut off the air...

...The secret of Balaguer's survival in those vile surroundings, though, was his meekness, his loyalty to the Benefactor and his capacity to melt into the woodwork when necessary...

...In late October the fifth Dominican Communist party was formed, and one of them has just created a "Red Guard" of teenage boys which has so far limited itself to stealing bicycles and motor-scooters from ideological rivals on the Left...

...By some process of psychological transference these emotions attached themselves to the land itself...

...According to calculations released last month by the National Statistics office, the population has increased 23 per cent, to 3.7 million, since the 1960 census...

...But the Dominican Association for Human Rights has reported that between August 27 and mid-November, it received complaints of 111 arrests, 11 deaths, seven bullet wounds, 20 beatings, six disappearances and 40 illegal searches of homes...

...The assassination of Rafael Leo-nidas Trujillo five years ago plunged the country into a spectacular process of disintegration...

...Working hand-in-hand after they emerged from hiding when the dictator's family fled the country in 1961, Imbert and Amiama also succeeded in dominating the weak State Council until forced to back away by steady pressure from U.S...

...lieutenants will be attached to each company...

...He succeeded Trujillo's brother Hector to the Presidency in 1960, as part of a frantic "democratization" effort by the Benefactor to ward off oas sanctions following his attempt to assassinate the then Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt...

...It was here that slumdwellers armed with machine guns and Molotov cocktails turned back the crack tank and infantry units of the Dominican Air Force in 1965...

...The three men served together in the Provisional State Council that ruled from Balaguer's ouster in January 1962 until Juan Bosch's inauguration 13 months later...

...But experience suggests that the hope will encounter surprises...

...Bosch had relied on the captain to restrain protesting street crowds at the first sign of his June 1 electoral defeat...

...To investigate such charges firsthand, I visited the flimsy clapboard slums of Santo Domingo, where precarious houses sprawl away from the center of the city on both banks of the Ozama River and under the Duarte Bridge...

...President Balaguer has taken steps to limit police abuses and has ordered freedom for several of those detained without cause...

...A soldier sitting at the other end of the bar, hearing this, took out his pistol and announced, 'This is the only God.' Then he fired the pistol and killed my chauffeur's son...

...The Bernardino court decision provoked a major scandal in Santo Domingo, and the government has appealed...

...The slums of Santo Domingo are the worst victims of the steady, sickening degeneration that has plagued the Dominican Republic since Tru-jillo's death...

...Today many highland areas are barren of trees, and principal streams, like the Yaque del Norte River, are clogged with upland sediment, causing droughts in summer and flash floods during the rainy season...

...Many Dominicans share the feelings of the Bishop of Santiago, Monsignor Roque Adames, who told a Social Christian Workers' Congress earlier this month that "there exists the fear of a new explosion of violence as dangerous as that of 1965...

...Perdomo's speech, reported by the Associated Press and U nited Press International, aroused bitter protests from journalists and political quarters in Santo Domingo...

...Ambassador John Bartlow Martin...

...military advisory program in Vietnam...

...Haitian armies occupied the country for 22 years...

...While the majority of incidents allegedly involve a lapse or abuse of police authority, the violence also has resulted in the death of several policemen and of two U.S...

...They included the respected Jose Rafael Molina Urena, who served briefly as Provisional President during the 1965 revolt...

...It regulated its own violence and pillage and usually maintained a surface appearance of legitimacy and order...

...Perhaps more significant than the speech itself, however, was President Balaguer's failure to react????reflecting the still fitful and uncertain exercise of his powers as Commander in Chief, even against forces out to subvert him...

...The major U.S...

...Then the friend himself was arrested, brought before a military tribunal, and intimidated until he swore he never gave such a deposition...

...On December 8, seven leading members of the Leftist-nationalist June 14th Movement, including Secretary-General Rafael (Fafa) Tav-cras...

...It was Balaguer's proven meekness and pliability, too, that led prominent generals and politicians of the Trujillo hierarchy to promote him once more for the Presidency after Juan Bosch's ouster in 1963...

