Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic

POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

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POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Christian Krohn-Hansen

POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Copyright © Christian Krohn-Hansen, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60953–2 ISBN-10: 0–230–60953–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Krohn-Hansen, Christian, 1957– Political authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic / Christian Krohn-Hansen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60953–8 1. Authoritarianism—Dominican Republic. 2. Dominican Republic— Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. JL1130.K76 2009 320.97293—dc22

2008018051

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To the memory of my father Arne Krohn-Hansen

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Map: The Dominican Republic

xii

1

Introduction

1

2

Island, State, and Community

21

3

Kin, Friends, and Leaders

49

4

Negotiating Rule: The Reformists and the Public Sector

95

5 Negotiating Rule: Political Fraud as Interaction

117

6

133

Constructing Masculinity, Negotiating Rule

7 Making the Nation

157

8

173

Bloody Memories

9 Conclusion

191

Notes

197

Bibliography

223

Index

241

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O

ver the years working on this study, many people and institutions have generously assisted me. I would like to thank the following bodies for supporting my research and writing: the Center for Development and the Environment of the University of Oslo; the Norwegian Research Council; Centro de Investigación y Economía Aplicada in Santo Domingo; the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation for Educational Exchange; the Department of Anthropology of the Johns Hopkins University; the Department of Anthropology of the University of Oslo; and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Michigan. This study is based on ethnographic-historical research on the building of the state in the southwestern region of the Dominican Republic. I carried out thirteen months of fieldwork in and around the community of La Descubierta in 1991–1992. I would like to thank the people of La Descubierta. Not only did they give generously of their time, hospitality, and knowledge but also overall they formed my work by providing contexts and perspectives crucial for producing this book. In 1997, I spent three months in the Dominican capital and in various regions of the country; I worked in libraries, traveled, and talked with people. In 2000, I spent two weeks in the Dominican capital. In the period from mid-2002 to mid-2007, I spent about eight months carrying out fieldwork among Dominican immigrants in northern Manhattan and parts of the Bronx and Queens in New York City. The analysis in this book is based on the whole of this contact with Dominicans and on the literature. But by far the most important part has been the field research I conducted in the early 1990s. A brief note is in order here on the use of pseudonyms in this book. The most powerful extended family in La Descubierta during the greater part of the twentieth century was the Ramírez family. I have used the real names of all members of the Ramírez family. At the time of the fieldwork, the community housed two important political leaderships—that of Miriam Méndez de Piñeyro, who represented the Reformist Party,

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and that of Rafael Peguero Méndez, who represented the Dominican Revolutionary Party. I have used the real names of both these leaders. I have also retained the real names of Miriam’s husband and Rafael’s father respectively. All other names of families and persons from La Descubierta have been changed. Within the academic world, many colleagues and friends contributed to the development of this book. I would especially like to thank the following people for the helpful comments they have provided on this manuscript at various stages in its preparation: the late Eduardo P. Archetti; Fredrik Barth; Thomas Hylland Eriksen; the late Harry Hoetink; Marit Melhuus; Sidney W. Mintz; Knut G. Nustad; Karen Fog Olwig; Rubén Silié; Kristi Anne Stølen; Halvard Vike; and Unni Wikan. Thanks go as well to Jonathan Derrick for help with editing and language. And finally, I express my profound debt to several historians of the Dominican Republic from whose published work I have benefited enormously, above all Michiel Baud, Lauren Derby, Frank Moya Pons, and Richard Lee Turits. Earlier and different versions of paragraphs and sections of this book appeared in: “Negotiated Dictatorship: The Building of the Trujillo State in the Southwestern Dominican Republic,” in C. Krohn-Hansen and K.G. Nustad (eds.), State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005: 96–122); and “Masculinity and the Political among Dominicans: ‘The Dominican Tiger,’ ” in M. Melhuus and K.A. Stølen (eds.), Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas (London: Verso, 1996: 108–133).

POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Map The Dominican Republic

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

T

he Dominican Republic was ruled for several decades in the twentieth century by the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later by another authoritarian leader, Joaquín Balaguer. Both ruled with considerable violence. Yet when studying closely the political history of one area of the country, the southwest, I found something paradoxical.1 The rule of those two leaders, arbitrary and brutal though it had been, was remembered in a positive way by the people of that area. A watershed in the history of the Dominican Republic, independent since 1844, was the U.S. occupation from 1916 to 1924. The U.S. occupation regime created an effective national military institution in a country that had previously had none. Among the members of the first class of native officers who graduated from the new military academy in 1921 was Rafael Trujillo. By the age of thirty-nine, he had become the leader of the modernized military that the United States had helped to establish. Using his position to overthrow the elected government, he ruled the country from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo’s rule was marked by grotesque violence and abuse, and he used state power to amass a spectacular fortune. The regime’s greatest crime was the 1937 Haitian massacre; beginning in October 1937 Trujillo’s military killed thousands of Haitians in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands with guns and machetes, and a still greater number was expelled from the country. Hundreds of Dominicans were also killed by his agents, although the dictator generally employed means of domination and repression short of actual liquidation. The dictator, called the Generalísimo, ruled for some time without holding the title of president, through puppet presidents of whom the last was Joaquín Balaguer. A lawyer and shrewd politician, Balaguer was also a prolific author who published a large number of books. He occupied a set of important positions under Trujillo and was one of the regime’s

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leading ideologues. Some six months after the Generalísimo’s death, a group of military officers rebelled against his sons and brothers and forced the entire Trujillo family into exile. But for a couple of months longer Balaguer maintained his grip on the presidency, helped by the new military leaders. In early 1962, he was forced to resign and f lee into exile. Three years later, Balaguer returned to the island. With thousands of U.S. Marines entering the country, and while hundreds of Dominican activists were killed by paramilitary groups, Balaguer was elected president in 1966; he kept that position until 1978. Eight years later, he regained the Dominican presidency and thereafter stayed in power until 1996. His twelve years from 1966 to 1978 have been described as “Trujillismo without Trujillo” (Black 1986:42), and paramilitary groups killed more than 4,000 Dominicans between 1966 and 1974 (Moya Pons 1990:528). Balaguer gave up power in 1978 after the elections that year had triggered loud allegations of fraud. When he stepped down from office for the last time in 1996, he had once again been forced to resign, having lost credibility in a spectacular way. The opposition and foreign observers had condemned the presidential elections of 1994, which Balaguer was declared to have won, as scandalously rigged. A large portion of the academic literature on the twentieth-century Dominican Republic emphasizes terror and deception as almost the sole explanation for Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s protracted regimes. But there is another history—a story of political and social life under Trujillo and Balaguer that is very different from the one I have just sketched. When I carried out fieldwork in a community in the Dominican southwest in the early 1990s I was told this other story again and again by villagers and peasants. In this book I narrate this other story. In the Dominican southwest, people often described the Trujillo dictatorship as a crucial transition—from lack of progress to a more civilized life. Many in the community where my research was conducted, La Descubierta, claimed that the dictator had begun basic modernization. Old people vividly recalled the dictator’s use of terror and violence. Yet they argued that the region and the nation had needed development and what they described as Dominicanization, and that Trujillo had taken care of both things. This is not to say that there was no ambiguity. Most locals also recognized that Trujillo’s regime had demanded excessive sacrifices—that the price paid by some had been too high. They claimed, for example, that Trujillo had been both unbelievably selfish and exceptionally cruel. Most often, however, people said among themselves that Trujillo had been right, that the political and social changes that he headed had been not only necessary but also legitimate.

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The informal head of La Descubierta’s largest extended family, a local leader of peasant stock, one day put it in the following manner: “They say that Trujillo was bad. But 85 percent of the time Trujillo was a good president.” In another conversation, he explained: “I was born in 1924. I’d say that those were the times of ‘the crazy ones,’ or those who lacked civilization. For they didn’t know that one could study, what was a secondary school, a clinic. Where the Town Hall is now, my mother had three corrals for goats. . . . We were pulled out from there by Trujillo. From that time until now it has been opened up.” Another leader in La Descubierta claimed: “This [southwestern] region was totally archaic. And no matter what people say, it is Trujillo who pulls us out and makes us take off.” People in La Descubierta recalled how the Trujillo years had brought increased civilization and development through the creation of the nation-state. Their main view, or story, was that however dictatorial a regime is, it may all the same change society in fruitful ways. No matter how undemocratic it is, it may still breed a sense of intensified progress and enhanced modernity. In the southwest in the early 1990s, a large segment of the region’s villagers and peasants backed Balaguer. In La Descubierta, the main representative of the Balaguer state was Miriam Méndez de Piñeyro, a leader and key state-builder in this part of the country from 1974 until 1996. Her uncle had been Trujillo’s most important leader in this region from the mid-1930s until 1961. Miriam’s political work and state-building activities had a remarkable degree of local support. Many in the southwest viewed Balaguer in the same way as they viewed Trujillo. Both these leaders, they argued, had helped to secure necessary development. Both these men’s regimes had brought progress through the building of the state. When I lived in La Descubierta, a large part of the community had strongly and actively backed Balaguer since the mid-1960s. How, then, can one usefully understand authoritarian rule? What is an authoritarian history? Using the case of the twentieth-century Dominican southwest, this book outlines a set of answers to these questions. In this study, I examine “from below” the state formation headed by Trujillo and Balaguer. The book offers a historical ethnography from one part of the country. It should be imperative, I argue, to approach authoritarian histories—like other histories—on the basis of detailed investigations of power relationships, everyday practices, and meanings. Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic shows how political life in the twentieth-century Dominican southwest was made, remade, and modified at the local level. I argue that villagers and peasants and their local leaders in this region helped to create and build the Trujillo and

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Balaguer state in this part of the country. Authoritarian rule is produced by means of alliances and forms of support, with development of efficient forms of consent; also by means of networks, exchanges, and negotiations. To paraphrase Luce Irigaray (2001), the exercise of authoritarian power begins between two; it starts in everyday life and ritual. As we shall see, the past 150 years in the Dominican southwest reveal considerable social and cultural continuity. In the twentieth century, the communities of that region were increasingly incorporated into the postcolonial state. But there was no incompatibility between the area’s welltried institutions and the building of the twentieth-century Dominican state. On the contrary, in this part of the country, the construction of the twentieth-century authoritarian Dominican state both depended upon and strengthened the most important old-established cultural forms and practices of the region. The building of the twentieth-century authoritarian Dominican state consolidated and reinforced forms of masculinity and patronage; it is the same with such institutions as the extended family and compadrazgo. The Trujillo and Balaguer state was produced precisely by means of these cultural forms and practices. In the making of the twentieth-century Dominican state, old forms were used in transformed ways and for new purposes. A new state-system, yes—but the emergence of the Trujillo and Balaguer state did not mean a cultural revolution. The centerpiece of this book is an examination of political, social, and cultural processes in one community in the southwestern region. La Descubierta is situated on the border that separates the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The twentieth-century history of La Descubierta typifies the Dominican southwest. And it is representative of the country’s borderlands—the areas situated along the Dominican-Haitian border.2 Oral history of power struggles, families, and individuals in La Descubierta, explored in this study, covers the period from around 1920 to 1992. Little changed in La Descubierta between 1992 and 1996, the year Balaguer stepped down. The book can therefore be said to describe Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s regimes as they looked in La Descubierta. As I have already said, at the time of the fieldwork a sizeable proportion of La Descubierta’s inhabitants had backed Balaguer’s leadership since the mid-1960s. Many of the data that I discuss are derived from processes and events that took place in La Descubierta in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The crux of the book is therefore an analysis of the ways in which the Balaguer state was shaped, reshaped and modified in this part of the country—at a time when Balaguer (who died in 2002) and his followers had dominated more than two decades of post-Trujillo history. In the book’s last chapter, I summarize brief ly the most important political events in La Descubierta in the years from 1992 to 2002.

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As I see it, the typical notions of how authoritarian histories are produced have become narrow and misleading. Hegemonic Western discourses on despots express ethnocentrism, turning “their” authoritarian histories into fantasies of almost complete political irrationality, and much political and scholarly discourse on contemporary dictators and autocrats has strong elements of solipsism. By “hegemonic Western discourses on despots,” I am referring to a set of dominant notions, a powerful tradition. I view this tradition as dominant in society and in significant parts of the academic community. Yet this is not the whole story. A series of researchers have during the last decades in various ways challenged, and written against, the dominant ideas about, and understandings of, political despotism. Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic is inspired by, and attempts to build on, some of these other, less inf luential—or, if one wishes, subordinate, or more peripheral— perspectives on forms of despotic and authoritarian rule. To break away from a sterile and exoticizing form of analysis, we should acknowledge three circumstances. First, we have to get rid of a deep-rooted myth—the myth that one man may wield total power. Foucault (1980:97, 121) long ago claimed that political theory ought to cut off the King’s head. Yet many do not follow this advice, and especially not when they deal with authoritarianism. Instead they are obsessed with the idea that we need to understand the ruler, and remain in practice convinced that it is sufficient to examine what takes place at the top of the state. Second, the analysis of authoritarian rule ought to be solidly rooted in examinations of everyday life. Most important, we should anchor our analyses in investigations of political, social and material practices, specific forms of agency. The field of power and knowledge that we call the modern state comes into being and is reproduced and transformed through particular practices. We must seek to understand those practices that constitute and reconstitute the state. This applies also to those states we call despotic. Third, we should view authoritarian states as sets of cultural processes. The past decades have seen the appearance of a new anthropology of modern state-building, with the focus of analysis on the cultural forms and practices that constitute states.3 A growing number of researchers now recognize that much of the building of states involves the construction of meaning. I agree with this view, and in this book seek to show that political history under Trujillo and Balaguer cannot be understood in isolation from cultural history. We will consider each of these points in turn. The section that follows first takes a closer look at a set of hegemonic discourses on dictators and

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autocrats, showing how these discourses serve to mystify and are thus of little use. Next I sketch in greater detail my own analytical starting point. The Crisis in Hegemonic Political Theory and Ethnography There are several reasons why we ought to begin by taking a closer look at the dominant Western way of thinking about despots. First, and perhaps most important, dominant Western discourses on despots are ref lections of a more general political theory, a theory about the making and remaking of modern states. My view is that this is a theory we ought to get rid of. Second, some of the most inf luential texts on twentieth- century Dominican political history embody precisely this way of thinking. Third, this way of thinking continues to have a tremendous inf luence among many of the world’s political leaders and their followers. Dominican political history after 1930 has far too often been unduly simplified. What has been emphasized is the autocrat’s—or Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s—ability to define most aspects of official policy and everyday life across the national territory from the top of the state. In this manner scholars and others have in practice obliterated the need for examining and understanding an entire society, or researching for a more comprehensive and complex history of what produces and reproduces dictatorial and authoritarian rule.4 The best example is the political scientist Juan Linz, and the academic tradition that Linz helped create. Linz used the Trujillo dictatorship in a classification of the types of non-democratic regimes in the world (Linz 1975). In so doing he turned Trujillo’s Dominican Republic into a type—or an image. Trujillo’s rule became the archetype of what Linz describes as a “sultanistic” regime.5 Sultanistic rule is claimed to have little social basis—so little that there seems to be almost none at all: “In the end the social bases of a sultanistic regime are restricted to its clients: family members of the rulers and their cronies” (Chehabi and Linz 1998b:20). According to the theory, it is this lack of a social basis and the resultant “freedom” from social and cultural constraints that explain how the ruler can maintain his grip on power: “The ability of sultanistic rulers to stay in power depends on their freedom from the need to forge alliances with civil society and to build coalitions” (20–21). Chehabi and Linz sum up the sultanistic rule as follows: “The ruler exercises his power without restraint, at his own discretion and above all unencumbered by rules or by any commitment to an ideology or value system” (7).6

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The Linz tradition’s narrative of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, and of sultanistic despots generally, articulates a tenacious way of thinking, not only about dictators and autocrats, but also more generally about how a modern state is generated and reproduced. With the 2003 war on Saddam’s Iraq led by the United States and Britain, many aspects of this way of thinking have been recycled. In his classic paper on the difficulty of studying the state, Philip Abrams ([1977] 1988) claimed that he was less radical than RadcliffeBrown had been in his preface to African Political Systems ([1940] 1987). Abrams proposed not that we should try to eliminate the idea of the state, but that we should continue to take the idea of the state very seriously. Like other collective representations the state “is a social fact—but not a fact in nature” ([1977] 1988:75). With this I agree. The “state-system,” a concrete configuration of social and political practices, is the historical process out of which the idea of the state, a symbolic construct, is made. Like Foucault, Abrams saw work based on an intellectual separation of “the state” and “society” as fruitless. By positing a veiling separation of the state and society, analysts, politicians and citizens have provided the state with a misplaced concreteness (Alonso 1995:115; Trouillot 2001; Harvey 2005). They have fetishized it, turning complex historical processes into a person, a will, a spirit, or a thing. The idea of the state, then, is above all “the mask that prevents our seeing political practice as it is” (Abrams [1977] 1988:82). This is of importance for understanding the hegemonic Western discourses on despots. Dominant discourses on despots in the contemporary world continue to erase and mystify. There is little need, so the argument in practice goes, to inquire into how things work deep down in the political and social system. Instead, discourses on dictatorial and authoritarian rule often go to great lengths in personalizing the state. They tend to construct an image of nearly complete omnipotence, projecting the assumed absolute power onto a mythic figure, the dictator or autocrat, and then demonizing him. This faulty analysis is ironically mirrored in despots’ own representations of themselves. A dictator will try to construct, display and reify images of himself as all-powerful: not as a demon, but as a savior. A dictator often attempts to represent himself not only as the source and the essence, but also as the very embodiment of the state. Dictatorships create a cult of the ruler. The cult turns complex political and social histories into a fiction, a bust, a monument, a myth, and a name. Or, in the words of Achille Mbembe (1992: 11–12), “in the [authoritarian] postcolony the commandement is constantly engaged in projecting an image both of itself and of the world—a fantasy that it presents to its subjects as a truth that is

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beyond dispute. . . . The commandement itself aspires to be a cosmogony.” The Trujillo state forged a personalist political ideology based on the all-encompassing figure of “El Jefe,” or “the Chief,” whom it sought to deify. Less than three weeks after Trujillo’s inauguration in 1930, a hurricane demolished the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo. Trujillo reconstructed the city, including a new bridge over the Ozama River, and greatly improved port facilities. He thereafter named the new bridge, the new port, and the city itself after himself. In 1936, the Dominican capital was rechristened Ciudad Trujillo. Streets, bridges, squares, parks, and buildings throughout the country were named or renamed after Trujillo and his family (Roorda 1998b:59, 97–98). By the close of the regime, “an estimated eighteen hundred sculptures of the Generalísimo sat in public squares and buildings throughout the Dominican Republic, one for every ten square miles” (Roorda 1998b:97). In La Descubierta in the 1990s, villagers and peasants recalled how everyone had had to repeat “Dios en el cielo y Trujillo en la tierra,” or “God in Heaven and Trujillo on Earth.” In sum, one discourse sought to deify Trujillo, another sought to demonize him. Both, however, gave to the Trujillo state formation a mystifying concreteness. In Abrams’s words, both transformed Dominican history between 1930 and 1961 into a mask. Such ideas about political power are ref lected in what Katherine Verdery has called “statue politics.” In a study of Eastern Europe’s changes beginning around 1989, in which statues of Communist rulers were torn down, she comments that building a statue of such a ruler is “bringing him into the realm of the timeless or the sacred, like an icon. For this reason, desecrating a statue partakes of the larger history of iconoclasm” (Verdery 1999:5). In late 1961, everything bearing the face or the name of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic was trashed. The capital Santo Domingo, which had been renamed Ciudad Trujillo, reverted to its original name. All Trujillo property was confiscated by the state. “And suddenly,” as one scholar has put it, “there were no Trujillo loyalists to be found” (Black 1986:39). The history of the Trujillo state is far less clear-cut than this; likewise with the history of the Balaguer state. We cannot understand the Dominican Republic’s political history before and after 1961 if we only examine the top of the state. We cannot comprehend this history without seeking to study a whole political and social fabric—a whole system of power relationships, practices and meanings. The analysis in this book rests upon some basic ideas. The first major idea may be formulated in the following manner: Even in the most repressive regimes, political power is far more dispersed and transactional than is most often assumed. A good many studies of political and social

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life in dictatorships in various parts of the world have demonstrated this. Studies have documented (1) that the field of power relationships, practices and meanings that we call a dictatorship is created and built by many—that it is produced, sustained and modified by a vast number of political and social actors; and (2) that even a form of dictatorial rule may have a (surprisingly) broad backing among the population, or parts of the population.7 The second important idea upon which this study rests has to do with our understanding of the complexity of “the state.” In my view the state, or the state-system, may most fruitfully be understood as a set of translocal institutions that are made manifest and visible in localized (or specific) practices. As Penelope Harvey (2005:138) has maintained, it seems not very helpful to consider the state as “more than” the local (or worse, as “over” or “above” the local, or as “encompassing” the local). This position seems crucial. It means accepting that researchers may produce valuable knowledge of a part of the complexity inherent in the constitution and reconstitution of a particular state-system through investigating a group of localized processes and practices, or through making an ethnography based on (localized) participant observation. Another way of putting this is to argue, as Das and Poole (2004b: 3–33) have powerfully done, that what are often considered as the state’s territorial and/or social “margins” are not peripheral to its workings but, on the contrary, constitute manifest and prominent key features of its routine functioning.8 The third basic idea which has helped to give form to the analysis in this book emphasizes that the study of the state should remain solidly rooted in examinations of everyday life—especially everyday practices. We need to understand the construction of modern states as the outcome of complex sets of everyday activities, exchanges and processes. This shifts the focus of analysis to the many practices of power and the mundane and ritual forms that constitute the state. It invites the researcher to examine in detail how a particular state is produced in ordinary encounters at the grassroots level—in those contexts where the state bodies’ representatives and individuals and groups interact (Bayart 1989; Joseph and Nugent 1994; Crais 2005). Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s Dominican Republic was, as we shall soon see, basically a rural country. In such a country, it is essential to investigate mundane and ritual practices, and the production of the state, at the level of the small towns and villages. As Akhil Gupta (1995:376) has put it with reference to the study of India: Research on the state, with its focus on large-scale structures, epochal events, major policies, and “important” people . . ., has failed to illuminate

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the quotidian practices . . . of bureaucrats that tell us about the effects of the state on the everyday lives of rural people. Surprisingly little research has been conducted in the small towns . . . where a large number of state officials, constituting the broad base of the bureaucratic pyramid, live and work—the village-level workers, land record keepers, elementary school teachers, agricultural extension agents, the staff of the civil hospital, and others. This is the site where the majority of people in a rural and agricultural country such as India come into contact with “the state,” and this is where many of their images of the state are forged.

The fourth fundamental idea behind this study relates to the way we assess the necessity of examining cultural meaning when our goal is to be able to understand forms of politics and state formation. In my opinion, political life cannot be understood in isolation from culture. Too much analysis of modern politics has been reductionist. It has ignored the enormous significance of symbolic forms and meanings in the construction and reconstruction of configurations of power in the contemporary world. In sharp contrast to this, I set out from the premise that we should seek to examine how people involved in the making of contemporary forms of politics shape and reshape categories and meanings and understand their worlds.9 The pursuit of meaning is, as Max Weber claimed, at the heart of human activity. Social practices and structures of inequality and domination are constituted with the aid of categories, imageries and meanings. We should therefore see political life as continuous negotiation of meaning, and fighting over it. Politics is a realm both of tactical behavior and struggle and of activity taking place through intricate symbolic processes (Bourdieu 1977; Gregory 2007). The final idea that has helped to form this study emphasizes that anthropologists need to study history. We ought to seek to combine ethnographic and historic examination. As Mintz (1985:xxx) wrote, “Human beings do create social structures, and do endow events with meaning; but these structures and meanings have historical origins that shape, limit, and help to explain such creativity.” In this book, I am concerned with history in three different ways. First, I provide a local history; I outline La Descubierta’s social and political history since the early twentieth century. Second, I place this history within a wider and more comprehensive history. As part of this I look at the island’s long colonial history and the creation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In addition I sketch features of the Dominican Republic’s politicaleconomic integration into world society and a set of important national transformations. That is, I focus on a local history, but it is still necessary to take into account a much bigger history if we want to understand what made Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s Dominican Republic possible.

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For example, one cannot understand the twentieth-century Dominican Republic without taking into account the nation’s relationship with the United States. The support which Trujillo received from United States political, military and financial interests during most of his time in power (or at least up to the second half of the 1950s) was central to the implementation of the regime’s project (Roorda 1998b). Franklin D. Roosevelt is credited with having said that Trujillo “may be an S.O.B., but he is our S.O.B.” (Williams [1970] 1984:465).10 Balaguer, too, was backed by Washington. After he had conquered the presidency in 1966 with U.S. troops in the country, the Dominican authorities received considerable financial aid from the United States. Third, I am concerned with memories, or more precisely, the politics of memories. The book examines how people in the southern Dominican borderlands constructed their past. I look at how they represented the history of the island and the borderlands—and how they remembered the twentieth-century state-building project. Why do I concern myself with this? As many have shown, collective and individual memories are often at the core of contemporary politics (see, for example, Friedman 1992; Malkki 1995; and Coronil and Skurski 2005). Memories give form to the practice of politics and the construction of the state in a deep sense. Ideas about the past shape political identities, preserve myths of authority, authorize claims, and provide political actors with a horizon and a direction (Price 1983; Verdery 1999). In other words, if we want to understand today’s Dominican politics, it is imperative to seek to understand how Dominicans themselves remember and convey their history. I view the construction of collective and individual memories as a profoundly historical and social process. Memories ref lect, and express, particular power relationships and particular social and cultural practices and processes (Trouillot 1995). In a set of stimulating works, two younger historians have masterfully challenged and undermined conventional representations of the Trujillo dictatorship—and of dictatorial rule more generally. Richard Lee Turits and Lauren Derby have sought to demonstrate that, contrary to standard assumptions, even the Trujillo regime that has been viewed as totally despotic had a substantial social basis and spheres of acceptance (Turits 2003; Derby 1998b; 1999; 2003). They argue that power was exercised under Trujillo less by autocratic decree than by a complex, heterogeneous state—or a myriad political and social agents. In this study, I add support to these two historians’ basic arguments about the Trujillo dictatorship. Of special significance is Turits’s Foundations of Despotism. Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (2003). Turits’s study profoundly investigates Trujillo’s

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rural policies. It reveals how the protracted dictatorship mediated important socioeconomic changes, especially through agrarian policies that benefited the country’s large independent peasant population. The bulk of the Dominican people remained rural. In the mid1930s, 82 percent of the population had been rural; in 1960, 70 percent remained rural, still one of the highest proportions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Turits 2003:265). Turits shows how the Trujillo state carried out rural reforms that changed the nascent processes of restructuring in the countryside that had threatened Dominican peasants when Trujillo seized power—changes energized by new production of sugar for the world market, by increased commercialization of land, and by new property laws. By implementing policies that in practice sustained the peasants’ free access to land during a phase of national growth, the dictator secured rural backing. In Turits’s terms, Trujillo promoted a peasant-based modernity (2003:81–82). The dictatorship’s strategies “helped make Trujillo’s Dominican Republic a virtually self-sufficient country in agricultural terms (save wheat), in contrast to the rest of the twentieth-century Caribbean and much of Latin America” (2003:20). The dictatorship’s reforms were put into effect in the area where I carried out research in the southern borderlands. The state’s attempts to increase agricultural production and secure peasant access to land started in 1934 in the southwestern region, and the regime expanded the state infrastructure in and around La Descubierta also. During the few years from 1943 to 1947 this small outlying rural community, La Descubierta, saw the creation not only of hill agrarian colonies and military posts, but also of a completely new road to the east that connected it with the country’s public systems of roads. And it got a new road in the community’s highlands, an aqueduct, an electric power plant, and schools. The village nucleus got streets and a park, later followed by a church and a proper building to house the local chapter of Trujillo’s political party, the nation’s sole party, the Dominican Party (Ramírez 2000:83–90, 110). Under Trujillo, travel and transport between La Descubierta and the rest of the country were significantly changed in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly with the road to the east. In sum, the state’s presence in everyday life grew dramatically. But the Trujillo state was not simply imposed like some unavoidable force. As I have already said, the most basic everyday forms and practices of the rural masses in the southwestern region were neither threatened nor undermined under the dictator. On the contrary, the construction and reconstruction of Trujillo’s rule in this part of the country both depended upon and reinforced those forms and practices. In La Descubierta, villagers and peasants helped to bring into being and build the Trujillo state.

