(2 of 3)
Blood on the Trigger. No one had an accurate count of the casualties. Caamaño claimed 67 dead, close to 200 wounded. That might be an exaggeration, but the casualties were obviously heavy. In the rebel zone, TIME Correspondent Mo Garcia reported a sad, ugly scene. In Padre Billini Hospital, four dead rebels lay along a hallway; another seven were stacked in a small room. Both operating rooms were full, and one of the two washrooms had been converted for emergency service. On a table in the morgue lay a two-year-old boy caught in a crossfire, his stomach full of shrapnel; next to him was the corpse of André Rivière, a French soldier of fortune who was one of Caamaño's top aides. When they carted him out, a young rebel dramatically poked a finger into Riviére's still-oozing neck wound and daubed the blood on his rifle trigger.
A thick haze of smoke from burning warehouses along the Ozama River choked the city. The streets were a sea of glass, and looters darted in and out of the shops. At Caamaño's headquarters, the 14th of June's Rafael Tavera, who had called for "war," was nowhere to be seen. Caamaño himself seemed to forget everything except the clobbering he had taken. His secretary proudly reported that he had been right out there on the firing line. "When the shooting starts," she said, "the President is the first one to grab his gun and join the firing."
Now, one key Caamaño adviser was railing that Brazil's General Alvim was "el vagabundo"—the tramp. Another sent a report to the U.N. on "what is happening in the open city of Santo Domingo." Caamaño himself accused U.S. troops of committing "an act of genocide without precedent in our country." The U.S., he said, even shelled a Red Cross center in the Ozama Fortress, killing seven women and eleven children. In fact, one of Caamaño's own men at the fortress admitted to U.S. newsmen that there were neither women, children nor Red Cross in the fortress. Caamaño bitterly accused the OAS troops of firing first. Answering that, Brazil's General Alvim angrily insisted: "More than 1,000 rounds of small-arms fire and a few mortar shells were received before we returned the fire. My troops fired back to defend themselves."
Another Plan. Whatever Caamaño had hoped to achieve by his surprise attack, the powerful OAS reply apparently convinced him to cut it out. Only an occasional sniper's shot broke the truce the rest of the week. Once again U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and the other two members of the OAS negotiating team resumed the work of trying to arrange a settlement between Caamaño and the loyalist junta of Brigadier General Antonio Imbert Barreras, who had been waiting peacefully for almost a month.
At week's end the OAS team finally proposed a plan to end the fighting and restore some sort of sanity to the country. It called for: 1) disarming of all civilians, 2) return of all army regulars to the armed forces and "irregulars" to civilian life, 3) formation of a neutral provisional government, and 4) elections in six to nine months. In the meantime, the Inter-American Peace Force would remain in the country to keep order.