Dominican Republic

In 1822, under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, the Haitians began a twenty-two-year occupation of the eastern two-thirds of Hispanolia. Dominican historians have traditionally described this period as the nadir of their country's history because of the imposition of high taxes, a military draft, the confiscation of church lands, the destruction of the prevailing educational system, and efforts of Haitianization. Recently, revisionist historians have stressed some of the positive aspects of the Haitian occupation, such as the freeing of the Dominican slaves. There is no doubt, however, that a substantial part of the Dominican people desired the end of Haitian rule.

The fight for Dominican liberation was led by Juan Pablo Duarte, who is regarded as "the father of his country" and its greatest national hero. He was ably assisted by Ramón Matias Mella and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, who are almost equally admired. On 27 February 1844, the Dominican Republic successfully proclaimed its independence from Haiti.

FROM SANTANA TO HEUREAUX (1845–1899)

Duarte's dream of establishing a liberal, democratic republic soon vanished with his permanent exile to Venezuela and his replacement by two caudillos (Pedro Santana and Buenaventura Báez) who for decades battled each other to control the country. The instability produced by this struggle was aggravated by the threat of frequent armed incursions by Haiti. Since neither Báez nor Santana believed in the viability of the Dominican Republic, they searched for foreign protectors. Whereas Báez hoped for annexation by France or the United States, Santana looked for salvation to Spain, which reannexed its former colony of Santo Domingo in 1861. Most Dominicans objected to the reestablishment of Spanish control and commenced the War of Restoration (of Dominican independence) on 16 August 1863, a conflict that resulted in Spain's permanent withdrawal from Santo Domingo in 1865. Báez's U.S. annexation scheme was almost realized in the 1870s, when the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant strove to carry it out. The determined resistance of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts narrowly defeated the annexation treaty's passage in the Senate.

The frequent turmoil that had plagued the nation ever since it attained independence was suspended temporarily during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when General Ulises Heureaux (1882–1899) clamped an iron dictatorship on the country. His rule was marked by assassinations, bribery, and secret police surveillance. Nevertheless, the stability of the political situation led to a flurry of foreign investments that resulted in the building of telegraph lines, railways, roads, and the first large sugar mills in the southern Dominican Republic.

INCREASED UNITED STATES DOMINATION (1900–1926)

Heureaux's assassination in 1899 resulted in renewed political and financial destabilization, which was instrumental in persuading the government of the United States to take over the receivership of Dominican customs (1905) under the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. Under the beneficent presidency of Ramón Cáceres (1906–1911), the Dominican Republic experienced a brief spell of reform and modernization. Cáceres's assassination hurled the country into a new cycle of violence and financial indebtedness that persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to send in the U.S. Marines.

From 1916 to 1924 the Dominican Republic remained under the military control of the United States. The occupation resulted in improved roads, schools, and sanitation facilities as well as in the introduction of baseball, which became a national pastime. U.S. rule, however, also had its negative aspects, including the suppression of Dominican guerrilla activities, which was accompanied by incidents of torture. A pervasive attitude of racism on the part of the occupiers toward Dominicans created long-lasting resentments. Perhaps the worst legacy of the U.S. occupation was the creation of a Marine-trained National Guard under a commander in chief named Rafael Léonidas Trujillo Molina, who became the dictator of the Dominican Republic in 1930.

THE ERA OF TRUJILLO (1930–1961)

Trujillo followed in the footsteps of Báez, Santana, and Heureaux—he even patterned his uniforms after those worn by Heureaux. However, his regime was infinitely more encompassing than the governments of his three caudillo predecessors. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare him with his more famous contemporaries, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In terms of cruelty, Gleichschaltung (conformity laws), secret police terror, genocidal massacres, and megalomania, Trujillo certainly held his own in comparison with the German and Soviet rulers. He differed from them, however, in one important aspect: whereas Hitler and Stalin were indifferent to the accumulation of personal wealth, Trujillo, the son of a lower-middle-class postal officer, was determined to amass one of the world's great fortunes. He turned the Dominican Republic into his personal fiefdom by taking possession of most of the land, many industries, and many export-import monopolies. It is estimated that by the time of his death in 1961, his personal fortune amounted to more than U.S. $800 million. Members of Trujillo's extensive family were given important government positions that they used to make their own fortunes.

