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Unceasingly, the rebel radio dinned against the "Yanqui invaders." Businessmen were warned not to open shop: "Each bullet in a rebel gun has the name of a gringo on it, and if not a gringo then an industrialist." At each turn of the negotiations with Special Envoy Martin, Caamaño had new complaints, new demands, new reasons for not negotiating with Imbert's junta. He imperiously demanded his own "corridor" slicing across the U.S. cordon along Avenida San Juan Bosco—to maintain communication with "our forces in the north." Such a passage would nullify the entire U.S. effort to isolate the fighting; the demand was swiftly rejected. Caamaño excused himself so often to huddle secretly with his "advisers" that there was increasing doubt about who actually was the rebel leader. Finally, he was asked who his advisers were, and he gave some meaningless names. "I know these people," said one witness, "and I know he wouldn't even ask them what time it is."
In the end, the rebels refused point-blank to join Imbert. "We want a constitutional government," declared a rebel spokesman. "We flatly reject any coalitions." Caamaño repudiated the ceasefire agreement, denounced the OAS, and declared that he would now place his case before the U.N. As for the U.S., the rebels railed against the troops hemming them in, ticked off lists of "atrocities," threatened an all-out attack. Said Caamaño's armed-forces minister: "It doesn't matter that we'll all be massacred. Unless the Americans clear out, we're going to attack."
Snipers All Around. Caamaño and his rebels might be bluffing. But the sniping continued unabated, raising U.S. casualties to 18 dead, 86 wounded. The U.S. reported 137 cease-fire violations to the OAS in nine days, 36 of them in a single night. Despite the lasso around the rebel sector, snipers were popping up all over Santo Domingo. "This is what we feared most," said one U.S. official, "that the hard-core people would somehow get out of the city." One afternoon, a band of rebels fought a four-hour battle with loyalist troops at the national cemetery. Snipers killed a marine near the Hotel Embajador, on the border of the supposedly safe International Zone; a paratroop lieutenant was killed and seven men were wounded in a vicious north-south crossfire near the supply corridor. The rebels even managed to whomp two mortar rounds smack into the front yard of Marine headquarters.
The U.S. troops were under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon. For several hours, paratroopers, forbidden to interfere, watched rebels assemble a .50-cal. machine gun atop a building. When the machine gun cut loose, the troopers disassembled it with one shot from a 106-mm. recoilless rifle. But that was unusual. A sniper pinned a paratrooper in a doorway one night, and before corps headquarters finally granted permission for covering fire, the G.I. counted 183 shots zinging off the walls around him. "We're fighting politics, and maybe that's O.K.," said the sergeant. "But, man, they're shooting at the poor s.o.b. out there."