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Much like Turits and Derby, I seek in this book to reveal what we may call the hidden foundations of protracted despotism in the Dominican Republic. Even so, this study differs from those others, in at least three important respects. First, the works are dissimilar with regard to time, or historic period. In this book I cover two long regimes, that of Trujillo and that of Balaguer; a large part of the book focuses on the years after 1961. In contrast, Turits and Derby end their works with Trujillo’s death in the early 1960s; they do not deal with the Balaguer state. Second, Turits’s and Derby’s works differ in terms of space, or geography. Turits draws on data from all the country’s regions. He examines the state-peasantry relationship in the nation as a whole. Derby (1998b; 1999; 2003), for her part, explores urban space. She writes about connections between the organization of urban space, civic culture and political ritual under Trujillo. In comparison, I offer a historical ethnography that outlines the construction of the twentieth-century Dominican state in and around a single community—La Descubierta. Third, those two works are dissimilar to mine with regard to basic methodology. Turits’s and Derby’s analyses are based on archival work and sets of interviews. My own analysis is created by means of participant observation, or fieldwork. As I see it, ethnography may still be a powerful tool. Classic fieldwork—or living together with the people of a given area or community—makes it possible to analyze practices and processes which it is extremely hard, if not impossible to describe or examine without fieldwork.11 For our purposes, three sets of practices and processes should especially be mentioned: 1. Through ethnography it is possible to convey and analyze a part of the immense socio-cultural complexity that shaped Dominican communities—and the Dominican state—under Trujillo and Balaguer. 2. Likewise with political life: in this study, I seek to show that the building of the twentieth-century Dominican state in the southwest was profoundly rooted in, and formed by, the internal political struggles of this region. Few research strategies are better suited for mapping the internal political processes of communities than fairly classic anthropological fieldwork. 3. I have already argued that a modern state, even an authoritarian one, is not a “thing” or an object, or for that matter a single decision-maker, but instead something far more messy and, in a certain sense, boundless: namely, an intricate configuration of everyday and ritual practices or forms of agency. Anthropologically

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shaped fieldwork not only permits but forces the researcher to observe a stream of mundane and ritualized behavior—practices and encounters formed by people of f lesh and blood, or persons with consciousnesses, intentions, strategies, relationships, networks, conf licts, fears and desires. In my view, fieldwork-driven ethnography is therefore a great tool to use when the goal is to try to represent “the state” as the incoherent, f luid system of practices that it is, rather than reinforce the reifying and fetishizing story that every state tells about itself. As I have already said, the Trujillo regime’s most grotesque act of state terror took place precisely in the Dominican border region. By the late 1930s, Haitian peasants had been settling for more than a century on abandoned agricultural lands on the Dominican side of the DominicanHaitian border. In late 1937, the Dominican military killed thousands of Haitian peasants in this frontier region; some 15,000 may have died in the massacre (Vega 1995:341–53; Turits 1997:486, note 137). Trujillo also expelled all Haitians from the country, with the exception of those working for the sugar plantations owned by foreigners. After the bloodbath and the evictions, the Trujillo regime closed the border, embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to demonize its neighbor, and launched a large-scale Dominicanization program in the frontier provinces. Trujillo rapidly expanded the state infrastructure in the whole border region, creating agrarian colonies or rural settlements close to the demarcation line as well as building roads, schools and health-care systems, and establishing state bodies in all the border provinces. In fact it was not until the Trujillo regime and the late 1930s that the Dominican state firmly and massively established itself in the border region (including the southern areas in which I carried out the fieldwork). Up till the beginning of the twentieth century, Haiti was militarily, economically and demographically the stronger of the two countries. The Haitian massacre in the late 1930s did not result in diminished support for the regime on the Dominican side of the border. On the contrary, many in the Dominican Republic backed or accepted Trujillo’s brutal imposition of a new community—a mono-ethnic nation—in the frontier area. In La Descubierta in the 1990s, an overwhelming majority maintained that the border areas and the country had needed the Dominicanization. One elderly community leader, for example, had already accounted for the regime’s eviction of the Haitians, when I asked whether many had been killed. He said: “If Trujillo doesn’t do that, the Haitians take this. This place was already filled up with Haitians. After Trujillo repatriated them, he founded agrarian colonies. He repopulated.”

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After 1961, the Dominican Republic gradually adopted a new economic model. State support for agriculture and the peasant masses was reduced, and the nation registered far less self-sufficiency and an enormous migration of all social strata from most parts of the country, partly from the countryside to the cities and partly to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. In the early 1960s, Trujillo’s vast private properties were nationalized. After that the Dominican public sector continued to grow. It was only after 1978, or after Balaguer’s first twelve years in power and under a new president, that the country finally saw an end to state repression. In 1978, Dominicans had lived with surveillance and terror since 1930. All the same, the years under Trujillo continued to give form to the country. Not only was Balaguer able to regain the presidency in 1986 and thereafter keep it for another decade, until he was ninety years old. In addition, deep down in the state-system there was also a set of far more basic continuities. The political and social history from La Descubierta that I tell in the subsequent chapters demonstrates this in detail. Across the country local people and their leaders continued—as they had done under Trujillo—to produce the state with the aid of kinship, friendship and patronage. La Descubierta’s principal political leader under Trujillo was a local man, Jesús María Ramírez. Jesús María recruited people from the community to farm his own land, build the state’s roads and agrarian colonies, occupy public offices, and run the local branch of the dictator’s party, the Dominican Party. He used members of one of the largest extended families in La Descubierta as his agricultural workers. Most of these were landless; through his patronage Jesús María tied them to his own family and hence to the regime. He recruited members from most of the community’s large families to carry out public works, organizing and completing these works with the aid of the socially acknowledged heads of these families, men who enjoyed respect in the community. A few of these highly respected villagers were offered public positions in the community. By the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and other public employees had to be recruited from other parts of the country as well, but the inf luence of the large local families and their informal heads remained strong. The Balaguer state’s most important leader and representative in this part of the country was, as I have already said, Jesús María Ramírez’s niece. Jesús María’s and Miriam’s family, the Ramírez, had been, and continued to be, the most powerful in the community. Miriam and her local followers staffed the public sector in the same way as it had been staffed under Trujillo—with the aid of extended families and their informal heads, compadrazgo and patronage.

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The Research As I explained in the acknowledgments, this book is based on the whole of the contact I have had with Dominicans, and on the academic literature. Yet by far the most important part has been the fieldwork I carried out in the Dominican southwest. In anthropological fieldwork, the contexts in which the researcher finds himself or herself shape the day-to-day practices and the methodology of the research. For this reason, a brief description of the fieldwork I carried out in the southern Dominican borderlands seems appropriate. I lived in La Descubierta for almost thirteen months, from early August 1991 to late August 1992. After spending some four months in the village, I began to tape conversations between villagers and myself. Most of the talks put on tape were dialogues, and consisted of questions raised by me and answers given by the informant. All were conducted in Spanish. I continued to record conversations in this way until my departure from the community. Before I arrived in La Descubierta, I never imagined that I would carry out so many conversations on tape; five years earlier, I had carried out a year’s fieldwork in a Colombian rural area without taping a single talk. But in the Dominican Republic most people readily agreed to being recorded, except a few who were reluctant for very good reasons. With few exceptions, villagers welcomed me, and seemed to accept my explanation that I was there to acquire knowledge so as to represent Dominican history and Dominican practices to people elsewhere (in addition I possessed a letter of recommendation written by the director of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano—Museum of Dominican Man—in Santo Domingo, which I showed to La Descubierta’s mayor and his close collaborators when I visited them for the first time). In addition, I found that taping actually taught me a lot; it legitimated much anthropological curiosity and many questions, and meant access to rich material of oral history, ways of talking, and uses of local symbols. The subjects covered by the talks put on tape were varied. They included leadership and history; parties and the public sector; family and friendship; men and women; Dominicans and Haitians; healing and sorcery; and beliefs and rituals. Many informants had been, or were, leaders or active in local politics. Others were chosen because they seemed good observers (or local people with a social analyst’s distance from their own practices), or because they had particular knowledge (of kinship, the army, a public office, magic, etc.). I recorded conversations in people’s own households or in a place picked by the informant. Only with a couple of villagers were talks taped in the household where I lived, and then because they preferred it that way. I usually brought to the conversation

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two or three questions or topics that I wanted to discuss and the rest would be improvised. It was extremely informal. No appointments were made, and I often left without having put anything on tape (e.g., when the person to be interviewed wasn’t home, or he or she was there but had to carry out some activity, or other visitors to the household had to be attended to). With some, I adapted strongly to their habits. For example, an old villager used to sit in front of his house in the morning while people passed him in the street on their way to and from a nearby market. I used to visit him at that hour of the day; because of this, our recorded talks have a lot of greetings during and between questions and answers (such as “Good morning compadre!” and “How are you?”). Other informants were repeatedly interrupted by the sounds of a fighting cock. After returning home from a conversation, I would often think of topics of which I lacked understanding or knowledge. This made me return later to the same informant (or another one) for more conversation. Of great help was my landlady in the village, a schoolteacher with an interest in my work. I often discussed issues from my other talks with her. The assistance she gave was twofold. She helped me identify informants (by telling me about them, and sometimes introducing me to them). And she helped me realize where I simply hadn’t understood, and where I needed more knowledge. Certainly she was not the only one who helped me in this way. For example, the old villager mentioned above insisted that I should go and see his compadre who lived down the street, a man, he said, who had better knowledge than himself about what we were discussing. Other informants would refer to talks I had already had with other villagers. The recorded material was transcribed by a trusted secretary in Santo Domingo.12 Of course one must be careful not to view taped material as representing the “facts.” It contains statements that are just as contextually produced, positioned and dependent on interpretation as any kind of expression (Samuel 1971; Passerini 1979; Tonkin 1992). The advantage of the conversations on tape, however, is that they offer an opportunity to listen to, and to represent, details of native ways of formulating notions and accounting for practices.13 Anyway, the taped conversations represent only a small share of the talks I was involved in while I lived in La Descubierta. I talked far more with the villagers whose voices I recorded in “situations without taping” than in “situations with taping.” Apart from my landlady’s household, I “belonged” to two other households. While I rented a room in my landlady’s house, I had three daily meals with a family in another house. After some months, the parents in this family went abroad to work and I found another household for daily

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meals. During a period of three or four months I also used to eat almost daily in a fourth household. These households were located in different areas of the village; visiting them meant observation of, and discussions about, all sorts of matters. My days were also spent in many other activities: going to agricultural plots; hanging around with men who played dominoes, read a newspaper, or had a drink; visiting employees of the community’s public offices; sitting in the park; visiting households in different sectors of the village; taking a bath in an irrigation canal (bathing places were public arenas: people often took a bath three or more times a day, and so did I); going to a political meeting, a wake, or a bar or disco, or to La Descubierta’s arena for cockfights. Accompanied by peasants, traders, or others who regularly traveled between village and hill, I visited hamlets, households, and military posts in the hills. A couple of times I went on brief trips to Haiti. I traveled with local men to cockfights arranged in hamlets and villages near La Descubierta, and often went by public transport to different towns situated in the Dominican southwest, and between La Descubierta and Santo Domingo (where I visited university libraries and public offices, and was in contact with Dominican researchers and friends). In connection with all my visits and travels I conversed with people and thereafter took notes. Since 1961 there have been three large national political parties in the Dominican Republic: Balaguer’s Reformist Party (which after some years became the Christian Social Reformist Party, PRSC), and two competitors, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) and the Party for Dominican Liberation (PLD).14 A few days after I had settled down in La Descubierta, one of the local PLD activists, a man in his early forties, accompanied me on a walk through a considerable area of the outskirts of the village, the poor barrios or neighborhoods, introducing me to friends of his; these were members of a group of households scattered around the village, some of which (but far from all) included PLD supporters. After that I started to visit most of these households on my own, and was gradually introduced to kinsmen who belonged to other households, neighbors, friends and others who happened to be in the neighborhood. After some weeks, I reduced somewhat my contact with the PLD activist who had helped me so much in the beginning (without, however, bringing the relationship to an end). I felt it was necessary to do this to be able to secure more general trust in this political and social environment that for so long had been, and remained, dominated by prominent local followers of Balaguer and their clients. Little by little, I established fairly good relations with the local power holders, Miriam and the rest of the Ramírez. But we never developed close contact. However,

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my landlady and the wife in one of the households where I had daily meals had for a long time been among Miriam’s closest local friends. Both were passionate Balaguer supporters who spoke willingly and frankly about most sorts of issues. With their help and that of very many other Balagueristas in the community, I was able to achieve a many-faceted insight into local Reformist life. I also established, and preserved, a good relationship with La Descubierta’s PRD leader and PRD supporters. In sum, I was in close contact with a large number of people—with local leaders and supporters of all the three large national political parties; with traders, store owners, public employees, peasants, and workers; with old, middle-aged, and young; and with men and women. Sometimes in ethnographic fieldwork, as Liisa Malkki has said, “what is called for is not an ‘investigator’ at all, but an attentive listener. It may be precisely by giving up the scientific detective’s urge to know ‘everything’ that we gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us” (Malkki 1995:51). I agree. In deeply politicized contexts with a history of violence and repression, the fieldworker should be willing to leave some stones unturned—to be content not to know certain things. Just as important, he or she should implicitly convey a message about this to the community in which the data collection is carried out, by demonstrating that he or she knows when, and where, not to ask any questions (Feldman 1991:12). Like Malkki, I am convinced that an anthropologist in the field may often learn more or better if he or she places emphasis on the role as a listener, trying to listen systematically to what one’s informants choose to articulate as of central relevance and importance. * *

*

The next chapter first offers a brief history of the Dominican Republic, and then sketches some features of Dominican ideas about race and of the most important Dominican political parties. The chapter ends with an outline of the Dominican southwest and La Descubierta in the early 1990s. Thereafter I analyze La Descubierta’s power structure. In chapter 3, I map La Descubierta’s political and social history from the early twentieth century up till the time of the fieldwork. Chapters 4 and 5 seek to show how the political and social networks that produced the Balaguer state in this part of the country were constantly made and remade by means of everyday practices, exchanges and negotiations. Chapter 4 examines how the local Balaguer followers distributed the region’s public jobs, and the following chapter analyzes local election rigging.

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Chapter 6 explores the relationship between the construction of political practices and the making of forms of masculinity. The chapter shows how political practices and processes were provided with meaning in terms of culturally specific imageries of masculinity. Chapter 7 looks at the production of the nation, seeking to demonstrate that important cultural forms and practices in La Descubierta not only were compatible with Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s nation-building project, but also helped to consolidate and strengthen it. Chapter 8 looks at two sets of memories of the state’s use of violence. After first having analyzed how southern border residents in the 1990s remembered the 1937 massacre, I thereafter examine how they described Trujillo’s terror.

CHAPTER 2 ISLAND, STATE, AND COMMUNITY

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he building of the state and making of the nation in the southern Dominican borderlands in the twentieth century formed part of large-scale processes—processes that changed the conditions for most people in the two societies of Hispaniola. These processes were shaped by a long colonial history. Two features stand out in the history of the Hispanophone Caribbean islands—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo—between, say, the early sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century: their tiny production for export to Europe and their slow demographic development. In the Dominican case, this picture remained intact even during most of the nineteenth century. When large-scale cultivation of sugar for export started in the Dominican Republic from the mid-1870s, sugar production had already fully matured in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and had been intensely developed by the French and British in other parts of the Antilles from the mid-seventeenth century. Two kinds of agrarian systems defined Spanish Santo Domingo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries1—stock-raising based on extensive land use and agriculture of a slash-and-burn type on small plots. The cattle ranches, however, were not advanced economic units. What carried value was the cattle, not the land (Silié 1990:145). The work was done either by the owners themselves or by a few slaves (Deive 1980). The history of Hispaniola as a tale of a political and social borderland— first between France and Spain, thereafter between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—can be said to begin in the early seventeenth century, in 1605–1606. During those years, in a failed attempt to encourage exports from the port of Santo Domingo and suppress smuggling on the island’s northern coastline, Spain depopulated the northern and western areas of Hispaniola. Some decades later, those lands came to be populated by French migrants and adventurers—the famous buccaneers.

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Spain attempted to expel the French from the island. The result was a century-long conf lict during which the de facto French occupation first came to be tolerated, and then was finally acknowledged through two frontier treaties. Under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain ceded the western third of the island to France. But only in 1731 did a first frontier treaty determine the border between the two colonies— along two rivers, the El Masacre in the north and the Pedernales in the south. A second European treaty, the Treaty of Aranjuez, signed in Spain in 1777, specified what became the definitive boundary between France and Spain in Hispaniola (Moya Pons 1984b:55–157; Cassá 1987:93–127). The boundary continued to be respected by both sides until 1795. That year Spain ceded its colony in Hispaniola to France as a consequence of two remarkable events of Western history: the French and the Haitian revolutions begun in 1789 and 1791. Production of sugar under the French in the western sector of Hispaniola developed from the end of the seventeenth century. In the late eighteenth century, at a time when Spanish Santo Domingo was still scarcely populated, members of the planter aristocracy in Saint-Domingue managed great sources of profit (Lundahl 1983:68–70; Trouillot 1990:35–58). Before the revolution, Saint-Domingue included almost half a million black slaves who made up 85–90 percent of the colony’s population. In the 1780s, the planters of Saint-Domingue, predominantly white, were importing an average of 30,000 Africans annually (Moya Pons 1984a:238). The slave revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture between 1791 and 1804 not only created Haiti but also came to inf luence nearly all political life in Hispaniola thereafter. The eastern sector of the island was invaded by the Haitians in 1801 and 1805, and later occupied by Haiti for a period of twenty-two years, from 1822 to 1844. After 1844, the year of Dominican independence, Haitian troops invaded Dominican territory and were driven back several times up till the later 1850s. Most of these Haitian military actions must be understood in light of the isolation of the slave revolution and then the first independent black state in the Western hemisphere, opposed from all sides—by the European colonial powers, the United States, and the Vatican (Trouillot 1990:50–58). On the basis of the Treaty of Basle in 1795, which had made Spain cede its colony in Hispaniola to France, Napoleon launched a huge invasion force to reimpose metropolitan control over the entire island. It ultimately failed, owing partly to huge losses caused by yellow fever. Between 1782 and 1819, the population of Spanish Hispaniola decreased from 119,600 to 71,223 (Moya Pons 1986d:38–39; Marte 1984:53). From 1822 to 1844, the Haitians ruled the whole island.2 Their first public decision, once they held Santo Domingo, was to decree the

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abolition of slavery in the eastern sector, and to offer land to all the freemen. However, the number of slaves was relatively low. In the late eighteenth century, the Spanish part of the island had no more than 15,000 slaves (Moya Pons 1984a:246). The bulk of the eastern population of no more than 75,000 individuals consisted of free mulattos and poor whites. The Haitian land and agricultural policies in the eastern sector damaged the interests of not only the white landowners but also the church and the peasants (Moya Pons 1985:181–214; Turits 2003:45–47). When a coup was launched against the Haitians on February 27, 1844, the Haitian authorities in Santo Domingo found that they had no alternative but to leave. In March of the same year Haitian troops invaded the eastern part again in order to restore their control, but they were forced to withdraw after suffering heavy losses. New Haitian invasions followed, and were driven back, in 1845, 1848, and 1855 (Hoetink 1986:287–291). The fact that Dominicans created their republic in war with the Haitians makes them an exception to the main pattern of the Americas. Their war for independence was waged against an “imperialist” next-door neighbor—a people sharing the same island but conceived as different in terms of descent, language, and customs. For nearly a century after 1844, the question of demarcation of the political border between Haitians and Dominicans ref lected and expressed the overall state of affairs between the island’s two governments. The frontier question remained disputed and unresolved until 1936. That year the first mutually accepted Dominican-Haitian treaty covering the demarcation of the two countries’ common border was finally ratified, and the border has not been changed since then. The Dominican Republic before 1930 The Dominican scene during the first decades after independence in 1844 was dominated by two leaderships—those of the caudillos Pedro Santana (president 1844–1848, 1853–1856, and 1858–1865) and Buenaventura Báez (president 1849–1853, 1856–1858, 1868–1874, and 1876–1878). Both were cattle ranchers, from the east and south respectively. The threat from Haiti, which remained militarily and economically the stronger of the two countries throughout the nineteenth century, made the Dominican leaders engage in ever-greater efforts to place their territory under the protection of a European state or the United States. Finally, Santana succeeded in having the Dominican Republic reannexed to Spain. He brought Spanish colonialism back to the eastern sector of the island, and Spain governed eastern Hispaniola from 1861 to 1865. But the so-called

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War of Restoration started as a rebellion against Spanish rule in 1863 and after two years led to a new period of Dominican independence. From 1882 until his assassination in 1899 (with the exception of the years from 1884 to 1887), General Ulíses Heureaux was Dominican president. Heureaux—or Lilís, as he was popularly known and is remembered in countless anecdotes among Dominicans today—was of humble origins. Having served in the War of Restoration, he rose quickly, first in military rank, and thereafter in governmental positions in the north. His long rule has often been described as a dictatorship (Hoetink 1982:129–137). The development of a modern sugar industry during those years broadened the economic base of the country, and thereby widened the sources of credit for the state. For the first time, the Dominican government could use its access to resources in order to play off leaders in one region against those in another, as Heureaux did constantly. Between the regimes of Heureaux and Trujillo, the Dominican Republic was occupied and governed for a period of eight years by the United States. From Heureaux’s death to the beginning of the occupation in 1916, and from 1924 to the coup that brought Trujillo to power, Dominican politics was marked by struggles between followers of less dominant leaders than the two mentioned. The passionate rivalry between the factions of Juan Isidro Jiménez and Horacio Vásquez, that is, between Jimenistas and Horacistas, is legendary among Dominicans, and dominated the first three decades of the twentieth century. Heureaux’s regime entailed use of public funds in a constant mixture with the general’s personal finances. This ultimately produced a downward spiral of public indebtedness and chaos. In 1916, the United States, which had already taken control of Haiti in 1915, occupied the country. A decisive move in the process which led to the American occupation had been taken some years before: the Dominican-American Convention of 1907, which was a product of efforts both to formalize Dominican state finances and to secure revenue for repayment of overdue loans to international creditors, turned over customs collection to the United States. The treaty entailed the establishment of customs houses staffed by the United States along the Dominican-Haitian border. We may therefore say that 1907 marks the beginning of the physical presence of representatives of U.S. imperialism in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands.3 This was the first effective collection of customs at the DominicanHaitian border. The Dominican frontier including the area of La Descubierta effectively became a border as a result of the DominicanAmerican Convention (Clausner 1973:146–162; Derby 1994:489–490). Before 1937, La Descubierta was integrated into significant HaitianDominican trade. Some Dominicans living in La Descubierta in the

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1920s, for instance, traveled regularly to markets in Haiti in order to sell cattle. This trade came to be controlled and subjected to duties by the American customs houses along the border. The U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic opened the way to power for Trujillo. A key to understanding the longevity and stability of Trujillo’s thirty-one-year rule lies in the general disarmament imposed by the U.S. Marines between 1916 and 1924 (Moya Pons 1990:509).4 That disarmament undermined the power of the various regional leaders of the country, and made possible the establishment of a professional national police force obedient only to the central government—a police force that developed into the National Army, with Trujillo as commander in chief, in 1927, and thereafter into his main source of power when he ruled the country (Franks 1995:174–175; Roorda 1998a:271, 276–283). Between the mid-1870s and 1930, sugar production in the Dominican Republic expanded at a dizzying pace. The final decades of the nineteenth century saw an increase in international trade, the centers of industrial production characteristically demanding growing amounts of tropical commodities, such as sugar (Mintz 1985:72–73). The Dominican Republic had natural conditions that were propitious to sugar. Land was cheap, and vast virgin areas could still be found because of the low population density and the lack of agriculture. The only major challenge posed by large-scale sugar cultivation under such conditions was, of course, access to the necessary labor.5 The Dominican southeast became transformed into the main sugar region of the country. In order to keep costs down, the producers began large-scale importation of foreign, contracted workers. These laborers, called cocolos by Dominicans, came from the Lesser Antilles, and most of them returned to their home countries at the end of the harvest (Bryan 1985; Baud 1992:308–310). This migration was to continue throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, after which Haitian immigration—begun during the U.S. occupation of the whole island— was to predominate and completely displace the cane workers from the Lesser Antilles. This pattern has survived to the present day when recourse to Haitian labor seems indispensable for the Dominican sugar harvest (Lundahl 1983:117–150; Moya Pons 1986a; Martínez 1995, 1999). The use of Haitian immigrants instead of workers from the Lesser Antilles helped the sugar industry keep its costs down and further reduce them. After a sugar boom associated with the First World War, the industry entered a crisis in the 1920s, and new areas of enterprise were not established. Instead, a pattern of sugar-cane enclaves within the Dominican territory developed, “a pattern of enclaves . . . with characteristics that have been prolonged for decades, virtually unaltered” (del Castillo 1985:220).6