Trujillo added another bloody chapter to the long history of hostilities between Dominicans and Haitians by ordering the execution of all Haitians who could be found on Dominican soil. In October 1937, approximately 25,000 Haitian women, men, and children were massacred at the dictator's request. Trujillo, whose maternal grandmother was Haitian, hoped to "whiten" his country by this measure.

Owing his meteoric military career to the U.S. occupation forces, Trujillo sought to ingratiate himself with his former superiors. Besides creating a George Washington and Marine Corps Boulevard in Santo Domingo, Trujillo made sure that his country's debt to the United States was paid in full, within a decade. With the exception of the final phase of his reign, Trujillo elevated the maintenance of good relations with the United States to the cardinal principle of his foreign policy. These efforts resulted in the Trujillo-Hull Treaty (1940), by which the United States gave up its right to collect Dominican customs duties.

When the United States became involved in World War II, the Dominican Republic was one of the first Latin American countries to declare war on the Axis. The products of the Dominican Republic's agroindustries, which Trujillo had done so much to develop in the 1930s, found a ready market in the United States during the war. Dominican coffee, tobacco, and cocoa were in high demand, and the Dominican Republic became the second largest sugar exporter (after Cuba) to the United States. In 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill called for worldwide adherence to democratic principles, Trujillo even allowed the formation of opposition parties. He crushed them ruthlessly in 1947, at the beginning of the cold war, during which the Dominican dictator posed as Latin America's champion of anticommunism. His anticommunist stance, as well as the administering of favors and outright bribes, assured him support from a powerful group of U.S. senators and congressmen. Most North American journalists lavished praise on Trujillo for establishing a stable government in his country.

The Dominican ruler reached the apex of his reign in 1955, when he celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his seizure of power by arranging for a Fair of Peace and Brotherhood of the Free World at Santo Domingo. After that event, Trujillo's fortunes began to decline rapidly. The toppling of dictators all over Latin America with the encouragement of the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy left Trujillo an isolated relic. On 14 June 1959, Dominican exiles, with the encouragement of President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, launched an abortive invasion of the Dominican Republic. Trujillo ordered the captured rebels tortured and then killed. In retaliation for Betancourt's sponsorship of the invasion, Trujillo sent agents to Venezuela who dynamited Betancourt's car and injured the Venezuelan president. Other Dominican agents participated in the assassination of Guatemala's president, Carlos Castillo Armas, in 1957. These actions resulted in the imposition of economic sanctions against the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States (OAS).

In his desperation, Trujillo began to abandon his principle of never antagonizing the United States. The 1956 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Columbia University instructor Jesús de Galíndez, who had infuriated the Dominican dictator by publishing a book dealing with Trujillo's many crimes, lessened Trujillo's support in the U.S. Congress. Many congressional members were outraged by Trujillo's murder of the North American pilot who had flown the kidnapped professor to his death in the Dominican Republic. The United States imposed an arms embargo on the Dominican Republic that was followed by a special excise tax on the importation of Dominican sugar. The latter measure dealt a crippling blow to the Dominican economy. Isolated abroad and increasingly opposed at home, the aging dictator was ambushed and murdered along Santo Domingo's waterfront (Malecón) on 30 May 1961.

