Never, Ever

Historically, a popular revolution is assumed to be a movement that generates change, which takes leaps in the walk of history. But this isn’t always true. April of 1965 was a cry of constitutional redemption that ended up being frustrated by the world’s main power, the U.S., which drowned it in blood. 42 marines embarked to prevent the Dominican people from regaining the democratic way started by Professor Juan Bosch and his Dominican Revolutionary Party. The blood spilled resulted in a pact that only served to lay the groundwork toward the legitimization of the government of Joaquin Balaguer.

And to think that April 24 was a consequence of the coup d’etat against the constitutional government, which the U.S. sponsored in league with the Creole oligarchy, the intolerant military, the conservative clergymen and their media. That is to say, the empire that destabilized Bosch’s government drowned brutally with the intervention on the 28th of this month, the popular movement in favor of the comeback of constitutionality. It has an ominous role in the national identity — it’s the same thing that happened from 1916 to 1924.

What should have been a transitional process from dictatorship to democracy ended up becoming truncated until it turned tortuous, long and violent. Those were the times when East-West tensions were predominant, in which two society models confronted each other on a global scale, the U.S. and the USSR. After Cuba, every continental move that didn’t hold up to Washington’s standards was object of suspicions of communism. Bosch’s democratic rehearsal was measured under that standard. They preferred governments of force, militaristic human rights abusers that now claim to defend them.

With Balaguer set up by the United States, the Dominicans would live hard times; political intolerance, a state of terror, deportations, murders and politicization of the Army. Over time, we’ve been recovering democracy. The struggles of the Dominican people and changes in the foreign policy made it possible to reach the point at which we are now — convinced that we should never, ever allow another fateful April 24.