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Between 1875 and 1899, no fewer than thirty new towns—of a total of thirty-eight for the whole century—“were founded or elevated” (Hoetink 1970:102). Growth was considerable in many areas of the south, particularly in the southeast. It was also significant in the Cibao region of the north. Large-scale cultivation of cane also had implications for the people inhabiting the parts of the country in which it remained absent. This was particularly so in the western areas. The emergence of large-scale production of sugar in the east led to the marginalization and ultimately the underdevelopment of the western region (Baud 1987:148). Deprived of state support (oriented toward the cane-producing areas) and drained of a part of its population (migrating to the new economic centers), the western provinces were left with the Haitian market as their main recourse. Until 1937, these areas continued to supply the DominicanHaitian trade begun in colonial times (Baud 1993a:9–21; Derby 1994:496–501). In the first four decades of the twentieth century, the people of La Descubierta and the other parts of the Dominican Republic’s western region were more familiar with the Haitian capital, Port-auPrince, than with Santo Domingo, the capital of their own country (Garrido 1970:17; Baud 1993b:41; Ramírez 2000:13–62). The Dominican Republic after 1930 Rafael Trujillo was born in 1891, a mulatto from a lower-class family in San Cristóbal, a southern town. He joined the new police force created by the Americans. He rose rapidly within the force, and “used his growing power as a local commander to make a fortune.” (Moya Pons 1990:511) When he became commander in chief in 1927, he was already both rich and powerful.7 As president he became much more so. Trujillo employed his control of the state to create an enormous private empire. While sugar prices were low in the 1930s, by the end of the Second World War the profits made by the country’s sugar producers were enormous. Soon Trujillo entered the industry (Moya Pons 1990:515; Turits 2003: 232–263). By 1961, the only mills that he had not purchased were the Casa Vicini and Central Romana mills. That situation continued to define the Dominican sugar industry when I lived in La Descubierta. In 1966, a Dominican state sugar consortium, the Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA) was created to run Trujillo’s nationalized plantations and mills. As proprietor of around 60 percent of production after Trujillo’s death, the CEA was by far the most important sugar-producing agency in the country. The other mills were privately controlled. After Trujillo’s assassination his industrial, commercial and agricultural holdings were

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converted into state property. This nationalization turned the Dominican public sector into an enormous one, and one of the largest publicenterprise sectors in Latin America (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:69; Betances 1995:113–133). Under Trujillo the country’s agricultural production and selfsufficiency increased substantially (Turits 2003:84). As Turits (2003) has amply documented, the dictatorship efficiently used agrarian reform as a means of both transforming peasant practices and shoring up political stability. Under the dictatorship the country also experienced industrial growth. During the period from 1938 to 1960 “the number of manufacturing establishments in the Dominican Republic almost doubled; capital investment multiplied nine times; . . . expenditure on fuel and lubricants went up twenty-two times . . . . And these figures do not include the massive investments made by Trujillo in the sugar industry” (Moya Pons 1990:514–515; see also Cassá 1982). The state established a personality cult focused on the all-encompassing figure of El Jefe, or The Chief. In the 1950s, the dictator was officially referred to as His Excellency, the Generalísimo, Honorable President of the Republic, Benefactor of the Nation, and Restorer of the Financial Independence of the Country. Trujillo accepted no opposition. His repression embraced a system of military surveillance and control of all citizens, detention without trial, prisons that used torture, and liquidation. His political party was the Partido Dominicano, founded in 1932. It was the country’s sole political party. Membership was virtually mandatory to avoid harassment by the authorities (Roorda 1998b:93). Trujillo also imposed a 10 percent deduction from the salaries of the country’s public employees that went to his political party (Moya Pons 1998:360). Thousands of prisoners were sent to the regime’s penal colonies established and run by the military. These were defined by brutality and terror and involved dreadful instances of forced labor for the state (Turits 2003:193). Trujillo’s general strategy was not one of elimination of opposition by assassination. Still, hundreds of Dominicans were liquidated by the regime during those thirty-one years. A source of information on Trujillo’s rule is The Era of Trujillo, written by Jesús de Galíndez, a Spanish exile from the civil war, who taught international law in Santo Domingo and later was abducted from New York City and murdered on Trujillo’s orders for having written this book.8 Galíndez wrote that “The Trujillo dictatorship is not as bloody as the exiles assert it is. There is no doubt about the cases of assassinations. However, Trujillo’s style is characterized more by another type of domination.” (Galíndez 1958:129) Far more efficient was the spread of fear. But in 1946, a journalist listed 134 victims of political

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liquidations by Trujillo’s rule (Hicks 1946:228–230). A greater number must have died from diseases and abuse in the state’s prisons and penal colonies (Turits 2003:269).9 By the 1930s, Haitian peasants had been settling for more than a century on agricultural lands abandoned by people of the eastern sector during the nineteenth-century wars. After the first mutually accepted Dominican-Haitian treaty had been negotiated, tens of thousands of Haitian peasants continued to live on Dominican lands, both in the south and in the north. Others worked in the sugar industry, or earned a living as traders and servants in the interior of the country. By the mid-1930s, around 200,000 Haitians dwelt in the Dominican Republic’s border areas and elsewhere in the country (Fiehrer 1990:11). Haitian currency was in normal use in the Dominican north, and in the south it circulated as far as Azua. This Haitian presence was “anathema to Trujillo” (Moya Pons 1990:517). In 1936, he and the Haitian president Stenio Vincent signed the treaty establishing the official border between the two republics, and the latter agreed to stem what, in Dominican eyes, amounted to a tide of illegal migration. However, on October 4, 1937, Trujillo initiated a massacre in the Dominican borderlands (Cuello 1985; Vega 1995). Thousands of Haitian peasants were slaughtered with guns and machetes in border areas by the military, and all Haitians were expelled from the country except for those working on the sugar plantations owned by foreigners, who protected their source of cheap labor. There is considerable uncertainty about the number of Haitians killed in the massacre. Estimates range from 5,000 to 25,000 (Vega 1995: 341–353; Turits 1997:486). After the slaughter the border was closed. In 1941, the state launched a major Dominicanization program in the border provinces in order to strengthen relations with the rest of the country. The government established military posts and agricultural settlements along the border, and constructed roads, villages, schools, and irrigation canals. Within a few years, the countryside that had formerly been inhabited by Haitians was repopulated by Dominicans. Many were granted lands by the state in the new agricultural settlements (Turits 1997:427–577).10 Through education and trade, the population became more solidly integrated into the rest of the country. The state also embarked on a heavy propaganda campaign against the Haitians (Mateo 1993:113–116, 136–147). Trujillo firmly established the state in the western region. But he did this in a particular manner. After the massacre, the border was constructed as a “buffer” against Haiti, and at the same time as a region heavily dependent on state-sponsored patronage sanctioned in the capital. After 1961, this situation remained almost unaltered.

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After Trujillo was assassinated, relatively free elections followed in 1962, the first of their kind since 1924. Those elections resulted in an overwhelming victory for Juan Bosch. He was the candidate and leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), which he founded in Cuba in 1939. Although Bosch’s political ideas were far more “reformist” than “revolutionary,” he was soon labeled Communist (by members of the armed forces, by businessmen, and by industrialists), and after only seven months his government was overthrown by a military coup. The Triumvirate regime that followed stayed in power with the support of the Trujilloist generals in the army and the United States. In April 1965, civil war broke out in the capital area between pro-Bosch and anti-Bosch forces. Peace, or a second Pax Americana, was then imposed, when President Johnson on April 28, 1965 ordered 42,000 U.S. Marines to Santo Domingo in order to stop Bosch and prevent “a second Cuba in America.” This was the prelude to the era of Balaguer. Born in a village in the Cibao, Balaguer was raised in modest circumstances. Like Bosch, he was an intellectual and prolific author. A lawyer by profession, he had studied at the University of Santo Domingo and at the Sorbonne. Before 1960, Balaguer occupied the positions of secretary and minister under Trujillo, and ambassador to Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras. After a brief exile in New York following Trujillo’s death, Balaguer founded the Reformist Party (PR) in 1964 and gained the support of army officers. His first twelve years in power (1966–1978) were violently repressive. The elections in 1966 were organized in an atmosphere of extended civil war. With the American troops in the country, and while terrorist campaigns against Bosch’s PRD killed hundreds of the party’s activists and Bosch himself feared for his life, Balaguer won with 57 percent of the vote to Bosch’s 39 percent. The country suffered for some eight years under Balaguer’s state-sponsored terror. More than 4,000 Dominicans lost their lives in terrorist acts between 1966 and 1974 (Moya Pons 1990:528). Yet, Balaguer also enjoyed ample support in various sectors of society. He used the enormous public sector for patronage politics. Across the country, public jobs were given almost exclusively to members of the president’s own party. After 1966, the number of employees in the public sector increased steadily. Three circumstances served to make this everexpanding public sector during the first Balaguer administration possible. In the first years after 1966, the Dominican state received hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance from the United States. This, on a per capita basis, made the country the largest recipient of U.S. aid in Latin America. The aid was coupled with a favorable U.S. sugar

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quota (Moya Pons 1990:531; Betances 1995:120, 123). Second, during a good part of the 1970s, the Dominican economy experienced considerable growth. While world prices of sugar were high, foreign oil costs were manageable. Balaguer’s government attracted foreign investors, and opened the country to tourists (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:49–50, 137–138).11 Third, incredibly, between 1966 and 1978 public employees received no pay increases (Kearney 1986:151). An almost complete turnaround came in the period from 1977 to 1981.12 In 1977, petroleum costs absorbed 60 percent of sugar export earnings, while the figure had increased to 133 percent in 1982 (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:138–139). By the 1978 election, clear signs of an end to the economic boom were already present. In addition, leaders of the opposition had finally managed to put aside their differences and shape a viable coalition. Their presidential candidate was Antonio Guzmán, a PRD leader, whose main promise was to get rid of the repression and establish democracy. The year 1978 gives us the first example of a peaceful transfer of power based on elections in the nation’s history.13 Guzmán’s party, the PRD, thereafter remained in power for eight years. Another PRD leader, Salvador Jorge Blanco, was elected president for the period from 1982 to 1986. Guzmán put an end to the repression (Hartlyn 1998:146–149). Through personnel changes, he dismantled “the Trujilloist military machine that Balaguer himself had restructured in 1966 and kept in power since then” (Moya Pons 1990:534). After Balaguer’s return to power in 1986, the daily military repression that had characterized his first twelve years was not resumed. Yet this remarkable victory was achieved at a certain price. In the words of a La Descubierta villager, “the PRD democratized corruption.” The Dominican military officer corps won a reputation as one of the most blatant participants in the use of public office for personal gain (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:97). With the new rise in oil prices from the late 1970s, and the drop in the prices of export products, the state soon faced acute crisis; “by 1981 it was already evident that the entire public sector was on the edge of bankruptcy” (Moya Pons 1990:537). Negotiations on the Dominican debt problem with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral creditors followed. However, in spite of the crisis and the recommendations of the IMF, the PRD governments continued to expand the number of public employees while they paid lip service to the need for reduction. The two PRD governments used the state to employ their own activists, and they did so on a mounting scale. Guzmán increased the number of people employed in the public sector by some 50 to 60 percent. Blanco expanded the number by another 40 percent. Whereas there had been

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around 120,000 employees when Balaguer left office in 1978, there were, by 1985, some 250,000 (Black 1986:141). While it is true that most of these employees were only paid meager salaries, the pattern itself, the ever-expanding number of public employees, has to be understood as a product of the ways in which politics works in most communities of the country—in communities such as La Descubierta. Popular pressure on local, regional, and national politicians to get a public job—as a reward for the family’s votes—is wholly integral to today’s Dominican power struggles. Balaguer’s electoral victory in 1986 may seem hard to understand, at least at first sight. It meant his return to the presidency for the fifth time in twenty-five years, and in 1986 he was eighty years old. When he had given up power in 1978, it had been in the midst of great discredit, since President Carter had forced him to transfer power after scandalous election rigging, and glaucoma had already caused the complete loss of his vision. Nevertheless, there are several circumstances that help explain the outcome of the 1986 election. The PRD had been characterized by factionalism since the early 1970s and was profoundly disunited. In addition, PRD rule overlapped with an escalating economic crisis, a recession that culminated in severely repressed riots in Santo Domingo in April 1984, and the IMF agreement of January 1985. Many Dominicans must have compared all this with the economic “miracle” of the 1970s, associated with the rule of Balaguer. One of Balaguer’s most effective weapons was his strong identification with the nation as defined by powerful Dominican patriotic discourses. In the mid-1980s, José Francisco Peña Gómez, a black Dominican perceived by many of his countrymen not as a real Dominican but as “a Haitian,” battled to win the leadership of the PRD. Peña Gómez’s growing power, and the lack of political stability in Haiti after the fall of its hated dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, again opened the field for reformulation of racist and nationalist ideas that the Trujillo and Balaguer regimes had been so skilled in nurturing and exploiting. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw an anti-Haitian campaign against Peña Gómez that was described by Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons as “the worst display of racism that we have seen since the Haitian-Dominican wars” (quoted in Sagás 2000:110). Race and Nation Many Dominican intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seemed almost obsessed with the issues of race and national identity. Dominicans, faced with the inescapable fact that their republic shares

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the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, have built barriers of prejudice and racism to be able to distance themselves both from their own African roots and from their “barbarian,” dark-skinned neighbors. The country has a history of constructing its national identity in relation to Haiti. In his Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic, Ernesto Sagás sums it up as follows: There is an intimate link between race, culture and politics in the Caribbean, particularly in the former colonies of Spain . . . The case of antihaitianismo in the Dominican Republic is particularly poignant, as it has added an intraisland dimension to these Hispanophile dominant ideologies . . . Not only does this hegemonic ideology affect Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, but it has also traditionally been employed as an ideological weapon to subdue the black and mulatto Dominican lower classes and maintain their political quiescence. (Sagás 2000:ix)

Dominican society is not color-blind or free of racial intolerance. Much of this racism is directed toward Haiti, a state where blacks make up the vast majority of the population: “Haiti and things ‘Haitian’ are scorned and rejected by Dominican society” (Sagás 2000:4). Negrophobia and antiHaitianism were, and continue to be, widespread among Dominicans (Derby 1994; Martínez 1997; Torres-Saillant 1998a, 1998b; Sagás 2000; Howard 2001). Some authors, in particular Yunén (1985) and Baud (1996; 2002), have claimed that anti-Haitianism has not been generalized in Dominican society—that it has mainly been a product fashioned from above by elites, and has not typically had a large following in the popular sectors. I disagree with these views. In La Descubierta, most people expressed a set of anti-Haitian views. The Haitians’ invasions of the eastern side in the nineteenth century have often been held as the starting point of Dominican Negrophobia and racism. However, the pattern has a much longer history, going back to the colonial era (Torres-Saillant 1998a; Sagás 2000). Dominicans discriminate against black fellow-citizens and Haitians on the basis of a conf lation of race and nation, raza and nación. In popular Dominican discourse, the notion of “race” means nation or people, and is used to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians (Derby 1994:490). Dominican discourse equates a racial distinction with the political and cultural boundary that divides the island; Dominicans conf late race and nation (Gonzalez 1973:112; Fennema and Loewenthal 1987). A range of boundary markers is used by Dominicans to distinguish themselves from the Haitians. Important markers are color, language and, at least among peasants and poor villagers, ways of dressing. Color may easily be misinterpreted by the researcher as a more significant marker

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than it actually is (which of course is not to say that it does not operate as a very important criterion to people): “Although the European imagination makes a fetish of skin color, measuring it in minute degrees of tonality as the primary index of racial alterity, Dominicans and Haitians define their difference from one another through a wide range of bodily practices.” (Derby 1994:521) These practices cover features related to walking, sitting, sleeping, eating, and procreating.14 The production of ideas about white superiority went hand in hand with the creation of notions of the Dominican masses’ mixture. One part of Dominican state formation was the construction of particular ideas about the people’s mestizaje or mixture. Dominicans produced a paradoxical hegemonic truth, a truth that states that the majority of the Dominican masses are indios, but indios understood as mestizos—people of mixed heritage. The Trujillo regime consolidated this truth (Cassá 1976:75). Today a majority of the Dominican masses classify themselves, and are classified by others, as indios, that is, as people of a light color—indio—and the product of a past essentially characterized by mixing of light-skinned native Indians’ blood with the blood of white Spaniards. In the 1930s, the Trujillo state adopted the category indio as a color classification for the registration of color in the official identity card, a card that all citizens had to carry (Incháustegui Cabral 1976:6; Sagás 2000:35, 67, 130–131). Skin color was classified in the following manner when I carried out fieldwork in La Descubierta: the majority of the population were either trigueños (“brownish-goldens”) or indios (indicating the span from trigueño to blanco or “white”). Indio, and this is important, is a wide category, one open to many. This is ref lected in the fact that the indio category is subdivided, so that people commonly employ indio oscuro (“dark indio”) and indio claro (“light indio”) for purposes of classification on the basis of skin color. Some people were completely dark-skinned. By an official euphemism they were classified as morenos (“browns”), but people often spoke pejoratively of them as negros or prietos (“blacks”) or simply as haitianos (“Haitians”).15 The use of the term indio has made it possible to continue to shape ideas about essential differences between the Haitians, seen as blacks, and Dominicans seen as whites and light-skinned mestizos or indios (Fennema and Loewenthal 1987:28–30, 61–65; Vega 1990:52–53; Fennema 1998:211). But this Dominican production of mestizaje has also helped maintain interest among Dominican society in its white, Hispanic roots. Since mestizaje was formulated as a mixture of categories (or between native and Spanish ancestors), it necessarily presupposed ideas about the existence of “pure” categories, as an implicit guarantee of its own meaning. Ideas about difference were built into the message of mestizaje. The difference was viewed in hierarchical terms. Even when producing true

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Dominicanness in terms of mixture, Dominicans conveyed to each other that the most powerful forces that created their society had been white, Hispanic, and Catholic. Parties and Elections In La Descubierta, the political participation among villagers and peasants was striking. The most obvious background cause of this was the politicization of the huge public sector’s jobs and services. Across the country, locals struggled actively in the election battles between the large parties—hoping at least to be paid a minimum salary for a job in the public sector when or if their side took home a four-year victory. As I have previously indicated, since 1961 there have been three large national parties: the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), the Reformist Party (which after twenty-two years became the Christian Social Reformist Party, PRSC), and the Party for Dominican Liberation (PLD).16 The PRD, founded by Bosch as early as 1939, became during the 1970s and 1980s a party torn asunder by factionalism. Bosch himself left the party in 1973 in the midst of a deep ideological and personal division between his group of younger party leaders and that of more pragmatic, established leaders, then headed by the party’s general secretary José Francisco Peña Gómez. Without Bosch’s caudilloist authority, the PRD relied on several national leaders—Guzmán, Blanco, and Jacobo Majluta—who developed intransigent mutual antagonism (del Castillo 1981:83). The rivalry reached a climax in the latter half of the 1980s. Peña Gómez—a lawyer and fiery orator—was the second figure in the party hierarchy and popular leadership before Bosch left the PRD. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Peña Gómez remained the party’s general secretary and maintained considerable inf luence among the Dominican masses. With Guzmán dead and Blanco discredited and committed to seeking only one term, he formed his own movement, the Bloque Institucional, in order to gain the party leadership and nomination as candidate for the presidency. He came to the nominating convention in 1985 confident that he had the necessary votes to be declared the candidate of his party. However, in a confused meeting in which one delegate was shot and killed, the forces of Majluta prevailed over Peña Gómez. Peña Gómez and his supporters alleged massive fraud. Later the rivalry continued. After Majluta’s defeat by Balaguer in 1986, Peña Gómez was nominated for the 1990 election, and this divided the party. Majluta and his followers founded a new party, called the Independent Revolutionary Party (PRI), shortly before the election and contested offices throughout the country.

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Peña Gómez’s popular leadership takes us back to the time after Trujillo’s death. His power had been shaped already in those turbulent and violent times.17 During the periods when Bosch was in exile (1963–1965 and 1966–1970) the young Peña Gómez built his own reputation as the supreme leader of the PRD in the country. Like Bosch, he used daily radio talks to establish contact with the party and people throughout the nation. His experience was vast. He had studied in Paris, and had served as vice president of the Socialist International and as president of the Latin American affiliate of the same organization. While I carried out fieldwork, his message was populist: essentially, help for the poor, and reforms based on his access to important European and Latin American friends through his personal networks. Peña Gómez—and he alone—at that time had a leadership which seemed as firmly rooted as those of Balaguer and Bosch. In every village of the country the people worked for, and without hesitation followed, one of these three heroes. But Peña Gómez faced a difficult problem. Balaguer and Bosch were light-skinned, while he was black. Peña Gómez in fact embodied both the 1937 Haitian massacre and Dominican intolerance. At the time Trujillo issued the massacre order in 1937, Peña Gómez was a few months old and his parents disappeared in the killing; his last names were those of his parents of adoption. All his life he lived in the Dominican Republic, but the issue of his “Haitian origins” caused concern not only among Balagueristas but also in the ranks of his own party. The Balagueristas and many others denied him Dominicanness by calling him “a Haitian.” Some even accused him of working with plans for an extension of Haitian territory, or integration of the two nations (Sagás 2000:106–115, 137–140). The Christian Social Reformist Party (PRSC) received its name in 1984 when the Reformist Party and the Christian Social Revolutionary Party (founded in 1962) merged on the basis of Balaguer’s candidacy. Balaguer’s party was a highly personalistic organization held together only by the authority of Balaguer himself. This was, for example, made strikingly clear in 1991 when distinguished Reformists founded a movement named “Whatever Balaguer Says” (Lo que Diga Balaguer) within the party: although they created the movement in order to “awake the sleeping Reformist colossus” before 1994, their sole representation of solidarity was the obligation of all Reformists to submit themselves to Balaguer’s will.18 The slogan “Whatever Balaguer Says” went into the Reformist discourses in the village where I lived as well. Juan Bosch’s Party for Dominican Liberation, the third of the large parties at the time when I carried out fieldwork, was an unusual one. In that party, in the 1980s and the early 1990s, we see a blend of his strongly

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personalized power with ideological socialization and Leninist-inspired discipline. The party was founded in 1973 by Bosch and his followers after he broke with his first party. That break was not only motivated by personal incompatibility but was also ideological; Bosch was then politically more radical than his party. His bitter experience in the 1960s and the violence under Balaguer had convinced him that a new, more centralized and militant, party model was necessary. This new model emphasized ideological cohesion and more centralized decision-making. Having first tried to reform the PRD, he then decided to use his model to develop a completely new party (del Castillo 1981:63–67). Bosch’s reputation was as one of his country’s most brilliant intellectuals. In his literary production there are innovative novels and sociological studies. His approach to politics was anchored in analyses that formed the Boschista doctrine: his personally worked out, class-based and Marxist-inspired, interpretation of Caribbean history. The doctrine is well condensed in his book Composición Social Dominicana (Dominican Social Composition) published in 1970, which went into its sixteenth edition in 1988. While I carried out fieldwork, all who joined the PLD were made members of a base committee based on participation in locally headed “study circles” (círculos de estudio), which discussed adapted texts by Bosch, particularly from the above-mentioned work. Bosch’s followers—for example, in La Descubierta—typically referred to him without his name but simply as “the professor” (el profesor). While the PLD remained small during the 1970s and early 1980s, its growth from 1982 to 1990 was remarkable. In 1986 Bosch captured almost 20 percent of the votes and doubled thereby his performance in the 1982 election. In 1990 the PLD received more votes than the Reformists. Balaguer only won the presidency with the votes of tiny allied parties. But Bosch and many more claimed that Balaguer stole the victory by fraud.19 The PLD political program was one of radical reform to validate state legitimacy and create social justice. In Bosch’s view, Balaguer never possessed legitimate power, and therefore the Dominican Republic was not a democracy but a Balaguerocracia. However, the PLD’s militants criticized the two other parties (PRSC and PRD) equally. They said consistently that the PRD was just as bad as Balaguer’s party because it was equally lacking in morality and seriousness and equally compromised; their view referred to the PRD’s eight years in power from 1978 to 1986. A characteristic of Dominican politics has been accusations of election rigging; they were wholly integral to the election process up to 1996. While in Balaguer’s twelve years barely 50 percent of the electorate participated in what were obviously opposition-less contests

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(the PRD abstained in 1970 and 1974, charging the regime with both repression and fraud), the 1978 elections marked a turning point, and over 70 percent voted: Moreover, early returns showed Guzmán with a sizable lead of 180,000 votes over Balaguer. It was at this juncture that conservative interests in support of President Balaguer (and perhaps Balaguer himself ) entered directly into the electoral process. At 4:00 a.m. [on May 17, 1978], military units entered the Central Electoral Headquarters in Santo Domingo and acting on “superior orders” confiscated the ballot boxes from the crucial National District (where Guzmán’s major support could be found) and hauled them off to an undetermined site. The theft of the ballot boxes sent shock waves of disbelief through the Dominican Republic and indeed throughout Europe and Latin America. (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:52–53)

A “neutral” solution came from President Carter and the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo, who notified Balaguer that the United States was displeased with the raid on the election headquarters and that the Dominican government should be mindful of the large economic assistance that came from Washington (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:53). La Descubierta Compared with the agriculturally fertile Cibao region, or with the eastern and northern areas of sugar mills and advanced tourism, the southwest is far less densely populated, has a poorer infrastructure, and is less productive, commercial, and urbanized. Away from the coast, this region comprises remote hilly regions, lakes, and valley plains just above and below sea level, with silent, captivating, and sometimes breathtaking beauty. However, it is a harsh environment, the climate dry, and the hottest in the Republic. Irregular rainfall and droughts, as well as the wars of the nineteenth century, have typified a long history of poverty. The southwest, covering around one-third of the national territory, consists of seven provinces: Elías Piña, San Juan and Azua (making up the subregion of El Valle de San Juan); and Barahona, Bahoruco, Independencia and Pedernales (the subregion of Enriquillo). While the average southwestern population density is low compared to the national figure (58 and 148 persons per square kilometer respectively), the three border provinces—Elías Piña, Independencia and Pedernales—have the lowest density.20 In the southwest, the population living in the countryside decreased from 76 to 54 percent between 1960 and 1990. The urban growth was mainly registered in the coastal towns of Azua and Barahona, and in San Juan and Las Matas de Farfán. Apart from such

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internal migration from rural areas to villages and towns, the southwest has long registered heavy out-migration to Santo Domingo and, more recently, abroad. Agriculture and ranching continue to form the basis of the region’s productive life. Important products in the subregion of Enriquillo are sugar (produced by the Barahona mill), coffee, and plantains. In the somewhat more yielding environment of El Valle, principal products are rice, beans, and tomatoes. The village of La Descubierta is the center of a municipio of (at the time of the fieldwork) around 8,000 inhabitants. The municipio, which bears the same name, has a border with Haiti. Most of the 8,000 reside in the urban center, and many of those who live and work in the small rural sections also have a house in the village. Apart from low population density, poorer infrastructure and (largely as a consequence of the infrastructure) limited production and commercialization compared to other areas of the country, the border provinces have two features in common:21 strong dependence on state patronage, and a number of military posts signaling these areas’ subordination to the central power. The relatively limited commercial life and the relative absence of industries and tourism mean that competition for state aid and employment seems today particularly tough in the border provinces. This is so because many ordinary people depend considerably on the state for employment and livelihood strategies. In addition, the border implies, of course, a permanent military presence. In La Descubierta, there are a number of military posts (one of which lies in the lowland urban center and the others in the hills, close to the demarcation line) and one detachment (in the hills). These forces come under a camp situated by the town of Neyba, the capital of the neighboring province of Bahoruco. Independencia, the province of which La Descubierta is a part, also contains a military camp on the outskirts of its capital. Jimaní, the capital, lies near the demarcation line, and it is the military’s responsibility to patrol the provincial territory to prevent smuggling and illegal immigration. Jimaní is a village not much greater than La Descubierta that, in spite of the lack of agricultural potential and small population, was founded and given its administrative status by Trujillo as part of the Dominicanization program. The main sources of employment in this outlying center have been the provincial government, the Customs and the military. The province of Independencia also includes Duvergé and Postrer Río. The latter is a rustic village that until recently formed an administrative part of La Descubierta, but has now achieved the status of an independent municipio. Duvergé was founded during Spanish rule and is the largest community in the province, its urban center containing more than twice as many inhabitants than that of La Descubierta.

