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RAG-TAGS, SCUM, RIFF-RAFF, AND COMMIES by Eric Thomas Chester All material copyright © 2001 by Monthly Review Press |
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March 2001 |
Prologue The Dominican Republic is located five hundred miles southeast of Florida, where it occupies the eastern half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, just west of Puerto Rico. A small country of three and a half million residents, it has long been dependent on the production and export of sugar cane. Possessing little in the way of valuable natural resources, it would hardly seem to present a prime target of strategic interest, and yet in the spring of 1965 this small Third World nation became the primary focus of concern for President Lyndon Johnson and his White House advisors. On April 24, 1965, an insurrection of junior officers of the Dominican army started to unfold. Planned as a rapid coup by disaffected units, the insurrection bogged down, as top military commanders rallied loyal troops for a counterattack. Air force planes then began bombing insurgent forces holding Santo Domingo, the capital city and urban metropolis of the Dominican Republic. Rebel officers responded by authorizing the distribution of thousands of rifles and machine guns to civilian militants. A military coup had been transformed into a popular rebellion. In Washington, the president was determined that the revolt not be permitted to succeed. A successful popular uprising in the Dominican Republic, one that incorporated an armed populace, could be the signal for similar revolts throughout Latin America. U.S. decision makers devised and implemented a sophisticated set of maneuvers to contain and defuse the revolt. Mobilizing the entire gamut of resources in its arsenal, the United States succeeded in defusing and containing a volatile crisis. The Dominican Republic had been a focal point of concern of U.S. foreign policy for several years before it came to the world’s attention in 1965. Its people had suffered through three decades of rule by a vicious and rapacious autocrat, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Although the United States had consistently aided the Trujillo regime, by the 1950s relations had become strained. Trujillo had become the foremost symbol of oppression throughout Latin America. Soon after Fidel Castro’s revolutionary conquest of power in January 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that Trujillo’s excesses could no longer be tolerated. The U.S. drive to depose Castro could only be pursued within the broader framework set by a concerted push toward a democratized Dominican Republic. President John F. Kennedy implemented covert operations already formulated during Eisenhower’s term in office. In addition to sanctioning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, President Kennedy approved Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assistance to a clandestine group that was preparing to topple Trujillo. On May 30, 1961, only six weeks after the embarrassing failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a small circle of conspirators succeeded in assassinating Trujillo. The next four years proved to be tumultuous as the Dominican Republic stumbled toward a more democratic society. The high point came in December 1962, when Juan Bosch, a moderate social democrat, was elected president. Bosch had lived for twenty-five years in exile, most of them in Cuba, where he helped to organize a series of unsuccessful efforts to depose the Trujillo dynasty. Although his term in office was cut short by a military coup in September 1963, he remained immensely popular. The uprising of April 1965 aimed at restoring Bosch to power. President Johnson’s response to the Dominican revolt has to be placed within the context of the Cuban revolution and the Cold War. The president repeatedly warned his advisors that he would not countenance the creation of another Cuba in the Caribbean. Furthermore, he was convinced that the Dominican revolt had been planned in Moscow as a rejoinder to U.S. military operations in Vietnam. Only a few months earlier, the president had made the fateful decision to escalate drastically the U.S. presence in South Vietnam. U.S. bombers began raiding North Vietnam in February 1965. Then, in early March 1965, the first Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam. Ultimately, the number of U.S. combat troops in Southeast Asia would mushroom to more than five hundred and forty thousand soldiers, but in the spring of 1965 the administration was just initiating its descent into this bottomless quagmire. From President Johnson’s perspective, the Dominican crisis constituted a major test of his resolve as a leader, as well as a crucial challenge to the commitment of the United States to the anti- Communist crusade. Quickly, and without hesitation, he ordered the deployment of U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic, thereby overturning the balance of forces that had been forged on the streets of Santo Domingo. At the zenith of the Dominican crisis, in early May of 1965, there were as many U.S. troops stationed in and around Santo Domingo as there were positioned in South Vietnam. Indeed, the United States task force grew to more than thirty-one thousand paratroopers, sailors and Marines sent to isolate and overwhelm a force of less than five thousand rebels, many of whom were lightly armed civilians with