THE AFTERMATH OF TRUJILLO (1961–1965)

The murdered dictator left behind a dislocated economy and a large power vacuum that his favorite son, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez (Ramfis), and Tru-jillo's last puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, attempted to fill. While Ramfis was rounding up and torturing his father's assassins (they were all caught and killed, except for Luis Amiama Tío and General Antonio Imbert Barrera), Balaguer initiated some minor democratic reforms that failed to persuade the OAS to lift its economic sanctions. The reforms alarmed the late dictator's brothers, José Arismendi and Héctor Bienvenido, who tried to undo even these minor changes in order to preserve "Trujilloism with Trujillo." The protests of Santo Domingo's business community, backed by a show of force of U.S. naval units, persuaded the entire Trujillo clan to go into permanent exile on 20 November 1961. Before following suit, however, Balaguer formed and headed a seven-man Council of State. Consisting of members of the Dominican elite, this body was designed to preside over the country's transition to democracy until the national elections were held on 20 December 1962. These changes resulted in the lifting of sanctions by the OAS as well as a massive outpouring of economic and technical assistance by the United States.

The elections of 1962 proved to be a contest between two major parties: the conservative National Civic Union (UCN), which was backed by the elite, and the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), which had been founded in 1939 by anti-Trujilloist exiles and consisted largely of members of the middle and lower classes. The PRD was led by the prominent Dominican novelist Juan Bosch, who won the presidential election. President John F. Kennedy, who was pleased by the outcome of the voting, invited the newly elected Dominican president to the White House and appointed his liberal speech writer, John Bartlow Martin, as ambassador to the Dominican Republic. The Kennedy administration's enthusiasm for Bosch soon vanished when the new president ignored the guidelines of the Alliance for Progress program and considered establishing diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba. Elements of the Dominican armed forces, known as Loyalists and led by General Elías Wessín y Wessín, were well aware of the changed U.S. attitude toward Bosch, which enabled them to stage a successful military coup against Bosch in September 1963.

After Bosch's overthrow, the Dominican Republic was run by a triumvirate headed by business leader Donald Reid Cabral. The real power behind this civilian facade, however, was the military, which became so steeped in corruption and repression that the Dominican people revolted on 24 April 1965 in order to restore civilian rule under former president Bosch, who then was living in exile in Puerto Rico.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1965

The rebels of 24 April 1965 called themselves Constitutionalists because they advocated the reestablishment of a truly civilian, constitutionalist government headed by deposed president Juan Bosch. The Constitutionalists, who consisted of members of the PRD, some Christian Socialists, and part of the armed forces under Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó, stormed the National Palace and placed Reid Cabral under house arrest. When the people of Santo Domingo realized that the hated triumvirate had ended, they poured into the streets to support the Constitutionalists, who provided them with arms. General Wessín y Wessín, who headed those elements of the armed forces who called themselves Loyalists because they remained loyal to the triumvirate, unleashed the air force upon the defenseless population of the capital, which suffered thousands of casualties. He also sent heavily armed units backed by tanks across the Duarte Bridge, which spans the Ozama River. This river separated the Loyalist forces, headquartered at San Isidro Air Force base, from the Constitutionalists, who were concentrated in the old part of Santo Domingo (zona colonial). Armed with only light weapons and Molotov cocktails, the rebels were able to repel and defeat the Loyalists, capturing and disabling many armored vehicles.

With Caamaño's supporters on the verge of victory in the capital, the revolution threatened to spread to the rest of the country, a development that caused such panic at the U.S. embassy that Ambassador William Tapley Bennett informed President Lyndon Johnson that Communist-led hordes were committing atrocities and endangering the lives of U.S. citizens. On 28 April 1965, President Johnson sent tens of thousands of Marines (and, later, airborne units) into Santo Domingo, ostensibly to prevent a Communist takeover (a "second Cuba"), but in reality to obviate a Constitutionalist victory. On 29 April, the Constitutionalists formed a government with Caamaño as president. The Loyalists, too, formed a government, which was headed by General Antonio Imbert Barrera, one of the two surviving Trujillo assassins.

Johnson had been mistaken in his belief that U.S. intervention would put a quick end to the civil war. Instead, it lasted until 31 August 1965, when the Act of Dominican Reconciliation put an end to the conflict. This reconciliation pact called for the reintegration of the armed forces, the establishment of a temporary government, and the holding of national elections in June 1966.

