THE AMERICAS: Convicted & Sentenced

• Share

Assembled in the clear, democratic air of San Jose, Costa Rica, the hemisphere foreign ministers last week quickly convicted Dominican Repnblic Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of collusion in the attempted assassination of Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt on June 24. The proof (TIME, July 18), gathered by an Organization of American States investigating committee, might have been vulnerable to questions from a tough defense lawyer, but after 30 years of Trujillo's tyranny, no one was in a mood to demand full evidence.

Remodeled Mandate. After convicting Trujillo, most of the delegates backed Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ignacio Luis

Arcaya in demanding vengeance in the form of tough sanctions. Though he too supported punishment, U.S. Delegate Christian Herter looked ahead to suggest a cure for ending the Trujillo dictatorship altogether: a special committee of the OAS that would oversee a free election to establish democracy in the Dominican Republic.

Herter's proposal failed, mostly because he sprang it as a surprise. What worries the U.S. is that while sanctions alone may topple Trujillo. it may leave a vacuum to be filled by Communists and Dominican sympathizers of Fidel Castro. Yet in San Jose, Herter found Venezuela's Arcaya unshakably determined to demand maximum sanctions.

Herter huddled with the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, Whiting Willauer, who recalled an old suggestion by Costa Rican ex-President Jose ("Pepe") Figueres for a U.N. "mandate" over the Dominican Republic. Herter seized on the idea, hurriedly turned it into his proposal for an OAS democratizing committee, and presented it to the conference. In effect, he improvised an unprecedented recognition of the authority and power of two-thirds of the hemisphere nations to supervise the affairs of a single member nation if it strays from democratic standards. The move was aimed at Trujillo, but if OAS-supervised elections became a custom, Fidel Castro might eventually be compelled to hold one.

Obscene Fury. Unprepared for such ground breaking, the Latino delegates reacted almost by instinct. They condemned Herter's plan out of hand as a mere trick aimed at letting Trujillo off, accused Herter of being taken in by Trujillo's current show of democracy (last week Trujillo's latest puppet President proposed an amnesty for political crimes).

At closed-door conferences, the U.S. proposal was first incorporated into a compromise that would put sanctions first and supervised elections second; then, at the insistence of Arcaya, it was put aside for discussion at a separate meeting this week. The sentence against Trujillo—which sent Trujillo's delegate walking out in protest: 1) breaking of diplomatic relations down to the consular level; 2) partial economic sanctions, starting with an embargo on arms.