THE LAST BEACHHEAD
Nelson, Anne
The Last Beachhead Seventeen years ago Lyndon Johnson sent in the Marines; the Dominicans haven't recovered-and neither have we BY ANNE NELSON Popular fear of an armed plunge into the morass of...
...In perhaps the key move of these maneuvers, General Dennis MacAuliffe arrived from the Southern Command in Panama to supervise a reshuffling of the Dominican officer corps...
...If, in 1972, the United States had been willing and able to "intervene" on behalf of the coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and Communists when it won the national elections in El Salvador, the results might have been as far-reaching as they have been in the Dominican Republic...
...These lightly edited excerpts were translated by Nelson...
...Q: What can we expect over the next four years in the Dominican Republic...
...We are in a very polemical region, the Caribbean...
...But most Dominicans—whether PRD supporters or not—say they will recall it as a time when repression came to a virtual halt...
...Guzman took the presidency and his party won control of the legislature...
...Because European social democrats are struggling against European Marxist-Leninists...
...In Washington, a sense of imminence seemingly gives way to one of diffidence...
...Johnson's "success in the Caribbean" consisted of the needless loss of life, the postponement of real elections in the Dominican Republic for more than a decade, and the compromising of any gains the Alliance for Progress might have made for the United States in Latin America...
...BOSCH: He's a poor man...
...And by that time, the civilians were already presiding over a civil war...
...0 'A Near-divine Authority to Intervene' Editor's Note: Shortly before national elections were held in the Dominican Republic last spring, Anne Nelson spoke with Juan Bosch, the seventy-year-old Dominican political leader, writer, and university professor...
...If this began with a crisis imported from the United States, it has worsened becaus^ of the Dominican government's ineptitude in dealing with economic problems...
...In 1964 the PRD had to withdraw from the elections twenty-four hours before they took place, and in 1978 within hours after the polling places were closed, soldiers arrived and carried off all the documentation from the Central Election Board...
...A group of State Department moderates, led by McGeorge Bundy, labored toward a negotiated settlement that involved PRD centrist Antonio Guzman as provisional president—a solution acceptable to the pro-Bosch forces and all but a tiny handful of the opposing military...
...BOSCH: The [Balaguer] go^ ernment was aided and protected, ecor amically and politically, by the United S ates, and felt itself so powerful that it didn't want to give up office...
...economic and military aid as goads...
...To carry out a military action...
...We had just come out of World War II, and the war had produced a tremendous economic boom that would last until 1957...
...For example, now we are in an electoral campaign because of this situation, and we know that for the moment the Reagan Administration can't make decisions—at least publicly—to intervene in the Dominican Republic because it would hurt them...
...After this, Carter and his team tried to recoup by organizing the reconquest of the U.S...
...press...
...BOSCH: The problem in politics isn't whether they'd like to or not, it's the results...
...Everything happening in Guatemala today is the result of the downfall of Arbenz...
...The more coup-prone members of the command were forcibly retired with handsome pensions...
...When it became clear that he was losing to PRD candidate Antonio Guzman, his military backers invoked the time-honored practice of confiscating the voting urns (as the ruling National Conciliation Party had in El Salvador against the leftist coalition in 1972 and again in 1977...
...It is manifested in the price of the dollar...
...What are the elements of the crisis...
...President Duarte would go from being provisional president to constitutional president...
...But the most startling ghosts are those among the living who participated in the elections last May...
...The failure was on the part of the United States, in considering all of these parties as dangerous to U.S...
...Santo Domingo's conversations are dotted with remembrances of journalists, students, labor leaders—the usual Latin American troublemakers—who were massacred under Trujillo or "disappeared" under Balaguer...
...The situation in the Dominican Republic, or the situation of'the Dominican Republic, presents U.S...
...The Pentagon finally felt obliged to announce that "the Department of Defense, and the United States Government, are impartial toward the Dominican election results, and seek neither to help nor prejudice any candidate"—in effect promising not to intervene...
...The Dominicans have had ample opportunity to observe meddling on the part of the United States first-hand, in all its forms...
...What do you think...
...Q: Do you believe the United States still supports Balaguer...
...Q: How would you describe the pattern of intervention after 1965...
...It is in NATO that the destiny of the world is being played out...
...Because this way he had the majority in the senate...
...forces intervened overtly in the affairs of another nation in this hemisphere...
...economic interest than Dominican political autonomy: In this century, U.S...
...And then Carter intervened...
...BOSCH: Just like Reagan...
...There had never been a similar case in history, and the international public knowledge of this episode was going to do the Americans tremendous harm...
...Khomeini knew about this, and he never forgave Carter for it...
...The formation of the first junta in October 1980 was a step in an encouraging direction, but the far-right army officers left in positions of power quickly undercut the best efforts of civilian leaders...
...there have been many...
...servicemen died that dark April...
...Reconsidering the impact of past policy decisions may seem like an unrewarding enterprise—until we consider the fates of the Dominicans, the Salvadorans, and others who must live with the consequences of what flows from Washington...
...Do you see the progressive movements of Luis Munoz Marin in Puerto Rico and Don Pepe Figueres in Costa Rica as a way to buy time...
...In its parity with the peso over the past few months it has gone from an equal exchange to be worth one peso fifty cents...
...Second: When the revolution against the Shah grew more serious, Carter sent a general to organize a rebellion within the Iranian army to defeat the Shah before the arrival of Khomeini...
...There are the governments of Mitterrand, of Papandreou, of Schmidt...
...This quickly gave way to other arguments...
...In 1978, Joaquin Balaguer staged his reelection, as he had every four years in the post-1965 period...
...Juan Pena Gomez, the fiery orator who broadcast the original call to arms for the Constitutionalist forces, was elected mayor of Santo Domingo...
...And this was a lamentable failure...
...swagger that had much to do with the shaping of Dominican history and the history of other nations in the region...
...Q: In the United States it was presented as a triumph—perhaps the only triumph—of the Carter human rights policy...
...BOSCH: Not really, because Balaguer's relations with the United States had always been very good...
...But the situation is different from what it was before...
...The President's action [in Santo Domingo] was supported by the American public," writes political scientist Larry Ber-man in Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam...
...embassy officials in Santo Domingo told reporters that the Constitutionalist forces were dominated by Communists, and that the moderate businessmen and officers among them were "Communist dupes...
...It formed very similar parties throughout the Caribbean basin, and the leaders of these parties were Pepe Figueres in Costa Rica, Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Betancourt in Venezuela, and Luis Munoz Marin in Puerto Rico...
...He obliged Balaguer to acknowledge his electoral defeat, but Balaguer pressured Carter into a negotiation in which Carter, Balaguer, and Guzman participated...
...To assuage Balaguer's shock and fury, the State Department engineered a compromise that left his party in control of the senate...
...That would be a scandal, not only in the United States, but in the heart of NATO—which matters much more than El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, or the whole Caribbean put together...
...Such measures, of course, would have been unthinkable in the Nixon White House...
...Earnest young Colonel Caamano survived a joint assassination plan, never carried out, by Green Berets and the CIA during the rebellion, only to be executed under mysterious circumstances following his capture in a smaller guerrilla offensive in 1973...
...The Guzman administration, on the other hand, had one of the best human rights records in the hemisphere...
...This is a delicate situation...
...Their goal was the restoration of the democratically elected government of Juan Bosch and the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), which had been overthrown two years before in a military coup...
...We have to take advantage of all of the results of the polemic that would be positive for us...
...The statement made banner headlines in the Dominican press, though it reminded many of the man who has stopped beating his wife...
...But in the end Carter sent arms and helicopters to El Salvador just like...
...Times have not changed: the exclusion of the Left from the Salvadoran electoral process (or, depending on whom you talk to, its non-participation) continues to preclude the possibility of a political settlement, and economic reforms still run counter to the perceived interests of the victorious parties of the Right...
...residents in the country which, with Haiti on the west, occupies the Caribbean island of Hispanola...
...The Constitutionalist forces, as the Bosch supporters called themselves, were well on their way to retaking the country, under the able command of Dominican Air Force Colonel Francisco Caamano...
