Dominican Republic: The Coup That Became a War

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Led by tanks with 90-mm. cannon and armored troop carriers, the 2nd Battalion of the 6th U.S. Marines rolled across the red dust of a once trim polo field on the western outskirts of Santo Domingo and moved cautiously into the war-torn capital of the Dominican Republic. As the columns churned down Avenida Independencia, past the empty side streets, people suddenly appeared in windows and doorways. Some waved. Others stared. A few spoke. “I wish the Americans would take us over,” muttered a woman. A man near by sighed and nodded. “Since they are here, we had better take advantage of it.”

In counterpoint to those desperate words of welcome, the rattle and burp of rebel gunfire echoed from the smoking city center barely a mile up the road. Down the street went the marines, most of them green, all of them scared, grimly clutching M14 rifles, M60 machine guns and 3.5-in. bazookas. Now the firing grew in intensity, and rebel bullets whined past the U.S. troops. Near the U.S. embassy, two marines caught the full blast from a hidden machine-gun nest in an unfinished building a short distance away. Nine more were wounded before bazooka men came up to blast the nest to shreds.

At approximately the same time, a battalion of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division rolled out of San Isidro airbase, 14 miles away on the other side of the city. Linking up with loyal Dominican troops, the G.I.s drove up to the bridge spanning the Ozama River ?and into another volley of rebel fire. Three hours passed and the casualty toll mounted to 20 wounded before the U.S. forces could declare their objectives secured: the paratroopers to clear the approaches to the Duarte Bridge into Santo Domingo, the marines to carve a 3.5-sq.-mi. “international zone” out of the city as a refuge for U.S. nationals and anyone else who hoped to remain alive in a city gone berserk in the bloodiest civil war in recent Latin American history.

To the Wall! It was the first time that U.S. troops had gone ashore on business in the Caribbean since 1916, the first time since 1927, when marines landed in Nicaragua, that U.S. forces had intervened in any Latin American nation. Yet if ever a firm hand was needed to keep order, last week was the time and the Dominican Republic was the place. In seven confused days of coup, counterattack and mounting warfare, the small Caribbean island republic had experienced a bloodbath surely as violent, and certainly more prolonged than the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles against Fidel Castro.

No one had an accurate count of the casualties as frenzied knots of soldiers and civilians roamed the streets, shooting, looting and herding people to their execution with cries of “Paredón! Paredón!” (To the wall! To the wall!) Some reports put the dead at around 2,000, with the wounded perhaps five times that. The Dominican Red Cross was burying people where they lay. In the hospitals, harried doctors were operating by flashlight and without anesthetics. Santo Domingo was a city without power, without water, without food, without any semblance of sanity. The rebels executed at least 110 opponents, hacked the head off a police officer and carried it about as a trophy.

In the narrow sense, U.S. troops were there merely to protect some 2,400 terrified U.S. citizens and other foreign nationals after U.S. Ambassador William Tapley Bennett Jr. had informed Washington that Dominican authorities wanted U.S. help, that they could no longer guarantee the safety of American lives. In a much larger sense, the troops were there quite simply to prevent another Cuba in the Caribbean. What had happened, in its baldest terms, was an attempt by highly trained Castro-Communist agitators and their followers to turn an abortive comeback by a deposed Dominican President into a “war of national liberation.”

The fighting started as a revolt by a group of junior officers in favor of ousted President Juan Bosch, currently in exile in Puerto Rico. Within three days, that military revolt fizzled. But not before vast stocks of arms had been passed out to pro-Bosch civilians and their Castroite allies, who succeeded in transforming the attempted coup into a full-scale civil war.

Flank Speed Ahead. The Dominican most responsible for the U.S. military presence was Elías Wessin y Wessin, a tough little brigadier general who commands the country’s most powerful military base and at the time the marines landed was the key force for law and order. Twice before, General Wessin y Wessin, 40, had relied on his planes and tank-equipped supporting troops to settle political disputes in the Dominican Republic. He was the man who deposed Juan Bosch in 1963, after a series of angry confrontations over Communist infiltration in the government. Now he was fighting again, as he saw it, to prevent a political struggle from becoming a Communist takeover. And for help this time, he called on the U.S. Said Wessin y Wessin: “We saved the country by only a hair. The conspiracy was very big. The majority of people did not even know what was going on.”

