Page 286 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

788 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

the first year of the GND’s existence when the campaign to completely and quickly disarm
the civilian population against the threat of armed resistance in unknown territory led to
sometimes brutal actions and equally violent responses. The early months of the occupation
were therefore often chaotic, and court systems were arbitrary in many cases: some cases of
illegal weapon possession or dealing in all regions being tried by certain standards in U.S.
provost courts and military tribunals as these were established throughout the country, while
others were originally left to the Dominican civil court system under the guise of Knapp’s
proclamation. Further complicating the issue—and causing the need for the responses of
individual Marine leaders in remote provinces—was the impossibility of leaving civil law
in the hands of Dominicans when no Dominicans outside the GND were legally armed.
47
The need to police prisons, for example, was especially difficult in remote provinces. While
local Marine occupation leaders in those provinces understood the need to have Dominican
armed prison guards, the central administration continued to disallow any armed Dominicans
who were not part of the trained GND, leading to a period during which the Marines also had
to staff prisons, or opt to arm some Dominicans despite the general order. Solutions to this
problem were individual, and therefore inconsistent from region to region. In areas that
had more problems with continued guerrilla warfare (such as El Seibo), for example, many
of the prisoners were those who were clearly “directly interfering” with the occupation, and
thus were a problem for the GND rather than any separate Dominican civil administration.
Yet for the first years of the occupation no standard answer to this problem could be created,
because regional conditions were so variable. in el Seibo, where the logical answer was
to lean more heavily on the use of military tribunals and Guardia prison guards, resistance
increased because the GND was officered solely by Marines for the first four years of the
occupation. 48
Confusion over these issues continued to be exacerbated by the difficulties in commu-
nication that plagued the first years of the occupation. In October of 1918, nearly two years
after the occupation began, the military government issued a general order stating that “the
Guardia Nacional Dominicana has been organized and equipped as a NATIONAL POLICE
FORCE and as such is required to see that the laws of the Dominican Republic are carried
out to the letter.” While it certainly served as such in the capital city, however, most Ma-
49
rine leaders in the provinces had already developed regional methods of dealing with civil
policing. In El Seibo, where continued guerrilla warfare meant a continually and danger-
ously understaffed GND but also meant that Marines did not trust Dominicans with arms,
policing was a serious issue. in an unspecified region in the north, however, local police
forces were created by 1919 that were established as permanent and completely separate
from the GND. Similarly, certain areas, has long traditions of the hiring of private armed
50
men, “guardacampestres,” to guard the more wealthy plantations. As the wealth of some of
these plantations increased—and local Marines in the west needed to maintain the support

47 For more information on the controversy of which cases would be left in the hands of the deteriorating Do-
minican court system, see Moran, 137, and Schoenrich, 220.
48 aGN, muster rolls.
49 General Order 33, 26 October 1918, “Ejército Nacional,” Legajo 1, AGN
50 Reference in General Order 8, Series 1919, Ejército Nacional, Legajo 1, AGN.