An attempted coup by the military last year was adroitly side-stepped by the wily president. His unswerving, pro-U.S. government has made him impregnable. The Americans are assured of everything they want as long as Balaguer is in power for life.
U.S. ambassador Robert A. Hurwitch said that in 25 years of diplomatic experience, mainly in Latin America, ‘I have never been in a more pro-American country’. This brought the response from opposition leader and former president Juan Bosch, ‘This country is not pro-American, it is American. It is United States property.’
The next elections are in 1978 and although Balaguer does not have enough popular support to win cleanly, win he will. It will be his fourth term of office and he will be 70, but as the invaluable friend of the U.S. he is destined to rule until he dies.
The huge New York-based conglomerate Gulf and Western has been accused of openly backing Balaguer to secure its $200 million stake in the sugar, cattle, cement and tourist business. There have also been allegations that the Republic is fast becoming the home of the Mafia. Well-known figures with connections with the U.S. underworld have been frequent visitors recently and it is alleged that they have interests in gambling rackets, hotel-keeping and narcotics.
But there is still room for those Dominicans loyal to the president. Senior officers are openly allowed to enrich themselves; Trujillo’s colonels have become Balaguer’s generals.
This unsatisfactory structure is oiled along its way with American money. U.S. aid to the country comes to some $50 million a year and includes a $10 million food distribution programme. One in every four Dominicans is fed by U.S. surplus food. The reason that the Dominicans are unable to produce enough of their own in their fertile, semi-tropical nation stems from bad husbandry and unequal food distribution. The land is being used at one third of its potential.
Life is dismal for most Dominicans. More than half of the population are dangerously undernourished and children with swollen bellies wander the streets of Santo Domingo as visual evidence of malnutrition. Out of a job force of 1.2 million Balaguer has admitted an unemployed population of 400,000. The Republic has one of the world’s highest population growth rates while food production is stagnant and the country becomes increasingly unable to feed itself. Land control is feudal, agrarian reform gets no further than the debating point and the wages of the urban masses have been held down since 1966 despite inflation.
But the island is a Caribbean paradise and the government is coaxing more tourists to its sandy, sun-kissed beaches each year. It is possible to avoid the grisly spectacle of the country’s daily life by hugging the hotel pool-side and visiting the prosperous section of Santo Domingo where new houses, offices and boulevards have sprung up. But 95 per cent of the country’s population is guaranteed to derive no benefit at all from the boom.
The Dominicans have also introduced new laws to push the divorce business. This most catholic country is now the best place in the world for a swift and easy divorce which only requires one party of the marriage to spend a week in the country as a resident.
Symbolically, there could be no better place to finalize the total breakdown of a relationship. To move further afield from the luxury hotels, or to seek advantages of the national life apart from divorce, is to court the fear that the average Dominican has grown to accept.
And there is no reason to suppose that Dr Sosa is not still running the Presidential Intelligence Department together with his band of ghouls and all his deadly skill.
THE END
Postscript
On 3 July 2002, the National Drug Control Department (DNCD) acknowledged in a press release that Everstz was on their payroll as an informant, according to a report in El Caribe newspaper.
A little over a year later, on 29 September 2003, the Dominican Republic’s Daily News carried the headline: Carlos Evertsz silenced
“Senator Celeste Gomez (Santiago Rodriguez-PRD) says that Friday’s murder of 61-year-old Carlos Enrique Everstz Fournier clearly indicates there were sinister forces at play in the death of her brother, the late senator Dario Gomez,” it said.
Senator Gomez was reported as suggesting that the death of Carlos Everstz was evidence that behind the killing of her brother there were ‘intellectual authors’ and that the information Evertsz held was key to solving the crime. “If this were not true, he would not have been killed,” said Gomez.
It turned out that on 28 June 2002, Carlos Everstz appeared on a TV programme and alleged the complicity of high-ranking military officers in the murder of the senator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jvlF_2phNY
He named former police chief of homicide, General Rafael Oscar Bencosme Candelier, who he said offered him RD$1 million and a job with the police force as a major if he accepted the mission of murdering Dario Gomez. Everstz said that Bencosme was chief of the paramilitary group, Grupo Cobra, created to carry out covert work for the police.
During the TV interview, Everstz alleged that his life was being threatened, and that several others with key information were also in danger of being ‘silenced’. Evertsz claimed the Grupo Cobra was the brainchild of five people: an army soldier; a nephew of Colonel Espiritusanto; a university student called Carlos Rodriguez, and two other civilians he identified as Raul Martinez Acosta and a woman named only as Elizabeth.
The newspaper article suggested that so far, his predictions had been coming true. The first victim was the student Rodriguez, who was shot in the head, although authorities claimed it was suicide.
One of those arrested by the police and accused of murdering Senator Dario Gomez, Carlos Manuel Geronimo Alfonseca (AKA Collares), was killed during an apparent fight in the gaol where he was being held. His killer was Liborio Hernandez, a man serving a 30-year sentence for killing his pregnant wife. Alfonseca’s death happened soon after another of the five the police had accused of the murder, Domingo Daniel Minaya, claimed his life was under threat.
“The government sent Collares, Minaya, Ernesto Melendez Vasquez (El Chino), Ramon Antonio Rosario Taveras (El Gringo) and Pedro Urbano Pina (Kelly) to jail for Gomez’s murder,” said the Daily News. “After having been released from jail less than a year ago, Everstz was shot to death by a passing motorcycle rider in Santiago, as he waited for the bus on his way to his security job in a Puerto Plata free zone.”
One week before the Daily News piece ran, El Nacional newspaper published an account that Everstz had repeated on a TV programme that he would be murdered and that he had plans to seek asylum at a foreign embassy.
“Everstz worked for many years as an intelligence agent for the army,” it said, “and had bragged of killing 30 to 40 men and women during his career as a secret agent. The son of a Dutch father and a mother of US citizenship, he is also linked to the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar during the Trujillo dictatorship and the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA and trained in Virginia and Panama.”
Copyright
PUBLISHED BY APOSTROPHE BOOKS LTD
www.apostrophebooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-908556-59-2
First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Star Publishing
Digital edition 2013 by Apostrophe Books Ltd
Copyright © Christopher Robbins 1977 & 2013
The author has asserted his ownership of the electronic rights and his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Apostrophe Book Ltd Reg. No. 7612239
Cover photograph copyright © Christopher Robbins
Cover design and eBook development by Jamie Downham
About the author
Christopher Robbins is the author of six non-fiction books: The Test of Courage is the biography of Michel Thomas, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance fighter, and Nazi hunter; The Empress of Ireland is a memoir of his friendship with the Irish film director Brian Desmond Hurst, and won the Saga Aware for Wit; the travelogue, In Search of Kazakhstan, was short-listed for the Author’s Club Travel Award in the UK, and the Geographica award in the US.
The Ravens, a companion to Air America, charts the history of the men who flew in the secret air war in Laos.
We are sad to report that Christopher Robbins died on 24 December 2012. Speaking of him in The Spectator, friend and author William Shawcross wrote: ‘Chris was a man of infinite wit, style and charm, beloved by his many friends... He adored life and lived it as if he were a guest at a banquet, his curiosity always making someone else the guest of honour.’
Table of Contents
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Postscript
Copyright
About the author
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