The U.S. decision to go in involved well-known risks. Memories of previous U.S. interventions are still very much alive in Latin America; the words “Yankee imperialism” are a rallying cry for leftists everywhere.

President Johnson weighed the possible damage to U.S. prestige and to the Alliance for Progress, huddling with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, CIA Boss William Raborn. As the situation grew more alarming by the hour, he snapped: “I will not have another Cuba in the Caribbean.” At last orders went out to Task Force 124, centered on the aircraft carrier Boxer and with 1,800 combat-ready marines, to make flank speed for Santo Domingo. Another set of orders started the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, N.C., toward its C124 and C-130 transports.

On TV, Johnson explained his decision to the nation. “The United States Government has been informed by military authorities in the Dominican Republic that American lives are in danger,” said the President. “I have ordered the Secretary of Defense to put the necessary American troops ashore in order to give protection to hundreds of Americans who are still in the Dominican Republic and to escort them safely back to this country. This same assistance will be available to the nationals of other countries, some of whom have already asked for our help.”

The Soviets, Red Chinese and Cubans reacted with howls about imperialist aggression. In a shrill May Day speech, Castro called the U.S. landing “one of the most criminal and humiliating actions of this century.” The comment from the rest of Latin America was surprisingly mild. Few of the expected mobs materialized to hurl rocks at U.S. embassies. Chile’s President Eduardo Frei and Venezuela’s Raúl Leoni issued public statements deploring the U.S. landings. But privately, many Latin American statesmen admitted the necessity for quick U.S. action. Some even went on record about it. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said that it regretted a move “which evokes such painful memories,” but recognized the humanitarian reasons and hoped the marines’ stay “will be as brief as possible.” Added Argentina’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Zavala Ortíz: “Sometimes those who appear as intervening actually are only reacting against a hidden intervention.”

The Argentine was talking directly to Fidel Castro. The 1962 missile confrontation may have taken Russian IRBMs out of Cuba?or so the U.S. believes?but it did nothing to halt Castro’s campaign of subversion around the hemisphere. According to U.S. intelligence, Cuban training schools turn out more than 1,500 American graduates each year as guerrilla cadres. Venezuela’s army has been chasing them through the interior without notable success. Colombia’s even more expert army no sooner cleaned out the country’s bandits than a pair of Castro-style guerrilla bands cropped up in the same Andean hills. There have been reports of Communist guerrillas in Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Brazil?and of course the Dominican Republic, for which Castro has a special affinity. Way back in September 1947 Fidel himself, then a student, was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a 1,100-man invasion force from Cuba.

Considering the island’s ugly history (see box), it is a wonder that the Dominican Republic’s leftists did not make their move long before. The tinder for revolution has been building for generations, and in the unstable years after Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican military has been the strongest anti-Communist influence. Most often it was in the person of Wessin y Wessin.

The son of poor Lebanese immigrants, Wessin is a rare bird among the fine-feathered Dominican officers. He prefers fatigues or suntans to fancy uniforms, scorns the usual fruit-salad decorations, and no one has ever accused him of growing rich on graft. He lives in a modest $12,000 concrete house with his wife and two sons, enjoys cockfighting and baseball. He is painfully shy among strangers, speaks only Spanish, and seldom says much. But he is a devout Catholic in a part of the world where males pay little attention to their religion, and he regards Communism with a bleak, uncompromising hatred. As commander of the military training establishment at San Isidro airbase, he instituted mandatory Sunday Mass for recruits, taught courses in how to spot Communists. He also has at his disposal a sizable chunk of the Dominican Republic’s firepower: eight F-51 propeller-driven fighters, eight Vampire jets, a company of 23 tanks, and two infantry battalions totaling 1,700 men.

In 1962, Wessin y Wessin helped stop the Armed Forces Secretary from overthrowing the seven-man civilian Council of State that administered the country after Trujillo. A year later, he led a coup to depose the country’s newly elected President, Juan Bosch, whose promises of reform won wide praise but whose attitude toward Communists was highly permissive. Bosch declared an amnesty for all exiles, permitted scores of far leftists to return from Cuba and Europe?”the better to watch them,” he said. When Bosch refused to restrict the Communists’ right to travel and even allowed trips to Cuba, Wessin y Wessin demanded that the President outlaw the Communist Party. Bosch refused and demanded Wessin y Wessin’s resignation. Instead, in September 1963, the general staged the bloodless coup that ousted Bosch and sent him into exile in Puerto Rico. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Wessin y Wessin, “Bosch is a Communist.”