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Political contact between Duvergé and La Descubierta—particularly between their leaders—is important. However, geography and transport systems make the two communities separate and fairly distant social entities. Travel to the capital is easy. The road in the province was once bad and made travel time-consuming, but it was recently improved. Several privately owned minibuses pass daily to and from Santo Domingo.22 Some villagers would say that La Descubierta in the early 1990s looked more like a field (campo) than a village (pueblo), and its people most often lived in huts (ranchos) instead of houses (casas). Animals such as goats and pigs wandered freely in all places. Hanging around in the centrally located park, men watched women and children from the whole village passing by with cans for fetching water for consumption. The aqueduct, which for a time served some of the houses, needed repair, as did the Communal House that was originally built by Trujillo at the end of the 1930s for the activities of the Dominican Party, the dictator’s party. All streets, except for the road to Santo Domingo that passed the park and one central street, were dusty and unpaved. In the outer, heavily populated barrios of the village there often existed neither streets nor electricity. These were clusters of huts of clay with palm-leaf roofs, with some wooden or cement houses with sheet metal roofs to break the monotony. Villagers said that the simple wooden church, built in the Era of Trujillo, fell into decay in the 1960s and 1970s. For a number of years until 1982, it was not used for celebrating mass but for housing animals. La Descubierta had never had a permanent priest, but had been irregularly visited by church representatives. During the time I spent in the village, a priest came weekly from the provincial capital; those present at mass were mainly a few women. La Descubierta was an agricultural village. But because of low productivity, most people looked for alternatives. In the early 1990s, the main ones were public employment and migration. In La Descubierta, there were more than 300 public-sector jobs, the vast majority concentrated in the urban nucleus. Less than forty were paid for by the municipality, while the rest were state jobs in education, health, and other areas. Since the community contained a secondary school and several primary and rural schools, there were relatively many teachers. But the largest group of employees was found in the hospital. In addition to the doctors (usually only pasantes who came to practice for a brief period to complete their education), there were more than eighty in other positions. The other state employees worked in the post office, the telecommunication office, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Agricultural Bank, the Forestry office (run by the military), the National Park office, the municipal Court of Justice, the municipal Electoral Board (including, from 1992, the Registry and Personal Identity offices), the Police, and the Military.

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Yet all employees were paid only miserable wages. While a doctor was paid about 2,000 pesos monthly, the vast majority of employees, as well as soldiers and policemen, earned less than 800 (some less than 500), clearly insufficient to sustain a living anywhere in the country.23 Meanwhile the productivity of the employees in La Descubierta was nearly nonexistent. Most depended on other activities, and attended to their agriculture and household duties during working hours. The school day in primary school was reduced by two or three hours. In the secondary school, students were offered only a couple of hours of classes daily. The employees of the Town Hall, the post office, and other offices (even the hospital) spent most of their time at work sitting in the shadow outside the buildings, chatting, or watching. A few never showed up. Asked for an explanation, people said that they had nothing to work with and that the low pay could not justify much work anyway. Competence in terms of education was not the decisive criterion of employment. Persons with little education staffed the Court and offices, and were teachers and nurses, while a number of educated people and professionals killed time in the village without being given jobs. Central was political belonging and loyalty. Color was not of much relevance in the context of employment; an eighty-year-old black man held a job as the village’s officer for water supplies; his family was large and a son, only known as negro, had for many years been head of one of the state offices.24 The majority in La Descubierta were involved in agriculture, either as small landholders or as sharecroppers and day laborers. Ecologically, the lands of the community belong to two different zones: one of f lat, canal-irrigated lowlands near the village, and the other of non-irrigated, often remote, steep hills. The latter were mostly accessible only on foot or muleback, although some stretches of road existed. They produced coffee, beans, or sorghum for sale, and bananas, maize, vegetables, oranges, and lemons largely for consumption. People also used the hills for raising cattle, as well as goats, mules and horses. Some lived permanently in hamlets or on isolated farms in the hills, but migration between hill and village was a predominant pattern. Hill people frequently had a house in the urban center, to which they sent children for schooling and which they used to go to market and run errands, while many of those living in the village spent weekdays in a hill hut doing farm work and returned to their home at weekends. The lands near the village—which, unlike the hills, appear to have good agricultural potential 25 —were largely in the hands of one family. The Ramírez had exercised dynastic dominance over La Descubierta since the 1920s, and owned the greater part of the lowlands and were also buying in the hills. But their production was backward and limited.

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They raised cattle in a simple manner for sale of meat, milk, and cheese, and large sections of their lands in fact lay fallow. Previously the Ramírez ran a small factory, based on cattle raising, and a filling station in the community, but both activities had been closed down when I was there. The generation that dominated in the early 1990s consisted of two married brothers in their fifties, of whom the younger (without university training) had always lived in La Descubierta while the other had been a senior civil servant and businessman in the capital. Their eldest brother had died, and a sister had been bought out. Since the mother was still living in La Descubierta, family properties had not been divided but were held by a family corporation in the father’s name. However, almost all the cattle belonged to the brother in Santo Domingo, and he and a son from the capital were the ones who engaged in livestock production and land buying. Their absence, and the lack of employment of modern methods, contributed to the unsatisfactory results. The younger brother had started a shop, which was one of the two largest in the village. Thus he spent most of the day at the shop counter. His oldest son had gone to New York a few years earlier, and had apparently established a lucrative business. His money had bought the parents a jeep, and he himself had become owner of one of the vehicles that traveled daily between the province and Santo Domingo. He had also bought the family’s bar, and was buying pieces of its land. The Ramírez family’s bar with a dance f loor had for decades been the only one in La Descubierta, but now it faced hard competition from another large one and several small ones. In addition to the land of the Ramírez, the lowlands around the village contained two or three far smaller properties with cattle, and many conucos—tiny plots—with plantains, yucca, rice, beans and other products mostly for consumption. Data from 1984 show that nearly 70 percent of properties at that time were less than 5 hectares and 15 percent were less than half a hectare, while the remaining ones (excepting the four largest) indicated an average of 12 hectares (Oficina Nacional de Planificación et al. 1987:93). Nevertheless, the majority of households owned no land. Some of these borrowed a plot from a kinsman or neighbor, and some tried sharecropping. As has been shown, for example, in Georges (1990:179–181), during the 1970s and 1980s Dominican agricultural policies served as incentives to cattle raising and disincentives to cultivation. The agricultural products in La Descubierta—coffee, beans, and plantains—brought only low prices in markets dominated by middlemen.26 Furthermore, growing beans in the non-irrigated hills was risky, and harvests were often damaged. The lack of infrastructure in the hills also greatly reduced commercial marketing. The daily turnover in La Descubierta’s

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market place was low, and the villagers went to markets in Neyba to sell and buy provisions. A peasant might spend two or three days and money on travel, just to sell a couple of bags. In addition, the simple technology (neither fertilizer nor chemicals, but usually machete, hoe, and burning) and small-scale cultivation kept productivity generally low. Cattle raising and largely subsistence agriculture provided few wageemployment opportunities. The Ramírez used a small group permanently, but most of the days they offered work to some (say, five to fifteen) men from the village. Peasants used paid labor and exchange of labor, but the former was more frequent. However, tractor plowing, and sometimes combine-harvesting, in accessible areas had reduced day work, and in addition the day wage was only between 20 and 30 pesos: as the men said, not even enough to pay for one family meal. Badly paid Haitians now carried out most of the agricultural work in the hills as well as in the lowlands. Haitians cleared and prepared fields, picked coffee, and grew beans, maize, and other products. Either they were paid on the basis of an agreed sum for a specified piece of work (ajuste), or they worked as sharecroppers. In the first case, they received payment that no non-Haitian would work for. Hence even the poor in La Descubierta farmed with Haitian laborers.27 Peasants referred to them as negros. Some peasants, like a few of the Haitians, were more or less bilingual. The Haitians were rural people who might be from the border area and walk each day in and out on paths in the hills, or stay for several days or weeks on Dominican territory. They slept and ate poorly on the farms where they worked, and no documents were usually needed in the hills when they were observed by Dominican soldiers who often recognized them. Young people, in the village and hills, now turned away from agriculture. Men who went daily to the conucos were mostly adults and old people, while many of the young regarded it as a future without meaning: hardship for one’s entire life without getting anywhere. More generally, both those who went to secondary school and others looked forward to migration and recruitment to the military and police, saying that the village had no work. Some local alternatives existed in addition to agriculture and the public sector. From the mid-1960s, charcoal production developed as a major activity among laborers and peasants in La Descubierta, as it did throughout the southwest.28 People abandoned agriculture to make charcoal for truck owners from Azua who sold it on the Santo Domingo market. This large-scale business29 brought large, stable amounts of money in, to circulate in poor barrios and hamlets. Any man who produced charcoal in La Descubierta could make a thousand pesos in a week or two, and trucks entered the barrios daily. The production was brought to an end after the 1990 elections through military repression by the Forestry

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office, headed by Colonel Candelier. Balaguer referred to the nation’s disastrous deforestation and hence the ecological necessity to stop charcoal making. Only a couple of households made charcoal clandestinely for local consumption while I lived in the village. Many of the locals relied on charcoal for cooking, but had trouble buying any. People spoke bitterly of Candelier, and told of men who used to make charcoal for their living and had now gone to Santo Domingo. Other sources of income for many villagers were cock raising and the selling of lottery tickets. Women made and sold food, and traveled to nearby Haitian markets in order to resell clothes and blankets in the village. A few earned a pittance from prostitution. Probably more than thirty boys did shoe-shining in the park. Continuous, small-scale smuggling of goods from Haitian to Dominican territory was a help to households. It provided some with income, and gave all access to cheap, modern—that is, U.S. or Panama produced—clothes, jogging shoes, perfume, and electric articles, apart from liquor: either the popular Haitian clerin (rum) or fine whisky. To Haiti were taken black beans, fighting cocks, and fuel. Smuggling of sugar, accompanied by currency dealing, was an important business for a decade after the PRD came to power, and frontier commerce took off after 1978. The biggest operators in this business in La Descubierta (six to eight men) made a lot of money during those years. Some rented village houses to store the sugar they bought up. They transported it to Haiti in trucks and small vehicles during the nights, the military collecting a sum per bag at each checkpoint. On the other side, they were paid in Haitian currency that was brought to Port-au-Prince and changed into U.S. dollars; thereafter they traveled to Santo Domingo where they sold the dollars to the highest bidder—a firm or an individual. This business provided a chain of persons in the community with income, from carriers to chauffeurs and currency dealers. In addition poorer men acquired and rented mules to smuggle sugar along hill paths. The business ceased when the military were finally instructed to control it. People also said that the scarcity of sugar, changed prices, and Haitian political turmoil contributed to the decline. The intensified crisis affected artisans, workshops, and shops. Carpenters suffered from lack of wood and thus faced a severe crisis as a consequence of repression by the Forestry office. In the tailors’ workshops, it was said that villagers previously spent more money on new clothes. A couple of mechanics and the part-time barbers were no better off than the village majority. Local shops were numerous, but were typically mum-and-dad shops with a tiny turnover. Some were downtown, and in the urban center there were five relatively large ones. The largest were those

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of the younger Ramírez brother, Ramirito, and his brother-in-law, Piñeyro. The latter was married to Doña Miriam, an elder sister of Ramirito’s wife, and a lawyer and, since the 1970s, Balaguer’s top local representative in La Descubierta. Born and raised in the village, she was elected deputy for the Independencia province in congress for the fourth time in 1990. The locals called her just Miriam, or “the lawyer” (la abogada). Both Piñeyro and Miriam were blancos, and their children had left for the capital and the United States. He was from an eastern town, in his sixties, and an ex-officer who married Miriam after he came to the province on duty in the late 1950s. Since he was a rough and essentially uneducated man, with little verbal skill, villagers sometimes summed it up saying that he was only a guard. However, he and Miriam had had success in business. Having begun without property of their own after he retired as a lieutenant in the 1960s, Piñeyro rapidly established his store as the leading one in the village. He still worked a twelve-hour day behind the counter, and took only Sunday afternoons and occasional evenings off to play dominoes and drink with other men. For many years he owned a couple of trucks and served stores in a number of municipalities dealing wholesale in basic articles, and he took part in the profitable sugar smuggling. In the early 1990s he had reduced his business to the store and limited wholesaling. While it seemed that he quite liked unpretentious frontier life, the family had a f lat in the bustling center of the capital. Slightly smaller were three other centrally located shops. One belonged to a nephew of Piñeyro, who also came from the east; after working in his uncle’s shop, he started his own. Another shop belonged to Rafael Peguero. He was now an old and ill man, but the father of twenty-three children. Rafael had combined agriculture and cattle raising in the hills with shops mostly run by his women. For decades under Trujillo and during Balaguer’s twelve years, he was also a state employee. He had been among the heads of the Reformist Party in La Descubierta since 1966, and served for a brief period as deputy in Congress in the early 1970s. The fifth of the shops belonged to Rafael’s first wife, who had raised their six children from that shop and still hardly left the counter. Her mother, who lived with her, was the leader of a neighboring community under Trujillo, and a leading activist in the PRD in La Descubierta in the years after Trujillo’s death. This woman’s father, as she herself recalled, was a nephew of the great caudillo and five-times-president Buenaventura Báez, while her grandson, Rafael Peguero’s oldest son, became elected deputy for the PRD for Independencia in 1986 and was reelected in 1990. This man, called Rafaelito in the village, was a trigueño, unmarried, and about forty. He was an engineer by profession and, like his elder rival

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Miriam, had studied at the University of Santo Domingo. The villagers spoke of him as “the engineer” (el ingeniero). After going to study he had lived in the capital, but now he visited the southwest most weekends. Being on good terms with Peña Gómez, he had been appointed leader in his region for the PRD, supervising party processes in all of the municipalities of several provinces. This meant traveling, and his life in the early 1990s was very much on the road, between congress, towns, and villages. His permanent chauffeur was his brother. As an engineer and politician, he made plenty of money. In the center of La Descubierta, he had built a large house on his mother’s property. This was the most sophisticated—in fact, the only wholly urban—house in the village. In addition he was owner of the most popular disco. Located by the park, it every night blasted forth merengue, bachata, and salsa so that it gave rhythm to a good section of the village. It was packed with people all Sundays and holidays. However, Rafaelito had left the management and the money it produced to his brothers. The political activities and strategies of Miriam and Rafaelito are described later. Ramirito, Piñeyro, and Miriam were, in the eyes of villagers, the local rich (los ricos). They had large and comfortable houses connected to their shops, although more rustic than the new one erected by Rafaelito. Following them in the hierarchy were a group of probably less than thirty men and women of whom most had completed far less than secondary school, and only a couple who had studied at university. They lived on combinations of cattle, agriculture, business (shops, bars, cafes, the national and Venezuelan lotteries), or transport (to Neyba, Barahona or Santo Domingo); in addition, some were public employees, and a few had raised initial capital through mystical activity. However, the differences between the mass of village poor and the majority in this group were not great. The prevailing diet consisted of plantains and bananas, rice and beans, spaghetti, and meat (mostly of chicken) and salted herring, in all households. The poor ate once or twice daily, and the others three times. The people making up a household varied a lot. While the Ramirito and Piñeyro households and some others displayed stable partnerships and largely nuclear families, most people in the village did not marry. Instead they lived in different unions throughout their lives, registered officially as singles (solteros). Fertility had been high, although it was presumably going down and young women often wanted only three children. Many well-respected men had more than twenty children, and earned sometimes for more than one woman and her children simultaneously. Thus the pattern was one of shifting and widely different household forms, which has been generally demonstrated for Caribbean societies. 30

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In La Descubierta, migration abroad was on the increase. As mentioned above, poor villagers had migrated to Santo Domingo, 31 while only a limited number of men and women with contacts and resources had been able to acquire visas for the United States. 32 Both women and men had gone to the United States. Yet they had left few local traces. With a few exceptions, they had not sent much money to their remaining kinsmen, nor returned to invest in La Descubierta. 33 However, from the 1980s onward the southwest has seen massive female emigration, primarily to Spain but spreading to other European countries such as Italy, Greece, Holland, and Switzerland. This process was still new and unpredictable while I carried out fieldwork. But already most households in many communities in the region already had one or several women (wife, daughters, sisters) working in Barcelona or Madrid, or else were trying to raise capital for the journey and arrange contacts and documents to try to dupe the Spanish immigration officers. Local creativity was striking, and entrepreneurs accumulated new roles as middlemen—for example, as moneylenders, as sellers of certificates and passports, and as traveling escorts presenting themselves as husbands or fathers of women. The women entered Spain on tourist visas and immediately hid, living and doing housework in a family residence. Men were also eager to go, but had recognized that they could not find any work. Instead, they helped their women to leave. In 1992, the monthly payment for illegal housework in Spain varied between 70,000 and 100,000 pesetas (from 700 to 1,000 U.S. dollars), which meant a lot of money to ordinary Dominicans.34 The female migrants left their children with the grandmother or another kinswoman, and spent a year or two or three accumulating money, in order to buy a house, start a business and provide children with education. Meanwhile, they provided men, children, and other relatives in La Descubierta with money, clothes, and other articles. While many sought to improve their lives in the village, women also seemed to return from Barcelona or Madrid directly to the capital. Some young women had already bought houses and cars and established businesses in Santo Domingo. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the price of houses increased dramatically in La Descubierta (say, from 15,000 to 50,000 pesos), mainly because of more expensive building materials and the Forestry regulations suppressing the supply of wood. However, the money from Spain meant that there was a demand, and that most people now without a house had to earn money illegally or go abroad in order to get their own homes. It appeared that, generally, southwestern migrants ultimately sought a better life in their country, not outside it. Migration abroad—at least as

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it was viewed in the village—was conceptualized as a sacrifice in order to be able to “progress” (progresar) after returning to Dominican soil. People were pleased with their island. They delighted in merengue, and men loved to share rum and dominoes with friends. The Dominican and southwestern problem was mostly perceived as a problem of money. Having made some abroad, men still only in their late thirties and forties often preferred a form of simple rent capitalism to more time-absorbing investment in production. Rather, they gave priority to consumption. Of central relevance in Dominican society at the time of the fieldwork was a shared ideal of seeking progress. Fundamentally it implied acquiring sufficient means for buying desired consumer goods. The goods might be anything from clothes to a well-constructed and furnished house, to a car and a business. While few or none fulfilled all their dreams, people tended upward toward them. Simplifying, I maintain that two roads were perceived by most Dominicans seeking progress. While the most-traveled road among the poor might be that of migration, the other meant going into and climbing in politics. Almost everyone, at least in La Descubierta, participated to some extent in politics and hoped at least to be publicly employed. There was also a widespread view of political leadership as a possible way to what they called “fast progress”—that is, a short cut to economic and social mobility. Dominican international migration has been relatively well investigated.35 Less recent attention has been given to the other, domestic, way to progress, and to the subject of this book—the practices and meanings that maintain and transform Dominican political life.

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CHAPTER 3 KIN, FRIENDS, AND LEADERS

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s the twentieth-century Dominican state-building project unfolded in the southwest, the region’s well-tried institutions—such as the family, compadrazgo, and patronage—were put to use in new ways and for new purposes.1 But the basic local institutions were neither threatened nor undermined. In La Descubierta, local social and cultural distinctiveness was not eliminated. On the contrary, the building of the state both depended upon and reinforced particular local forms. In La Descubierta, the state was largely brought into being and constructed by the community’s own inhabitants. Analysts who stress that central power imposes itself describe the construction of the nation-state as a historical process in which the state mostly forces, disciplines, and homogenizes. They suppose or argue that state-building and nation-making are processes essentially lacking in legitimacy in the eyes of peripheral or outlying communities within the state’s boundaries. The history of La Descubierta in the twentieth century is, however, not in accordance with such a picture. In what follows, I sketch the political and social history of La Descubierta. I tell this story chronologically. The history of La Descubierta is a history of networks—the networks that produced, reproduced, and transformed the structure of power in this region. This story shows how, to a striking degree, the area’s two dominant leaderships in the early 1990s—those of Miriam and Rafaelito—were products of the past. Before 1930: Dominicans and Haitians Although scattered references exist in a number of texts, there is no published history of La Descubierta. The archives of the Dominican Party in La Descubierta were destroyed when a crowd pillaged the village’s headquarters (today’s Community House) sometime after Trujillo’s

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death. Information on party candidates and results of elections since 1962 were available at the municipal Electoral Board.2 However, the most inspiring sources are of two kinds: taped conversations with many of the politicians in the village, and an autobiographical narrative written by La Descubierta’s leader during the Era of Trujillo Jesús María Ramírez. The narrative, which takes us back to before 1920, was written—according to a daughter with whom he spent his last years—in the Dominican capital in the 1980s. Jesús María wrote some 400 pages of notes about his life in La Descubierta. He was born in Neyba in 1909, moved to La Descubierta in 1921, left the community for Santo Domingo in 1964, and died in 1988. While I was in the field I was given access to parts of the notes by his daughter. She said she was in the process of shortening and revising the notes for family circulation and possible publication. The revision was done to protect her father’s reputation, and involved eliminating repetitions, imposing a stricter chronology on the narrated events and checking information against other sources. In 2000, Jesús María’s story was published in Spanish in Santo Domingo as a book of some 150 pages: Jesús María Ramírez, Mis 43 años en la Descubierta (My 43 Years in La Descubierta). In this book, I refer to both the book and the notes. The reference to the book is: Ramírez (2000); the reference to the notes is: Ramírez (n.d.). I have used the notes only where I have been unable to find in the book what I have found in the notes that I was given access to. Like the oral materials, Jesús María’s story raises obvious questions. But both sets of data mean a possibility of hearing voices where there otherwise only may be a silent past. By the mid-eighteenth century, the intense growth of sugar production based on plantations and slavery in French Saint-Domingue had created a thriving market for ranching products in the Spanish sector of Hispaniola. During this period, frontier cattle activities expanded and central-southern frontier towns, such as Bánica (in the Spanish sector) and Hinche (in the French sector), prospered on account of their strategic location on the route to Port-au-Prince (Derby 1994:497). With the loosely controlled border, a large part of the cattle trade was illegal. The same period also registered another important “illegal” movement, one that went in the opposite direction—from the French to the Spanish colony. The two colonies’ vastly different developments in the eighteenth century made the Spanish side of the border a desirable refuge for the French plantations’ runaway slaves (Moreau de SaintMéry [1797–1798] 1996; Deive 1980, 1985). According to Mats Lundahl, there were some 3,000 escaped Saint-Domingue slaves on the Spanish side in 1751; twenty-five years later, in 1776, “the towns on the Spanish

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side of the border were inhabited mainly by maroons from the French side” (Lundahl 1983:112–113). These French-Spanish borderlands in the eighteenth century were areas of melting-pot processes. However, as a result of the political turmoil on the island in the first part of the nineteenth century the cattle-based economy in the borderlands was brought more or less to a halt and these areas saw extensive emigration (Derby 1994:498). Lundahl claims that the lands freed by emigration from the border region were soon taken over by Haitian immigrants, particularly in the central sector of the borderlands: “when the Haitians had to leave Santo Domingo in 1844, they retained large portions of the Central plain . . . . The Haitian settlements were gradually extended into the San Juan valley” (Lundahl 1983:116–117). The development of a Dominican sugar industry in the southeast from the mid-1870s once more caused Dominican emigration from the borderlands. People left to seek work in the new industry (Baud 1993a:14–15). Emigration and stagnation in the first part of the nineteenth century, Haitian settlements, and from the late nineteenth century marginalization of the Dominican western areas in the Dominican national economy led to the Dominican-Haitian border region once again turning toward the Haitian market (Baud 1987:143). In the period from 1870 to 1937, life in the Dominican border areas relied heavily on trade with the other side. The Haitian migration to the Dominican borderlands in the nineteenth century was rooted in the two country’s dissimilar agrarian processes. While rural Haiti in the nineteenth century saw a gradual dispersal of state lands (due to land distribution through agrarian reform and political patronage) and growing tendencies toward a dense matrix of small farms, plus population pressure and splitting up of properties by the inheritance pattern of the Napoleonic Code (Lundahl 1983:67–76; Trouillot 1990:38–40; Derby 1994:509), the Dominican side was, in contrast, still a largely open, thinly populated cattle society based on easy or uncontrolled access to state lands. Much of the terrain in the northern Dominican border provinces as late as the 1930s was state land, and the central and southern Dominican border areas were mainly terrenos comuneros, or common lands—undivided land tracts owned by groups of individuals (Derby 1994:509). On this general situation in the Dominican borderlands before 1937 Derby writes . . . given the access to land, low demographic density, and the predominant practice of state land use in the Dominican Republic, most residents— Haitian or Dominican—did not hold legal title, but this does not seem to have been a problem. Only the wealthiest cattle-ranching families, such as the Carrascos and the Corderos of [the northern town of ] Dajabón, who

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each held herds of 100 to 200 head in the 1930s, bothered to purchase rights (derechos or acciones) for the state lands they utilized. And even these families used the public common grazing lands for pasture. . . . In the south, wealthy Haitian ranchers grazed their cattle across the borderline on Dominican terrain; and Dominican ranchers frequently kept herds on the Haitian side of the border to avoid export duties. (Derby 1994:510)

This clarifies also what it meant to be wealthy in these areas. In Baud’s words, there were few ranchers and “these were far from the proverbial Latin-American landowners” (Baud 1993a:9).3 Two patterns of trade that crossed the Haitian-Dominican border prevailed in this period, the decades up to 1937. Dominicans brought cattle and other products to the Haitian markets in the borderlands or to the Haitian capital. They spent the money they earned in Haiti on manufactured goods, for the most part imported products from Europe, and often resold these on the other side of the border. Such trade was carried out almost entirely in Haitian currency. The other commercial pattern that transcended the border consisted of Haitian traders— typically women—who traveled to Dominican rural areas, selling a variety of products. These traders went as far as the Dominican east (Baud 1993a:10–13; Derby 1994). In 1907, customs houses staffed by the United States were established along the border. This new state control of the border imposed effective checks on trade across the border for the first time, with heavy fines exacted for smuggling.4 The border control established in 1907 meant a significant change in the borderlands. It meant not only that duties had to be paid but also that Dominican state power established itself where it previously had been mostly absent—in the midst of everyday activities of residents in the Dominican border provinces. It is a paradox that while Trujillo launched a campaign of vigorous anti-Haitianism after 1937 he let the sugar companies, most of which were North American, continue their importation of cheap Haitian labor. Haitian cane workers, however, were not to be seen in and around La Descubierta. Jesús María’s daughter, for example, who spent her childhood in La Descubierta in the 1940s, vividly remembered her first view of a Haitian when she went to live in Barahona, the center of the Barahona Sugar Company. In contrast, a La Descubierta peasant in his late eighties told about life before 1937: I will tell you. First the properties were deserted, deserted. The men, a part of the men worked and another didn’t work, look I saw that . . . the lands were deserted. Then the Haitians lived in those hills, because they worked more, and some Dominicans worked but others didn’t. . . . The

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Haitians were here. The Haitians worked in those hills. [They did] much work in those hills and they came down with hen, with chicken, with eggs, plantain and everything.

