Dominican Republic: Unaccustomed Calm

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While just about everyone wants an election in the Dominican Republic, the fear has persisted that the campaign preceding it might only intensify the hatreds that lie just beneath the surface. Last week, with all three major candidates entered in the field and the election only six weeks away, the Dominicans were acting with unaccustomed calm. All the parties seemed ready to abide by the election results, and even the military promised the winner full cooperation. The campaign was conspicuously subdued. Even the memory of Santo Domingo's violent fighting and demonstrations was quietly receding.

The first to hang out their banners were the Reform Party's Joaquín Balaguer, 59, a onetime Trujillo functionary and moderate who served as interim President from 1960 to 1962, and the National Integration Movement's Rafael Bonnelly, 60, a conservative who succeeded Balaguer as interim President in 1962. Last week, to hardly anyone's surprise—and after weeks of denying that he wanted it—the nomination of the Dominican Revolutionary Party went by acclamation to Juan Bosch, the onetime President who was tossed out by the military in 1963. Bosch insisted that he had been drafted, said that his goal would be to "develop this country in such a way that our sons and the sons of our sons will live in dignity."

The campaign, in which Bosch's chief opponent is Balaguer, is basically one of personalities, but there is a major emotional issue: the charges of Communism against Bosch. Last week sidewalks and walls in Santo Domingo were slathered with orange signs reading "Juan Bosch es comunista." Bosch tried to blunt such charges by taking to the radio in a series of half-hour broadcasts, declaring that "Communism is always totalitarianism."

As the June 1 election neared, provisional President Héctor García-Godoy could afford a sigh of satisfaction. "I feel sure," he said, "that the next President will have some basis for order and stability." Armed Forces Minister General Enrique Pérez y Pérez, under whom the army has become more transigent, promised last week that the armed forces "will respect the popular will." Dominicans, facing their first free elections since 1962, could only hope that the mood would last.