...Martinez Alba accumulated a fortune of roughly $40 million under the dictator, mostly through a wide range of import-export, construction and insurance enterprises, based on monopoly and extortion backed by the government and in partnership with Trujillo or his wife, Maria Martinez...

...A successful coup against Balaguer would almost automatically unite pro-Bosch and pro-Balaguer forces into the potent coalition that routed the Dominican Armed Forces in the 1965 revolution and could once more plunge the country into civil war...

...His overthrow would be another catastrophe for the Dominican Republic, moving it closer to outright military rule and a revival of last year's carnage...

...For three decades (1930-1961) the dictatorship had operated like a big-time crime syndicate—served by an army, navy, national flag and diplomatic corps...

...is still plunged deeply in that treacherous political swamp vividly evoked by Robert D. Crass-weller in his recent biography, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator: ". . . men had come to regard the Dominican Republic with something of the dread and awe with which Shakespeare's contemporaries regarded the Germany of the Faust legend, the home of things obscure and satanic...

...Even some of Balaguer's closest advisers now believe that the new regime is much more dangerously exposed to a threat from the Right than from the Left...

...Instrumental in these strange legal maneuvers was Bernardino's sister Minerva, a former UN delegate and feminist leader in Trujillo's Dominican party...

...In his December 5 radio-television speech, Balaguer noted that some 300,000 Haitians have filtered across the mountain frontier since 1961...

...The police are searching our houses for guns and commit less abuses than in the past when doing so, but several of our people are getting killed mysteriously and are disappearing for good after their arrest by police," he told me in November...

...Outside the barber shops and the bars with their blaring juke boxes, brown men hunch over dominoes set on wood boxes...

...Bernardino was freed from jail soon after Balaguer's inauguration and was given back his lands in the eastern portion of the Republic by court order...

...In August, an appeals court in Santo Domingo acquitted him of "illicit enrichment" and returned to him many of his properties in the Republic...

...Balaguer [in the cases of such killings] has stimulated these depraved persecuters to continue counter-revolutionary careers...

...While anti-Yankee feeling has grown dramatically among the capital's youth?particularly in the Santo Domingo secondary schools that supply the shock troops for Leftist street demonstrations—the various Marxist Leninist "parties" continue to dissipate themselves by dividing and subdividing...

...Pena Gomez' bitter accusations against the Balaguer regime resumed following the December 7 assassination of Rafael Guzman, 22, the third member of the 1965 Commando Lobo combat group to be killed within the past eight weeks...

...Army officers will serve as "advisers" for three-year hitches at all command levels, and 13 U.S...

...The next week after another rebel combatant, Miguel Reys, was killed in a similar attack...

...Most of the buildings are wood and cardboard shacks...

...They said political violence had resulted in five murders (a sixth has occurred since), bullet wounds for five persons and the disappearance of two more...

...supervision an elite fighting force can be kept out of intramural military politics and in readiness to suppress insurrection...

...now Balaguer's legal counsel...

...This is similar to the U.S...

...A woman in our neighborhood saw him get shot...

...This made it clear that the revolution was not inspired by patriotic ideals or by well-understood nationalism, but by political passions of a distinct reddish color...

...Beneath the bridge naked children play baseball in the mud with shiny plastic balls and bats...

...Supporting this group are Bonnelly's friends in the Santiago oligarchy...

...Meanwhile, the extreme Left seems to be growing in a fitful and splintered fashion...

...During that period Imbert had broad supervisory powers in security matters, and managed to install several of his proteges in key police posts...

...These problems are being compounded by the country's rapid population growth...

...Painted pink and yellow and powder blue, they are clogged with tattered country people along streets stark and fetid and soaked with autumn rains...

...Indeed, Marine Colonel Henry Van Joslin, head of the 60-man U.S...

...The Imbert-Amiama-Bonnelly collaboration has been a major factor in Dominican politics almost continually for the past five years...

