Dominican Republic: Two Governments, Face to Face

Resplendent in a freshly pressed uniform, a stocky, scar-faced man wearing brigadier general's rank marched stiffly through the ruined doorway of the Dominican Republic's Congressional Assembly Hall. He was a Dominican national hero, Antonio Imbert Barreras, 44, one of the two surviving assassins of Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Honored with a general's commission, he had been living quietly in the background. Now he had come as the anti-Communist head of a new five-man loyalist junta, replacing the three soldiers installed by Brigadier General Wessin y Wessin a fortnight ago, hoping to pacify his small Caribbean country torn by one of the bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history.

"Citizens," said Imbert, after taking the oath of office, "our capital is in ruins. Our national life is in pieces. Dominicans of all sectors have come forth in order that we can form a government of national reconstruction. We do not desire anything other than the salvation of our fatherland." Imbert's junta was composed of a lawyer, an engineer, an air force colonel from Wessin y Wessin's government; in a gesture to the rebels who had started the revolt in the name of deposed President Juan Bosch, he included a pro-Bosch editor.

Imbert appealed to the rebels holed up in downtown Santo Domingo to surrender their weapons, guaranteed their safe-conduct "without reservations." He called for peace, unity, bound himself "to cooperate totally" with the Organization of American States, and, with the U.S., struggle to bring at least a semblance of sanity to his battered, forsaken land. He claimed he had control of all 25 Dominican provinces and 90% of the capital district. He asked all public employees to return to work, promised that his government would start paying salaries promptly.

Another Fidel? Thus, late last week, the Dominican Republic got a loyalist government that could assert its right to govern against the claims of the so-called "constitutionalist" government of Rebel Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó, 32, the officer who triggered the revolt on April 24. Caamaño's political background is murky. He is quarrelsome, opportunistic, a plotter who, in the words of one U.S. official, "has the potential of becoming another Fidel Castro." His father, Lieut. General Fausto Caamaño, was boss of Trujillo's secret police, took a leading part in the 1937 slaughter of 15,000 Haitian squatters. Young Caamaño joined the navy in 1950, proved so contentious that he was bucked to the marines, next to the police, finally to the army. He helped in the 1963 coup that exiled Bosch, and plotted against his successor.