a modicum of military training. April 28, 1965, the day when the first Marine contingent was deployed as a combat force, represented a decisive turning point in Latin American history. For thirty-one years, from 1934 to 1965, the United States had refrained from deploying troops on combat missions within the Western Hemisphere. The Good Neighbor Policy as enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt had become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. When Lyndon Johnson opted to dispatch troops to the Dominican Republic, he sent a clear signal to all of Latin America that the United States was prepared to use its devastating military power to maintain its tight hold over the region. The Dominican crisis marked one of the defining moments of the Cold War. President Johnson was convinced that a rebel victory had to be prevented and he was willing to utilize every resource at his command to attain this goal. Needless to say, the full extent of the U.S. effort was kept secret. Thousands of documents were held under the tightest security precautions, stamped secret or top secret. For decades, researchers have been prevented from viewing these documents, notified that their release would, in some undefined way, endanger the national security of the United States. Thirty-five years after the crisis, I have been able to circumvent many of these barriers to the truth. I filed dozens of requests for declassification reviews, as well as dozens of appeals on documents exempted from declassification at the first level of review. Many of my requests were denied, or brought forth censored versions of documents that had been stripped of any substantive content. Nevertheless, I gained access to all but a few lines of a lengthy chronology providing a detailed description of one of the more fascinating highlights of the Dominican crisis, the mission to Santo Domingo of the president’s most influential foreign policy advisors, led by White House national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy. Although documents filed at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, such as the Bundy chronology, were useful, I uncovered the most revealing items in private archives scattered around the country. The most sensitive cache came from the papers of Thomas Mann, under secretary of state for economic affairs and a key presidential advisor on Latin America. Mann had taped telephone conversations and then had them transcribed. The transcripts present the candid and unvarnished opinions of Lyndon Johnson and his closest advisors. The following narrative provides an in-depth description of the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, from the first days of the popular revolt in April 1965 through the presidential election of June 1, 1966. It constitutes a case study in how the United States can exert its massive power to mold and manipulate the recurring crises it confronts within the poverty-stricken countries of the Third World. At the time the first U.S. troops were dispatched to Santo Domingo, Washington insisted that these troops had been sent to protect American tourists, and to prevent the further loss of life. Soon afterward, the official position shifted to a version of the standard Cold War rationale. The Johnson administration insisted that the popular uprising had been usurped by communist cadres, and thus a rebel victory would inevitably lead to another Cuba. Once U.S. forces had created a cordon surrounding the rebel-controlled inner city of Santo Domingo, the United States contended that it was a completely neutral force interposed between the two sides. Its troops would remain in place as a guarantor of civil peace and democratic elections. Furthermore, U.S. diplomats publicly pledged that Washington would provide aid to the newly elected government, no matter who led it. In fact, from the first days of the revolt, the United States was committed to the defeat of the rebel cause, not because such a victory would be followed by a Communist regime, but because the insurgents were committed to the immediate return of Juan Bosch as the constitutionally elected president. Key presidential advisors quickly realized that communist cadres were an insignificant presence within the rebel leadership. Still, Washington assessed Bosch as erratic, egotistical and politically unreliable. For his part, Bosch eagerly sought U.S. support. Nevertheless, he was also a genuine outsider within a highly stratified society. He distrusted the entrenched oligarchy of wealthy landowners, and he proposed to undermine their economic and political power. At the same time, Bosch sought to marginalize the radical left through the implementation of a program of social reform, rather than through the more traditional method of repression and violence. Although the Central Intelligence Agency had channeled covert support to Bosch during the 1962 election campaign, President Kennedy tacitly approved the military coup that deposed him in September 1963, a brief seven months into his term of office. The military command quickly ceded governmental authority to a civilian junta that was soon dominated by Donald Reid Cabral, an affluent auto dealer. An integral member of the oligarchy, and a scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Dominican aristocracy, Reid Cabral proved to be a colorless and ineffectual politician, without a shred of popular support. His decision to remain in power in spite of his devastating unpopularity