Caribbean Tyranny

As tight a little tyranny as ever flourished in the Caribbean is beige-colored Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina's in the Dominican Republic. Behind the superb 16th Century bastions of Santo Domingo, where once Christopher Columbus was jailed, there are now few political prisoners because they are all dead or in exile.* When the U.S. Marines left the republic peaceful and subdued in 1924, young (31) Trujillo had come up from dubious beginnings to become a Marine informer, then a captain in the National Guard modeled on the Marines. By 1930 he was Chief of the Army and ready to take over the Presidency in the first of his dummy elections. He clamped on the lazy, illiterate, Spanish-speaking near-whites his own personal monopolies in salt, shoes, milk, meat and tobacco, paid almost nobody honest wages except the over-sized army of 2,500. He toadied to Washington and, in short, applied the usual formula of Caribbean tyranny. He has an armor-plated Packard car with facsimile field guns for fender lamps, a toothsome white mistress* and their bastard child who has a colonel's rank and colonel's pay. He has been happy but for two annoyances.

One is honest, efficient William E. Pulliam, U. S. Customs Receiver General, whose job it is to collect Dominican customs against the Republic's $16,000,000 debt to U. S. bondholders. The other was the Italian Consul, Amadeo Barletta.

Bumptious Amadeo Barletta, who is also General Motors' sales manager in the Republic, had broken Trujillo's tobacco monopoly with a U. S.-controlled company. Month ago Trujillo lost patience. He charged Barletta with conspiring to assassinate him, clapped Barletta into jail, canceled his consular credentials by decree, passed a law confiscating the property of conspirators and, though the Dominican Constitution forbids retroactive laws, confiscated Barletta's Dominican Tobacco Co. He also confiscated an automobile of Barletta's, gave it to his Chief of Police.

Benito Mussolini, Barletta's boss, demanded last week Barletta's release, reimbursement for all losses as a result of his imprisonment and a $200,000 indemnity. The U. S. owners of Dominican Tobacco Co. were scuttling about Washington prodding the State Department to protest. Last week some Washington observers thought the State Department might use the Barletta incident to demonstrate President Roosevelt's "good neighbor" concept of the 112-year-old Monroe Doctrine -- i.e., might not only refuse all requests to crack down on Trujillo but permit Mussolini to crack down himself, if he can. Thus, in the eyes of Latin America, the U. S. would be blameless, Musso lini the goat.

* Last fortnight Exile Angel Morales, Dominican Minister to the U. S. under ex-President Horacio Vasquez (1924-30), hired a bodyguard of two, after an assassin entered his apartment, found his secretary shaving, mistook his lathered face for Morales' and killed him.

*Donna Maria Martinez has the monopolies in hardware and the army's laundry.

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