Writing about the early 1920s, Jesús María Ramírez states that La Descubierta “nevertheless was not as poor as it looked. It had good agriculture and better animal raising that provided cheap food” (Ramírez n.d.). As he explained, however, in those days the people of La Descubierta (meaning Dominicans), “with the exception of a few families, did not work in the hills” (Ramírez n.d.). Ethnicity could be read from settlement. While Dominicans in La Descubierta typically lived in the lowlands, Haitians typically populated the surrounding hills. “The trade,” Jesús María then goes on, “was conducted with Haitians in a market that was held each Sunday near the barracks in the village, or sometimes by traveling to Haiti, mainly to the markets of Croix des Bouquets and Port-au-Prince” (Ramírez n.d.).5 He interestingly describes his first Sunday at the market in La Descubierta, having spent the first fourteen years of his life further east: The Haitians started to arrive on their horses loaded with agricultural products, chickens and various commodities. The majority of these Haitians came from the Dominican hills, where they lived permanently. They came from Los Pinos, Marrosó, Sabanne Borne (Sabambón), Toussaint (Tusen), Malón, Bonete, and other places.6 The rest crossed the border . . . and those who made the longest journey . . . came because of a particular business—for example, they bought products for wholesale, like in the month of May with the beans . . . or they purchased cattle, cocks, a pack of mules, or animals for cross-breeding. (Ramírez 2000:16–17; italics in the original)

In this social context, many people became bilingual. In the early 1990s, several of the elderly persons who had always lived in the village spoke f luent Creole. Furthermore, as claimed by Moya Pons (1990:517), in the south before 1937, Haitian currency circulated freely as far as Azua, only 120 kilometers from the capital, indicating (especially to Dominican nationalists) the considerable degree of Haitian-Dominican trade. Trujillo’s native town, San Cristóbal (30 kilometers from the capital), was simply called Marché because of its Haitian characteristics (Vega 1988:61). But all this was greatly disliked by Dominican power-holders. A law passed in 1907 declared the development of all the districts bordering on Haiti to be in the public good, and in 1924 President Vásquez, concerned with Dominicanizing, appointed a commission to determine sites for a set of agricultural settlements on the border. Nine had been established

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by the time that his government was overthrown in 1930 (Vega 1988:18). This fitted within a long tradition: that of seeking the protection of the island’s “Hispanic” region through “whitening,” and populating its sparsely populated territory with white immigrant peasants. The tradition dated back to colonial times when, for example, the King was asked to “send more Canary Islanders” (Vega 1988:25), and remained strong after 1844. Power-holders and writers promoted white immigration as a solution to many of the nation’s problems, but with very little success. Yet to say that life in the southern border areas was spatially and socially marginal to the Dominican center is to turn things round. A good indication is found in Jesús María’s autobiography that reveals his familiarity with the Haitian capital. In 1927, he left for Santo Domingo to join the armed forces, and had to spend ten days in travel on muleback and in cars. Since the southwest in which he grew up had no roads, he saw one in his own country for the first time, he writes, after several days (Ramírez 2000:36–37). Thereafter he describes his first impression of the Dominican capital: This city appeared very different from Port-au-Prince, the other city that I knew. The streets of Santo Domingo were not filled with the noise which I knew from Port-au-Prince. This is presumably due to the fact that my stays in Port-au-Prince always were related with markets and commercial areas, areas with lots of people. (Ramírez n.d.)7

This and similar information about settlement, trade and interethnic relations in the Dominican southwest during the first decades of the twentieth-century support a central argument in this study. It was the development elsewhere in the Dominican Republic (particularly in the southeast and in the north), and the profits reaped by Trujillo through the building of a personal “empire,” which in turn made it possible to pour resources into Dominicanization and the construction of a particular form of patronage politics in the Dominican border provinces, oriented more to the Haitian market during decades when Haiti was the stronger of the two countries, until in the 1920s and 1930s the Dominican Republic caught up with and surpassed its neighbor. The Local Families The most powerful extended family in La Descubierta during the greater part of the twentieth century was the Ramírez. Members of that family began to develop power in the community from before 1920. The power of the Ramírez family was thereafter expanded under Trujillo, and preserved after his death.8

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In the early 1990s, members of other families said that the Ramírez were one of the “shortest families” of the community. In La Descubierta, their members were very few, and Miriam’s enemies in the Reformist Party argued that “she doesn’t have family here.” To a certain extent, this was true. When the first Ramírez members settled in La Descubierta, other families were already established in the community. The Ramírez’ local heads were Miriam, whose mother was the late Jesús María’s sister, and the two landowning brothers, of whom Ramirito lived in the village. Miriam’s sister, as we have seen, was married to her cousin Ramirito. Since Miriam’s only local brother was also married to his first cousin, it was a local saying that the Ramírez only married each other, in order not to have to divide their properties. Yet, those who represented the family properties in the early 1990s, or Ramirito and his brother, never engaged actively in politics, while others of the family did so from the 1920s. Before Miriam, there was her uncle Jesús María, and before him, his uncle Emilio. These three were the principal political leaders of La Descubierta from the early 1920s to the mid- or late-1990s. How did the young Emilio, as one of the first Ramírez, settle in the community and rise to power? Sometime before 1917, he and his brother Jesús María (the father of the later leader and memoir writer, who was named after his father) left wives and children in their native town Neyba, and came to La Descubierta as members of a police formation named the Republican Guard. Today some villagers will say that they came looking for a living, but this remains unclear. It is true that they did not possess capital, but they had left a more prosperous area and had had the privilege of going to school for some time in Azua. When the U.S. forces dissolved the Republican Guard and created the Dominican National Police in 1917, the brothers refused to join the new force, and decided to settle in the area. Jesús María’s wife and their children—including their son Jesús María, the later Trujillista leader and memoir writer—joined them a few years later. However, Emilio already lived with a new woman. Her name was Isabel Méndez, and she had a sister married to an elder brother of Emilio living elsewhere. The father of these sisters was relatively well off. A daughter of Emilio told me that Isabel had “very good manners and was of those who appear to be very clean—well-to-do in the countryside.” She was a widow when she joined Emilio and had been married to a light-skinned man in Port-au-Prince, perhaps a man of some resources. Anyway, Emilio’s daughter, who wanted to convey the best impression of her father, frankly recognized that Isabel “had resources . . . she had land and Emilio bought [more land] and they accumulated wealth together.”

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From the start after leaving the police, Emilio and his new wife had commercial success, while his brother remained a worker his whole life. Jesús María writes that, in 1921, the only trader of significance was his uncle Emilio, who with Isabel owned a shop that he supplied with goods bought in Azua (Ramírez 2000: 18). In this thinly populated, rustic environment, probably no one else had the contacts and the capital required to provide commodities from as far away as Azua. The only way of doing this was by organizing packs of mules. Emilio also raised livestock, and from 1922 traveled regularly with his brother and Jesús María, the later leader, to the Haitian market town of Croix des Bouquets to sell cattle. Jesús María writes that the profits “were very good” (Ramírez 2000:23). This trade meant the creation of extensive personal networks on both sides of the border, since Emilio sold not only his own stock but also animals raised by others in a region far wider than La Descubierta. In the mid-1920s, Emilio closed his store and started to accumulate land in La Descubierta’s lowlands, where he cultivated sugar cane and erected a sugar mill.9 Why did Emilio begin to accumulate land during the 1920s? Or, in more general terms, how may we explain that a process of land consolidation and increased farming took place in and around La Descubierta from the 1920s onward? A set of studies shows that the Dominican Republic experienced processes of land consolidation during the first decades of the twentieth century (Inoa 1994:1–18, 86–101; Franks 1995; Baud 1995:153–165; San Miguel 1997b:199–220; Turits 1997:14–16, 259–332). Franks has tied the land consolidation of the eastern region at the start of the twentieth century to the development of a sugar industry, processes of Dominican state formation, and the U.S. intervention. She writes that In 1920, the U.S. Military Government promulgated a long-awaited reform of the terrenos comuneros system, the Land Registration Act. The Land Registration Act . . . created a new judicial body to implement the state’s authority, the national land tribunal, which superseded the networks of local officials and offices that had previously overseen land transfers. In spite of the land court’s legal and political significance, its inf luence on the accumulation of land in the East was minimal. When the U.S. military occupation government began to oversee the surveying and dividing up of terrenos comuneros in the 1920s, the basic outlines of company properties were already drawn. (Franks 1995:164)

The take-off of sugar production for the world market and the U.S. intervention helped end the system of terrenos comuneros and institutionalize private land-holdings in the Dominican Republic. Another

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contributing factor was a discourse on improved agriculture as a road to increased “civilization”—and, correspondingly, on free ranching as a barrier, or in opposition, to “civilization.” In the words of Derby (1994:499), by the turn of the century “liberal reformers saw agricultural development and smallholding cultivation as a cure for national vices associated with cattle culture on public lands. Unfenced animals, like stateless caudillos, were seen as social parasites preying on the private property and hard work of others” (see also González 1993; Franks 1995:163). With the Trujillo regime from 1930 onward, farming was made attractive. Turits argues that The Trujillo regime’s rural policies ameliorated the threats to the peasantry implicit in the new private property laws, transition to individualized ownership, and increasing land commercialization marking the previous few decades . . . Peasants who were considered “productive” were protected from eviction and could accumulate sufficient time so that when their land was surveyed and later adjudicated, it would be “prescribed” to them rather than divided up among the co-owners with “peso titles” [shares in terrenos comuneros] who were not cultivating the land . . . There was a significant degree of coherence in the Trujillo regime’s property and land reforms which, however limited and problematic, were relatively favorable to the preservation of a semi-independent peasantry, fostered an effective “land to the tiller” policy, and envisaged a peasant or small farmer road to economic development. (Turits 1997:328–330)10

During the Trujillo regime farming activities were secured and stimulated in most areas of the country; there were laws, vigorously enforced in all communities, that classified any peasant cultivating less than ten tareas (0.63 hectares) as a “vagrant.” Jesús María’s autobiography describes a public meeting in La Descubierta in 1935. The description is a testimony to the state’s attempts to orchestrate campaigns across the country to increase agricultural production and secure peasant access to land. Trujillo’s land distribution campaign had started in 1934. It was then that the state commissioned an officer, Major Rafael Carretero, to travel to a part of the southwestern region to examine and seek to resolve land tenure disputes there (Turits 2003:90). Jesús María describes how, when Major Carretero arrived in La Descubierta in 1935, he summoned all the men of the community: Major Carretero told us that vagrancy would be punished with public work and to show that you were not a vagrant, we who lived in the countryside had to have at least ten tareas cultivated. He also said that he was going to

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organize a Junta Protectora de la Agricultura to distribute the neglected lands that were not being used by their owners. (Ramírez 2000:58).

Much later, with the election of Balaguer in 1966, there was a vigorous campaign by the state to promote cattle raising. During Balaguer’s “twelve years,” incentives to cattle raising and disincentives to agriculture again promoted transformation of land-use patterns. In the early 1990s, “underutilization” was the distinguishing mark of the Ramírez property and considerable sections of the family’s lands lay fallow. But at that time, land had been completely consolidated as property—and access to land was no longer indispensable to the development of local economic and political power. In sum, it seems not at all strange that Emilio and other members of the Ramírez family sought to accumulate land and develop farming activities in La Descubierta from the mid-1920s onward. Emilio’s role as a political leader must be understood in this context of trade networks and relative economic power. Although he never possessed much, and slept in a hammock, in this frontier world of scattered stockbreeders and farmers where hardly anyone knew how to write his house became a center to which all sorts of activities gravitated. Supplying local people with work and thus money, Emilio was consulted for advice on personal matters, trade, and politics, and he offered hospitality to those who visited the hamlet from outside. Emilio had a gift for relationships, “more because of his character than because of his economic position” as Jesús María recalled (Ramírez n.d.). Emilio’s talent may be seen from his relationships with women, of which the favorable union with Isabel, which lasted to her death around 1930, is but one example. People spoke of him as a man much given to the pursuit of women (mujeriego). He had fourteen children with five women. In addition, politics was Emilio’s upbringing and vocation. “He always liked that activity,” says Jesús María, who adds that “I have been told that while he was very young they arrested and brought him to the capital because of politics” (Ramírez n.d.). In Azua, where he went to school, Emilio’s grandfather had been close to the family of President Buenaventura Báez and participated in guerrilla activities in support of Baecismo. In 1913 and 1914, Emilio’s father was persecuted and f led for his life, and his properties were destroyed, in connection with political unrest. The most inf luential caudillo in the southwestern part of the Dominican Republic at the time, Wenceslao Ramírez, was a kinsman of Emilio.11 In 1924, the first presidential elections in the Dominican Republic were organized after the end of the U.S. occupation. The Ramírez family backed Horacio Vásquez, who won and remained president up to

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Trujillo’s coup in 1930. Emilio’s role as a local leader is described by his nephew Jesús María in these terms: The people came to consult him and he told them what to do in order to secure the triumph of Horacio Vásquez in the elections. He often traveled to the provincial capital and Neyba because of this, and the leaders of the Horacismo visited him to promote their candidatures in the community. (Ramírez n.d.; see in addition Ramírez 2000:31)

The most powerful man in the southwestern part of the Dominican Republic when Trujillo rose to power was José del Carmen (“Carmito”) Ramírez, Wenceslao’s son and a kinsman of Emilio. Carmito, a big landowner with various cattle ranches all over the San Juan Valley, lived in the vicinity of San Juan de la Maguana, to the north of the Neyba and La Descubierta areas. After Trujillo’s seizure of power in 1930, Carmito together with others—Horacistas, or supporters of Vásquez—went into exile in the Haitian capital, where Trujillo kept them under surveillance and negotiated with them (Vega 1988:54–60, 105–122). Emilio also f led and spent some months in Port-au-Prince before he returned, accepting the safety offered with other anti-Trujillistas (Ramírez 2000:51). Later, in the words of Emilio’s daughter in the early 1990s, “Trujillo sent for him, and he went, and they became friends . . . Emilio and Trujillo became friends.” In brief, during the first years of the new regime, Emilio remained the leader of the community. In the early 1990s, some family surnames were very common names in La Descubierta: Mella, Martínez, Alba, Barranco, Sánchez, Ares, and Viñas. Most locals bore some combination of two of these names, while they agreed that the largest families were the Mellas and the Barrancos. The oldest and largest family was that of the Mellas. An old Mella, who knew much genealogy, said about his father’s grandmother that she was the “Bonga,” and that “Bonga was the one who cleared here, she was the owner of all—Bonga. After Bonga everything became cleared.” She had the nickname of “the Bonga” because she was a “double” woman, that is, big. The Mellas were a single family, who descended from the Bonga, who was the owner of “from Azua to here”: “She was the owner of all the land, she ruled all, all, all, she was the owner, she was Bonga, from Azua downwards, she was the owner.” He explained that his father’s father was the Bonga’s son, Ramón Mella, whose nickname was Ramón Bonga. This man, Ramón Bonga, lived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and was a cattle raiser and farmer, the father of many children and the principal figure of the community of

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his times. A man whom Ramón raised as his son was the largest owner of cattle in La Descubierta when Emilio Ramírez started to accumulate wealth in the early 1920s, and some of this man’s sons and other Mellas were still owners of land and cattle when I lived in the village. Other Mellas told different versions, but the core facts were always beyond discussion: they formed the oldest family, whose ancestress was the Bonga, once ruler of all the lands. The evident implication was a strongly supported moral claim in the community. The largest families also included the Martínez and the Albas. All ancestors were claimed to have been settlers from southern communities further east. An exception was the name of Chauvet, borne by many, which was said to have originated with a man moving from Port-au-Prince in the nineteenth century. The Martínez were divided on the basis of descent into two sections: the Martínez blancos (white Martínez) and Martínez prietos (black Martínez). The same applied to the Albas, distinguished locally as either Albas or “Albitas,” referring to the difference between blancos and prietos. Nevertheless, color was no longer a distinguishing mark. The Martínez blancos and the Albas were more or less dark-skinned, and some might be more so than their namesakes who were classified as prietos. For example, when I discussed the issue with three friends, all of the Martínez family, they explained that the one of them with the darkest skin was a Martínez blanco, while one of the others was a Martínez prieto; the third, whose descent made him a Martínez blanco, chose to laugh at all this, and claimed that all the Martínez were the same, as did the old Mella quoted above: There are Martínez blancos and Martínez prietos. . . . In order to differentiate them, one said Martínez prieto and Martínez blanco, but they are the same Martínez of color, because you are [for example] whiter than me and maybe we say prieto, the prietos de blanco and the prietos prietos [the black whites and the black blacks].

Although these distinctions were not relevant for access to jobs and politics, people were fully aware of them at what may be described as the level of everyday understanding. And they could choose to draw on them for ammunition, for example, in the event of a personal controversy. Moreover, as Leach ([1954] 1981) and others have argued, there were only positioned statements, no correct versions. Some had transformed the distinction between the two classes of Martínez into a difference based on degree of “intelligence” and “civilization.” Let me explain. My landlady was classified as india and belonged to the Martínez blancos. She was a teacher, and read books and newspapers and was a convinced

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Balaguerista. Among her closest friends was Miriam, the politician. She had told me some genealogical facts, when she suggested I ask the abovementioned Mella, because, she said, he knew it all. According to her story, the Martínez were originally two different families: the ancestry of the prietos was local but unknown, while the blancos descended from a man named Anastasio Martínez who, accompanied by his wife, came from the southern town of Baní in the latter part of the nineteenth century. My Mella informant told a different story. This was that two brothers, Anastasio and Santiago, came from Baní and settled. Both were indios, but while Anastasio was married to a blanca (white woman) and had children who were blancos, Santiago’s wife was una morena, and their offspring morenos; thus originated the two sections. Interestingly enough, he immediately added that “this united” (esto se ligó), and asked Don’t you know that the negros [Haitians] ruled twenty-two years? But here there are many arellanos [a term used for offspring of mixed unions of Dominicans and Haitians] . . . and it is visible that they are arellanos, because they have good hair—he who has bad hair, is a Haitian, and a Dominican has straight hair. The negros ruled twenty-two years.

The local constructions of race were interwoven with constructions of the nation. Of course I told my landlady his version, but she stuck to her own. Anyway, she claimed, the most important difference had never been about color, but about manners and civilization, and this had mainly remained intact: she explained that while the local Martínez prietos had lived, and continued to live, without manners (sin costumbre), the Martínez blancos, who descended from Baní, were more intelligent and more cultivated. The distinction between the Albas and “Albitas” was largely context-dependent also. While people claimed that the categories had originated because two different groups of Albas had moved to La Descubierta from two different communities, some “Albitas,” who sought to suppress the distinction, said that they all were a single family and race because of their common name. This underscores two points that I elaborate on later. First, the difference between white and black was “good to think.” People used this difference to construct, give form to, and reproduce other differences—differences that had to do with culture, intelligence, hygiene, work, and nationality. Second, the above positioning was situational and political. Put differently, the local uses of extended-family identities were contextually defined. Persons were able to shift emphasis in their use of name and

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thus family belonging, because they inherited a part of both their father’s and mother’s names, and acceptably drew on those of grandparents in given situations. In fact, family should in no small measure be viewed as the voluntary networks and pro tempore alliances expressed in idioms of kinship of respected villagers and politicians. For example, an old and respected peasant and former public employee, who signed his name as Alba Mella because his mother was an Alba and his father a Mella, stressed the political unity of his kindred and generally of the Albas and Mellas, asserting that they were all the same family. The head of the well-united Barrancos married a daughter of the deceased head of this family, and was delegated his highly informal authority by his fatherin-law, but he did not sign his name as Barranco; he used Mella Alvarez as his surname. Networks and alliances were shaped by kinship, by family and by compadrazgo. But the most important common activity had for a long time been supporting political leaders, such as Trujillo and Jesús María and Balaguer and Miriam. In brief, the exercise of power and leadership, in addition to kinship, is a key to understanding both the local families and local politics. As the Mellas’ story about their ancestress reveals, family imageries also concerned land and stratification. There was a local explanation for the accumulation of Ramirito’s father, Alejandro, who was brought up with Jesús María. Alejandro’s father was a well-to-do cattle raiser and trader in Duvergé, but sent him to live with Emilio and Isabel, who raised him as a trader. Around 1930, the father established a store in La Descubierta with him in charge. Later Alejandro ran it alone. As the common story then went, he gradually bought lowland property until he was one of the community’s two large landowners—the other was his cousin Jesús María. Every time someone in the community died, the relatives were given the goods for the nine-day wake on credit in Alejandro’s store, with a piece of land as surety, and later Alejandro would acquire the land. People considered that he bought his land rightfully but bought it cheap. Anyway, as some said, property was cheap because there were fewer people and every household had land and could clear new fields. Later, in the mid-1960s, Jesús María sold his land to Alejandro’s successors, who thereby doubled their property. One consequence was that many in the community described their own family’s history in terms of a downward movement. Mellas said that their ancestors were once the largest cattle raisers and leaders, and hence at the top of the community. Others, such as many Martínez, said that their grandfather or father once owned a piece of land in La Descubierta’s lowlands but that it was now in the hands of the Ramírez.

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Leadership 1930–1961 Not so much changed in La Descubierta immediately after Trujillo had gained power in the capital. Jesús María Ramírez (2000:54–56) writes that La Descubierta began to experience Trujillismo as a political force in 1933. On May 28, 1933, the first political mass meeting in this region under the new regime was held in Duvergé. The rally was part of a series of revistas cívicas or reunions organized in all parts of the country in order to demand the dictator’s first reelection. Trujillo was present, as were representatives of communities from a wide area. The La Descubierta representatives were headed by Emilio, Jesús María and the community’s military leader, a lieutenant. Emilio died in 1943. However, even by the mid-1930s Jesús María had become La Descubierta’s most inf luential man in practice. As a villager and ex-military man said of the Trujillo dictatorship, “The principal of all was Jesús María Ramírez. He was the friend of Trujillo.” People explained that Jesús María’s power was greater than that of La Descubierta’s military, because, among the latter, there were mostly sergeants as highest-ranking commanders. Jesús María left La Descubierta and joined the army in 1927. After serving as a soldier in Santo Domingo and the Cibao region, he was recovering from illness in the capital when he witnessed the drama of February 1930, which marked the overthrow of the government of Horacio Vásquez and Trujillo’s seizure of power. He then returned to La Descubierta. In the village, he set up a butcher’s shop. In 1933, he bought his first landed property. He thereafter continued to accumulate land and develop agricultural activities in La Descubierta. After the regime’s Major Rafael Carretero had held a public meeting in La Descubierta in 1935 to tell the community that every man had to have 10 tareas cultivated and vagrancy would be punished, Jesús María was made head of the community’s Junta Protectora de la Agricultura, the new state entity organized to distribute the neglected local lands not being used by their owners. Some land properties in La Descubierta and areas nearby were distributed. In the same period, Jesús María headed the construction of a public health clinic for La Descubierta. He recruited locals from various parts of the community to help him with the activities of the Junta and with carpentry work on the clinic (Ramírez 2000:58–61). In April 1938, Trujillo toured the region. On his way through La Descubierta, the dictator stopped. On the spot, he appointed Emilio as local Judge and Jesús María, whom he then called “the young man,” as president of the local division of the Partido Dominicano, the state

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political party. At the same time Trujillo made the decision to elevate the administrative status of the village, to transform La Descubierta into an independent común or independent municipality. According to Jesús María’s recollections, the dictator then asked his uncle Emilio and him: “Do you have the people you need to fill the public positions that will be created [as a consequence of the elevation to común]?” Jesús María answered: “Yes, sir” (Ramírez 2000:64). After this, a friend of the Ramírez, a man from the village, was appointed as the first mayor of La Descubierta. Jesús María’s cousin became municipal treasurer; another villager became the judge’s (or Emilio’s) secretary, while Jesús María’s father was given the job of head of La Descubierta’s Registry office. And another villager was appointed as Jesús María’s secretary in the Dominican Party. In the hills around La Descubierta, the state’s violent eviction of Haitians started immediately after Trujillo’s April 1938 visit.12 Soon thereafter the state launched its Dominicanization program—a systematic, massive attempt to increase the state’s presence in the entire Dominican border region and to strengthen the incorporation of this region into the national community. The fact that La Descubierta was fully involved in the grotesque events in the late 1930s may be seen from the following recollections of two villagers. The first quotation is from Pablo, a well-liked community leader under and after Trujillo, but a modest man, and careful and elaborate with words: Well, the expulsion of the Haitians took place based on Trujillo’s order. Walking through the hills, one evicted all to the other side [Haiti]. Both Haitians and Dominicans died; but there were more Haitians who lost their lives, because they didn’t want to leave the Dominican lands which they had occupied—because of this the expulsion lasted some time. . . . At the beginning, one was sorry, because people were so used to living with the Haitians. One was sorry, since the Dominicans were very tied to the Haitians. There were even Dominican women living with Haitians. Haitian women had Dominican husbands, and they had children together. But after a while that feeling disappeared, and we felt good. In those days, the Haitians had occupied most of the highlands. They cultivated the land as if it were their property; they had important crops such as coffee, cattle, and many things. . . . They lost many things, just as many around here lost things. . . . After the expulsion, Trujillo constructed a boundary, using engineers and groups of Dominican workers. This boundary line is still there—it’s recognized by both Dominicans and Haitians.