...chief of the sim, has returned to the National Police and was promoted shortly after Balaguer's inauguration...

...The new elite replaces the dispersed Air Force tank and infantry units commanded by Brigadier General Elias Wessin y Wessin until he was exiled late last year...

...He declared: "The insurrectionist movement initiated on April 24, 1965 [was] . . . marred by the disposition of some frustrated and neurotic military officers to give arms stolen from arsenals of the State to bums, thugs, loafers, gangsters, eager to sack and destroy the human person and private property...

...Now, instead of overthrowing Balaguer, competing factions appear to be trying to capture him alive...

...The country has descended further into what Rafael Herrera, editor of the newspaper Listin Diario, has called "the symbiotic, self-renewing hatreds between extremists of the Right and Left...

...This may also explain Balaguer's announcement of a judicial shakeup on December 5. "The greatest stimulus to crime right now is the weakness of the judges," Balaguer said...

...Stentorian flourishes of the Roman patrician, he pounds the rostrum at moments of climax when, incongruously, his voice tends to slip into a plaintive whine of the Cibao countryside where he was born...

...In the months following Bosch's 1963 overthrow, with police backing, Imbert and Amiama organized the Partido Liberal Evolucionista (ple), a strange configuration of oligarchs, gunmen and Trujillistas opposed to Balaguer...

...These hatreds were pointed up and significantly aggravated last month by the Dominican Army chief, General Osiris Perdomo speaking in Buenos Aires at an Inter-American meeting of military chiefs of staff...

...Santo Domingo provides the classic example: Its population doubled between 1950-60, and has increased from 370,000 to 560,000 inhabitants over the past six years alone...

...Yet controlling police and mob violence in Santo Domingo promises to be a difficult long-term job...

...In the April revolution we did not break into the rich people's houses and into the main street stores to loot the nice things we always wanted...

...Juan Bosch is one of those vanguard Latin American political figures of lower-middle class origin who started to emerge in the second quarter of the 20th century to hasten their countries' social revolutions...

...After the dictator's death, he joined the prd and one of Bosch's aides sent him to the Institute of Political Studies in San Jose, Costa Rica, where Bosch was teaching...

...Military Aid and Assistance Group (maag), was a training adviser in Vietnam in 1961...

...Thousands of the victims were lined up in stockades and courtyards to witness the executions as they awaited their turn to be beheaded...

...The departing group announced that it expected to take with it the greater part of the June 14th rank-and-file organization "for the task of building and developing the proletarian party in our country...

...The result has been a stodgy class system, with the middle and upper classes consuming increasing quantities of manufactured imports to imitate U.S...

...Also promoted was Colonel Tadeo Guerrero, one of the hard core of Trujillo's killers remaining in the Armed Forces, who terrorized several interior towns during the Benefactor's reign...

...innovation to date for handling the politico-military situation has been the organization of a 3.400-man elite Army brigade, trained in riot control and counter-insurgency techniques...

...The military have been active, too...

...Other prd and Constitutionalist militants were ambushed in relatively quick succession...

...Juan Bosch's departure will free us to fight again...

...Balaguer, it is complained, has surrounded himself with an "invisible cabinet" of veteran Trujillista politicians who guided him to power and are now guiding most of his decisions...

...Although his notable flair for indignation, which has won him the permanent enmity of the military, is of a kind best aired in exile, his departure last November 26 for an indefinite stay in Spain may have removed one of the main underpinnings of the Balaguer regime...

...has spent to train and equip Latin American armies over the past 15 years????s that under effective U.S...

...This was a most unusual step against a high-ranking police officer...

...We are heading downhill, and if we don't stop this landslide, we'll be a country not only without memories but also without penalties...

...The U.S...

...To these destructive ends they were urged on by unscrupulous politicians through demagogic preaching...

...There have been mysterious killings, disappearances, street attacks and imprisonments, some clearly attributable to the military and police, others to the extreme Left, still others without clear authorship or design...

