Shay Horse/NurPhoto via AP
Confrontations between rioters and police on January 6 outside the U.S. Capitol
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson justified the deployment of 40,000 troops to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, under the pretext that a “popular democratic revolution, committed to democracy and social justice” had fallen “into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators.” Since then, the Dominican Republic has seldom graced news headlines. The late New Left intellectual and polyglot Fred Halliday, writing back in 2009, wondered how the country, “scene of one of the most tumultuous confrontations of the cold war, should have slipped so easily from international attention.” Halliday concluded with the hope that it was time for the Dominican Republic to contribute “another page” to history.
Today, I’m writing that page. Prior U.S. interventions and the leaders Washington installed in periphery countries like the Dominican Republic can help us understand the rampage on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. On that fateful day, ABC anchor Martha Raddatz, CNN’s Jake Tapper, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger all invoked the Third World as a synecdoche, an ideological catchall designed to other-ize insurrection as a product of “shithole countries.” But armed white mobs storming the seat of the nation’s government happens to be a very U.S. phenomenon.
In The New Republic, Laura Weiss tried to bring the analysis back home, while also situating it in “regional—and global—trends toward right-wing extremism,” invoking the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, the mass shooting of Latinos in El Paso, and the death of an activist at the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Likewise, writing in The Nation, the historian Eric Foner placed the Capitol putsch squarely in the country’s history of seeking to “overturn extralegally the results of a democratic election,” including during the Reconstruction era when armed white mobs seized control of local governments in 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana; 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina; and figuratively speaking in 2013, the year “the Supreme Court eviscerated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.”
Although these quintessentially U.S. antecedents help shed light on the events in Washington last week, our understanding can also draw from the United States’ past military adventurism in Latin America catching up with the country’s contradictions, no longer able to be masked with claims of innocence. Even without going deep into the sordid catalog of U.S. interventions abroad, the U.S. has supported right-wing coups recently in Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019), with striking parallels between the latter and the siege of the U.S. Capitol, as Weiss points out. After Bolivia’s indigenous president Evo Morales won a fourth term in 2019, far-right lawmakers stormed the presidential palace and sent Morales into exile, successfully bringing “a revanchist evangelist right wing to power in Bolivia, which repeatedly put off new elections for nearly a year, when Morales’s party won the presidency.”
Go a bit further into the past and the parallels become even clearer. Take, for example, the Dominican Republic.
THE MEXICAN DICTATOR PORFIRIO DIAZ, describing his country’s plight, allegedly said: “Poor Mexico! So far from Heaven, so close to the United States!” If Díaz’s aphorism captures the oppressively lopsided nature of U.S.-Mexican relations, it serves even more so as an appropriate summation of the relationship between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. After the assassination of the island’s brutal dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1961, President John F. Kennedy summed up the possibilities of the country as “in order of decreasing preference: a decent democratic order, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castroite regime. We must strive for the first, but we cannot really exclude the second until we are sure we can avoid the third.”
After Trujillo’s death, the U.S. invaded in 1965 to depose the island’s democratically elected social democratic president Juan Bosch, subsequently creating a veritable welfare state in the Caribbean nation. From April 1965 to June 1966, the U.S. poured $122 million into the island. After installing Joaquín Balaguer, a former collaborator with Trujillo, as president that July, aid surged between 1967 and 1969 to $133 million a year. “During the troubled years of the 1960s, the United States gave more aid per capita to the Dominican Republic than to any other country in the world,” according to political scientists Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek in The Politics of External Influence in the Dominican Republic.
Throughout the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Balaguer remained the United States’ staunchest ally, who “led a counter-revolutionary government, a direct consequence of the US military occupation and the defeat of the 1965 democratic revolution.” During Balaguer’s first years in power, a death squad known as La Banda, or the Anti-Terrorist and Anti-Communist Democratic Front of Reformist Youth, massacred more than 600 Dominican leftists, labor activists, and youth dissidents, a death toll that estimates hold reached 2,000 or 3,000 by 1974. The murderous campaign, spanning the years 1966–1978, better known as “the twelve years,” left Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, awash in blood.
AP Photo
U.S. Marines and soldiers in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, May 3, 1965
In response, on September 18, 1971, hundreds of Dominican protesters organized by the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), with participation from the Dominican Communist Party (PCD), came to demonstrate in the U.S. capital against Balaguer for the killing of political opponents. As chants of “Halt the Terror!” punctuated the air, Dominican protesters marched, holding aloft white crosses with the names of the murdered inscribed on them, or oversized photos with the faces of missing comrades. The display of banners and crosses at the “Silent March on Washington” evoked the peculiar mix of a rowdy political rally and a sober funeral procession, the silent clamor of voices mourning.
The United States purchased 68 percent of Dominican exports in 1979, sugar being the main source of revenue, a trade imbalance that made the island nation dependent on the U.S. government for economic solvency, if not survival. In 1970, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) provided Balaguer with a total of $35 million—$4 million of which went to training the Dominican National Police by 1971. Under house arrest, former President Bosch argued that the “AID program has been aimed principally at developing a counterinsurgency force to eliminate and ‘pacify’ the restive slum dwellers,” reported The Washington Post in 1971.
FOR OBSERVERS OF THE SIEGE at the Capitol last week, the mob violence harkens back to political insurgencies the U.S. has funded and armed in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. But at a deeper and less obvious level, they also point to how people experience the state.
As the FBI comes knocking on the doors of the people who participated in the putsch, some will soon come face-to-face with the deep state they maligned, without fully comprehending its power to discipline and punish. But for those of us from Latin American countries forced to migrate to United States because of death squads funded by the U.S. government, we knew that the chickens would inevitably come home to roost.
Amaury Rodriguez, a historian and translator with a focus on Dominican history from below, views “this latest far-right blowback” as inevitable and a long time coming. “The U.S. ruling class is having a taste of its own medicine,” Amaury added, highlighting the book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
“During the Cold War, Washington trained and funded genocidal armies while conducting all sorts of covert operations to overthrow democratically elected governments,” Amaury said, adding, “Santo Domingo was a dress rehearsal that shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.”
In Empire’s Workshop, the historian Greg Grandin writes about “the porous border between foreign and domestic policy,” exploring how Latin America served as a “counterinsurgency laboratory,” with lessons and tactics later applied to the Middle East. Now that the insurgency appears to have come home, the U.S. should take a page from its Latin American neighbors and understand that Donald Trump is merely a symptom of a larger problem. To defeat the reactionary forces he accelerated into insurrection, the conditions that gave rise to him must be transformed, along with the social realities feeding the revanchist far right.
Come Inauguration Day, Trump’s social base, and the nearly 75 million people who voted for him and are not exclusively far-right militia members, will still be around. They are an assortment of businesspeople, the locally rich, cops, and mother-and-son duos. The key to defeating them is an organized, popular mass movement, borrowing a slogan from the Latin American left:
¡Luchando, creando, poder popular!
(“Fighting, creating, popular power!”)
