Uneasy Time

One morning last week, in the little town of Sosua (pop. 10,000) on the Dominican north coast. Dr. Alejo Martinez, 32, a physician, answered a knock on his door. Submachine guns chattered, and Martinez fell dead on the porch. About the same time, in downtown Sosua, a telephone call sent an office clerk named Pedro Clisante, 28, put-putting away on his motorbike on an errand that would take him past a military post. As Clisante approached, a soldier blasted him off his bike. Two days earlier, near the provincial capital of Santiago, Epedio Jesus Cabrera had picked up a "hitchhiker" and was later found knifed to death.

The victims had one thing in common. All three were opponents of the Trujillo regime, and all were highly vocal partisans of the burgeoning new oppositionist group, the National Civic Union. Cabrera dis tributed the U.C.N.'s Santiago newspaper. Martinez and Clisante had helped transport people to a U.C.N. rally at Puerto Plata only the day before they died. When Clisante's body was turned over to his relatives, the head was beaten almost to a pulp. An enraged mob burst into the hospital morgue, draped a Dominican flag over the corpse, and paraded it through the streets, crying "Liberty! Down with dictatorship!" Another crowd started pegging rocks at police, were finally dispersed when the cops fired over their heads.

The government, as usual, had its own version of the deaths: Cabrera had made homosexual advances to the "hitchhiker," and the other two men had deliberately assaulted the Sosua army post in broad daylight. But few Dominicans believed the official version, and perhaps (the uses of terror being what they are) were not expected to. The killings were the ugliest blot to date on the liberalized regime of Ramfis Trujillo, who took over when his dictator father was assassinated three months ago. They were also a reminder that, while Ramfis may have eased things up in the Ciudad Trujillo capital, life in the isolated back country remains as tightly controlled as before.

Despite opposition fears that the Trujillos will never leave power without a blood bath ("It's only a matter of time before they slice us up like hot dogs," said one U.C.N. leader last week), there are many observers who feel that things could be worse in the Dominican Republic. The country has not yet degenerated into civil war or Communism. There are also some small signs that Ramfis Trujillo may be finding his father's mantle a little heavy. In an hour-long interview with a New York Times correspondent last week, Ramfis pleaded for a resumption of U.S. diplomatic relations, spoke gloomily of the threat of a full-scale revolt, possibly within his own armed forces, unless other nations prop him up. Without their "moral support," he said, "there will develop here a problem worse than in Cuba." Ramfis also insisted that he has no intention of running for President next May, and added that as far as he knows none of his relatives plan to run either.

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