Page 274 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

776 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

Navy and the U.S. Marines stationed throughout the country. These two groups—the Navy
commanders in charge of central government in the capital city and contingents of Marines
charged with building and maintaining local order throughout the provinces—were charged
with improving the infrastructure of the country so as to facilitate the occupiers’ communica-
tion and movement through, as well as to improve the economy of, the country, and on creat-
ing a new Dominican army modeled on the United States Marine Corps.
The first task of Marine forces, upon restoring order to the provinces, was to begin to
build a new Dominican military, the Guardia Nacional Dominicana. With the exception of a
temporary group maintained in the capital to aid Marine forces there in the first year of the
occupation, all Dominican armed forces and police were disarmed and were to be reconsti-
tuted under the auspices of this new armed force. At first, it was to be officered by Marine
Corps officers, and was to allow any eligible Dominican citizens to join at the bottom ranks
and be trained by Marines—and eligibility was loosely measured. The military organiza-
tion in the Dominican Republic was chaotic when the Marines arrived in 1916. Prior to the
military intervention, the Dominican military had been fragmented since even before the
death of dictator Ulíses Heureaux (Lilís) in 1898, and especially since his assassination,
with different areas under the rules of regional caudillo-type generals and many provinces
remaining remote and controlled only by local police forces. Upon the assassination of Lilís
by one political group (the Horacistas), the generals who had trained in the dictator’s army
formed regional forces that forced concessions out of politicians in return for protection,
but this fragmented political system repeatedly broke down when the conflicting interests of
military and political groups led to military coups d’etat—the fragmentation of society and
politics that led to U.S. military intervention and the declaration of a military government in
1916. The regional and partisan conflicts had become a devastating civil war that was largely
informed by the cults of personality of certain dictators—most based in the country’s two
major cities and fighting for control of the government, which in most parts of the city and
countryside included armed resistance to the Marine presence as well. For this reason, the
military government under Navy Captain Harry S. Knapp immediately declared disarma-
ment of the general population to be the most urgent action of the occupation.
When Marines landed, the extent of the Dominican military that had any centralized
organization was the miscellany of the Guardia Republicana created by the brief presidency
of Ramón Cáceres in 1907. Yet from the assassination of Cáceres in 1911 until the oc-
4
cupation, the remnants of the military were so disorganized that not a single military decree
or order was issued by any Dominican government. The remainder of Cáceres’s Guardia
5
Republicana, by the time of formal U.S. occupation in late 1916, is accurately and succinctly
described by Dominican historian Soto Jiménez as consisting of small, poorly equipped,
and completely disorganized armed groups, usually used only for local police functions, and
separated from most regions by the lack of communications infrastructure in the country.
6

4 Cáceres founded the Dominican Guardia Repúblicana under Ley Número 4793 on June 26; Dominican
Republic. Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas, 33.
5 Dominican Republic. Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas.
6 Soto Jiménez, José Miguel, Las Fuerzas Militares en la República Dominicana: Desde la Primera Repú-
blica hasta los comienzos de la Cuarta República. Ensayo sobre su evolución institucional (Santo Domingo: