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The two uncles descended on President Balaguer at the presidential palace to remind him that he had once been a complacent Trujillo stooge and had better be again. By now, twelve U.S. warships boldly stood to in clear sight of the capital. Balaguer was not alone. General Rodriguez rounded up the support of several armed forces commanders by telephone, sent his planes to strafe four reluctant garrisons in the interior.
As they presented their demands to Balaguer, the Trujillo brothers found themselves surrounded by pro-Balaguer Cabinet officers and army men. U.S. Consul John Calvin Hill Jr. strolled in, joining Balaguer and the brothers. As if helpless in such a situation, Balaguer shrugged his shoulders, told the Trujillos that "if you don't leave, they'll invade us." Consul Hill joined in: "That's absolutely the best thing." Arismendi conferred alone with Balaguer another 20 minutes, then picked up the phone, dialed his wife and told her to "pack and get ready to go."
Yells from Castro. Latin American opinion, which recoils from the thought of any Yankee intervention, took this one in stride. Fidel Castro, with designs of his own on the Dominican Republic, claimed that the whole maneuver was merely designed to set a precedent for action against him. He sent delegates to the U.N. Security Council and the Organization of American States to denounce the U.S. intervention and demand that the U.S. forces be withdrawn. At the Security Council he won the approval of Russia's Valerian Zorin but only eloquent silence from Security Council members Ecuador and Chile. At the OAS, no other Latin American nation could bring itself to protest the toppling of the Trujillo empire, and Dr. José Antonio Bonilla Atiles, one of the Trujillo opposition, told the Security Council. " 'Blessed be the moment when the American fleet came to Dominican waters.' "
As the Trujillos flew out of Ciudad Trujillo, two principal opposition leaders—the National Civic Union's Viriato Fiallo and the 14th of June's Manuel Tavárez—flew in from San Juan. They found the road from airport to city a sea of celebrators, flinging flowers, weeping, clapping hands, tooting whistles. At the bridge that forms the main entrance to the city, more than 100,000 people joyfully stopped the caravan.
All over town the Trujillo statues and street signs came down. President Balaguer rushed a measure through Congress changing Ciudad Trujillo back to the name Columbus gave it, Santo Domingo. From jubilation, mobs turned to selective looting, cleaning out homes and businesses of Trujillos and their friends.
Powerful Dissent. At week's end, President Balaguer found himself in shaky control. He rewarded the two air force men by putting them in control of the armed forces—Pedro Ramón Rodriguez Echaverria as Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, Brother Pedro Santiago as air force chief of staff. Balaguer worked to form a transitional coalition government. In this he was backed by the moderately leftist Dominican Revolutionary Party of longtime anti-Trujillo Exile Juan Bosch, by Fiallo's middle-of-the-road National Civic Union, and by some elements of the leftist 14th of June. A risky intervention, done with speed and good intentions, seemed to be working.