Page 275 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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In the years leading up to 1916, one of the popular Dominican generals from the civil war
years, Desiderio Arias, was taking advantage of this chaos to gather followers in arms and
seize customs houses along the Dominican-Haitian border, while the other two were vying
for power in the cities. The first U.S. Marines arrived in late 1912 as a pacification com-
mission sent by U.S. President William Taft; these 750 Marines arrived with orders to quell
disorder under threat of more direct and extensive military intervention.
7
Reactions to this imposed military presence and threat were complicated by many factors:
the variety of contending factions already vying for power, and their mixed responses to the
Marine presence; general fear throughout the country of falling under the control of yet an-
other military occupation; and regionalism and different regional interests coupled with lack
of infrastructure and communication. The most common reaction to the U.S. presence, too,
was informed by popular and nationalist protest against U.S. solicitations to the Dominican
Republic the year before to build a U.S. Naval station in Samaná Bay, which led many Do-
8
minican nationalists to believe that the U.S. Marine presence and the threatened intervention
were based more on a desire for territorial acquisition than any desire to bring about peace or
economic stability in the country. Rather than quickly pacifying the country, therefore, the
9
Marine presence intensified the passions of those military leaders and politicians who fought
to come out on top in the civil war, many of whom attempted to ally themselves strategically
with Marine officers while refusing to accept the absolute terms upon which those Marines
insisted. The Marines attempted to restore order through many provisional governments from
1912-1916, but the continuation of regionalism and the caudillo rule of dissenting generals
meant that they all led to failure.
The political and social realities of those civil war years were extremely complex for the
Dominican Republic, but also for the U.S. government, as World War I began in Europe and
influenced the U.S. desire to fortify the Western Hemisphere against German influence and
therefore protect its most important trading partners in both hemispheres. In his book, The
Americans in Santo Domingo, written four years after the Marine withdrawal from the Do-
minican Republic, historian Melvin Knight analyzed the situation of those pre-intervention
years, demonstrating through thorough analysis of primary documents that the failure of
the Jiménes government and the direct U.S. intervention of 1916 were largely a product of
General arias’s increasing demands on provisional presidents those presidents’ need to retain
the support of armed forces that were increasingly loyal to Arias. the situation and U.S.
10
response were complicated, too, in the fact that the Dominican Republic had for decades
been a site of German investment, and many Dominicans openly supported German efforts
in the european War.
As the situation in the country spun increasingly out of control and many citizens formed

Ediciones Grupo 5, 1996), 126-132.
7 Ibid.
8 Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores.
9 Though historical documentation shows that the previous desire to build a naval station in Samaná Bay did
not play into later decisions to intervene, and the station was never built, it was to become a common belief
and rallying cry for nationalists trying to turn Dominicans against the U.S. occupation.
10 Melvin M. Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo, (New York: Vanguard Press, 1928), 70-73.