...It was only later that anyone noticed that many of the fifty-three were dead, long-exiled, or otherwise hors de combat...
...The Bay of Pigs invasion had failed...
...The case of Arbenz, for example: Arbenz was overthrown for nationalizing United Fruit's.land holdings...
...Jimmy Carter took strong and immediate action in forcing Balaguer to concede his loss...
...It was the postwar economic abundance that launched them in their struggle for power...
...Barely two months after his 1965 Dominican intervention, Lyndon Johnson escalated the U.S...
...PRD candidate Salvador Jorge Blanco, who won a broad presidential victory, had represented the pro-Bosch forces in the 1965 negotiations...
...And there are medicines...
...But if intervention has been the harsh reality of the Dominican national experience, the Carter Administration showed that it was a theme with some less opprobrious variations...
...They are battling for the wills of their respective peoples...
...BOSCH: Yes, we face an economic crisis, and it is very profound...
...as Juan Bosch points out (see accompanying interview), MacAuliffe reinforced the policy on repeated visits, including one at the crucial time of Guzman's inauguration...
...This means a paralysis of commercial activities that is contagious to industry, transportation, and health—it comes to affect the entire economy...
...military mission learned that I knew, they gave orders that my government should be defeated...
...BOSCH: The United States committed a very grave error, and allowed its mistake to be revealed to many people, myself included, who had believed that the United States was a world leader of democracy...
...Q: And how do you view the current situation in El Salvador and Guatemala...
...There the Reagan Administration demanded that elections be held without the participation of the Left...
...military mission had ordered the defeat of the government I presided over, because among other things Haitian guerrillas were organizing camps in Dominican territory without my knowledge as president...
...It can't, at the same time, be an important member in the United Nations, with veto powers, and do such things...
...Old habits can be difficult to break, even with the mechanisms of a bourgeois democracy beginning to fall into place...
...And well they should be, for they are as genuinely anticommunist as their fellow members of the Socialist International...
...Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Inquiry, and other publications...
...That's it...
...But Johnson Administration hard-liners, notably Under Secretary of State Thomas Mann, vetoed the plan on the grounds that Guzman might be "soft on communism...
...These governments can't let a move made by their ally, the United States, slip by in the Americas because the opposition Communist parties will take advantage of the weaknesses of the social democrats and their allies...
...Had the American public been better informed and more involved in the decision, a considerable calamity might have been averted—and not just for the Dominicans...
...Just think, it was at this very moment that President Johnson sent the first large contingent of troops to Vietnam...
...The Dominican Republic, like other nations of the Caribbean basin, was slow to shed its colonial status and even slower to establish a national identity...
...But there are also primary materials for many industries...
...The simple fact of being economically and militarily powerful convinces North American politicians that they have a near-divine authority to intervene all over the world...
...For weeks before the election, rumors of a military coup hummed through the capital, raised to a fever pitch by Jack Anderson, who suggested in a column that Washington looked kindly on the prospect...
...Working people tend to give Balaguer credit for the economic boom of the 1960s and blame Guzman for the 1970s bust...
...Q: It's been said that the day the United States intervened in the Dominican Republic was the day it lost the Cold War in the Third World...
...BOSCH: They fulfilled their stage...
...Q: How did you view the actions of the Carter Administration in 19''8...
...It's a game that we, the politicians of the Caribbean, must see with clarity, because if we know how to move within the rules of this game we can pull off many things we couldn't otherwise...
...But there was obviously an improvement here in the country's human rights situation...
...Q: It's fair to say that your country's economy is at a critical point...
...Anne Nelson is a free-lance photojournalist with a special interest in Latin America...
...This was a frank intervention...
...The 1965 intervention was, then, merely one more step in a long routine of U.S...
...But in one of the ironies of recent history, it was precisely the Reagan Administration's policy in El Salvador that allowed the Dominican Revolutionary Party to sweep into office last May...
...Q: At the beginning of the Carter Presidency, many liberals believed that the human rights policy was going to bring about a change in hemispheric relations, and they pointed to the events of 1978 as a departure from a dictatorship...