THE ERA OF BALAGUER (1966–1978)

The ensuing electoral battle was fought between the PRD, once again led by Bosch, who had returned from exile, and the PR (Reformist Party), headed by Joaquín Balaguer, who had founded that party in 1963 during his exile in New York City. Balaguer, presenting himself as the candidate who could bring peace and reconciliation to his nation, won 57 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 1970 and 1974, thus creating the era of Balaguer, which coincided with a dramatic increase in the world price for sugar, the Dominican Republic's main export. Balaguer used the impressive revenues derived from the sugar export boom to construct schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and dams. He concentrated particularly on the countryside, where he gained much political support from segments of the peasantry. The Dominican president tried to reduce his country's dependence on sugar production by encouraging the tourist industry and by inviting foreign companies to explore the Dominican Republic's mineral resources (gold, silver, ferronickel, and bauxite).

The economic boom benefited the upper class and some strata of the bourgeoisie. It also produced much corruption, particularly among the top military leaders, many of whom became millionaires under Balaguer. Human rights violations constituted another negative aspect of the era. Especially in the 1970s, former leading Constitutionalists, Socialists, and Communists were murdered by a roving paramilitary gang known as La Banda (The Band), which was encouraged by the government. By 1978, as Balaguer was finishing his third consecutive term as president, his "economic miracle" was under assault by rising oil prices and the simultaneous decline in world demand for coffee, cocoa, and sugar. In June of that year, impoverished urban workers, ill-paid professionals, and disillusioned Dominicans everywhere put an end to twelve years of Balaguerism by voting in the PRD's candidate for the presidency, Antonio Guzmán Fernández.

THE PRD INTERLUDE AND THE RETURN OF BALAGUER

During the electoral campaign, Guzmán had promised to bring about a change (el cambio) for all those Dominicans (the majority) who had been left out of the "economic miracle" of the Balaguer epoch. However, the continuing increase in the price of oil and the further decline in demand for the Dominican Republic's agricultural products prevented Guzmán from initiating the social reforms he had delineated during the campaign. The endemic political corruption continued under Guzmán. When the president learned that members of his immediate family were involved in a scandal, he committed suicide at the National Palace on 4 July 1982. His vice president, Jacobo Majluta Azar, served the remaining forty-three days of Guzmán's term. Although disappointed by Guzmán and Majluta, the Dominican voters showed that they still preferred the PRD to Balaguer's PR or Bosch's Party of Dominican Liberation (PLD, founded in 1973) when they elected the PRD's Salvador Jorge Blanco to the presidency in 1982.

Beset from the start by the Dominican Republic's enormous debt and the constantly falling world price for sugar, Jorge Blanco was as unable as his predecessors to improve the lot of the average Dominican. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Dominican president trebled the price of subsistence items such as cooking oil, rice, and beans in April 1984. The resulting outbursts of popular fury were bloodily suppressed by the police and armed forces. When Jorge Blanco was accused of personal corruption (for which he was jailed in 1988 and tried in 1991), the Dominican people's disillusionment with the PRD was complete. In the 1986 electoral battle of three ex-presidents (Balaguer, Bosch, and Majluta), Balaguer (and his party, the Reformist Social Christian Party [Partido Reformista Social Cristiano—PRSC]) emerged as the winner.

The government formed by the nearly blind, seventy-eight-year-old president seemed like an apparition from the past: former president of the triumvirate Reid Cabral as foreign minister, General Wessín y Wessín as minister of the interior (and later head of the armed forces), and Imbert Barrera as army chief. Balaguer, in his fifth term as president, faced nearly insurmountable problems. His country's agricultural exports were selling as poorly as ever and the U.S. Congress made the situation worse by cutting the Dominican sugar quota. The poor infrastructure of the Dominican Republic was crumbling everywhere. Electric power outages of up to twenty hours a day wrought havoc with industry, hotels, restaurants, and homes.

