Page 278 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

780 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

months after the official declaration of the military government—was the long-discussed
Dominican National Guard (GND) established even in name. During those four months, all
military and police actions were carried out by Marines and the Marine-controlled remnants
of the Guardia Republicana, which by March of 1917 stood at a membership of only178
members.
21
This occupation government in the city suffered from a number of problems from its in-
ception, which spread into the ranks of the GND upon its founding. The first was the inability
of almost all of the occupying forces to read or write in Spanish; taking over all functions of
the government, then, meant virtually re-writing laws in English and dealing with a popula-
tion that did not understand those laws or the Marines who tried to enforce them. Knapp was
the only military governor throughout the first six years of the occupation to employ and
include Dominicans as advisors in his government, and therefore had some translators and
advisors on Dominican customs, but his government, too, was hampered in civil relations
by commonly held assumptions of the cultural and racial inferiority of Dominicans; Knapp
himself explained that “Dominicans can easily be led in matters of improvement and bet-
terment of conditions; but they greatly lack initiative as a people, and their dependence on
American advice is often almost pathetically childish.” Thus even the military governor
22
who was later extolled by Marine Corps historians as having included Dominicans and given
great credit to their advice and opinions on his government was ambiguous at best about
23
his trust in the capabilities of the Dominican people. Such difficulties, combined in the first
years with the continuation of haphazard armed resistance, limited even central governmen-
tal control within the capital city. Other central problems for the new military and its Marine
architects quickly increased with U.S. military entry into World War One, which meant both
a less consistent provision of funds and supplies from the government in Washington D.C.
and the loss of many of its more experienced officers, who were shipped off to the European
theater. The military government was also from the start distracted from infrastructural and
military improvements by the need to reorient Dominican export trade toward the United
States and away from Europe. During the initial stages of this reorientation of trade, many
other promises made by the military government were stalled indefinitely.
Conditions in the provinces suffered from these central problems, and were compounded,
too, by provincial problems: Nearly all the provinces lacked useable infrastructure, and most
had no modern medical facilities; the provinces did not have enough Marines to carry out all
of the functions that needed to be carried out—which, with the disarmament of the entire Do-
minican population, included the guarding of prisons; Marines who moved out to take con-
trol of the provinces also lacked communications with the military government throughout
the occupation; Dominican citizens more removed from the capital were better able to set up

21 Dominican Republic, “Orden de Campaña No 3,” August, 1917, Legajo 22, “Gobierno Militar,” “Año 1924,”
aGN.
22 United States, “Quarterly Report of January to March, 1918,” Entry 15 Quarterly Reports of the Military
Governor of Santo Domingo, RG 38: Navy Chief of Operations, NARA, 2-3, 10-11.
23 See Stephen M. Fuller and Graham A. Cosmas, Marines in the Dominican Republic, 1916-1924, (Washing-
ton DC: Marine Corps, 1974), and Brian Moran, “Prison Reform in the United States Navy and the Domini-
can Republic: The Military Occupation and Prisons, 1900-1930,” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at
Chicago, 2000), 163.