Donald Reid Cabral, 41, a Santo Domingo auto dealer, emerged as the leader of the civilian triumvirate that succeeded Bosch. With the general’s backing, Reid instituted some beginning social and economic reforms, even tried to stop the time-honored military practice of smuggling in goods from overseas. All the while, Bosch’s supporters plotted for their leader’s return ?and apparently found considerable backing among young army officers. Bosch’s men also found encouragement among the country’s leftists, notably the Castroite 14th of June Movement, which attempted an abortive anti-Trujillo invasion from Cuba in 1959. To exactly what extent Bosch himself knew of the Castroite involvement is unclear. The fact remains that in the past few weeks, according to intelligence sources, considerable numbers of Cuban-trained Dominicans have been slipping across the Windward Passage. Last week three boats loaded with about 65 Dominicans were seen leaving the Cuban port of Santiago. “I reported the conspiracy to President Reid for 15 or 20 consecutive days,” says Wessin y Wessin, “but he paid no attention to me.”

Kill a Policeman! On Saturday, April 24, at 3:30 p.m., three army sergeants and a handful of civilians seized Radio Santo Domingo and announced a “triumphant revolution to restore Juan Bosch to the presidency.” The announcement was enough to send the crowds boiling out onto the streets, where agitators whipped them into a frenzy. Army units at two nearby bases joined the revolt, and mobs invaded the central fire station, stole the engines and drove them all night, sirens howling, through the city streets.

The next morning, high-ranking army officers, anxious to use the revolt as an excuse for getting rid of Reid, told him that they would not fire on the rebel troops. Reid had no choice but to resign, and fled into hiding at a friend’s home. It was already too late to smother the mob’s pent-up passions. Insistently, the rebel radio exhorted: “Kill a policeman! Kill a policeman!” “Come into the street and bring three or four others with you!” The frightened army men who had forced Reid’s resignation turned the government over to Lawyer Rafael Molina Ureña, a Bosch supporter, until Bosch himself could return. In San Juan, Bosch announced that he would be in Santo Domingo “just as soon as the air force sends a plane for me.”

“Bring Them to Us.” The Dominican air force was loyal to Wessin y Wessin. Up to this point he had only watched from the sidelines at San Isidro. At last he took a hand. Instead of a DC-3 to San Juan, he ordered his F-51s to strafe the palace and the approaches to the Duarte Bridge, which his tanks would cross to reach the city. Several people were killed in the raids, which roused the rebel radio and TV stations to a new frenzy. Well-known members of three Communist groups, including the 14th of June, appeared on TV in Cuban-style uniforms to harangue the audience into action. They broadcast the addresses of loyalists’ supporters and relatives. “Wessin’s sister lives at 25 Santiago!” “Find the pilots’ families and bring them to us!” And the mob did. Wives and children of air force pilots were dragged before TV cameras. Warned the announcer: “We are going to hold them at the bridge. If you strafe there, you kill them.”

On Sunday afternoon, army defectors distributed four truckloads of weapons among rebels in the Ciudad Nueva, a low-cost housing area in the city’s southeast: bazookas, .50-cal. machine guns, automatic rifles. Pro-Bosch rebels numbering about 2,000 to 4,000 began waging an urban guerrilla war, making forays into the business district, thus paralyzing the city. Rebel mobs sacked the new Pepsi-Cola plant, set fire to the offices of a pro-Reid newspaper, destroyed Reid’s auto agency.

From his command post at San Isidro, Wessin y Wessin announced operación libre to liberate the city. The army garrison at San Cristóbal rallied to his side; the navy joined in, lobbed 3-in. shells at the palace. Air force planes made repeated strafing runs. Then across the river rumbled the tanks, firing almost point-blank into rebel Ciudad Nueva.

Meanwhile the U.S. embassy was gathering Americans and other foreigners at the Embajador Hotel for evacuation. More than 500 people were waiting at the hotel and on the grounds when a group of rebel teenagers, most of them kids from 16 to 18, suddenly appeared waving burp guns. They lined the men up against a wall as if to execute them, then fired their automatic weapons harmlessly into the air. “Those brats just seemed to delight in terrorizing us,” said one U.S. housewife. Only the arrival of a rebel army colonel stopped the gunplay and permitted the removal of the refugees to the port of Haina, twelve miles away. There the U.S. Navy was already waiting to load 1,172 of them aboard transports. Some 1,000 other Americans elected to stay behind, hoping the disorder would soon be ended.