sparked the April 1965 revolt of junior officers. It was this revolt, pledged to the return of Juan Bosch as president, that provided the initial opening for a popular uprising. And when insurgent forces decisively defeated the most feared units of the Dominican military, the United States opted to intervene. Although Lyndon Johnson was determined to prevent a rebel victory, he was also anxious to avoid a direct military confrontation with the insurgents, and the resulting casualties that such a confrontation would inevitably cause. This reflected the administration’s understanding that domestic popular support for the administration’s policy would rapidly dwindle should U.S. soldiers start dying. Indeed, the president’s policy of escalation in South Vietnam would later lead to his fall from power for just this reason. Yet Washington decision-makers were also certain that the Dominican Republic had to emerge from the Trujillo era with a civilian government, one that could command at least a modicum of community support. Throughout Latin America, popular tolerance of the ongoing campaign to unseat Castro was contingent on U.S. support for civilian rule in the Dominican Republic. Thus, U.S. policy pursued a complex and twisting path during the Dominican crisis. Although President Johnson was implacable in his determination to prevent a rebel victory, Washington was also anxious to avoid a total triumph by the Dominican military command. This apparently contradictory policy produced a series of complicated tactical maneuvers, many of which were kept shielded from public scrutiny. Indeed, some of these maneuvers were so sensitive that only the president and his closest advisor during the crisis, Undersecretary of State Thomas Mann, knew of them. During the first days of the popular uprising, Mann formulated a long-run strategic plan that quickly gained the president’s approval. Mann’s plan would set the parameters for U.S. policy for the next thirteen months. It envisioned the formation of a new provisional government, one that would be primarily composed of nonpolitical technocrats and business leaders. Such a provisional government would pursue policies that avoided both the social reforms advocated by the insurgents and the zealous anticommunism demanded by the military command. Yet, and this was critical, such an interim regime would leave the existing military hierarchy intact. Mann hoped that a provisional government constituted along these lines could restore stability by regaining control over the inner city and dispersing the insurgent forces. This provisional government would be expected to remain in power for a lengthy transitional period prior to elections, thereby allowing the United States, in conjunction with its Dominican allies, to rally its resources behind a single presidential candidate. From the start, Mann was convinced that Joaquín Balaguer should be that candidate. Balaguer had served for decades as a faithful and sycophantic minion of Trujillo, before being selected by the aging autocrat for the then ceremonial post of president. After Trujillo’s assassination, Balaguer tried to remain in office, but he was soon forced to resign by popular pressure. Mann understood that the insurgent forces, led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó, would summarily reject the concept of a transitional regime of technocrats. Instead, the rebels insisted on an interim government dominated by supporters of Bosch. Furthermore, the insurgents were uncompromising in their demand that a reconstituted military command must incorporate officers drawn from their ranks, not just those who had sided with the military junta. The U.S. position and that of the rebels proved to be fundamentally irreconcilable. Thus, the U.S. strategy during the crisis proceeded along parallel tracks. On the one hand, the United States employed military force to undermine popular morale to the point where the rebel leadership was cajoled into reluctantly accepting the U.S. proposal for a provisional government. This was a delicate task, given Washington’s desire to avoid a total confrontation with the insurgents. At the same time, U.S. envoys carried out a series of negotiations with the insurgents holding open the possibility of a favorable settlement. These negotiations served to open and deepen lines of communication, thus exacerbating divisions within the rebel leadership, while also helping to defuse the popular fury being directed at U.S. military operations. In implementing its military strategy, the United States carefully and systematically escalated its pressure on the insurgents, moving methodically from secretive, low-level operations to open, if limited, warfare. Thousands of Marines and army paratroopers were rushed to Santo Domingo and then deployed to create a tight cordon around the rebel-controlled inner city. Over the next weeks, these troops engaged in frequent clashes with snipers, with U.S. forces utilizing their vast superiority in firepower to bombard insurgent positions, setting fires and destroying shacks and warehouses situated along the edge of the rebel zone. Special Forces personnel were dispatched on intelligence gathering missions into the countryside, using humanitarian aid as cover. Green Berets also joined elite units of the Dominican military in paramilitary forays aimed at destroying Radio Santo Domingo, the most powerful radio station in the Dominican Republic. (Radio Santo Domingo remained under rebel control for the first three weeks of the uprising, and its broadcasts were perceived as a vital threat by U.S. decision-makers.) President Johnson demanded a constant stream of reports from the scene. