A polite crowd of 15,000 sat through a barrage of speeches in a Ciudad Trujillo park one muggy night last week, applauding with the kind of suppressed boredom usually found at amateur theatricals. The occasion: a rally of “reaffirmation” for Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In similar spirit, the Dominican Senate addressed itself to a resolution to erect two more busts of Trujillo in the capital, already so statue studded that new sites are scarce. The resolution passed.
Half-hearted is Trujillo’s adulation, and half-hearted his opposition. Last week was the anniversary of the founding, in 1838. of La Trinitaria, a secret patriotic society devoted to freeing the country from Haitian occupation. In the 2Qth year of the “Era of Trujillo,” Trinitaria is back in business as the anti-Trujillo underground. Three-man cells are forming. For protection against Trujillo’s secret police, only one member of each cell knows the name of one member of another cell. But the underground is small and probably futile.
Middle-Class Grumbling. Opposition to Trujillo comes mostly from the middle and upper classes—about a quarter of the population of 2,800,000. “These people travel and have broader knowledge,” explains a foreign resident in Ciudad Trujillo. “They hate to take orders. They live well but insecurely.”
This year the resentments of the well-to-do are fueled by a $60 million slump in exports (caused mostly by the drop in commodity prices) and new import duties to pay for Trujillo’s $5,000,000 arms purchases abroad. But few are willing to jump from passive opposition to active rebellion by joining Trinitaria at home or one of the exile groups abroad. They fear now that revolution might lead to Castro-style measures against themselves.
Disciplined Support. Plotters can count on no broad base for revolt. Peasants in the back country are apathetic or mildly progovernment. They eagerly inform on armed rebels for a $1,000-a-head reward. Workers in the towns—25% of the population—have a paternalistic labor code, a 20¢-an-hour minimum wage, good housing, medical care—and a healthy fear of the dictator’s police.
Trujillo numbers 23,000 well-armed troops under his banners, plus 4,500 police and 1,000 mounted landowners who patrol the hills in pairs and call themselves the “Horsemen of the East.” On paper, another outfit called the “AntiCommunist Foreign Legion” has 100,000 bureaucrats, ex-soldiers and foreign mercenaries, including a few veterans of the Spanish Blue Division. The legion drills weekly on a Ciudad Trujillo fairground in trim new uniforms, could probably muster 16,000 with arms. Though the dictator’s vast bureaucracy and army are shot through with men who secretly oppose him, these men see no reasonable alternative.
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