Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
False Starts
When Trujillo was assassinated by a group of Dominican dissidents on May 30, 1961,
some hoped that the country would turn a corner. The promise of change, however, was
short-lived. President Joaquín Balaguer officially assumed the office. He renamed the cap-
ital Santo Domingo. After a groundswell of unrest and at the insistence of the USA, a
seven-member Council of State, which included two of the men who'd taken part in
Trujillo's deadly ambush, was established to guide the country until elections were held in
December 1962. The first free elections in many years in the DR was won by the scholar-
poet Juan Bosch Gaviño.
Nine months later, after introducing liberal policies including the redistribution of land,
the creation of a new constitution and guaranteeing civil and individual rights, Bosch was
deposed by yet another military coup in September 1963. Wealthy landowners, to whom
democracy was a threat, and a group of military leaders led by Generals Elías Wessin y
Wessin and Antonio Imbert Barreras installed Donald Reid Cabral, a prominent business-
man, as president. Bosch fled into exile but his supporters, calling themselves the Constitu-
tionalists, took to the streets and seized the National Palace. Santo Domingo saw the stir-
rings of a civil war; the military launched tank assaults and bombing runs against civilian
protesters.
The fighting continued until the USA intervened yet again. This time the Johnson admin-
istration, after losing Cuba, feared a left-wing or communist takeover of the Dominican Re-
public, despite the fact that Bosch wasn't a communist and papers later revealed US intelli-
gence had identified only 54 individuals who were part of the movement fighting the milit-
ary junta. The official reason was that the US could no longer guarantee the safety of its na-
tionals and so over 500 marines landed in Santo Domingo on April 27, 1965. A week later,
and only 40 years since the previous occupation, 14,000 American military personnel were
stationed in the Dominican Republic.
Trujillo's nicknames included Hot Balls, the Goat, the Chief and the Butcher.
