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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Dominican Republic
Index
Sketch of the landing at Hispaniola, reputedly drawn
by Christopher Columbus
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC EXPERIENCED many setbacks on the
road
to the democratic system under which it functioned in the
late
1980s. The nation did not enjoy full independence until
1844,
when it emerged from twenty-two years of occupation by
Haiti;
this liberation came later than that of most Latin
American
countries. Reacceptance of Spanish rule from 1861 to 1865
demonstrated the republic's insecurity and dependence on
larger
powers to protect it and to define its status. Dominican
vulnerability to intervention from abroad was also made
evident
by the United States military occupation of 1916-24 and by
a more
limited action by United States forces during a brief
civil war
in 1965.
Politically, Dominican history has been defined by an
almost
continuous competition for supremacy among caudillos of
authoritarian ideological convictions. Political and
regional
competition overlapped to a great extent because mainly
conservative leaders from the south and the east pitted
themselves against generally more liberal figures from the
northern part of the Valle del Cibao (the Cibao Valley,
commonly
called the Cibao). Traditions of personalism, militarism,
and
social and economic elitism locked the country into
decades of
debilitating wars, conspiracies, and despotism that
drained its
resources and undermined its efforts to establish liberal
constitutional rule.
In the late 1980s, the republic was still struggling to
emerge from the shadow of the ultimate Dominican caudillo,
Rafael
LeĆ³nidas Trujillo Molina (1930-61), who emerged from the
military
and held nearly absolute power throughout his rule. The
apparent
establishment of a democratic process in 1978 was a
promising
development; however, the survival of democracy appeared
to be
closely linked to the country's economic fortunes, which
had
declined steadily since the mid-1970s. As it had
throughout its
history, the republic continued to struggle with the
nature of
its domestic politics and with the definition of its
economic and
political role in the wider world.
Data as of December 1989
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