Word: trujillos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...long the lid will stay on the troubled Dominican Republic. Since Dictator Rafael Trujillo died in a fusillade of assassins' bullets in 1961, the country has had four coups and seven governments. Thus on past form alone, the country's new President Joaquín Balaguer, 59, could not be expected to last very long. But last week, after his first 21 months in office, some of the cynics who had predicted his early downfall were having second thoughts...
...salute pounded out over the Caribbean and rolled across the Santo Domingo coastal plain, signaling to Dominicans the inauguration of the country's first constitutional President since the military toppled Leftist Juan Bosch in 1963. "I have not come here to put on the uniform and boots of Trujillo," President Joaquín Balaguer told his inauguration audience. "I have come to make an attempt - a new at tempt - to make these symbols of op pression disappear from the life of the Dominican people...
...quite a speech for a onetime Trujillo functionary who had been denounced by Dominican leftists as a tool of the military and of the old Trujillo crowd. But it was only a reflection of the new times and new climate in the Dominican Republic-a climate that was growing ever mellower with the final withdrawal last week of OAS peace-keeping troops...
Into the Streets. The election was more than a simple choice between two political parties. Bosch was widely accused of being a Communist, and Balaguer-a onetime Trujillo functionary -was attacked as a Trujillista. Both denied any such associations, but the labels stuck anyway. An even deeper issue was last year's bloody revolt. Bosch, in whose name the revolt was launched, claimed that the fighting was a "popular" revolution and looked to the election results to bear...
Here is the crux of the problem: "The President has no guns." A year ago, this was not the case. The "constitutionalist" revolution of April, 1965 gave the Dominican people their first, and perhaps their last, chance to break out of the political prison constructed for them by Trujillo and his heirs. The urban populace--in Santo Domingo and Santiago and San Francisco--armed itself, split and then defeated the military, and came within hours of constructing a new ruling coalition: liberal lawyers and professors, progressive businessmen, small peasants, students, and workers...