Page 272 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

774 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

The Marine Corps occupation of the Dominican republic

ELLEN TILLMAN

In August of 1915, the 5 Regiment of the United States Marine Corps, commanded by
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Colonel Charles A. Doyen, left Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to land at Puerto Plata in the northern
Dominican Republic, ostensibly “to protect American lives and property during a revolution-
ary outbreak.” The U.S. government, in an effort to control the Caribbean and to gain and
1
protect U.S. investments, hegemony, and the Panama Canal, had begun to carry out direct
military intervention and occupation throughout the Caribbean (most notably in Cuba, Nica-
ragua, and Haiti), and had threatened to do so in Santo Domingo since 1905. As disorder and
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civil war in the Dominican Republic continued to worsen after 1915, the 6 and 9 USMC
companies landed in the country’s capital city, Santo Domingo, in May of 1916, acting on
the premise that the Dominican government had repeatedly failed to uphold payments on
a customs agreement signed with the United States in 1907. The Marine presence in the
2
capital was meant to quell disorder and demand payment, as well as to be a show of force to
back U.S. demands for increased control of the Dominican military and customs. Upon real-
izing the extent of the country’s internal disorder, however, the U.S. Navy deployed increas-
ing numbers of troops into both the capital and the interior, where they occupied numerous
towns; from May to November of 1916, the number of Marines stationed in the Dominican
Republic nearly quadrupled. 3
Finally, on November 29 of 1916, in the midst of continuing political confusion and the
provisional Dominican government’s continued refusal to agree to U.S. demands to hand
over control of the country’s finances and military, U.S. Navy Captain Harry S. Knapp read
his formal proclamation for U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic. Long be-
fore Knapp’s proclamation, however, the occupation was already suffering from armed and
non-combatant Dominican resistance throughout the country: Marine attempts to arrest a
Dominican man in Villa Duarte led to a fatal shoot-out; when elements of the Marines’ 4
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Regiment followed Dominican General Desiderio Arias and his followers from south to
north, fighting a minor guerrilla war all the way, they finally engaged in two bloody battles in
Las Trencheras and Guayacanas, which Dominicans classified as a “massacre”—and Arias

1 U.S. Marine Corps, Historical Division, A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, (U.S.
Marine Corps: Washington D.C., 1970), 116
2 This treaty was the Dominican-American Convention of 1907, which was approved by a Dominican
Congress pressured with intervention in May of 1907 and gave the U.S. government control of Dominican
finances and the right to interfere in Dominican politics in exchange for U.S. payment of Dominican foreign
debts. See: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Dominican Republic, “Memoria que al Ciudadano Presi-
dente de la República, General Ramón Cáceres, presenta al Ciudadano Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores,”
Memorias correspondientes a los ejercicios de ... Departamento de Relaciones Exteriores (Santo Do-
mingo: Impr. de J.R. VDA García, 1910); Frank Moya-Pons, El pasado dominicano. (Santo Domingo:
Fundación J.A. Caro Alvarez, 1986), 312-315.
3 Going from 632 to 2,219. Fuller, Stephen M. and Graham A. Cosmas. Marines in the Dominican Republic,
1916-1924, (Washington DC: Marine Corps, 1974), 89.