Monday, Jan. 16, 1950

"Permanent Aggression"

For 30 months, while the Caribbean echoed to plots, shots and abortive invasions, the Organization of American States and its predecessor, the Pan American Union, had tried one stopgap measure after another to calm the situation. Last week the O.A.S. stopped stalling. In one brisk, four-hour session, its council: 1) invoked the Rio treaty of inter-American defense, 2) ordered a showdown investigation of the whole Caribbean mess, and 3) prepared to call a meeting of all 21 American foreign ministers, if necessary.

As usual, the trouble involved the dictator-ridden Dominican Republic. Haiti's spokesman before the O.A.S. charged that the Dominicans, while raising a hue & cry about Cuban and Guatemalan plots against themselves, had actually been hatching a plot of their own against neighboring Haiti. The scheme, uncovered late last month, called for the murder of Haitian President Dumarsais Estime and other high Haitian officials and--to provide a reason for indignation--the burning of the Dominican embassy in Port-au-Prince. In the ensuing panic, Dominican troops under the renegade Haitian colonel, Astrel Roland (TIME, Feb. 21), were to invade the country.

What lent substance to the story was that it had been the Dominican charge d'affaires in Port-au-Prince himself who disclosed the plot to the Haitians. His motive: the discovery that he and his family were to have been beaten up to provide a good excuse for Dominican intervention. Having spilled the beans, he fled to the U.S., where, after a few consultations with his countrymen, he was promoted--and denied the whole story.

In the O.A.S., the Dominicans did their best to becloud the issue by dragging in their old charges against Cuba and Guatemala, demanding that the O.A.S. investigate them, too. Cried Dominican Ambassador Joaquin Salazar (whose country boasts the Caribbean's most impressive war machine): "We suffer from a permanent state of aggression!" Council members snickered, but agreed to let him have his say. In the boiling Caribbean, they felt, there could be no such thing as too much investigation.

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