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were sent to Santo Domingo to join the U.S. effort. FBI intelligence reports, of dubious validity, were employed to screen the backgrounds of prospective members of the provisional government. The CIA station burgeoned in size during the uprising, as dozens of intelligence officers were rushed to the Dominican Republic. Needless to say, most government documents detailing the clandestine operations undertaken by CIA case officers remain shrouded in secrecy. One of these covert operations, which was given the highest priority by White House decision-makers, was designed to place Colonel Caamaño, the popular hero of the rebellion, in a compromising position. Caamaño was to be lured out of his sanctuary in Santo Domingo’s inner city, offered a bribe to defect, and, if he refused, discredited by leaks claiming he had sought out U.S. officials in the hope of being financially compensated for his cooperation. The plan failed, but CIA officers continued to probe for potential defectors from within the rebel command. In tandem with the campaign of escalating force directed against the insurgents, U.S. diplomats undertook a series of negotiations with rebel leaders. At first, these contacts were kept at an informal level. John Bartlow Martin, Johnson’s personal emissary to Santo Domingo during the first two weeks of May 1965, met with Caamaño, and then traveled to Puerto Rico to confer with Bosch. These initial contacts were followed by a secret meeting between Bosch and Abe Fortas, a long-time friend and confidant of the president, thus laying the groundwork for one of the oddest and most remarkable incidents of the Cold War. In the middle of May 1965, President Johnson dispatched a delegation of his most senior foreign policy advisors to Santo Domingo, with the declared mandate to negotiate a quick settlement to the confrontation. The talks proceeded while some of the fiercest fighting of the Dominican crisis took place only blocks away. McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security advisor, along with Cyrus Vance, deputy secretary of defense, first went to Puerto Rico to join the talks between Bosch and Fortas, while Tom Mann went directly to Santo Domingo to open discussions with the Dominican military command. The entire U.S. delegation then assembled in the Dominican Republic for a series of intensive negotiations. Bundy met with Antonio Guzmán, a moderate member of Bosch’s party, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Dominicano or PRD), with the goal of hammering out a mutually satisfactory agreement leading to an interim government, one which Guzmán would head. As these talks proceeded, the United States escalated its military pressure on the insurgents by providing logistical support to the military junta as it sent thousands of soldiers to occupy an area of poverty-stricken barrios in Santo Domingo, just north of the U.S. created cordon. To further complicate the labyrinthine complexities of these negotiations, Bundy was being used as a foil by the president, who had no intention of permitting Guzmán, or any other Bosch supporter, to be named provisional president. In his desire to derail the Bundy-Guzmán talks, President Johnson repeatedly hardened the U.S. negotiating position. When the talks finally collapsed, the president opted to send Ellsworth Bunker, U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), to enter into the next round of negotiations. (Formally, Bunker served as one of three members of a special OAS Ad Hoc Commission to the Dominican Republic.) Over the next months, Bunker engaged in a steady series of discussions with influential leaders on both sides of the Dominican divide. Stymied by the refusal of the insurgents to offer concessions on crucial points of difference, his mission was fortuitously aided by the bloodiest confrontation between rebel and U.S. forces to occur during the Dominican crisis. On June 15, 1965, army paratroopers responded to rebel sniper fire with a forward encroachment along the eastern half of the cordon, occupying a fifty-block area within the inner city of Santo Domingo. Caamaño and the insurgent leaders were given no choice but to accept the U.S. proposal for an end to the crisis. On September 3, 1965, Héctor García Godoy, a moderate politician with ties to Balaguer, was installed as president of a provisional government. Most of my study concentrates on the seven weeks from the start of the uprising, April 24, 1965, to June 18, 1965, when Ambassador Bunker presented a detailed proposal for the transition period prior to the inauguration of a democratically elected government. Although this constitutes the primary focus of my study, I do carry the narrative through the presidential election of June 1, 1966. The formation of a provisional government headed by García Godoy marked a major milestone in the implementation of Mann’s overall strategic plan, but final success depended on the election of Joaquín Balaguer. Nevertheless, as the election date drew closer, it seemed as if Bosch was poised to win still another decisive mandate. Bosch attracted enthusiastic popular support, while Balaguer represented the old regime, the horrific days of the Trujillo autocracy. Yet the official election results showed Balaguer