...Among the things we import are many food products...
...The defeat of my government was September 25 and Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22...
...First mistake: They didn't see that the people of Iran had the right or the capacity to change their government...
...El Salvador...
...Washington also allowed all Dominicans who so desired to live in the United States, beginning with those who had been politically active in the April revolution...
...When I found out and the U.S...
...As a result, you now have half a million Dominicans living in the United States...
...Guzman's administration was marred by economic hard times and charges of corruption, which may have contributed to his suicide at the end of his term this summer...
...It is hard to gauge Ronald Reagan's attentipn span...
...You treated them as though they were dangerous...
...BOSCH: The best we can hope for is that the economic crisis doesn't create a social and political crisis, because if this catastrophe occurs, military intervention will return to our country...
...The U.S...
...Jorge and Pena, "Communist dupes" to the Johnson Administration in 1965, have become newly respectable and trustworthy in the eyes of the Reagan foreign policy makers in 1982...
...The Reagan Administration's policy has been impeccable, utterly intelligent," said Pena on the eve of the elections...
...Naturally, this error was not committed precipitously, but was a response to a historical phenomenon that cannot be avoided by any nation, any people, any state, or any person...
...The Dominicans have had ample opportunity to observe meddling on the part of the United States first-hand, in all its forms Santo Domingo bears few visible scars from the 1965 troubles, but it remains a city inhabited by ghosts...
...And in NATO there are governments that are not submissive, that don't unquestion-ingly accept the foreign policy of the United States...
...Look at the fiasco in Iran, owing to, among other things, the belief that while he enjoyed their support, the Shah was unshakable...
...troops have been sent to Santo Domingo five times and no Dominican government has taken office without the blessing of the United States...
...He will also continue to serve as the secretary-general of the party and president of the Latin American Commission of the Socialist International...
...Trujillo rose to power through a National Guard organized, trained, and equipped by U.S...
...BOSCH: Since the government of the United States was considered to be in the wrong in 1965, it made economic aid available to the new government on a vast scale...
...Was there an improvement in relations with the United States...
...They gave the Shah their total support, no matter what he was doing...
...The rebel ranks ranged from rag-tag slum brigades to some of the most honored names in Dominican professional and military circles...
...April 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic to put down a rebellion, has receded into history...
...Q: Do you believe that they ultimately failed as socialists...
...He was here when Guzman took office, and he has returned many times with his team of colonels...
...Q: You've studied the situation in the Caribbean basin for many years...
...Hands off Nicaragua...
...politicians with a dilemma, with frustration, because they can't support something different in the Dominican Republic from what they've supported in El Salvador...
...It was a defeat for Duarte, hence a defeat for U.S...
...the Dominicans haven't recovered-and neither have we BY ANNE NELSON Popular fear of an armed plunge into the morass of Central America waxes and wanes in the United States, depending on Presidential mood swings and the fortunes of various insurgent movements...
...Q: Do you think they'd like to...
...But we ought to recognize that we live with the consequences, too...
...policy in El Salvador...
...But what happened was that the extreme Right, among which are groups of recognized political assassins, won the elections...
...Interventionist policies are rarely applied against a stable government, and in the volatile republics of the Caribbean basin, precipitous change has affected U.S...
...The "support" of trje American public could be better labeled ignorance and passivity, since few Americans even remember the events of 1965, much less knew the particulars of the Dominican political drama at the time...
...Q: What do you think of Duarte...
...Now look at Guatemala...
...But from the beginning of its own nationhood, the United States has all too often formed its policy in the image of the old colonial masters, regarding Latin America as a field of strife against first its Western European and then its Soviet rivals, instead of a potential breeding ground for its own constitutional ideals...
...It was one thing to confront the demoralized Dominican regulars, however, and quite another to face 23,000 strapping U.S...
...What happens here in the Caribbean is immediately reflected in Europe...
...BOSCH: No, at the outset their efforts were not just means of buying time and their politics were not exclusive to them...
...Some 2,850 Dominicans and twenty-six U.S...
...And there's oil...