Balaguer's answer to these problems was a gigantic building program that included the construction of apartments, bridges, and highways as well as an immense lighthouse monument at Santo Domingo honoring Columbus. The building boom relieved unemployment but, at the same time, increased the country's already staggering debt. It also fueled a fierce inflation that threatened not only the survival of the poor but also the viability of the middle class. As far as the observance of human rights was concerned, the record of Balaguer's fifth term compared favorably with his previous tenures as head of state.

During the presidential elections of 1990, the PRD no longer proved to be a major factor because it had split into two hostile groupings: a left wing under the former mayor of Santo Domingo, José Francisco Peña Gómez, and a conservative faction, calling itself La Estructura, under former President Majluta. In the ensuing electoral battle, known as the "battle of the octogenarians," Balaguer was pitted against his old nemesis, Juan Bosch. The incumbent president defeated his opponent by a thin margin; Bosch claimed that he was cheated out of victory by electoral fraud.

Balaguer entered his sixth term as president in an atmosphere of rapid economic deterioration. He soon faced massive demonstrations against the prevailing inflation, unemployment, and dearth of medical and educational facilities, as well as the collapsing infrastructure. Only through the mediation of the Roman Catholic Church and his promise to step down as president in 1992 was Balaguer able to survive this crisis. (Although he remained in power through 1994 and was reelected.) After a temporary reprieve, a new crisis began building up during the summer of 1991, when severe power blackouts and continuing hyperinflation made life miserable for most Dominicans. Balaguer, at this point, apparently attempted to deflect attention from the domestic crisis by becoming embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Dominican Republic's old enemy, Haiti, over the expulsion of thousands of Haitians from Dominican soil. However, Balaguer lost the 1996 election to Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD). The PRD regained the presidency in 2000 when Hipólito Mejía won the election. However, observers considered his administration ineffective and in 2004 the population reelected Leonel Fernández.

Future politicians will face long-standing challenges. The growth of tourism and remittances from Dominicans living in the United States have helped economic growth in the early twenty-first century. Also, the Dominican Republic, along with Central American countries, signed a free trade agreement with the United States in 2005. Nevertheless, of the 9 million Dominicans (2007), 2.25 million exist in poverty. Income inequality hampers development with the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owning 40 percent of the national income. Santo Domingo has already grown its population to 2.5 million and there will also be more pollution, more deforestation, more legal and illegal immigration, less agriculture, and less water. While the government has become democratic, future politicians still have to address these social and economic issues to ensure political stability.

See alsoBalaguer, Joaquín; Betancourt, Rómulo; Bosch Gaviño, Juan; Boyer, Jean-Pierre; Cáceres, Ramón; Castillo Armas, Carlos; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Duarte, Juan Pablo; Galíndez, Jesús de; Heureaux, Ulises; Mella, Ramón Matías; Monroe Doctrine; Organization of American States (OAS); Roosevelt Corollary; Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas; Wilson, Woodrow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sumner Welles, Naboth's Vineyard: The Dominican Republic, 1844–1924, 2 vols. (1928).

Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (1964).

Howard J. Wiarda, The Dominican Republic: A Nation in Transition (1969).

Frank Moya Pons, Manual de historia dominicana (1977).

Ian Bell, The Dominican Republic (1981).

H. Hoetink, The Dominican People, 1850–1900 (1982).

Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek, The Dominican Republic: A Caribbean Crucible (1982).

Jan Knippers Black, The Dominican Republic: Politics and Development in an Unsovereign State (1986).

Frank Moya Pons, El pasado dominicano (1986).

Michael J. Kryzanek and Howard J. Wiarda, The Politics of External Influence upon the Dominican Republic (1988).

Kai P. Schoenhals, Dominican Republic (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Domínguez, Jaime de Jesús. Historia dominicana. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: ABC Editorial, 2001.

Gregory, Steven. The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Pérez, Odalís. Nacionalismo y cultura en República Dominicana. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Centro de Información Afroamericano, 2003.

Sagás, Ernesto. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

                                          Kai P. Schoenhals