The Cease-Fire That Never Was

To visitors at the White House last week, President Johnson quoted a new version of a Latin American slogan: "Constitutionalism, si! Communism, no!" It was a slogan that exactly described the U.S. position in the Dominican Republic's civil war. Yet in a week of deepening frustration, every U.S. and OAS effort to bring the rival factions peacefully together in some sort of non-Communist coalition, constitutional government was destined to fail. Despite an official ceasefire, the war went on, with mounting casualties on all sides.

As his special envoy, President Johnson sent John Bartlow Martin, 49, to plead for "broad-based" government between the rebels, led by Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, and the five-man loyalist junta headed by Brigadier General Antonio Imbert Barreras. Martin was U.S. ambassador in Santo Domingo in 1963 during the administration of exiled President Juan Bosch, in whose name the original revolt was launched. He was a friend of Bosch, knew both Caamano and Imbert. He carried only one condition from Johnson: that Communists among the rebels must be excluded from any new government. Martin shuttled repeatedly between the two camps without making any progress. "When the killing started," he said, "ideas disappeared."

"We Must Work." The problem was not so much Imbert, who was struggling to return some sort of order to the 90% of Santo Domingo he said he controlled. With U.S. permission, Imbert dipped into Alianza funds for $700,000 to pay government employees and get them back to work, called the city's top businessmen to the Congressional Palace and urged them to start up their factories. "We must create a national movement and work for our country," he said. "The Communists work night and day, but we don't."

Imbert declared himself ready to talk to Caamano "any time, any place." He quickly cleared the decks of six high-ranking military men unacceptable to the rebels, unceremoniously giving them each $1,000 pocket money, permitting one phone call to their families, then shipping them off to Puerto Rico aboard a Dominican gunboat. The one man he did not exile was Brigadier General Elias Wessin y Wessin, leader of the loyalists in the early stages of the revolt. At one point, Wessin y Wessin seemed on the verge of resigning, then changed his mind. Imbert refused to force his hand. "The government has not asked for his resignation," said Imbert. "He should know what to do." For his part, Wessin said: "I will not resign as long as one Communist remains in the country."

"We Are Stronger." In his downtown headquarters, Rebel Leader Caamano reacted to all this with hoots of derision. With his chief lieutenant, Hector Aristy, he spent the week posturing before newsmen, claiming 47,000 men under arms in the rebel zone (the figure is closer to 12,000) and proclaiming, "We are growing stronger every day." While the rebels denied that Communists were among their leaders, they were calling loyalists gusanos, meaning worms, a favorite Castroite term. And if they were genuinely interested in peace, they showed little sign of it.

Unceasingly, the rebel radio dinned against the "Yanqui invaders." Businessmen were warned not to open shop: "Each bullet in a rebel gun has the name of a gringo on it, and if not a gringo then an industrialist." At each turn of the negotiations with Special Envoy Martin, Caamano had new complaints, new demands, new reasons for not negotiating with Imbert's junta. He imperiously demanded his own "corridor" slicing across the U.S. cordon along Avenida San Juan Bosco--to maintain communication with "our forces in the north." Such a passage would nullify the entire U.S. effort to isolate the fighting; the demand was swiftly rejected. Caamano excused himself so often to huddle secretly with his "advisers" that there was increasing doubt about who actually was the rebel leader. Finally, he was asked who his advisers were, and he gave some meaningless names. "I know these people," said one witness, "and I know he wouldn't even ask them what time it is."

In the end, the rebels refused point-blank to join Imbert. "We want a constitutional government," declared a rebel spokesman. "We flatly reject any coalitions." Caamano repudiated the ceasefire agreement, denounced the OAS, and declared that he would now place his case before the U.N. As for the U.S., the rebels railed against the troops hemming them in, ticked off lists of "atrocities," threatened an all-out attack. Said Caamano's armed-forces minister: "It doesn't matter that we'll all be massacred. Unless the Americans clear out, we're going to attack."

Snipers All Around. Caamano and his rebels might be bluffing. But the sniping continued unabated, raising U.S. casualties to 18 dead, 86 wounded. The U.S. reported 137 cease-fire violations to the OAS in nine days, 36 of them in a single night. Despite the lasso around the rebel sector, snipers were popping up all over Santo Domingo. "This is what we feared most," said one U.S. official, "that the hard-core people would somehow get out of the city." One afternoon, a band of rebels fought a four-hour battle with loyalist troops at the national cemetery. Snipers killed a marine near the Hotel Embajador, on the border of the supposedly safe International Zone; a paratroop lieutenant was killed and seven men were wounded in a vicious north-south crossfire near the supply corridor. The rebels even managed to whomp two mortar rounds smack into the front yard of Marine headquarters.

The U.S. troops were under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon. For several hours, paratroopers, forbidden to interfere, watched rebels assemble a .50-cal. machine gun atop a building. When the machine gun cut loose, the troopers disassembled it with one shot from a 106-mm. recoilless rifle. But that was unusual. A sniper pinned a paratrooper in a doorway one night, and before corps headquarters finally granted permission for covering fire, the G.I. counted 183 shots zinging off the walls around him. "We're fighting politics, and maybe that's O.K.," said the sergeant. "But, man, they're shooting at the poor s.o.b. out there."

There were times when it was hard to tell who was shooting at whom or who held what ground. At the corner of Avenida Francia and Calle Rosa Duarte, an Airborne colonel asked a Marine lieutenant his line of fire. "Before us, sir, and down the street." "Damn it," roared the colonel, "that's the 82nd Airborne before you!" In a strafing attack on the city's rebel-held radio station, a pair of General Imbert's loyalist F-51 fighters from San Isidro airbase accidentally machine-gunned a nearby Marine position. U.S. troops promptly shot down one of the F-51s. Next day, as loyalist F-51s prepared for another strike, a column of U.S. paratroopers arrived with orders to destroy the planes if their pilots so much as punched a starter button.

Harder & Bloodier. In Manhattan, the United Nations voiced its alarm at the rapidly disintegrating situation by unanimously voting to send a team of "observers" to the Dominican Republic. The U.S. agreed that it might be helpful but insisted that the problem was one for the OAS. At OAS headquarters in Washington, U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker urgently advised Latin Americans to honor their pledge for a multination military force to help the U.S. keep order. And indeed, the first Latin Americans started arriving: 250 Honduran infantrymen, 20 Costa Rican policemen. Others were on their way from Nicaragua, probably from Brazil.

The U.S. hoped that their mere presence would have a calming effect on the Dominicans. But at week's end loyalist and rebel attitudes had hardened to the point where that seemed forlorn. Once more President Johnson appealed for peace and promised that the U.S. "will render all available assistance toward rapid economic development." As he spoke, 1,500 of Imbert's loyalist troops opened a major attack with tanks and heavy artillery aimed at wiping out about 300 rebels in the northern part of the city. The danger now was of another full-scale bloodbath--no matter how many U.S. and Latin American troops occupied the shell-shocked city of Santo Domingo.

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