defeating Bosch by a sizable margin. Bosch’s defeat was determined by a multiplicity of factors. Balaguer’s campaign benefitted from the covert aid and advice given by CIA experts in political and psychological warfare, while Bosch’s base of support was eroded by successive waves of terror as semi-official death squads exacted their vengeance on rebel fighters and PRD militants. Still, in spite of all of the manipulations, and in spite of the pervasive aura of fear, Bosch was still poised to win the election. In the end, only massive fraud could ensure Balaguer’s victory. Of course, Bosch realized well before the election that the United States was opposed to his return to power. He was also thoroughly briefed on the campaign of intimidation being waged against his campaign workers. In order to block Bosch from withdrawing as a presidential candidate, it was essential to convince him that the United States would willingly accept his election, and that U.S. prestige and power would be exerted to ensure a democratic election. It was at this critical juncture that Norman Thomas became a prominent figure on the Dominican scene. A six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, Thomas was a celebrated personality, with close ties to social democratic leaders throughout the world, and with Juan Bosch in particular. One reason the Dominican crisis remains so instructive rests on the role played by social- democratic leaders from the United States, and from Latin America as well. Bosch was very much a product of this political tendency. During his twenty-five year exile as an anti-Trujillo dissident, he had developed close personal relationships with key figures on the Latin American left, such as Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and José Figueres of Costa Rica. While submerged within this milieu, Bosch came to know Norman Thomas and his protégé, Sacha Volman. Volman was a mysterious and secretive figure. A Romanian immigrant to the United States, he was employed by the CIA as a contract officer on a variety of sensitive operations. After they worked together at a cadre-training school in Costa Rica, Volman became Bosch’s most influential confidant. In 1963, during Bosch’s term as Dominican president, Volman shuttled between the U.S. embassy and Bosch. Even after the military coup of September 1963, the two remained close friends. Thus, in early 1966 Volman and Thomas sought to reassure Bosch that the June election would be conducted on a fair and impartial basis. Norman Thomas convened a committee of prominent progressives that dispatched more than seventy election observers to the Dominican Republic, including Thomas himself. Upon his return to the United States, Thomas publicly declared that the election had, indeed, been fair, thereby undercutting Bosch’s claims of fraud. Thomas then proceeded to act as a confidential intermediary between Bosch and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. Bosch was lulled into docilely conceding the election. He promised that Balaguer would protect the rights of political opponents, and that any problems which might arise could be raised directly with the White House, through Thomas and Humphrey. Once Bosch accepted defeat, the social movement that had flowered on the streets of Santo Domingo thirteen months previously was left to dwindle in despair. Balaguer moved quickly to consolidate his power base, holding office for all but eight of the thirty years following the 1966 election. His rule reinforced the unbridled power of the Dominican oligarchy, while leaving the majority of the populace housed in slums, malnourished, and without access to the most rudimentary of social services. Since the Dominican crisis of 1965, the United States has occupied Grenada in October 1983 and Panama in December 1989. As the globally integrated economy spreads dislocation and destitution throughout Central and South America, the potential for mass social movements such as the one that erupted on the streets of Santo Domingo can only increase. For social democratic leaders such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of Mexico, the treatment accorded Bosch and the Santo Domingo rebellion remains a pointed object lesson. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War, the path has been cleared to a more insightful understanding of the Dominican crisis. The uprising of April 1965 was not led by communists, but it was a genuine popular revolt. As a result, the demands put forth by the insurgent leadership far exceeded the narrow constraints for social reform implicitly set by U.S. decision-makers. The U.S. military intervention thus stands as a warning to Latin America of the extent to which the United States will go to ensure its continued domination over this region. Far from acting as a Good Neighbor, or even a benevolent despot, the United States remains a bulwark of authoritarian rule and oligarchic domination. The popular uprising of 1965 can only be understood in its historical context, from the despotism of the Trujillo era to the volatile confrontations that characterized the four years following his assassination. The inability of Dominican society to resolve the deep divisions at its core laid the basis for the venomous hatreds that embittered the 1965 crisis. If you have any technical comments or suggestions, about this web site, please send e-mail to Our Webmaster at mrwebmaster@monthlyreview.org.  |
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