The Fighting Resumes

"Santo Domingo is a volcano that is going to envelop all Latin America in flames!" shrilled Rafael Tavera, 26, a leader of the Dominican Republic's Castroite 14th of June Movement. In the war-weary city's rebel zone last week, there was a celebration to observe the sixth anniversary of an abortive June 14, 1959, invasion from Castro's Cuba. And before a howling, rifle-waving crowd of 10,000, Tavera spewed hatred at the U.S. "There will not be peace until the last invader is destroyed and the last Yankee property is seized," he cried. "We have blood in our eye, hair on our chest and tobacco in our bladder. There is only one road -- war." Soon after came Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, who triggered the vicious little civil war, named himself "constitutionalist" President, and says he is for democracy. "We will fight to the end!" roared Caamano. "There will not be one step backward."

Less than 24 hours later, the city's fragile cease-fire erupted in the bloodiest fighting since the first days of the eight-week-old war. At 8 a.m., a U.S. 82nd Airborne noncom was inspecting weapons along the international corridor when a bullet plowed into his buttocks. From Colonel Caamano's rebel positions in downtown Santo Domingo, a stream of rifle fire laced into the troops of the OAS Inter-American Peace Force. For half an hour it went on without a reply. Another paratrooper got it in the neck. At last, the order to shoot back came down from the IAPF commander, Brazil's General Hugo Panasco Alvim.

Tanks & Snipers. At an intersection, one of Caamano's rebel tanks clanked up and fired into an 82nd Airborne command post, tearing off a radioman's leg. The paratroopers turned the tank into a furnace with seven rounds from a 106-mm. recoilless rifle. Near by, a careening rebel scout car ran into a barrage of M-14 fire that wounded two men riding in the rear. "I wasn't ready to start this crap again," muttered a U.S. paratrooper. He then squinted through his rifle sight and started working over a sniper-infested schoolhouse down the street.

At 11 a.m., with mounting casualties and continued rebel fire, General Alvim ordered his men into rebel territory. Behind a barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire from rooftop emplacements, platoons of paratroopers swept forward into a 40-block area, overrunning sandbagged street positions, searching houses and hauling out snipers. By late afternoon, the paratroopers were four to six blocks deep in the rebel zone, squeezing Caamano's remaining men into an area barely one mile square. The U.S. troops now stood on the last hill before the ocean, looking down into the shattered rebel stronghold. After two days, the shooting gradually began to taper off. Four U.S. paratroopers were dead, another 39 wounded, along with five Brazilians.

Blood on the Trigger. No one had an accurate count of the casualties. Caamano claimed 67 dead, close to 200 wounded. That might be an exaggeration, but the casualties were obviously heavy. In the rebel zone, TIME Correspondent Mo Garcia reported a sad, ugly scene. In Padre Billini Hospital, four dead rebels lay along a hallway; another seven were stacked in a small room. Both operating rooms were full, and one of the two washrooms had been converted for emergency service. On a table in the morgue lay a two-year-old boy caught in a crossfire, his stomach full of shrapnel; next to him was the corpse of Andre Riviere, a French soldier of fortune who was one of Caamano's top aides. When they carted him out, a young rebel dramatically poked a finger into Riviere's still-oozing neck wound and daubed the blood on his rifle trigger.

A thick haze of smoke from burning warehouses along the Ozama River choked the city. The streets were a sea of glass, and looters darted in and out of the shops. At Caamano's headquarters, the 14th of June's Rafael Tavera, who had called for "war," was nowhere to be seen. Caamano himself seemed to forget everything except the clobbering he had taken. His secretary proudly reported that he had been right out there on the firing line. "When the shooting starts," she said, "the President is the first one to grab his gun and join the firing."

Now, one key Caamano adviser was railing that Brazil's General Alvim was "el vagabundo"--the tramp. Another sent a report to the U.N. on "what is happening in the open city of Santo Domingo." Caamano himself accused U.S. troops of committing "an act of genocide without precedent in our country." The U.S., he said, even shelled a Red Cross center in the Ozama Fortress, killing seven women and eleven children. In fact, one of Caamano's own men at the fortress admitted to U.S. newsmen that there were neither women, children nor Red Cross in the fortress. Caamano bitterly accused the OAS troops of firing first. Answering that, Brazil's General Alvim angrily insisted: "More than 1,000 rounds of small-arms fire and a few mortar shells were received before we returned the fire. My troops fired back to defend themselves."

Another Plan. Whatever Caamano had hoped to achieve by his surprise attack, the powerful OAS reply apparently convinced him to cut it out. Only an occasional sniper's shot broke the truce the rest of the week. Once again U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and the other two members of the OAS negotiating team resumed the work of trying to arrange a settlement between Caamano and the loyalist junta of Brigadier General Antonio Imbert Barreras, who had been waiting peacefully for almost a month.

At week's end the OAS team finally proposed a plan to end the fighting and restore some sort of sanity to the country. It called for: 1) disarming of all civilians, 2) return of all army regulars to the armed forces and "irregulars" to civilian life, 3) formation of a neutral provisional government, and 4) elections in six to nine months. In the meantime, the Inter-American Peace Force would remain in the country to keep order.

Both Loyalist Leader Imbert and Caamano said they would study the proposal. But Caamano's rebels remained disdainful. When the OAS negotiators drove through the rebel zone, rebel youths chased one of their cars along the streets, pounding on the trunk and shouting "Assassins! Assassins!" After the OAS team had presented the peace plan, Caamano stepped from his office and told a cheering crowd that he would "not yield one step" from his previous demands--including a return of the 1963 constitution written under deposed President Juan Bosch, and control of the Dominican military.

The U.S. and the OAS were giving him a chance to think it over--for awhile. In Washington, President Johnson called last week's shooting "totally unjustified, a flagrant violation" of the ceasefire. "These unprovoked attacks on the Inter-American force," said Johnson, "appear to have been premeditated by elements which seek to prevent the establishment of peace in Santo Domingo. Our forces there have no other mission. They will continue to observe the same soldierly restraint that they have shown now for more than seven weeks, in the face of more than 900 cease-fire violations." And 24 U.S. dead, 149 wounded.

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