...But Balaguer confined himself to enumerating minor cases of graft in the school lunch program and the government sugar mills, and as usual failed to mention the prominent Trujillistas...

...It becomes a dangerous political element in an overcrowded city...

...Possessing considerable political aptitude, he comes to life resoundingly on the speaker's platform...

...But by its actions, by the impunity with which the terrorists act, by the absence of impartial justice and by the ease with which it surrenders to foreign masters, this is a de facto government...

...Most of the victims, however, come from Bosch's Partido Revolutionario Dominicano (prd) and the "Constitutionalist" movement, primarily in the Santo Domingo slums...

...Bosch's view was confirmed, independently, by a prd slum leader whom I first met when he commanded a machine-gun post during the 1965 fighting...

...A month before he left, Bosch told a radio audience: "There is no political activity in the country, only hunger and terror...

...Rumors of violence are encountered everywhere...

...Embassy here is clearly worried about this possibility...

...We your spiritual children, veterans of the campaigns you fought during more than 30 years to make great and to stabilize the Fatherland, Mill look toward your sepulcre as toward a towering symbol...

...Since his inauguration last July 1, marking his second time in the office, he has launched an austerity program to reduce the huge foreign debt, issued sharp warnings against corruption in government, drastically cut the salaries of top public officials, limited luxury imports, raised taxes, trimmed the public payroll and promulgated a stiff rent-control law that has angered powerful real estate interests...

...When on November 11 Police Colonel Cesar Nicolas Ramirez Alcantara, a well-known Trujillo thug, killed two persons with his machine gun and wounded another in a drunken rage, he was suspended and jailed pending trial...

...Several witnesses to the killing said a policeman named Ramon El Nato came up to three men on a street corner, shot Guzman fatally with a pistol at point blank range, and escaped on a green motor-scooter driven by another man...

...living standards, and the poor becoming poorer and more resentful...

...In a radio speech two days after, the new prd Secretary-General said "the silence of Dr...

...She was among the Trujillistas in New York who organized and sponsored Balaguer's Presidential candidacy after he went into exile there in 1962...

...Thus the country has been torn between the barbarism and poverty of the Haitian slave revolt 160 years ago, and the advanced political and material culture of the United States...

...True, this doll-like bachelor abstained from the egregious peculations, sexual excesses and brutalities common to leading men of the period while he served in several Cabinet and ambassadorial posts and as Rector of the University of Santo Domingo...

...Even before Bosch departed, the prd elected a more militant Leftist nationalist executive committee...

...One of these men described the present situation to me this way: "Many people are killed all of a sudden, usually by a bullet in the back of the neck, and many others disappear, and nearly all of them have fought in the Revolution as Constitucionalistas...

...Foreign advisers have predicted that unless the rapine is halted, the Dominican countryside will be stripped and eroded like neighboring Haiti's within a decade...

...In mid-August a group of Barahona lawyers declared to the conservative newspaper El Caribe that "1966 has been a very tragic year, with much fear, much terror, many dead and much grief" in their small town...

...Among those cited are Jaime Guerrero Avila, holder of several cabinet posts under Trujillo, now administrator of patronage for the Balaguer regime...

...The lawyers concluded: "Youths continue to be shot to death late at night, always under mysterious circumstances and with the hand of justice somehow never able to reach the guilty...

...The rank-and-file of Balaguer's Partido Reformisla (pr) is angry about what it feels is an unfair distribution of jobs...

...Combining lofty language with the studied...

...He is said to feel that he is the only Dominican leader capable of dissuading the slumdwellers from a resumption of violence and a swing to the extreme Left...

...The few concrete structures in the area are still pocked from the machine gun and bazooka fire of the battle...

...It is the deep collective guilt feeling of those who killed policemen in the streets and committed other violence against authority...

...Pichirilo was shot from behind by an unknown assailant on a street three blocks from his house...

