In the Nick of Time

The first glow of dawn was just brightening the sky over Santo Domingo when a force of 17 U.S. tanks and 2,000 OAS troops in full battle dress rolled into the city's downtown rebel zone. Within an hour, the OAS soldiers set up sandbagged emplacements throughout the l-sq.-mi. stronghold that leftist rebel partisans still call "sacred revolutionary soil." Shouted curses and a few harmless sniper shots greeted the troops. Most of the city's 500,000 frightened citizens could give thanks that the OAS was acting in the nick of time to prevent the Dominican Republic from plunging into a bloody replay of last April's civil war.

On Presidential Orders. The troops --two battalions of the U.S. 82nd Airborne and two brigades of Latin American soldiers--moved into the downtown area last week on the specific orders of Provisional President Hector Garcia-Godoy. In the previous two weeks, at least 15 Dominicans had been killed amid a series of bitter clashes between loyalist Dominican troops and Castroite rebels, who had refused to surrender their arms. Now the OAS would oversee the disarming.

At the headquarters of the Castroite 14th of June Movement and in a newspaper plant, U.S. paratroopers seized a small arsenal of rifles and ready-to-throw Molotov cocktails. Under orders to grab every weapon in sight, the 82nd troopers even disarmed the eight uniformed cops guarding the house of rebel-rousing ex-President Juan Bosch. As for Bosch himself, he requested--and got--a U.S. military escort to safer quarters five miles out of town. Rebel Chief Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, already safe at a camp outside the city, reacted predictably: "It is a shame for one of the most powerful armies in the world to have gone into the city in time of peace when they could not have done it during the war." In fact, he was alive to utter such bunkum only because the OAS had prevented the loyalists from smashing his 1,400-man force.

The takeover downtown was as much intended to calm the loyalist military as it was to knock rebel heads. For weeks, the soldiers, led by Armed Forces Chief Rivera Caminero, have been muttering angrily that President Garcia-Godoy was too soft on the left, was loading his Cabinet with rebels, and failing to collect rebel arms. The rebels, in turn, have been loudly crying for Garcia-Godoy to fire Rivera Caminero and the rest of the service chiefs for their so-called "genocide" early in the civil war. At one point, Garcia-Godoy came out of a four-hour Cabinet meeting ready to bow to the rebels and cashier the generals--which would have meant an almost certain bloodbath.

No End to Terror. That there was no full-scale fighting was due largely to U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth T. Bunker, the tall, white-haired OAS negotiator and chief architect of the tenuous Dominican truce. In an eleventh-hour session at the National Palace, Bunker strongly reminded Garcia-Godoy that alienating the military was hardly the way to run a government of reconciliation. He got the President, and later Rivera Caminero, to agree on the pacification of Santo Domingo through a house-to-house arms search by military, police and civilian teams. Garcia-Godoy then ordered OAS troops into the rebel area to make sure that the searchers would be able to do their jobs.

Ambassador Bunker's skilled patchwork may have forestalled major trouble, but it did little to soothe the violent hatreds that still divide the country. Outside Santo Domingo last week, a group of goons machine-gunned the car of a moderate provincial governor, killing him and seriously wounding three companions. In the capital, the Public Works Ministry was ransacked and machine-gunned by a 15-man group that identified itself as the "Democratic Anti-Communist Commando No. 1." At week's end, there were reports of similar raids in the usually placid interior city of Santiago.

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