...John Kennedy was already preparing his campaign for reelection...
...Times have changed: An election was held this spring in the midst of the fighting...
...Soon after last May's elections, disappointed losers attacked the Central Electoral Commission, killing five clerks...
...This class had the political will to hold power, and to fortify its economic position it needed the support of the state in each country...
...embassy in Teheran...
...interests and security...
...Johnson's success in the Caribbean probably shaded his expectation that the public would support similar moves against another Communist aggressor in Vietnam...
...This doesn't mean there haven't been abuses...
...Besides this, Carter sent the head of the Southern Command, a General Dennis MacAuliffe, who came here from Panama with a group of colonels to personally direct a restructuring of the Dominican military command...
...To vote for the PRD, they said, was to vote for hambre con libertad—hunger with liberty— but in the end they chose political freedom in massive numbers over their perceived economic well-being...
...The initial reason Washington gave for its armed presence was the protection of U.S...
...Naturally, this raises the price, not by 50 per cent but by at least 100 per cent, of everything we import...
...business interests, strategic considerations, and lives...
...troop commitment in Vietnam from 75,000 to 200,000 and plunged headlong into the Southeast Asian war...
...Ro-mulo Betancourt [in Venezuela], Juan Jose Arevalo [in Guatemala], and myself were also involved, and I was a friend of most of them...
...The United States continues to consider itself to have rights over any country whatsoever...
...There has been no meddling with our internal affairs—if they treated the rest of Latin America the same way, the situation would be different...
...It may, then, be both comforting and unnerving to remember in such an uncertain time that almost a generation has gone by— seventeen years—since U.S...
...This boom boosted the petit bourgeoisie that was developing in most of the Caribbean countries...
...that is, the natural aging process of societies and systems...
...A state, no matter how powerful, has no right to send its soldiers and weapons and material to another country to take an embassy...
...The PRD may have become more conservative since 1965, but neither the party nor its agenda are far in spirit from the mainstream movement of the mid-1960s...
...The 1977 elections might not have been too late to avert a civil war in El Salvador, but it was too early for the Carter Administration to act boldly...
...They gave Balaguer an electoral victory in four provinces where he hadn't won...
...Marines in the 1916-1924 occupation (just as Nicaragua's first So-moza would use the U.S.-created National Guard as his stepping stone to dictatorship a few years later...
...It has no right...
...BOSCH: I don't think so...
...One of Trujillo's puppet presidents, Joaquin Balaguer, was installed in the aftermath of the fighting, and he was to run the country in the Trujillo tradition for the next twelve years...
...The United States threw its weight behind the military conservatives and the political heirs of Rafael Trujillo, the murderous tyrant who had ruled the Dominican Republic for more than three decades...
...BOSCH: You have another political fiasco in El Salvador...
...Seventeen years after the Dominican intervention, the Reagan Administration finds itself bitterly debating the consequences of military intervention in El Salvador...
...Their party offers a program of modest, gradualist reform unthreatening to foreign business interests, including those of the Dominicans' favorite multinational bete noire, Gulf & Western...
...A list of fifty-three "known Communists'" supposedly leading the rebellion was released by the State Department and published by a dutiful U.S...
...The Dominicans took nothing for granted, however...
...In El Salvador they required elections, so here they can't oppose elections or their results...
...The United States did not annex the Dominican Republic, as it did Puerto Rico and, for a time, Cuba, but that was more for reasons of U.S...
...Juan Bosch, alienated from his old party, ran for president again on the Dominican Liberation Party ticket, while his long-time foe, Joaquin Balaguer, gamely made another try as the head of his Reformist Party...
...If what is produced with these primary materials has doubled in price in less than a year, and people have the same earnings as before, what can they do but buy less, buy half of what they used to...
...Naturally, the plan was to strengthen President Duarte politically because [Reagan] thought the Christian Democrats were going to win the elections...
...The interview was conducted in Spanish at Bosch's home in Santiago...
...True, it would have been necessary to rescue candidates,Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo from exile and political neutralization, and pressure military hard-liners in San Salvador to respect the democratic process, using U.S...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