“Collective Madness.” For a time, it did seem about over. Deciding that they were licked, most of the leaders of the army revolt trooped into the U.S. embassy, asked U.S. Ambassador Tapley Bennett to arrange a ceasefire. He called Wessin y Wessin, who immediately agreed. Fearing reprisals, dozens of rebels, including Acting President Molina, fled to political asylum in foreign embassies. A junta composed of pro-Wessin y Wessin officers was sworn in as a provisional government.

The surrender of the army rebels had little effect on the civilians, who by now were beyond recall. All day Wednesday the fighting intensified; Wessin y Wessin’s troops launched assault after assault in an attempt to cross the Duarte Bridge. Each time they were driven back. President Johnson ordered the first 405 marines ashore to protect American lives at Embajador and to guard the U.S. embassy downtown. Helicopters evacuating the remaining Americans and other nationals drew rebel gunfire. Snipers opened up on the Marine company dug in around the embassy; the leathernecks fired back, killing four rebels. The Salvadoran embassy was sacked and burned; shots spattered into the Mexican, Peruvian and Ecuadorian embassies. “This is collective madness,” U.S. Ambassador Bennett told newsmen. “I don’t know where we gofrom here.”

List of Reds. In San Juan, Bosch had his kind of answers. He charged that the U.S. had been duped into intervening by military gangsters in the Dominican Republic. “The only thing that Wessin y Wessin has done,” he said, “is to bomb the first city of America like a monster.” Bosch conceded that “a few Communists” might be fighting on his side, but insisted that his supporters were in complete command of the rebels. In reply, the State Department released a list of 58 Communist agitators, many of them graduates of Red Chinese and Czechoslovakian political warfare schools, who were leading the street fighting. Some of the leaders: Jaime Durán, a Cuban-trained member of the Dominican Young Communists’ Party; José D. Issa, a Communist who received guerrilla training in Cuba, visited Prague in 1963, Moscow in 1964; Fidelio Despradel Roques, a Peking-lining Communist.

The tragic fact was that no one seemed to be in real command any more?not Bosch’s people, not the remaining army rebels, not the Communists. At one rebel headquarters in the Ciudad Nueva, a group of young rebels pleadingly told TIME’s reporters: “We are not Communists. We are active antiCommunists. We are fighting for the constitution, for Bosch. When the constitution is restored, we will keep the Communists out. We can handle them.” Very possibly those youngsters genuinely thought that they were fighting for democracy. But before anyone could talk rationally about restoring anything in the Dominican Republic, there had to be a ceasefire, and at week’s end that still seemed beyond any immediate grasp.

Meeting in emergency session in Washington, the Organization of American States asked Msgr. Emanuelle Clarizio, the papal nuncio in Santo Domingo, to negotiate a cease-fire until a five-man truce team could fly down to work out a lasting settlement. Wessin y Wessin and other loyalist commanders and some rebel elements agreed under two conditions: that no one would be punished for any acts during the fighting, and that the OAS would supervise the formation of a provisional government. Even as Msgr. Clarizio reported the hopeful news to Washington, rebel forces captured Ozama Fortress, the police headquarters, with its stocks of weapons and ammunition. The shooting continued throughout Saturday, and the rebels claimed 10,000 armed fighters compared with 3,000 for Wessin y Wessin’s loyalist forces.

Driving in Earnest. That was probably a gross exaggeration. However many there were, there was no letup in the bloodbath or in the sniping at U.S. troops. Going into action for the first time in earnest, the 82nd Airborne joined Dominican infantrymen in pushing out from the bridge perimeter, fought their way through the city’s heart to link up with a Marine column attacking from the western International Zone. The drive cost another two U.S. dead, at least a dozen wounded?and brought an announcement from Washington that 2,000 more troops were being sent in, bringing the total contingent to 7,000 men.

The likelihood is that some sort of peace, either through force of arms or OAS persuasion, will eventually be imposed. But the dangers of anarchy-fed Castroism will remain for a long while. To prevent that, President Johnson has accepted a clear and unwavering U.S. responsibility. “The United States,” said the President, “will never depart from its commitment to the preservation of the right of all of the free people of this hemisphere to choose their own course without falling prey to international conspiracy from any quarter.” The meaning was as unmistakable as the presence of U.S. combat troops in Santo Domingo.