The next recollection was by Mario, the agricultural foreman employed by the Ramírez, who was a PRD veteran with a striking talent for

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sociological observation, and for precise, yet often condensed and anecdotal, description: They [the Haitians] came on that road [leading to Haiti]. . . . It was negro, negro and negro; everyone left, not a soul remained. [Pointing] That house over there [for example] belonged to a Haitian. . . . They finished them off. For instance, in Los Ríos [a neighboring hamlet], there was a very important pig breeder; but around there one stopped eating pork, because the pigs had eaten [corpses of ] negros. Everywhere in those mountains you could see them killed. The boundary line was established in such a way that you didn’t see a negro nowhere. But after they killed Trujillo, things became like before; with Balaguer, the negros came back.

After the massacre and the eviction, both locals and peasants from somewhat further east repopulated the hills of La Descubierta. As part of the Dominicanization program, the state established a series of small agricultural colonies, or rural settlements, in the hills close to the demarcation line, aimed at preventing Haitians from repopulating the hills on the Dominican side. Jesús María Ramírez played an important part in the Dominicanization program. Sent first by the Ministry of Agriculture to the Pedernales area, a neighboring province, in 1942 and 1943 in charge of establishing an agricultural settlement there, he was later responsible for building four other small settlements close to the border in the hills of La Descubierta, between 1943 and 1945.13 These projects involved mainly constructing wooden homes for peasant settlers. He used day laborers from the region. The regime also put him in charge of building houses for three military posts in the hills. As part of the Dominicanization, Creole names of places, hamlets, and villages were changed by the Trujillo state throughout the country (Tolentino Rojas 1944:328–333). Jesús María assisted in re-baptizing parts of the highlands of La Descubierta—for example, Marrosó, Sabambón and Toussaint became Angel Felix, Sabana Real and Granada. From 1943 to 1947, the regime’s Dominicanization program changed La Descubierta. During these few years, La Descubierta saw the creation, not only of hill agricultural settlements and military posts, but also of a completely new road to Neyba, a new road in the community’s highlands, an aqueduct, an electric power plant, and schools. And the village nucleus got streets and a park, later followed by a church and a proper building to house the local chapter of the Dominican Party (Ramírez 2000:83–90, 110). The dictatorship’s construction of roads, aqueducts and canals played a crucial part. Throughout world history, the establishment and

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development of public roads has been a key component of state-building. This is because a system of roads has functioned both as a technology and as an idiom of connection and incorporation (Harvey 2005). Under Trujillo, traveling and transport between La Descubierta and the rest of the country were dramatically altered in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly with the road to Neyba. Public works were largely carried out by members of local communities like La Descubierta through a public system of prestación del servicio, or forced or corvée labor for the state. Turits writes Formalized into law in 1907 . . . prestación del servicio referred to public labor required in lieu of paying a road tax. It was used primarily, but not exclusively, for work developing and maintaining country roads in the area in which the prestatarios lived. However, until Trujillo’s rule, the level of resistance to this onerous obligation prevented it from running successfully on a large scale. Not only was it effectively implemented under Trujillo, but it was utilized to a far greater degree than ever imagined before in terms of number of days of labor demanded by the state . . . . There was certainly some peasant resistance to this labor . . . . Yet overall, the state managed to secure peasants’ cooperation in this onerous labor, which, in retrospect at least, elderly peasants [interviewed by him in the 1980s and 1990s] rarely condemned. (Turits 2003:106)14

According to Jesús María Ramírez, the prestación del servicio or forced labor was far from popular, but was nonetheless used in La Descubierta during the initial phase of the dictatorship in order to improve many paths and tracks. Every man, he says, had to work on public labor for two days a month. A few, like him, could afford not to work on public labor; instead of working they paid a tax of 25 centavos for each day of corvée labor. Since this forced work was so disliked, he claims, the state stopped using it. Public works in this region were also carried out by means of paid day labor, and Jesús María argues that Trujillo’s popularity in the area increased significantly when the regime in the 1930s augmented the ordinary day wage for public works from 25 to 80 centavos (Ramírez 2000:57). Jesús María Ramírez continued to work for the state in the first half of the 1950s, and remained La Descubierta’s most inf luential leader up to the dictator’s assassination. In 1950 and 1951 he was appointed provincial governor, first of his own province of Independencia and then of the neighboring province of Bahoruco. However, in the first office he lasted less than a year and in the second only one month, presumably because of disputes with Trujillistas more inf luential than himself. We know at least that he was transferred from Independencia to Bahoruco after a conf lict with a local man or rival supported by an officer from Trujillo’s

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own family, Captain Danilo Trujillo, the dictator’s nephew (Ramírez 2000:108). While Jesús María Ramírez was governor of Independencia in 1950, he once received an unannounced visit by Trujillo, who appointed people to key posts on his recommendation (Ramírez 2000:99–101).15 Although he lasted only one month in the second job as governor, Jesús María nonetheless maintained his authority in this part of the country, and soon he was again assigned to work for the regime personally by Trujillo. In 1955, he was appointed General Supervisor of Agriculture for the whole frontier region. Jesús María’s tasks for the government were part and parcel of the dictatorship’s comprehensive agrarian reforms (Ramírez 2000:117–122; Turits 2003:101). As La Descubierta’s caudillo under Trujillo, Jesús María recruited people from the community to farm his own land, build roads and agricultural settlements, occupy public offices and run the La Descubierta branch of the Dominican Party. He employed members of one of the largest families in La Descubierta, the Barrancos, as his agricultural workers. Most of the Barrancos were landless. Through his patronage Jesús María tied them to his own family and hence to the regime. He recruited members from most families to carry out public works, organizing and accomplishing these works with the aid of the socially acknowledged heads of these families, men who enjoyed respect in the community. A few of these highly respected villagers were offered public positions in the community. By the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and other public employees had to be recruited from other parts of the country as well, but the inf luence of the large local families and their informal heads remained strong. Pablo, a respected man in La Descubierta, a head of the Albas, worked closely with Jesús María as the general secretary of the local Dominican Party branch in the 1930s and 1940s, and then as head of one of La Descubierta’s state offices, the Registry Office. The friendship between the two men, however, originated not in the Dominican Party, but in local everyday and ritual exchanges—in trade, fiestas, and a shared passion for cockfights. When I lived in La Descubierta, Pablo, Jesús María’s former right hand man in the Dominican Party, was said to be the person in the community with the greatest number of compadres, more than a hundred. In his time, also Jesús María had had many compadres in La Descubierta. The state system in this part of the country was brought into being and built by means of previously established cultural and social forms—the forms of the local peasant population. These forms expressed ideas about gender, kinship and patronage. The authority of Jesús María resulted from and was nurtured by his friendship with “The Chief,” but the respect that he enjoyed was also a product of other factors. His education

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was that typical in rural communities of the 1920s—only some three years of formal schooling. The leadership of Jesús María (and before him, his uncle Emilio) was a result of his participation in, and accumulation through, the pre-1937 trade with Haiti and agricultural activities in La Descubierta’s lowlands. Jesús María possessed land, and he built and maintained relations of patronage based on this land. Like Trujillo, he acted like a patriarch. So did the other informal heads of the extended families of the Dominican southwest. Jesús María’s family background—his Ramírez name and descent—had provided him with a recommendation, a kind of capital with which he could produce trust and authority. As a dedicated enthusiast for cockfighting and fiestas, he was enmeshed in the entire rural community. In the early 1990s, Mario, the sixty-five-year-old agricultural foreman of the Ramírez, described him in these terms: He danced a lot. He drank a lot. Oh, when he drank rum, he lasted four days drinking rum and offering rum to everyone who wanted and food as well. He called on José, the musicians, and the whole pueblo went to dance and drink. He carried out up to 18 cases of rum, for everyone to drink. He made himself famous. I believe Trujillo gave him some help. He probably helped him with some money for those big parties.

What we must realize is the extent to which the Trujillo regime managed to link this society to the national state-system, or the nation-state, and hence to the dictator’s patronage after 1937. With Trujillo, the community was not only militarized and Dominicanized but also administratively elevated to the status of a municipality, and one significant result was the establishment of “ justicia” or “justice.” The community got its own municipal judge and court. People referred to Trujillo as recto or “straight,” and time and again would stress that he had secured order. A person could sleep in the streets without being robbed, and everyone had to work and produce. They emphasized that there were two things Trujillo did not tolerate, el ladrón or the thief, and el vago or the lazy one. Therefore the dictator was not bad or evil; rather he was, as they put it, bad with the bad. Or as Mario said, “Trujillo had his law.” But people of La Descubierta remembered another history as well. They remembered also the dictator’s repression—Trujillo’s cruelty and spreading of fear. One day Pablo said Trujillo killed anybody; for the slightest thing. If he wanted something, for example, someone’s agricultural property, or whatever, he ordered that he be eliminated, “kill him,” that was his remedy . . . The Trujillo rule was a disastrous rule, a disastrous rule. So many persons who suffered under the Trujillo regime! . . . But everyone had to demonstrate that he was a

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sincere Trujillista, so that he didn’t fail politically . . . There was no other way out. No sir.

Villagers and peasants spoke openly of the Trujillo regime’s deployment of arbitrary force and violence. Sometimes they mentioned the almost unmentionable, the fear everyone had felt under Trujillo. For example, a peasant who used to speak well of Trujillo said: “During the Era of Trujillo no one was free, no one. . . . [The Guards] were abusers—and to not get into trouble, you chose to walk away. You kept away from the Guards, for what you had to say was worthless. . . . Although the Guard was culpable, although he was an abuser, you couldn’t say it: ‘Shut up! Come here Guard and speak!’ ”16 Leadership 1961–1965 Those villagers who were Trujillistas until 1961 voted massively for Juan Bosch as president in 1962, and then equally massively for Joaquín Balaguer in 1966. Let us consider this. Two rival national parties established themselves after Trujillo’s death: the National Civic Union (UCN) whose leader was Viriato Fiallo, a physician, and Juan Bosch’s Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). The UCN, created by business and professional leaders, attracted other elements of the upper classes, as well as the bulk of the church hierarchy, and came soon to be viewed as representing the right. After Trujillo’s death, Jesús María Ramírez was appointed governor of the province of Independencia, and leader of the UCN in La Descubierta. He was supported by the Barrancos and a few others, including Rafael Peguero (father of the later congress deputy Rafaelito). But in the 1962 elections the PRD won a stunning victory, not only nationally but also locally. In La Descubierta, the PRD captured around two-thirds of the vote. The local branch of the party was headed by Gregorio Alba, a close friend of Pablo. During the Trujillo regime, Gregorio had been mayor and head of the Post Office in the community. La Descubierta elected Pablo as mayor. Jesús María had resources at his disposal that he distributed during the campaign, while Gregorio, Pablo and their friends were on foot and went from place to place in the countryside on muleback. An intense atmosphere reigned, as in the rest of the country, and precautions were taken to prevent groups from the two parties meeting each other face-toface. Even so, two villagers were killed during this campaign. The question arises, why did Gregorio and Pablo (both Albas) and their local friends break with Jesús María, whom they had supported

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under Trujillo? Why did they decide to back Juan Bosch and run for the PRD? Was it the UCN, or was it the party’s leader in La Descubierta, Jesús María, who mainly lost the election in La Descubierta? In brief, what may explain the PRD’s landslide victory? It must be stressed that people of La Descubierta mainly spoke well of Jesús María—many claimed that he had been a good leader. But a few villagers described tensions and conf licts also. One of these was Pablo’s eldest son, who himself was a local leader and former mayor in La Descubierta. That eldest son, trying to explain to me why Jesús María and Gregorio had ended up in different parties (Gregorio died in the early 1970s), said, “Jesús María Ramírez and Gregorio Alba never had a good relationship . . . The regime kept them united, politically united, but there was no sincerity.” Other villagers said that Gregorio and Jesús María had had a strained relationship owing to a woman—she was Gregorio’s sister-in-law and had been Jesús María’s mistress. Still others claimed that Jesús María believed that Gregorio had tried to profit politically while he himself for a time had a difficult relationship with the Trujillo family and the Trujillo government. But Gregorio and his friends definitely ran in the elections with a practical motive. Theirs had been a life of public employees, petty bureaucrats dependent upon a salary, often referred to as “el cheque” or “the pay check.” They knew perfectly well that they had to be on the winning side in order to be guaranteed employment by the state—and before the elections in 1962, Bosch looked like the winner. Pablo said about their decision to back Bosch: We liked him better than the Civic Union. We believed that Juan Bosch was more recognized in the country. We knew little about the Civic Union, but we had heard the name of Juan Bosch mentioned in several places—and because of this we liked him.

Gregorio and his friends founded a local branch of the PRD and began to record members, and Bosch came to the village and spoke at a public meeting some months after he had returned from exile. In the early 1960s, many members of the large Barranco family, mainly a landless family, worked on the Ramírez property as rural laborers. The Barrancos conceived of themselves as dependent upon the Ramírez’ patronage, not public jobs. They therefore followed Jesús María and the UCN in the election. However, the Albas backed Gregorio and Pablo, and so did the Mellas, the Martínez, the Viñas, and the Ares, whose respected heads were Gregorio’s and Pablo’s compadres and had helped to start the PRD in the community. Both Gregorio and Pablo had a

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great number of compadres in the village and beyond. The local form of compadrazgo originated in personal friendship,17 but typically affected voting. As villagers put it, you shouldn’t vote against your compadre (although it did occur). In addition, Gregorio’s growing leadership was based on his verbal skills, that is, on what some described as an “easy word” (verbo fácil). As has been suggested, personal grudges against the dominant Jesús María obviously existed both before and after 1961, but Mario (the agricultural foreman and PRD veteran) said that it was not because of him that people lost faith in the Civic Union, but “because the cívicos behaved badly, like thieves.” When Bosch’s government was overthrown after only seven months, Pablo was replaced as mayor by Antonio Ribero, a villager who, like Pablo, had been head of a local branch of the Dominican Party under Trujillo. Leadership after 1965 In 1966, the Reformist Party captured well over 70 percent of the vote in the community. The party’s local heads were the same people who had organized a local branch of the PRD in order to back the rival four years earlier. Gregorio Alba and his friends founded their new party in 1964, shortly after Bosch had been overthrown. The most respected Mellas participated from the beginning, as did Rafael Peguero. This time they were also backed by the Barrancos, who were no longer dependent upon Jesús María after he had sold his property and left the village in 1964. Cattle raising (rather than agriculture), begun by Jesús María in the late 1950s and developed on the Ramírez property during the 1960s, decreased the demand for day labor, and increased the number of households aspiring for jobs in the public sector.18 This is how Pablo described how he and his friends had become reformistas: Yes I was in a vacuum [after the coup which had overthrown Bosch], we might say neutral, yes, I stayed neutral. . . . Then the Reformist Party emerged. So, Gregorio and I . . . well, the man who had begun to organize [a local branch of ] the Reformist Party, was Antonio Ribero. He had [already] started to organize it. But then Antonio became mayor [under the Triumvirate regime which replaced the Bosch government], and he dropped it. So, Gregorio and I spoke, and he proposed that we should organize [a local branch] . . . and we met with the most important persons in those days and established a board, and followed up. And we succeeded.

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The local president and vice president of the party were Gregorio and Pablo, and elections were won nearly without opposition in 1968, 1970 and 1974. In 1970, Gregorio was elected deputy to congress for the province, but died of illness during his term of office and was replaced by his substitute, Rafael Peguero. What earned Gregorio his respect and local leadership? Suffice it to quote the answer of Pablo’s eldest son in order to underscore what I already have indicated: [He was a] good friend, serious, very serious, a very sincere friend, and [he had] an easy word, a word suitable to our surroundings and to our education, a very affectionate man and friendly, a man who had more than forty or fifty compadres.

In addition Gregorio had the will to leadership, and was therefore different from Pablo. The latter was a modest man. Mario once described him as “always like the shadow of the master, all the time it was like that.” But Pablo was also described in the following manner by Rafael Peguero: He is a man who hasn’t had many resources. Because what he owns, he gives [to others]. . . . Pablo has been a very good man, good, good, honest, a man who worked so much for the state and you don’t see that he has accumulated anything . . . he isn’t a man that searched for wealth, nor women, he has children almost only with his wife, he isn’t a man like me—much given to the pursuit of women and things. I worked a lot—I grew a lot of beans, raised cattle, cleared land, I have twenty-three children.

Rafael (the father of the later deputy for the PRD, Rafaelito) enjoyed much respect himself mainly because of his “manner of being” ( forma de ser). He was known to be generous. Having succeeded relatively well as a farmer and a state employee, he had for decades served neighbors and friends, that is, made himself useful to many in the community, for he had acted as a broker in dealings with others, such as state representatives (helping people if they needed a loan for agricultural purposes, for example, or a public document). Rafael appeared to understand the politics of this rural-urban society as gut knowledge.19 But, in general terms, he had more been a worker and producer than a party leader. Serving as a substitute member in congress, Rafael’s goal was to continue as deputy after 1974, but he was smoothly out-manipulated by Doña Miriam—that is, by her family and their friends in the capital who advocated her candidacy as that of a pueblo intellectual and an important future leader. Until 1986, the party’s candidates were appointed from

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above by Balaguer, and he chose Miriam. Rafael spoke of the change in 1973 as a wise politician: The [local] groups supported me, all the masses. But, since the position [of the party] had begun to become critical, the party decided to back her. She is a lawyer, and I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an intellectual . . . Since Dr. Balaguer had the power to pick, she was picked, but she had our support, principally the support I gave her . . . and [the support of ] Pablo, who was mayor. We even introduced her to the [local Reformist] groups [in the different sections of the community and beyond]; for she had been a Reformist, but only in her home. She hadn’t participated in election campaigns. So we introduced her, and she worked hard.

Miriam definitely won the support of the local party. With a solid tie to Balaguer (who had even been among her teachers at the university in the 1950s) and to his closest collaborators, she consolidated her leadership throughout the community and in other villages—that is, in a considerable part of the province. In 1986, the candidates of the Reformist Party were for the first time elected by a provincial assembly, with delegates from all the municipios. Miriam lost at the finishing line to another woman, a public employee from Jimaní. Four years later, in 1990, she regained her position as a deputy to congress.20 All this raises two questions: What was Miriam’s background? And what were her sources of authority, apart from education and a link to the central authorities? The decisive thing to note is the trust (confianza) she enjoyed as a result of her family background and upbringing in the pueblo—in short, her genuine local belonging. Rafael first said when asked to explain why she became a leader: “Well that girl, daughter of a very good family. She was Jesús María Ramírez’s niece—her mother was Jesús María Ramírez’s sister. Her father arrived here as an officer in those days when we didn’t have doctors, and he was a doctor. He served the pueblo a lot with his medicine.” Doña Miriam’s deceased father, who sold medicine and acquired some land and cattle, was spoken of as good and honest, and as a passionate fighting-cock keeper. He provided all his children with education. He was an immigrant from Duvergé, which meant that Miriam also had kin in that politically decisive community. Before she was appointed from above in 1973, her cousin—Ramirito’s brother—who already worked for the Balaguer state, had recommended her. Yet at that time she had already achieved leadership through her own work. The establishment in the early 1970s of La Descubierta’s secondary school, where Miriam and her sisters taught and she was the first head teacher, was mainly to her credit, at least as this was conceived in the

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village. Through the acquisition of the secondary school, she created her own link to the central rulers. Miriam’s husband Piñeyro said that his business in the village was established in 1966, and that he and Miriam in those days had relatively few resources. According to him, Balaguer had already wanted Miriam for the position as provincial governor then, but only some years later, he claimed, had they been ready for politics. Piñeyro appeared profoundly right wing. During the civil war in 1965, he was a sergeant in the neighboring province, and the commanding colonel was a Boschista who had just ordered everyone who didn’t support Bosch to leave the fortress. Piñeyro refused to leave, and alone with the help of two soldiers he took the colonel prisoner. “I rebelled” (me sublevé), he concluded. Miriam not only had more education and far greater verbal skill than he but she also possessed great autonomy and considerable will. Her political leadership was clearly her own. But together they were strong indeed. The red-painted offices in La Descubierta in which Reformist meetings were held was their property, and connected to their home and shop. Visiting politicians (from the general secretary of the party to senators) and civil servants were taken care of in their house. Their car was used to transport people to and from meetings. Hence most villagers viewed a good house and vehicle, and a minimum of money, almost as necessary conditions for achieving leadership. These resources made political activities possible. Also, the shop was important. It may be claimed that Miriam and Piñeyro, as patrons and traders, exchanged credit, and tiny gifts, for Reformist loyalty. Fear of losing one’s access to credit was clearly a convincing argument for people who experienced destitution. Miriam’s workload was exhausting each weekend when she was home. She spent from Friday or Saturday to Monday morning in the village—and her house was visited without a break by villagers and hill people. No problem was too small to be taken directly to the leader, and she personally decided on every issue. During the fieldwork I found it nearly impossible to speak with Miriam without being interrupted. Often she attended to a series of persons at the same time behind the store counter or in the living room.21 Leadership, in this context, meant continual interaction and a stream of tasks. When not receiving people in her house, she traveled to Reformist meetings in the barrios and hills, accompanied by some of her most loyal followers. The most important work that Miriam did to consolidate her political leadership and that of the party was controlling and managing public

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employment. After each election the local heads of the party that had won distributed state and municipal jobs. Miriam’s role was decisive, because jobs in the state system, at least in the province of Independencia and in the neighboring provinces, were always awarded by the central authorities on the basis of recommendations by the local party. The question of how political processes affected the distribution of jobs is discussed in the next chapter. There I shall demonstrate not only the tremendous significance of the public jobs, but also Miriam’s striking will to independence. These factors—her management of the public jobs and the way in which she made decisions—contributed significantly to her leadership, but also undermined it. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, factionalism among the local Reformists intensified and in 1992, two years after they lost the municipal elections for the first time, they saw their first openly manifested conf lict. A group among La Descubierta’s Reformists, including ex-mayors and the president of the local party division, refused to visit or talk to Miriam. Instead they rented their own offices in the village, painting them red and covering them with the inscriptions: “Municipal Board of the Reformist Social Christian Party” and “What Balaguer Says.” Pablo was La Descubierta’s mayor and the local party’s president until 1982, when he retired. Miriam occupied the other board position of practical significance: the position of party secretary. Pablo was elected mayor in 1968, and thereafter reelected three times. Gregorio and Pablo and a third man, Pedro Mella, who was among the founders of the local Reformist Party in 1964, struck an agreement before the elections in 1970. Gregorio was then employed as agricultural representative and paid 200 pesos a month by the state, while the mayor was paid less, 165 pesos. The agreement was that if Gregorio was elected deputy, Pablo would take his job and cede his position as mayor to the substitute, Pedro. And so it happened. When I lived in La Descubierta, it was in addition part of local gossip that Pedro set the mayor’s office on fire in order to destroy documents just before his term finished in 1974, and thereafter accused some of the young PRD activists in the village of the crime. Some called him “shameless” (sin vergüenza). When Pablo retired in 1982, Miriam recruited Pedro as the new (puppet) president of the local party. Pedro’s third-grade education was from the mid-1940s. His main qualification apart from loyalty was his Mella background—that is, the fact that he had a large family—and some followers in the hills. In 1986, his loyalty gave him the job of La Descubierta’s judge. When I lived in the village, he continued to fill these two positions—as municipal judge and president of the village’s division of the Reformist Party.

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In the following, I sketch the histories of the local PRD and PLD and examine the emergence of the other important political leadership based in the village in the early 1990s, that of Rafaelito. The PRD 1978–1986 During the years from 1966 to 1978, the local opposition was persecuted. Surveillance and use of violence, and accompanying distrust and fear, were an integral part of everyday life. Mario, a PRD veteran, summarized “the twelve years” in a vivid description: We couldn’t say that “I’m a supporter of Juan Bosch.” We couldn’t organize a reunion, a patrol was there in no time and ruined the meeting for us . . . [It was] a war against the perredeísmo [PRD with its members and activities] . . . Oh they kicked them, they beat them. So, which peasant would say “I’m perredeísta [a PRD supporter],” “oh I’m PRD,” “I back Juan Bosch”?22 No it was impossible. One was compelled to be a Balaguerista, one was forced. [The PRD] had to collapse . . . we were nowhere; for instance, you couldn’t hire out your truck or bus to the PRD so that the local PRD supporters could go to the capital [for a demonstration], because they set fire to it, they destroyed it.

