DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Accident or Ambush?

On the grey, early morning of June 2, a truck was found smashed and burning in a ravine at El Número, on the coastal highway south of Ciudad Trujillo. Twisted in the gasoline-soaked wreckage were the bodies of six people. The wreck was listed as an accident by the Dominican government, and no details concerning an investigation were ever released.

Missing after the "accident" was the truck's owner, Porfirio Ramirez, commission merchant and member of a prominent Dominican family. Although the wreck and Ramirez' disappearance caused a stir in the Dominican Republic, the outside world heard little about it until last week, when a committee of Dominican exiles delivered a petition to the United Nations office at Lake Success. The petition charged that Ramirez and his companions were murdered, asked the U.N. to investigate the case as a violation of human rights.

The exiles' complaint was based chiefly on the story of a 21-year-old passenger who survived the wreck, escaped and talked with a member of the Ramirez family before he died in a hospital. The youth declared that Ramirez' truck had been stopped by Dominican soldiers at a road junction south of Ciudad Trujillo, on the night of June 1. When Ramirez jumped out, he was attacked with clubs, the witness said, but grabbed one away from a soldier and knocked down three men before he was riddled with bullets. Then soldiers took the seven passengers to El Numero. There they were beaten to a pulp, drenched with gasoline, thrown in the truck and dumped in the ravine.

Porfirio Ramirez, inactive in politics himself, was the brother of Caribbean Legion General Miguel Angel Ramirez, onetime Dominican diplomat and leader of two abortive expeditions to invade the Dominican Republic. Last spring, after Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo's knuckles were rapped by the Organization of American States in a report on Caribbean plotting (TIME, March 27), the dictator invited all exiles to come home. Ramirez refused, and the exile committee said that Trujillo took his revenge on Porfirio Ramirez.

El Presidente himself insisted that he knew nothing of what had happened at El Número. That in itself was odd. He once told an intimate: "Whenever anything happens here that I don't know about, or whenever anyone takes it upon himself to act without my authority, my days are numbered."