DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Turnabout

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Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who perennially lays claim to the title of the most anti of the hemisphere's antiCommunists, reversed himself last week. He announced that the Dominican government, meaning Trujillo, would put through its docile National Congress a constitutional amendment legalizing the Communist Party. Also scheduled to be made respectable by the same law: the Brooklyn-based Jehovah's Witnesses sect, banned since 1957, largely at the behest of Roman Catholic authorities.

Trujillo's turnabout was a nose-thumbing answer to the U.S. Government and the Roman Catholic Church, which have been pressing him to democratize his regime (TIME, Feb. 15 et seq.). In effect, Trujillo said to each: If it is democracy you want, let us start by restoring the rights of a group you dislike.

Trujillo and the Reds have played pata-cake before. In the postwar flush of good will toward Moscow, the dictator praised Russia "as one of the forces for progress," and legalized Communists as "eloquent rebuttal to calumniators who accuse the Dominican Republic of not being a democratic country." That honeymoon with the Reds lasted less than a year, after which Trujillo turned about once more, again banned the Communists and even set up an investigating Committee on Un-Dominican Activities.