Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965-1966

by Eric Thomas Chester

Book Overview

In April 1965, a popular rebellion in the Dominican Republic toppled the remnants of the U.S. backed Trujillo dictatorship setting the stage for the master tinkers of America's Cold War machine. In this groundbreaking study, Eric Thomas Chester carefully reconstructs the events that followed into a thriller of historical sweep, and creates a stunning portrait of how the U.S. government--from President Lyndon Johnson on down--used the Dominican...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583670327
• ISBN13: 9781583670323
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The limits of U.S. tolerance

The author portrays a very fascinating brief experiment in American support of politicians in the Third World who were mild social democrats. The Dominican exile Juan Bosch and his Social Democratic party the PRD received a great deal of CIA support from 1959-62. The U.S. had decided to withdraw its support from the barbarian dictator Rafael Trujillo who had been in power since 1930. Trujillo had risen to the leadership of the Dominian army during the very brutal U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic of 1916-24. They could not gain any sort of support whatever in the hemisphere against Fidel Castro if they continued to support Trujillo. The U.S. tried, without disrupting the power of the military or the landed oligarchy, to get rid of Trujilloism in the DR, particulary after Trujillo himself was assasinated at the end of May 1961. Bosch assumed power through a democratic election in February 1963 and spent most of his time trying not to upset the military. It was no use. Bosch granted considerable freedom for unions to organize. Thus, for instance the U.S. owned La Romana sugar referinery, the largest in the DR, was forced to to grant a 30 percent increase in wages. He also made lofty plans to redistribute to the poor the vast estates held formerly by Trujillo and his associates but only redistributed them to about 600 families. He made the mistake of telling the U.S. ambassador John B. Martin that he planned to place limits on land ownership and redistribute land held over those limits to the poor. He also wanted to place a twenty percent tax on the large landholders. Martin denounced this plan and Bosch withdrew it but it was one more sign to U.S. policy makers that Bosch was very unreliable. The Dominican military finally overthrew him in late September 1963, just eight months into his term. This coup had tacit U.S. support. The new military junta proceeded to set loose death squads on the opposition. The U.S. was quite fine with this. Now we come to April 1965 and the main focus of this book. Late in that month military officers calling themselves the constitutionalists launced a rebellion with the stated aim of restoring Bosch to power. The U.S. then invaded a few days later for the purpose of preventing this rebellion which was just about to succeed in taking over the country. Chester goes over laboriously U.S. actions over the next few months. The first stated reason for the intervention was to protect U.S. and other foreign nationals caught up in the fighting. Thomas notes that the U.S. had already been conducting an airlift of foreigners out of the country without an invasion and that this process could have handled the 2000 or so who remained to be evacuated. There is no evidence that these people were actually under any danger. After this excuse lost whatever power it had, there was the old communist card. LBJ believed at first that the rebellion was a plot directed by the Soviet Union but then came to realize along with his m