Word: dominicans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...