Success--So Far

No one can say how long the lid will stay on the troubled Dominican Republic. Since Dictator Rafael Trujillo died in a fusillade of assassins' bullets in 1961, the country has had four coups and seven governments. Thus on past form alone, the country's new President Joaquin Balaguer, 59, could not be expected to last very long. But last week, after his first 21 months in office, some of the cynics who had predicted his early downfall were having second thoughts.

Balaguer has hardly licked his country's many problems. But he at least has shown a sure hand in coping with them. To play down political bickering, the President selected his Cabinet from the lists of all major moderate parties and adopted several opposition bills for his own legislative program. His main concern has been to revive the shattered economy by reducing official salaries and reining in government spending. For the first time in 16 months, the Dominican Republic this month will meet its expenses without turning to the U.S. for assistance.

Balaguer has also begun to deal with two of his country's underlying problems: a conspiratorial far left and a power-hungry military. Still in a state of shock over Balaguer's election victory, the parties to the left of defeated Candidate Juan Bosch have dissipated their strength by intramural squabbling. Balaguer has denied the far left a leader by preventing the return of rebels who were shipped abroad after the civil war, and by appointing one of the wiliest, Hector Aristy Pereira, representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council in Paris.

Above Control. The Dominican military, which long considered itself above civilian control, last week felt the touch of Balaguer's authority. The military man in question was Brigadier General Elias Wessin y Wessin, whose elite troops had initially turned back the rebels in Santo Domingo, but whose continued presence had so disrupted peace negotiations that the U.S. hustled him out of the country last September.

Learning that some right-wing officers were scheming to bring Wessin back, Balaguer denounced the plot on television, though carefully absolving Wessin of any complicity. He then appointed Wessin an alternate Dominican delegate to the U.N. with the rank of ambassador, and ordered Wessin's old autonomous outfit at San Isidro airbase to be divided among other units throughout the country. Furthermore, Balaguer ordered a reorganization of the military so that "the barracks can no longer be used as a springboard" for political activities. So far, the military has accepted the President's orders without any visible signs of dangerous discontent.

In fact, the Dominican Republic last week seemed so peaceful that plans were going ahead for the final withdrawal of the Inter-American Peace Force by next week. Some Dominicans feared that the withdrawal would trigger a coup by leftists, by the military, or both. Balaguer evidently did not share that fear. Besides, he knew that if anything did happen, peace-force troops could be recalled within hours.

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