...This has been mainly due to migration from the countryside, bringing new slum residents to the city who are especially exposed to Dominican economic dislocations and still have many of the arms received during the 1965 revolution...

...The rehabilitation of key figures of the dictatorship has not only been aided by the courts but has extended to Trujillo's brother-in-law, Francisco Martinez Alba, and to Felix Bernardino (the "Jackal of the In some ways even more alarming is the fact that the police and the courts have become a stronghold of Trujillistas and the extreme right...

...Colonel Nin Melo, a notorious figure in Trujillo's dread secret police (sim), has been named head of the national secret service...

...A powerful, ebony-skinned orator, he and his brother were found in a field beside their slaughtered parents during Trujillo's Haitian massacre of 1937...

...Yet his personal honesty may prove an unexpected obstacle to their efforts...

...There is talk in Santo Domingo of massive U.S...

...The same configuration now is appearing again...

...One of the two surviving assassins of Trujillo, Imbert is known to be eager to regain the power he wielded briefly at Washington's behest during the 1965 Revolution...

...The patterns of violence have been complicated by a renewal of political jockeying within the police and Armed Forces, and a growing prominence of old Trujillistas in the Balaguer regime...

...In addition, his Administration still faces the potent and menacing right-wing opposition led by a cabal building up in the Armed Forces around General Imbert...

...troops rescue the Dominican armed forces from defeat????in retrospect, merely one more episode of the disintegration????there has been a hardening of rival positions...

...An ascetic, pious little man of humble birth, Balaguer diligently pursued his education at the University of Santo Domingo and in Paris...

...and a Consul in Haiti associated with the notorious Johnny Abbes, author of several of Trujillo's political assassinations in both the United States and in the Caribbean, who is now living in Port-au-Prince under the protection of Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier...

...Some have called the process "Haitianization," not only because it has been accompanied by a remarkable influx of Haitians but because of the ravaging effects of slash-and-burn agriculture and lumbering in the Republic's 8,000 square-mile mountain watershed...

...Pena Gomez could prove to be one of the most courageous leaders of the Dominican lower classes...

...For four years Santo Domingo's impoverished formed the principal base of support for Juan Bosch, who channelled their resentments into the political process...

...Jose Quesada, Finance Minister and Director of Internal Revenue under Trujillo, now Balaguer's principal financial adviser...

...A series of loans, imposed on the country by a succession of dictators, opened the Republic to economic chaos and dependency, leading to a U.S...

...Luis Mercado, former Secretary General of Trujillo's Dominican party...

...But the President has yet to exhibit the courage and strength he must have if he is to prevail in a prolonged power struggle with the military...

...On August 20 in Santiago, 26-year-old Juan Rafael Bisono Mera, an ex-police lieutenant, was shot in the back of the neck and killed by a police local Air Force base enjoys broad "'autonomous" responsibility for public order, six prd leaders were taken to the base and held for more than 24 hours...

...Others currently in the Balaguer government include Fortunato Canaan, who directed the mobs of stickwielding thugs called paleros in the closing months of the Trujillo Era...

...Although the move was blocked by a Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote against President Grant's annexation proposal, Americans soon asserted their influence...

...aid for public works and agricultural development, but little of the $40 million committed for these purposes six months ago has been spent...

...He assumed importance only when Trujillo's battered corpse was found in the trunk of a 1957 Chevrolet on a May night in 1961...

...In the south coastal city of Barahona, where the years after piloting Castro in his borrowed yacht, the Granma from Mexico to Cuba to begin the anti-Batista guerrilla movement...

...The police machine-gunned him to death...

...With Trujillo's death the controls began to crumble...

...was shot at from a motorscooter on a downtown Santo Domingo street...

...A vociferous anti-Communist, Pichirilo broke with Fidel Castro in 1959, three corporal (who shortly thereafter was promoted to lieutenant...

...The boy was sitting in a canteen in one of the slums, drinking a coke with a friend, when the discussion turned to the hard times of the people...