A thirty-year-old man from the village, called Federico, was elected deputy for the PRD in 1978, but carried out little work even in his own comrades’ eyes. They recalled that they hardly saw him during the fouryear term, or that he came home only to go fishing. Federico, who had grown up in La Descubierta, had gone to secondary school in Baní and worked for the state in the capital, and seemed to be the most eloquent of all the local leaders in the village. With a vocabulary and an ease that were often amazing he produced discourse on a broad range of topics, such as the growing of beans, etiquette, culture, revolution, and family. The next in the village who headed the local PRD was also a young man. Carlos was appointed provincial governor by president Blanco in 1982, but lasted less than a year before he was fired. Raised in poverty by his grandmother in the capital, he picked up bits of knowledge from Marxist study circles and the university before he settled in La Descubierta as a worker on the Ramírez property. People claimed that the reason he was fired as governor was that he “stole” (cogió). With what he took from the state in only six months, they said, he built his house and bought his land and some cattle. Rafaelito, who had campaigned politically with him in 1982, maintained that Carlos’ reputation had been destroyed (se quemó). Not only Rafaelito but also the local PLD activists, whom Carlos joined around 1990, kept him at some distance, although they

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recognized that he remained a fearless and creative orator. While I lived in La Descubierta, Carlos was elected local leader of the Independent Peasant Movement in the hills and had made contact with Fernando Alvarez Bogaert—at that time a national Reformist leader, who aspired to the presidency after Balaguer. Carlos’s case illustrates particularly well that political practice (including choice of party) was tied to kinship relations and the hunt for mobility. The man who introduced Carlos as a peasant leader to Alvarez Bogaert when the latter held a meeting in the village was José Chauvet, La Descubierta’s Reformist mayor from 1986 to 1990, who was Carlos’s cousin and had been his substitute when Carlos had been governor, and both had belonged to the PRD. José Chauvet, in his forties in the early 1990s, belonged to the PRD until the elections in 1986 when he changed sides and became Miriam’s candidate for the job of mayor. He had been working as her La Descubierta driver after previously spending many years as a state employee in the Cibao and the capital. In the early 1990s José wanted, as we shall see later, to get rid of Miriam’s leadership at any cost, because she, according to him, prevented him from finding a job and earning a living in La Descubierta. This made him invoke those connections between politics, access to public jobs and emigration that I have mentioned previously. As he explained to me, if he and his friends (the other factionalists in the local Reformist Party) should fail in the struggle against Miriam, his alternative would be to try to migrate to the United States, because, he claimed, he had already worked for many years as a lowly paid state employee, and it had left him with nothing. His status as an ex-mayor made it easier for him to obtain a U.S. visa—both his predecessor and his successor as La Descubierta’s mayor had shown him that. While the Reformist mayor until 1986 secured visas for himself and his wife shortly after his term ended, the PRD mayor who was elected in 1990 had already started to work on his application when I was living in the community. Carlos, on the other hand, was determined to progress at home. He worked relatively successfully as a farmer and had bought more land in the hills. As he told me in his highly penetrating manner, being a migrant means “being badly off,” and “if I am going to be badly off I prefer to be it in my own country!” During the PRD’s eight-year rule before Balaguer returned to power in 1986, the repression ended. Many officers with strongly right wing and Balaguerista involvement were pensioned off. On the other hand, the PRD governments opened up frontier commerce, including many smuggling activities. Officers and locals created new sources of income. The villager who became PRD mayor in 1990 lived largely on smuggling in the 1980s, before the sugar smuggling ceased.

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From 1978 to 1982 the Reformists maintained a majority in the Senate and hence retained control over important state bodies, such as the Central Electoral Board, the Judiciary, and the Registry and Personal Identity offices. Mario, who would have good reason to give an account of his governments’ achievements, emphasized the end to the repression but also recognized that “everything remained the same . . . because everything belonged to him [Balaguer], the senators, the Chambers. Everything remained as it was.” Still, the point to stress is that the PRD never manifested any intention of changing the rules of the game concerning employment. Having taken power, it employed its own members exclusively. Hence many villagers narrated their life history in terms of decisive years such as 1966, 1978, and 1986. For example, a Reformist militant who helped found the party in 1964 told me that until 1978 he worked in the post office, then for the next eight years he was employed by the municipality, and from 1986 in the Ministry of Agriculture. Several who belonged to the PRD were employed by the state until 1986, then were left without public jobs until they were employed again by the municipality in 1990. Rafaelito’s most trusted partisan and right-hand man in the village was Alfredo Mella, a modest and sincere high-school teacher in his forties, who had been a PRD activist since the late 1960s. Let us see how Alfredo explained that it was Juan Bosch who first established the rule in Dominican politics that transfer of power meant automatic replacement of all the public employees: That way of doing politics was established by the government of Juan Bosch, in ’63. He called it la aplanadora [“the leveling”]. When the PRD won in ’63, the first time, he made una aplanadora; he changed all the public employees . . . Around here, a poor region, where there is no industry providing jobs, that is what one can offer the party’s militants, a public job, replacing one person with another. Although one doesn’t agree [with these practices], it is the reality. For what do you offer a political militant? . . . [This system] was established that time [in ’63], because during Trujillo that didn’t exist. Now it is accepted by all the parties. It is true that you could hear the PLD say [before the elections in 1990] that they were not going to do that, that they were instead going to create more jobs, but [that was a] lie! We have already seen in the Town Halls that that was only something they said.23

Now here is a baff ling and realistic insight: while saying that Bosch through his practice after the death of Trujillo taught the pueblos and thereby the parties the rule of the aplanadora, he also claimed that the pueblos now taught it to Bosch.

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The Leadership of Rafaelito Rafaelito’s leadership for the PRD has to be understood in the context of his upbringing by his mother and particularly his grandmother, as sketched by Alfredo: Rafaelito was born in the PRD . . . since [she who directed the PRD since it started here] was his grandmother, he belonged to the PRD from very early on. That time in ’69–’70 when we were imprisoned, they accused us of throwing stones at the police, of walking with the MPD’s [the Movement for Popular Democracy’s] pamphlet, of walking with stones in our pockets. But they sent Rafaelito home quickly because he was still a minor, while we remained there. We were imprisoned for two weeks. That was in ’70 when they were killing those who belonged to the MPD and the PCD [the Dominican Communist Party], in the capital.

Rafaelito himself also stressed that his political formation came more from his grandmother than from his father: [She] played a very important part and is more of a politician than my father. Because she always was a politician. My father is more a worker; grandmother is more a natural politician and has a political origin more than father: the Báez. She is of the family of Buenaventura Báez who was president . . . My father is an agricultural worker, and worked a long time with an engineer in construction. He has a gift for sociability and therefore he is also a politician . . . My grandmother worked in the Post Office during Trujillo. She was a friend of Juan Tomas Díaz, the generals of Trujillo, Alcántara, all those people. And she was very active in the party. She was the head of the PRD in La Descubierta. Father never was the head of the reformismo in La Descubierta . . . He was a deputy to Congress, but not directly elected. Grandmother never was a deputy, but only because she chose not to be one: there was a party convention in which she won [the nomination]; but she was generous and offered it to a professional who lived in the capital . . . So I was inf luenced by my grandmother’s natural leadership more than by political awareness.

He recalled how he had joined in Bosch’s campaign in 1962; in 1966 his father went to the Reformist Party and he himself followed his grandmother in the PRD. Later, I started to read literature which was popular at the time, for example, Marxist literature; I received books from older friends in the capital; they copied many books. They sent me all those books. But [because of the repression] it was difficult to send them; they typically sent them to La Descubierta with women, because of the military control on the roads.

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Sometimes the women didn’t even know that they carried those books; my friends in the capital would just say to them “Take this packet to Rafaelito.” . . . All that lasted until ’78.

Rafaelito shows here that he had a considerable capacity for “penetration” (in Paul Willis’s [1977] sense of that term); and his analysis of his father’s decisive source of political authority (“he has a gift for sociability and therefore he is also a politician”) is very apt. While Rafaelito was raised in his mother’s store, I shall argue that he had acquired his father’s gift for relationships and his way of practicing generosity, and that the two of them also conceived it in that way. After Juan Bosch’s radicalization in 1973, Rafaelito followed him to the PLD up to a point, and was involved in both PLD and PRD networks at the university, but then rejoined his old party. Speaking about the decisive 1978 election he told me that “in ’78, I don’t participate in the electoral process, but I vote for the PRD, but now my sympathy is for the PLD, yet what happens is that I vote for the change and that way I give that meaning to my vote.” Before 1982, his main involvement was not with party politics, but with studies and professional establishment through work for a state institution in the capital. Through his background, studies and work he grew very familiar with the southwest, and with the campaign of 1982 approaching, Guzmán’s followers who headed the state institution for which Rafaelito worked encouraged him to run as candidate for senator in his native province. Campaigning with, among others, Carlos, who that year ran for mayor, he never really stood a chance of winning in this Reformist bastion. But the experience served to reintroduce and establish his political name throughout most of the province. In 1986, he was elected deputy after a well-prepared campaign that even introduced new methods to local politics such as the distribution among all the PRD followers of T-shirts with Rafaelito’s name and face on them. In the meantime he had become an independent producer: an engineer with construction and repair contracts awarded him by the Ministry of Public Works. He had also joined the Bloque Institucional and committed himself to support José Francisco Peña Gómez’s leadership in the PRD against the Majluta faction. Four years later he was reelected deputy, winning more votes in La Descubierta than Miriam (who nevertheless captured more votes than he at the provincial level). How, then, may we understand Rafaelito’s leadership? How can we understand his authority? It is clear that both his father and his grandmother greatly facilitated his introduction in many localities of the province. Their respect as “good persons” (gente buena) helped him generate trust,

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or confianza. For example, his father, who had worked and had relationships with women in many communities, had groups of compadres and friends spread over most of Independencia’s territory. The father said that Rafaelito, after a first political tour to the largest community of the province, Duvergé, returned saying how he had won support there because of his father’s work for a year on the road through the Duvergé community, and because the father had “helped many people.” Rafaelito also drew on support from his many younger brothers and sisters, of whom a number had transferred their loyalty from the Reformist Party (into which they were born because of their father) to the PRD on the basis of his growing leadership. In addition to his family, two other evident sources of authority were his professional status and economic productivity. His house and vehicle made party politics function, and his bar by the park was used for meetings. Villagers appeared to agree with some reason that if it had not been for Rafaelito and his input the local PRD would have been of far less significance, and that when he was not himself present in the village the party hardly worked. This was also frankly recognized by Alfredo, who explained the basis of Rafaelito’s leadership in these terms: Though Rafaelito was a leader from early on—he always was a fiery type—, his economic position has been of importance. Around here, let’s say from ’82 on or from ’78, it has become essential for a party to have a leader of some means, in order to keep it going. Around here it would be difficult without him; no one but Rafaelito can keep the party alive. It is the same thing which happens with the Reformist Party, which doesn’t move without Miriam, though it’s divided now.

Once Rafaelito arrived from the capital, his jeep was lent out to supporters, and his home was transformed into a party headquarters with villagers coming and going without respite. Like Miriam, he was personally sought out to resolve any difficulty and procure virtually all kinds of favors.24 Many asked for money for medicine, others for a lodging or a job in a factory or office in the capital. Still others needed help with applications or documents, or a free ride when he went back. Moreover, every single follower in the province had to be closely registered and followed up by him with regard to personal identity documents and voting cards. Villagers had an image of Rafaelito as one who was “unbound to his possessions, disinterested and loose” (desprendido); and they said that he was “generous” (amplio), and a man who “turns loose the peso” (suelta el peso). In short, his reputation was that of being good, because he gave. Or,

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in Alfredo’s biased words, “because he thinks of the others, he may even remain without money so that he has to borrow.” People also regarded him as “very informal” (muy informal): “He is without airs, he has a jeep and he gives anybody a ride, any wretch gets in and he takes him to the capital.” Rafaelito’s father beautifully explained the sense and importance of being “without airs of greatness” (sin complejos de grandeza) in this political culture: Well, if I’m a well-to-do man, not to look down on him who is poor, do you see? Yes. And speak with him, receive him and listen to his complaints. But if I begin to be unpleasant (antipático) nobody approaches me. You walk in the street and you who go with your horse and don’t speak to anybody, then the people leave you in peace. If you are young and offer a smile to the people, speak with them, no matter their qualities, you find sympathy . . . One is born with that. That is important, to be accommodating to the other.

Of course we may choose to say that there is an important difference between a horse and a jeep, but according to Rafael the social form that his son had adopted was essentially similar to the one he himself had always practiced: When I was drinking, I had to add three tables so that everybody could sit down, and to me that was a joy . . . It was with my way of being that I was able to obtain the sympathy of the pueblo and relations with the big people who came, because the people got hold of me when they arrived, because I could kill a goat for them, I could make them a pot of soup, I took them out . . . That was my life, therefore I had a lot of people who surrounded me. My son is copying that. My son does that and he sends them a delivery truck with sugar! Here there are many poor people, many, many.

Rafaelito was surrounded by people nearly everywhere, and stayed in touch with locals in the capital and brought them to his house; and he took a group, say ten or twelve, to a disco and spent the night dancing and drinking. Being without a wife, he was often accompanied by beautiful women. Thus he was viewed not only as a social man but also as a man much given to the pursuit of women (mujeriego) and as one who liked to drink (le gusta su trago). Mario condensed it all, and included a couple of nuances that I shall explain: Rafaelito is a leader based on his good politics, a very good individual, very loose, an individual who resolves any type of problem for anybody, be they peledeístas,25 be they perredeístas, or be they reformistas. He is a good man. If it is necessary to give someone food, he gives it, be he a reformista

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or be he whatever . . . he is a sound individual, no matter what they say. All have to do some small bad things in order to manage. Maybe people say this or that; but here in the pueblo we acknowledge him as a good boy who solves anything for a sick person, for anybody.

Rafaelito’s way of giving was largely as Mario described it. His strategy was that of serving without asking about the household’s party loyalty. Both he and the villagers mentioned this as a difference between him and Miriam. Such a strategy was well adapted to attract followers and build up leadership in a period in which the PRD had very limited or no access to the public sector. Put differently, while Miriam had been, and was, able to rely heavily on her delegated control over the distribution of public jobs, Rafaelito had constructed, and continued to construct, political power through activity that crossed established party ties. The context of such local power strategies, however, would have changed entirely for both Miriam and Rafaelito should state power have been transferred from Balaguer to Peña Gómez. Mario’s words above contain a cryptic phrase: “a sound individual, no matter what they say.” Mario referred to what all in the village said about the source of Rafaelito’s economic means. Let us therefore pose this question: how did he generate his money? Before and after the transfer of power in 1986 Rafaelito operated as an independent engineer with contracts for public buildings, canals and other ventures awarded him by the government. These left him with a surplus that he used for his other activities. Still, how had this been possible if it was common practice for public works projects in every province to pass via the province’s senator, who distributed them according to political criteria? Since the year Balaguer returned to power, Rafaelito had been awarded his contracts in a neighboring province (the province of Bahoruco) whose senator was now a nationally well-known Reformist leader, regarded as close to Balaguer, but had been elected deputy as an unknown for the first time in 1986. According to the villagers, he used to be a small trader who owned virtually nothing before he was elected; hence Mario uttered this bitter phrase: “Luis José, what good is he, Luis José was only traveling around here selling a bit of salt-herring, selling some salt-herring to the stores.” He used to visit Rafaelito’s father’s shop, and Rafaelito and he renewed their friendship as newly elected southwestern deputies. Both made a scoop in their careers when Luis José González Sánchez, surprisingly even to many in his own party, was in his first congressional term elected president of the Chamber over the heads of several Reformist candidates, in 1987. Rafaelito contributed to

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his election by persuading his PRD colleagues to vote for Luis José. Later Luis José showed him his gratitude. Alfredo told it like this: Several Reformists aspired for the presidency of the Chamber. So Balaguer chose the one who had inf luence with the opposition. [Before the election was going to take place in congress] Luis José went to Peña Gómez to find out whether the PRD deputies would support his candidature in the election; he used Rafaelito as his intermediary. Rafaelito spoke to the PRD deputies of his candidature, saying that he was the best alternative among the candidates, that he was best suited to the party, that he was less radical, and so on. And he achieved Peña’s support. Later he [Luis José] was very grateful; so what he did was that he got him [Rafaelito] his public works. But Rafaelito had to give him a percentage. That way Rafaelito was able to produce a livelihood during all those years, with the works which he was awarded through Luis José.

The share that Luis José demanded for each contract was 10 percent of the total project amount plus the whole of the Ministry’s f irst advance payment to the contractor. Villagers and people elsewhere frequently blamed this system for cheap materials, misconstruction and even non-completion of large parts of projects. Rafaelito also made much money through a congress system of privileged imports of cars, known as the system of tax exemptions. Every congress member had a right to importation of a vehicle on favorable terms—based on credit—every two years. Alfredo also explained this, and another villager in fact chose to name Rafaelito as “a master of exemptions” (un maestro de exoneraciones), helping even Miriam. So Rafaelito also generated capital as an entrepreneur and a middleman linking congress with the business class.26 Rafaelito’s Reformist friend, Luis José, advanced swiftly once he was elected, but Rafaelito moved far more slowly. Luis José owned property in the United States in addition to what he controlled in the southwest and the capital, and even loyal Reformists such as Pablo and Miriam would say that he was bad and that it was no secret that his politics was only that of enriching himself. But obviously Luis José was not the only one. While I lived in La Descubierta, the Archbishop frequently argued that the south was dominated by opportunistic profit-seekers and corrupt underminers of social growth, and even sought to link named Reformist politicians to the growing drug business in the region.27 After Rafaelito had obtained leadership of the PRD in his province, Peña Gómez trusted him with an important task as regional leader covering several provinces. This meant a considerable geographical expansion of

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regular political tours, and less frequent visits to his province. It also implied great economic costs (apart from those of a social nature associated with constant traveling), since he himself covered the expenses. Rafaelito expressed doubts to me whether he would be able to continue as he did for more than another term. While his day-to-day aim was to help bring Peña Gómez to power and decisively transform the context of partisan political life, he also spoke of his deep sense of responsibility resulting from his embodying “the trunk” (el tronco) of his family after his father, and about possibly being in a process of converting himself from a regionally based leader to a national one, residing and elected in the capital. The 1990 elections introduced a new ballot that enabled voters to split their vote. In previous elections, those voting for Balaguer automatically gave their vote to his party’s other candidates. But with the new ballot a person might choose to vote, for example, for Balaguer as president and for a PRD or PLD candidate as deputy or mayor. A significant number in La Descubierta chose to split their vote. Many of Rafael Peguero’s old compadres with their dependents gave their votes to Balaguer but voted for Rafael’s son as deputy. As Alfredo put it, “Now he [Rafael Peguero] gives his vote to Rafaelito, and so do his people, his friends. He made many people split their vote. That is to say, he said to them: ‘if you wish, vote for Balaguer, but vote for the PRD deputy and mayor.’ He made many split their vote. . . . [In the municipio] Rafaelito got more votes than Miriam.” Rafaelito’s own conclusion was that his leadership was based on a combination of his father’s leadership among his generation with his own among the younger generation. Rafael explained his friends’ actions in the following manner: [They did it] in gratitude. For example, if you have been helped previously when you have needed it, and you don’t have political engagements, you [ just] vote for a party, then instead of giving your vote, for example, to another, you give it to Rafaelito who is my son, because you are grateful to me. . . . Many reformistas who followed me have given their vote to my son.

He added that “My ideals are still Reformist. Yes, I have to cooperate with the Reformist Party, because that is my line and my leader is Joaquín Balaguer and I have an engagement, but the two parties are more or less almost the same thing, I would say, aren’t they?” The same process was evident in the municipal elections. The PRD candidate who in 1990 beat a Reformist for the first time was Pablo’s son,

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and many of Pablo’s Reformist compadres and friends gave their votes to him and not to the candidate of their own party. Pablo’s son, Felipe, was a Reformist and a public employee until 1982. That year he attempted to become his party’s candidate for mayor in order to succeed his father, but lost the nomination election by a narrow margin. Later he and most of his brothers became displeased with the local party and went over to the PRD. For the 1990 campaign, Felipe mobilized all his family. His oldest brother, who still was a Reformist but a Fernandista (supporter of the Reformist Fernando Alvarez Bogaert), made the local Fernandistas vote for him, and Pablo convinced his generation; and, as Alfredo explained, “You know that Pablo has many compadres, I believe he is the man who has the largest number of compadres here.” Rafaelito’s father also voted for his compadre’s son, and said: “[Felipe] was elected mayor because many reformistas voted for him . . . because he is the son of Pablo who is very cherished and many voted for him, since his father is very great in the pueblo. You want a political position and the friends of your father help you.” To sum up, then, in 1990 a number of villagers voted for Balaguer and the sons of Rafael and Pablo. Many claimed that Miriam was rejected in her own community since her vote was 2 percent lower than Rafaelito’s. Some argued that they followed Balaguer but not Miriam, others that people in the village were not Peña Gomistas but only with Rafaelito. While Miriam’s vote was 2 percent lower than that for Balaguer also, the vote for Rafaelito was 4 percent higher than that for Peña Gómez. The one with the highest figure was Pablo’s son, who captured nearly 40 percent, and the PLD got well below 20 percent, in spite of a significant increase from 1986. The PLD I shall discuss four aspects of the PLD in La Descubierta: (1) conf lict between family members associated with PLD participation; (2) the degree of repression before 1978; (3) local party heads; and (4) changes in the ties to the established politicization of the public sector from the 1990s. The local woman who was responsible for inspiring a few young people and students to found the PLD in the village after 1973 was a secondary school teacher and Miriam’s sister, who later died in an accident. As late as 1978, however, only some fifteen persons participated in a PLD procession through the village. The most instructive data from those early years relate to a conf lict over teaching of history in the secondary school.

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Miriam’s sister taught history in that school for two years in the mid1970s, and rather than continuing with the historical narratives that had been in monopolistic use in Dominican education for more than half a century, she drew on Bosch’s social analysis. She changed from the patriotic histories—those of Bernardo Pichardo and Manuel Arturo Peña Battle28 —to texts from Bosch’s class-based history. Because of this and her involvement in the PLD, she was isolated and spied on, as well as being put under pressure and threatened with dismissal by her sister and the rest of her family, as recounted by one of her students who was a teacher and among the heads of the local PLD when I lived in the village: In fact, she gave a scientific character to the teaching of history . . . and, really, that clashed with the Reformists. In addition . . . the contact with the family was broken. There was hostility among the children; the children couldn’t go to the family of the other . . . she broke what is called a barrier.

This family conf lict over the teaching of history demonstrates one way in which history may constitute, as Kapferer (1988:37) has written, the very stuff of politics. After Miriam’s sister’s two years, an uneducated Reformist and former poor dependent of the Ramírez was placed in the job as history teacher in the secondary school, and kept it until 1992. The only reason he was dismissed in 1992 was that he had left his job and the students twice in a row for more than six months at a time to work in the United States. This man used the history of Moya Pons (1984b), but the following is closer to the practical picture: Really, the pupil comes out empty; that is to say, the pupil doesn’t come out with real knowledge of our history . . . because one uses very traditional methods, the method of the question, the questionnaire style. Well . . . only questions, because nobody has the book, so the boys and girls take it upon themselves to study somewhere with a book. They fill in answers to questions, sometimes without meaning, it cannot be understood, and they go and fill in.

The description was given by the high-school teacher and PLD leader cited above. Although raised in great poverty by a peasant, he was among the two or three with an intellectual approach among his local supporters, another being a son of Miriam’s dead sister. Like the latter, he ended in profound conf lict with his family, who were Albas. When I lived in the village more than fifteen years later he was still not on speaking terms with some of them who were among the most eager Reformists. He recalled, “I lived outside home more than three years,

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living in the house of a sister of mine, going to school. Do you see? Because of political problems. Yes, for being, as they would say, against Balaguer, against the salary of my father. That is what they said, ‘Oh the government is supporting you, and you are acting against your father!’ ” Miriam’s sister and this young man and a few of their friends, who were the first in the village to refuse to submit to political authority based on kinship, were accused of putting the household viability of their whole family in danger. According to the same man, “The parents didn’t consult their children and they registered them, it even happened to me, they managed to sign me up in the Reformist Party without my wanting it,” and he remembered, for example, that Once in ’77 Balaguer arrived here. I remember that I had already completed school. And my brother forced me so much in order that I should go to the meeting that he beat me. He beat me. And I used to have an Afro-look and I remember myself there with a pair of scissors in my hair, he cut my hair and raged against me as Communist, there next door to some belonging to the military, that brother of mine, but, really, I sat there crying.

While surveillance and family pressure were everyday realities for the young PLD activists in the village in the 1970s, the violent repression by the military and police was mainly directed against the PRD until 1978. The same man said: “During those days [the twelve years], it was better to be a peledeísta than a perredeísta . . . The perredeístas were persecuted a lot. We were also persecuted, but not to the same degree as the perredeístas, who represented a [real] alternative [i.e., a large party], during the twelve years.” Leadership of the local PLD had been, and was, undermined through migration as well. Young activists had left for Santo Domingo in order to study and become employed, and some continued their work for the party there. The heads in the village during the year of my fieldwork were a group of relatively young men, of whom some were teachers in the primary school and the secondary school and a few were in the process of migrating. Their authority in the eyes of the villagers of other parties, however, was greatly weakened by their lack of resources and their youth in social terms. Many described them as boys (muchachos) and Miriam and Rafaelito as “the lawyer” and “the engineer,” and asked rhetorically what they might obtain through them who were even worse off than themselves. In Mario’s thought-provoking words, Here the politics is clear. The political environment here is dangerous. [Mario points toward Miriam’s house] Over there lives a women who isn’t easy, neither she nor her husband. But they are the ones who have money

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and meet with Balaguer. And Rafaelito; he is a politician anywhere. He helps no matter what, he helps a lot. And that is the problem with Juan Bosch. Bosch doesn’t turn loose the peso, he doesn’t give money. The militants of Bosch are honest, but they have to fight only with curses [anger], because he doesn’t give them anything. He gives nothing. So [all this being so]: what can the honest do? Because people are tired of Balaguer, they go to Bosch [at least many did this before 1990], since Bosch produces fine words. He doesn’t kill people. Bosch is a good president because Bosch doesn’t kill people, but he has a weak point: Juan Bosch isn’t visible to anybody! That is the only trouble with him. He doesn’t spend his money. He says he doesn’t have any; but if you don’t have, who is going to have? It hurts a lot, because [let’s suppose that] I’m his leader here and he doesn’t send me money so that I can help people; that makes parties and politicians stagnate.

