Page 273 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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escaped; the local governor of the interior city of San Pedro de Macorís created an armed
resistance based in the city’s Fortaleza; in the east and northeast, sugar planters began fund-
ing an organized armed resistance that would last the duration of the eight-year occupation;
in the capital, provisional president Juan Isidro Jimenez continued to refuse to capitulate to
U.S. demands.
All of these events and their repercussions, when compounded with the U.S. State De-
partment’s inconsistent commitment of resources or interest in the occupation and with
Dominicans’ intense anti-imperial and anti-occupation sentiments, contributed to a severe
breakdown in the already unfriendly relationship between most Dominicans and Marine
occupying forces. Yet the Marines throughout the country made many efforts to improve
civil-military relations after this first year of chaos and the beginning of the formal occupa-
tion. Detailing some of these efforts, I will argue that they failed for the same multiplicity
of complex reasons that the occupation failed more generally, which can be summed up as:
Dominican anti-imperialism, inconsistency from the U.S. government, a lack of clarity in
the occupation’s goals and command structure, and Marines’ lack of knowledge of Domini-
can language and culture, coupled with early-twentieth-century racist and paternalistic ap-
proaches. Many have criticized the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, drawing out the negative
effects of the intervention or its inability to organize a new military efficiently, yet no work
has endeavored to examine the programs put forward by contingents of Marine leaders to
unify the citizenry and garner support.
These Marines, stationed throughout a country that lacked roads and communication,
were often isolated for long periods from the capital city and the reach of the central military
government headed by the US Navy. Meeting varied levels of resistance and differing prob-
lems in the various provinces, and lacking the ability to communicate quickly with central
command in Santo Domingo, these groups of Marines often had to establish makeshift meth-
ods and institutions for trying to develop friendly relations with the Dominican citizens, who
resented general orders of the military government such as disarmament and censorship, and
were thus hesitant to trust the Marines who were carrying out these basic orders throughout
the country—especially after the violent encounters of 1916. Many of the early initiatives
for programs and strategies taken to facilitate the occupation were necessarily created and
carried out by Marines in these provinces, who had to garner local support for the program of
the new military and its functions in order to be able to carry out the occupation effectively.
The dual pulls of military government general orders from Santo Domingo—often delayed
for days to other provinces and based on a very different set of circumstances—and the
initiatives of Marines throughout the country, ultimately limited the effectiveness of Marine
attempts to garner support locally.

earLy goaLs and methods of occupation
The first measures of the new military government, in attempting to bring order out of a
chaotic situation that reigned throughout the country, included the gradual disbanding of all
existing Dominican armed and police forces, the disarmament of the entire Dominican popu-
lation, and strict censorship of the Dominican press. Through eight years of occupation, the
U.S. government left the occupation’s administration in the control of the Department of the