...The whole country knows the scandalous acquittals recently in cases against persons accused of contraband and illicit enrichment...

...We think those who disappeared are dead because we searched for days in all the jails and hospitals and morgues...

...soldiers who were shot in the head outside a slum laundry in September two days before the last American troops were withdrawn...

...These are the waters which the well-intentioned Joaquin Balaguer must somehow purify if he is not to be poisoned...

...The U.S...

...The boy said that, despite everything, there was a God...

...And since the popular uprising that saw nearly 30,000 U.S...

...As Bosch waited out events in Puerto Rico in April 1965, a close associate remarked caustically: "If the Americans wanted to destroy Juan Bosch politically, they ought to bring him to Santo Domingo in one of their own airplanes and let him govern for six months...

...On October 14 in Santiago, members of an Air Force infantry unit broke into a barbershop and administered a beating to a group of Constitutionalists...

...the Ambassadors to London and the UN...

...We shall in no way allow men to extinguish the flame you lighted on the altars of the Republic and in the souls of all Dominicans.?President Joaquin Balaguer at the funeral of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, San Cristobal, June 2, 1961...

...The prd has cited the names of several Constitutionalists who have died or disappeared or been beaten by police, and the newspapers frequently carry statements by relatives of those who have vanished completely after being taken to police headquarters...

...And the new Secretary-General, 29 year old Jose Francisco Peiia Gomez (Bosch's former protege and right-hand man), told a radio audience that the Balaguer regime "is a constitutional government because it is the product of elections...

...That is, if from behind the meekness there emerges sufficient determination and skill to cope with the economic ruin and the ravenous hatreds afflicting the Dominican Republic today...

...The hope behind this stepped up military aid program—part of some $1.3 billion the U.S...

...He added that the prd "wanted to mount a democratic opposition, but the government will not tolerate it and the people are interested in nothing but their situation of misery...

...A month later Bisono*s cousin, Rafael Sanchez Bisono...

...The inquiring visitor is told by a former minor Trujillo official that charges of police abuse by members of the "Constitutionalist" movement who fought for Bosch's return in 1965 should be dismissed as "the fantasy life of the defeated revolution...

...After the soldier fled, the dead boy's friend gave a deposition to the police, a rare thing for a Dominican to do...

...Two friends of mine were picked up by the cops on the street two months ago and we never could find them...

...Trujillo's assassination seems to have removed the psychological barriers to migration imposed in 1937, when the Benefactor sent machete-wielding peasants and soldiers to massacre between 10,000-20,000 Haitian squatters...

...Perdomo is reportedly a member of General Antonio Imbert Barreras' growing entourage...

...Such poverty can be absorbed tranquilly in a rural setting...

...resigned to join the Maoist Movimiento Popular Dominicano (mpd...

...Listin Diario, which has tried to play a conciliatory role, observed editorially that this was one of "many ferocious trivialities spoken by politicians incapable of confronting the country's true problems...

...and Polibio Diaz, cabinet minister and judge under Trujillo...

...While Bosch has usually been a moderating influence in the heat of crisis, in times of relative calm he has been prone to seizures of fear and despair, as well as to the rash and theatrical provocations that made his 1963 overthrow by the military at least in part a political suicide...

...His good intentions, moreover, are not impeded only by those who surround and ostensibly support him...

...In many respects he has moved decisively as President...

...The people want to fight again because they don't want to be killed this way...

...customs receivership and finally to the 1916-24 Marine occupation that enabled Trujillo to seize power...

...Most of them have been the focus of political controversy in their nations for a generation...

...Alcibiades Espinosa, Minister of the Interior and Police, earlier this year led an uprising in Santiago against former Provisional President Hector Garcia Godoy (who was, after all, vice president of Balaguer's party), seized a radio station, distributed arms and proclaimed a new Rightist cabinet...

...In recent weeks...

...My friend Danilo Medina was arrested on the street the night before Hurricane Inez, but jumped from the paddy wagon under the bridge...