Nevertheless, with its increased vote in the 1990 elections the PLD won one municipal councilor (regidor) while the other parties each obtained two. On this basis the local PRD and PLD negotiated an agreement that resulted in a Council majority, and distributed the municipal jobs between their respective supporters. There are at least two instructive features of this process. First, according to Alfredo, Rafaelito and he sought first to negotiate with the Reformists, because these controlled state employment and hence needed the municipal jobs less acutely than the PLD activists. As he put it, their preference had been a deal with the Reformists because it would have meant more PRD jobs in the community: The order we had was to negotiate with the highest bidder; that is, it wasn’t necessarily with the PLD. We first negotiated with the Reformist Party, but not with Miriam and [her husband] Piñeyro. Instead we met with the provincial governor. The agreement we made [with him] would give the Reformist Party the municipal president in Postrer Río and us the president in La Descubierta. In other words, we made a joint agreement for the two town halls. To us it was the best alternative to make an agreement with the Reformist Party [and not with the PLD], because they only demanded two jobs here [in the municipal administration of La Descubierta]. But the agreement was turned down in Postrer Río. The perredeístas in Postrer Río refused to accept it, because the struggle [between reformistas and perredeístas] there was almost a personal one: when Guzmán arrived in Postrer Río during the election campaign of ’78, shots were fired between reformistas and perredeístas . . . there were many wounded. After that the reformistas and perredeístas never had a good relationship, and the agreement was therefore turned down. After that we negotiated with the PLD with regard to the jobs; we gave them 33 percent, that is, ten or eleven jobs. But the agreement dealt only with the distribution of the jobs.

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What I find instructive in this, and therefore emphasize, is not so much the way the PLD could be substituted for the PRSC as a negotiating partner for the PRD, but that the single issue in negotiations between the local PRD and PLD was the number of jobs each would get. Put differently, after the 1990 election, the local PLD, in order to support Pablo’s son’s administration, demanded only enough jobs in it to satisfy its own supporters. Second, the PLD recruited its people for public jobs according to what they described as (a household’s or a person’s) “need” (necesidad), not skills and education. The local PLD selected those deserving party activists whom it considered in desperate need of a monthly pay check. An extreme example was a villager with small children who lived without working and was classified by many as “idle” (haragán), but was trusted with the job of municipal inspector by his fellows. Although he had been a meritorious village activist for the PLD since the mid-1970s, he had recently been expelled by his local committee for misappropriation of funds, and fought vigorously for his municipal job. One of Rafaelito’s brothers, who was a poor professional and presumably among the most upright men in La Descubierta, voted for the PLD as late as 1990, but went over to the PRD while I was in the field. In justifying his action he mentioned a couple of incidents, such as an important party division at the national level and a PLD mayor in another community having been bought up by the local Reformists, and referred to the local scene and the case of the municipal Inspector. His conclusion was that because the PLD too was apparently saturated with political opportunism, and after all Rafaelito was not among the worst, he should join his brother. In this we may see profound political drama. Repressive patronage politics undermined education and sustained poverty, and through migration drained the area of professionals and leadership. In this context the popular demand for “help” (ayuda) through any way of getting into the public sector through a job was maintained from below—presumably, in a way not so different from the way in which the poor English masses in the eighteenth century, through their moral economy, demanded a just price for bread (Thompson 1971). While fear of the people’s hunger riots and protests had a limited restraining effect on the powerful in pre-industrial England, Miriam and Rafaelito described themselves as chained by their followers. Both explained that even if they had wanted to transform the rules of the game relevant to jobs (something they apparently did not want to do), the people would not have let it happen. Rafaelito summarized it in his assertion that “Around here people vote with their belly.” I myself observed how actively households in the barrios fought for jobs, and hence put pressure on, interfered with, and sometimes rebelled against Miriam’s decisions.

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The Networks of Rule: Continuity and Change In La Descubierta, the state was largely created and constructed by the community’s own inhabitants. In this outlying region, the state-building project was not a process basically lacking in legitimacy in the eyes of the local people. On the contrary, the Dominicans residing in the southern borderlands saw the state-building project as a form of emancipation. They regarded it as a road to progress and development. The history of La Descubierta in the twentieth century testifies not only to change, but also to a striking continuity over time. In La Descubierta in the early twentieth century, a set of key institutions had structured and shaped political and social life for such a long time that the subsequent innovations were molded according to the example of these old, established ideas and practices. I do not ignore the processes of change. In La Descubierta, notable changes occurred from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1990s. The agrarian structure in the community’s lowlands grew into one of extreme concentration, and the patterns of production and work were changed, with shifts from a situation of “more agriculture and less cattle” to one of “more cattle and less agriculture.” Patterns of trade were transformed many times, and the area lived through booms based on timber, charcoal, and sugar. The ethnic composition underwent a dramatic change in 1937, but after 1961 Haitian peasants resumed their migration to the Dominican countryside and later to the cities. The community registered a steady yet slow population increase, and, after Trujillo’s death, heavy out-migration, particularly to the capital. In the late 1980s a spectacular process began of migration by a large number of women to the cities of Spain and other European nations, after some men and women had already left to live in New York. The changes of government meant shifts in the structure of parties and the extent of terror. While the years before and after Trujillo implied competition between parties, his rule forcibly incorporated the whole nation into a single Dominican Party. From 1978, Guzmán’s government put a stop to military repression. Finally, there was much conspicuous change in the areas of communication and consumption. Through the infrastructure erected during the Era of Trujillo the southwest and the border provinces became effectively tied to Santo Domingo, and television sets and video recorders, as well as groups of visiting tourists and the villagers’ own travels, in the early 1990s updated the population on matters of global importance. None the less these and the other changes that occurred were shaped according to a particular theory and practice: that of the Dominican people of the southern border.

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What were the main similarities and differences between the leaders we have met in La Descubierta from the 1920s to the 1990s? I shall close this chapter by attempting to answer this question. The twentieth-century history of leadership in La Descubierta offers invaluable insights into the dynamics of political and social life in this region. The focus on leadership lets us see with clarity (1) that the region’s twentieth-century political and social history has largely been a history of networks: networks of kin, compadres, friends and leaders, and (2) that this history contains not only changes, but also considerable continuity. The three local people who consolidated leadership after 1937 at a provincial and even regional level were Jesús María before the death of Trujillo, his niece Miriam from the early 1970s, and Rafaelito from the mid-1980s. These people served as power brokers who monopolized and controlled points of contact between power at the national level and the region, village and hamlets.29 Power mediation between the state apparatus and communities was evidently far more substantial in the cases of Jesús María and Miriam, who were the local leaders of the Trujillo and Balaguer regimes, than in that of Rafaelito, who seemed mostly to redistribute his own money in order to stimulate support in elections for himself and Peña Gómez. The three cases reveal complex vital qualifications for leadership. As the villagers put it, in order to be a leader one should “unite the conditions” (reunir las condiciones). Leaders should all be raised locally, implying that their followers ought to know (or have known) their fathers and respect others of their families as mostly good people. The reputation of a person’s parents or uncle guaranteed, in the eyes of locals, his seriousness in politics. In addition leaders should possess sufficient capital to sustain local redistribution through generosity, and make state or party politics operate through a local headquarters and transport. Jesús María’s political leadership—like his uncle Emilio’s before him—was related to participation in and accumulation through the (pre-1937) cattle trade with Haiti and farming in the community’s lowlands. Jesús María possessed land and built and maintained relations of patronage (particularly with the Barrancos) based on this landed property. After the death of Trujillo, landed property ceased to be an indispensable resource for the building up of leadership in La Descubierta. Yet Miriam’s leadership would presumably never have materialized had it not been for her membership of the Ramírez family and ties to her landowning—not to say land-monopolizing—kinsmen in the community. Miriam was, by all accounts, alone as a professional in the Reformist Party in the village in the early 1970s, and Rafaelito the only PRD head in his community with corresponding university training in the early

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1980s. Jesús María’s education was that of a rural community around 1920—that is, only some three years of schooling—but his descendants called him an autodidact, and Trujillo recruited him to produce soil surveys for his government. The decisive aspect of the three leaderships, apart from the above characteristics, was the personal central bond. While Jesús María was entrusted with his role on the spot by the leader personally30 when Trujillo went to the community in 1938, Miriam and Rafaelito had to work their way into local party leadership through links with central figures, forged first at the level of the capital. It appears that Trujillo literally brought the Dominican state to the southern frontier, where he later fomented public-sector clientage, but that after his death those who aimed at solid political leadership in the region had to travel to the capital themselves and there establish their personal connections that then served as their mark of exclusive trust among their followers. Miriam and Rafaelito had, as they and villagers said, a “commitment” (compromiso) with their leader—that is, Balaguer or Peña in either case—and because of this local people involved themselves with them. It clearly takes a good measure of talent and resources as well as extended networks to be able to enter into a personal commitment with a national leader in the capital, and hence we see the difference between power brokers such as Jesús María, Miriam and Rafaelito, who mediated between the local and central level, and those lesser brokers who essentially drew on their communal and regional networks. Neither Gregorio nor Pablo nor Rafael Peguero had the capacity to go far beyond their frontier society and create a personal bond of trust with a national leader, although Gregorio was probably striving after this when he fell ill and died. Pablo was only a village leader and his networks were those of his municipio and neighboring Postrer Río. But Gregorio and Rafael extended their connections to embrace at least the rest of the province and some officers and politicians outside the province. Together the three were able to mobilize a vast number of relatives supporting them as candidates in elections. In addition Jesús María’s leadership was associated with a multitude of compadres, while neither Miriam nor Rafaelito, who consolidated their roles from the mid-1970s, had many compadres in the village. In the case of Rafaelito, however, this might partly be explained by his absence, since he had lived in the capital after he left as a young man to study. Yet the leaderships of both Miriam and Rafaelito had been, and continued to be, enormously strengthened through compadrazgo and family ties. While Miriam had been, and still was, able to mobilize in their entirety the community powers of Pablo and other respected heads

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of families, Rafaelito and his father together converted the power of the latter among the old generation into that of the former, across party divisions. The strongest indication of the continued political importance of compadrazgo and family is the 1990 municipal election won by Pablo’s son, an ex-Reformist, for the PRD. He was elected with the votes of his father’s network of Reformist compadres and those of his Reformist older brother’s and Rafael Peguero’s compadres.

CHAPTER 4 NEGOTIATING RULE: THE REFORMISTS AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR

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ow “political” were the public jobs in La Descubierta in the early 1990s? Let me sketch an initial answer. For the sake of clarity, I shall limit myself to a look at the education sector, the hospital, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Post and Telecommunication offices. The latter two offices employed ten people.1 These were all of Reformist families. The head of the Barrancos, who was among Miriam’s closest collaborators in the village, was head of the post office. He had also previously been employed in the same office, and thereafter pensioned, so that the post office paid him two checks each month—one for being head of the La Descubierta office and one for having retired from the institution. Yet his job as head was an absentee one; instead he worked daily in straightforward village politics for the Reformists (a day-and-night job), while the post office was managed by another employee, a young man who worked mainly as a tailor. The telecommunication office, in which four persons were employed to operate one phone, was run by the Barranco head’s son. A constant accusation among peasants in the hills and village against the Ministry of Agriculture was that the distribution of seed was based on political criteria. A local Reformist (a militant since the party’s foundation in 1964), who worked in the Ministry of Agriculture from 1986 to 1991, was dismissed while I lived in the village on the grounds that he had not favored adequately the Reformist peasants of a specific hill community. Of the ministry’s twenty employees in the municipio almost all were of households that backed Balaguer and Miriam. The two exceptions were the head of the office and the office’s only veterinary surgeon. The latter was Rafaelito’s brother—the one who shifted from the PLD to the PRD during the year of the fieldwork. Later, in 1992, he was ordered by the

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ministry against his will to work in the east, which made him hand in his notice since it would be impossible to support his household there on his meager salary. An agronomist, who was a native of a neighboring community and belonged to the PRD, was head of the office. Having been transferred by the ministry—as he said, as a punishment—to the smaller office in La Descubierta after his party had lost the elections in 1986, he had managed to maintain a delicate relationship with Miriam and her followers and thereby survived in his job. In the hospital, both administrative personnel and cleaners were employed according to their Reformist merit, and so were nurses. Miriam recruited young women from the community’s Reformist households to send them to a school of nursing (in a different province) instead of employing some of the nurses in the village who were perredeístas and peledeístas. A local nurse had studied for two and a half years in the town of San Cristóbal, while most of those working in the Hospital had only done a ten-month course. Her father was an ex-military man and a reformista, but this was of no help since her husband was a PLD leader in the village, and her brother was elected a municipal councillor for the PLD in 1990. Recognizing that she would not be employed as long as Miriam stayed in power, she was making plans to find a domestic job in Europe. Her friend, another nurse married to a PLD leader, had already left for Barcelona. The hospital administrator, who was in charge of a considerable budget, was the son of Pedro Mella, the local president of the Reformist Party. This son was in his early twenties and had limited education (only the local secondary school). The day-to-day affairs of the hospital were in large measure decided on directly from Miriam’s home. Every morning Pedro’s son went to see Piñeyro in the latter’s home. The position of inspector of the province’s primary schools was occupied by Miriam’s brother, who held a university degree in education but lived from agriculture and business. His wife was head of the secondary school. Political loyalty was decisive also in the recruitment of teachers, and less than thirty of more than forty people who were employed as teachers in La Descubierta had completed the required teacher training. To illustrate, in 1992 two Reformist girls were employed as teachers in a hill hamlet. While they had completed secondary school, students of education also applied for jobs; but the latter belonged to the PRD and PLD. A vacancy in the primary school in the village was filled with a Reformist militant who had barely started his university training, while a perredeísta who applied for the position was about to complete a degree course in education. Thereafter many locals said the new teacher (who was brought down to the village from a hill school) didn’t know how to read and write, since he wrote with so many spelling mistakes.

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While the majority of La Descubierta’s teachers were Reformists, there were also a number who belonged to the PRD and PLD. Most of the latter obtained their jobs before 1986. Why had they not been dismissed? The best answer is the teachers’ national union (ADP). The following is what a PLD leader and teacher in the secondary school said about the ADP: “It is difficult for the reformistas to dismiss [teachers], because they will have to face the ADP. Any teacher, be he reformista, perredeísta or whatever, peledeísta, knows that if they dismiss him unjustly they will face the ADP, because, as a strong union in the Dominican Republic, there one doesn’t defend the teacher on the basis of the color of his party but on the basis of the fact that he is a teacher, the fact that he works in education.”2 Neither agronomists nor nurses had unions of comparable strength.3 We have seen that the history of the Dominican southwest is a story of political and social networks. Until now we have examined the networks that shaped life in La Descubierta as the outcome of a large-scale history and as a historical configuration in itself. So far I have drawn a picture of global, national and local historical structures, not of agency and tactics. But networks are outcomes not only of structures, but also of forms of agency. Political and social networks are products and transformations of historical structures. Yet they are also made, remade, and modified through individuals’ and groups’ concrete decision-making in everyday life—through what Bourdieu has called the logic of practice (Bourdieu 1980; Bourgois 1995). In this chapter, I shall give details of a set of processes that took place in La Descubierta in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The story’s protagonists are members of La Descubierta’s Reformist Party. I shall examine how they distributed, and fought over, the region’s public jobs. The analysis has two objectives. I hope to show the striking extent to which the networks that produced the Balaguer state in this part of the country were constantly created, re-created, and altered through everyday encounters, negotiations, and exchanges—in brief, agency. Second, I wish to document that leaders and followers interacted on the basis of a set of ideas about fairness. The Reformists quarreled over rights to public employment, and built the state, by means of a moral language. Political and social agency had normative roots. The construction of the Balaguer regime was morally anchored. Factionalism in political parties provides a particular research opportunity. Factionalist struggle means that a number of people choose to formulate more openly and more publicly what otherwise remains largely unsaid. An irreconcilable division among the Reformists in La Descubierta became openly manifest only from the beginning of 1992,

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with the creation of a new “Municipal Board of the PRSC” office described earlier. Yet the villagers’ accounts during my fieldwork made it clear that the split had developed over a period of at least ten years, and had matured through at least six important sets of events. The section that follows outlines these events. Thereafter I examine the factionalists’ discourse, and Miriam’s strategies to retain control of the party, the public sector, and, thereby the community. The Emergence of an Open Conf lict In late 1990, a bitter controversy developed between Miriam and Piñeyro and the head of an important household in the village, named Tomás. The latter had just been dismissed from his job as municipal treasurer. Tomás was mayor from 1982 to 1986. His candidature had been backed by Pedro Mella and other respected Mellas, while Miriam’s candidate had been one of Pablo’s sons. In the early 1980s, some Mellas and men of other families sought an adjustment of the municipal power balance, after many years of domination by the networks of Miriam and Pablo, the head of the Albas. That is why they promoted Tomás’s candidature. Still, the whole party voted for Tomás on election day. After the election, Pedro’s political work was rewarded with the job of municipal judge. During the fieldwork, many said Tomás was the best mayor the village ever saw. However, he made his decisions without consulting Miriam. When Miriam tried to interfere in his decision making, he told her that he would take no orders as mayor. While their relationship became strained, it was nonetheless maintained in a certain balance— mainly because of the inf luence of Tomás’s wife, who had for decades been among Miriam’s best friends in the village. After his term as mayor, Tomás became municipal treasurer. Open conf lict broke out when a public price inspector visited the village shops in 1990. He fined a number of the small shops in the barrios, but not those of Piñeyro, Ramirito, and Rafael Peguero—the local rich. The latter charged the same prices as those who had been fined, and were said to have bribed him. Believing that the whole episode had been unfair, Tomás (as municipal treasurer) first refused to proceed with the fines, and then attacked a police sergeant who had been ordered to the Court House to force Tomás to take action. On Miriam’s recommendation, he was fired. He then became utterly frustrated with his party (saying that he would never again take part in any form of politics) and became an uncompromising enemy of Piñeyro. Tomás did not join the factionalists’ group from the beginning in 1992, but he sympathized with their cause.

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A second local conf lict produced a so-called Fernandista faction in La Descubierta—a group of local followers of the national Reformist leader Fernando Alvarez Bogaert, who aspired for the presidency and had his own organized factions in almost every village, town, and city of the country. Born a millionaire and an economist by profession, Alvarez Bogaert was in his fifties when I carried out fieldwork. He was among the founders of the Reformist Party in 1964, and the second figure in the party hierarchy after 1966. In 1978, Alvarez Bogaert was Balaguer’s candidate for vice president but representatives of the Dominican armed forces—or the Trujilloist military machine that Balaguer himself had restructured in 1966 and kept in power since then—forced Balaguer to dismiss him during the last weeks of the electoral campaign (Hartlyn 1998:121; Moya Pons 1990:534).4 The two heads of the group of Fernandistas in La Descubierta, a retired officer called Ramón and Pablo’s oldest son, were employed in the hospital as administrator and deputy administrator respectively. They were dismissed in 1989 after a quarrel between Ramón and Piñeyro related to the former’s management of the hospital’s budget. Basically, Ramón, like Tomás, refused to accept orders from Miriam’s house: “I know my rights; she wasn’t going to run my office while I was head.” But Ramón’s attitude cost him his job. Later he fell ill. During the fieldwork, he recovered in his home, while his household was assisted by Fernando Alvarez Bogaert. Pablo’s son had found a public job in a different province, but spent the weekends in La Descubierta. A striking aspect of these cases is that the making of a local Fernandista faction was a response to a purely local struggle—not to a sudden estrangement from Balaguer. After the dismissals, Ramón and Pablo’s son (and their close compadres) knew that they would never again have a say, far less be employed, in La Descubierta as long as Miriam remained in power. Since Balaguer had a commitment with Miriam, the only way to get rid of the latter was to try to forge a tie to another national leader (who might gain power and then delegate it to them). Ramón once worked for Fernando in a different province, and therefore went to him for the creation of a personal tie to the national center. When Fernando came to La Descubierta on tour, he met with his followers in Ramón’s home. Fernando also knew what went on. In Ramón’s home, he scolded his local followers for losing sight of the aim. They had wasted their energy in the fight with Miriam, while the single thing that mattered in order to solve their difficulties, he said, was to work incessantly for his candidature to be the next Dominican president. Or to put it differently, the Fernandista faction in La Descubierta was shaped from below. It came into being as a result of a war between groups

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of locals, and its point of reference continued to be control over affairs (mainly employment) in the village. A new Reformist office in La Descubierta was established when Ramón and Pablo’s son joined forces with three others who had become Miriam’s enemies: José Chauvet, Santiago Mella, and the latter’s brotherin-law, Pedro Mella. What were the motives of these three? José was La Descubierta’s mayor from 1986 to 1990. After the 1990 election, Miriam got him a job in the Customs at the border. He soon left this after a personal controversy, and returned with the demand that she get him a new job. Since she was reluctant (asserting that there was no satisfactory position locally), he became her open critic. During fieldwork, he used to say: “She doesn’t want me to work.” As he was the person with the best verbal skills among the factionalists, his role seemed a key one as a catalyst of different local ambitions. He had also forged his own personal link with the provincial senator in Duvergé. In addition, he seemed determined. He was in no doubt that Miriam’s leadership blocked his own way to progress; that is, he knew well it was necessary to damage the party in the village first in order to achieve her defeat at the level of the province. As we have seen previously, his main alternative in the event of failing to remove her was migration abroad. However, his companions Pedro and Santiago nurtured different hopes. The latter’s dissatisfaction grew out of his attempt to become mayor in 1990. Santiago, a retired officer in his fifties, was the first Reformist candidate for mayor ever to have lost the municipal elections. Apart from his Mella background and own will, he seemed not to be particularly well qualified for communal leadership. People said he could not speak (“no sabe hablar”), and many villagers, Reformists included, mentioned his actions during “the twelve years” (1966–1978) as those of an officer with a bad reputation (“fue militar y de los malos”). Miriam and Piñeyro had originally supported another candidate in the party, and after the election Santiago accused them of having instructed the supporters not to give him their votes. Miriam’s reply was that this was blatantly false, and that it was ironical that those Reformists who had openly voted for Santiago’s PRD rival that time, the local Fernandistas, had become his closest allies after the defeat! Santiago’s accusations also revolved around money problems. After his retirement from the army, the job of mayor was intended to improve his household’s viability. Instead he had contracted debts while he was campaigning, and received no help from Miriam to get out of his trouble. A turning point in the factionalist struggle occurred when Santiago’s brother was fired from the Ministry of Agriculture in late 1991 on the

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grounds that he had not done his job properly. He was a meritorious member of the Reformist Party, who had occupied public jobs in the village since 1966, and his dismissal mobilized the sympathy of many of the Mellas. His account went as follows: “Miriam demands that employees go without delay to her house [in order to report and receive instructions], and because I don’t do that I was dismissed.” Yet Miriam’s action was not directed so much against Santiago or his brother as against an absent villager, Roberto, who was Santiago’s nephew and Pedro Mella’s oldest son. Roberto, an agricultural engineer who worked for the state in San Cristóbal, had for the last decade tried to position himself as Miriam’s political heir in the community. She, for her part, had made sure that he never got a job in the province and thereby kept him at a distance. After the sudden dismissal of Santiago’s brother (his own uncle) in late 1991, Roberto chose to put pressure on his father, Pedro Mella (the local Reformist president), who up till then had continued to be Miriam’s friend. He wanted him to choose between Miriam and the family. Pedro chose his son. Thereafter the tone between Miriam and the group hardened, and the struggle reached a climax when the factionalists organized a separate headquarters and started to convene meetings both there and in the village. They justified the inscription “Municipal Executive of the PRSC” (painted on the new premises) with the argument that, in fact, both the president (Pedro) and a majority of the board belonged on their side. Nonetheless, as we shall see, nearly all the public employees and their families continued to go to Miriam’s meetings, and kept away from the new place. The Factionalists’ Discourse Two issues were overwhelmingly present in the accounts of Miriam’s enemies: she actively undermined their access to public jobs, and she made decisions alone, without consulting others. They said that she was “bossy” (imperativa). However, the fact was that any party had to face an almost ceaseless struggle because of popular desires for public jobs and progress. Miriam’s own account of her impossible task appears to be as good as any: When a party wins, everybody wants a job. Unfortunately, everyone can’t get one. Many become dissatisfied . . . And sometimes, though there are vacant positions, the individuals in question cannot fill them . . . It is the means people have for social mobility. [For example] they start with a job in the hills, but soon, during the next four-year period, they don’t

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want to be in the hills. Instead they want to come down here [to the village] . . . [Politics here] is a source of social mobility in every sense [of that expression]. The problem is that sometimes people don’t want a job which matches their skills, but as a payment, a recompense for their political work. That’s where the problem lies. For example, as I was saying, right now I have problems with a group of people [she referred to the factionalists] who want jobs which lie outside what is possible. Still, they are of the opinion that one hasn’t wanted to help them. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, but that nothing can be found. So, they have left one’s side—and that in a manner which, I would say, is unjust.

She further clarified her view of justice by explaining the case of José: He is mayor. Then comes the election [in 1990]: he didn’t want to continue as mayor; instead he wanted another [more lucrative] job. After the election victory, he asked me for a job in the Customs. Having got him a job in the Customs, he leaves the job voluntarily after three months. He left voluntarily. Even so, he says that I haven’t got him anything. “But I already got you the biggest thing in the province: what can I get you? If that didn’t satisfy you, then what can we get you?”

Given the rules of the game of Dominican democracy and the limitations of the public sector, continuous factionalism was inevitable. But there is more. In a convincing manner, the endless political war testified to the sheer extent of popular participation. It was precisely because so many— indeed, in La Descubierta, it sometimes seemed like everyone—took so active a part in the election battles every four years that those battles seemed not to end but rather to go on. The accumulation of merit through defending one’s party against attacks from members of rival parties, through maintaining one’s family in the party, and through winning new members took place on a daily basis, though to varying degrees in different households and among different villagers. Politics meant work carried out by virtually everyone. It is against this background that we should consider the factionalists’ accusation that Miriam was “bossy.” Yet that word should not mislead. It did not imply a criticism of independent will and autonomous decision-making. Rather it meant a criticism of decisions considered to be unjust because they were taken to run against the hegemonic principles of assessment of merit in the Reformist context. Pablo’s son, who led the Fernandistas, almost clarified the point: She says that if one isn’t with her, one isn’t with anyone. She doesn’t look at the party . . . [But it ought to be as follows:] Let’s say that you campaign

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for a party and that the party wins; in that case [for instance] the fact that I’m not on good terms with you doesn’t matter, for you aren’t the party. You are another member of the party, but not the party. No, that señor campaigned, and the Reformist Party won: he participated in the election campaign, he therefore deserves a job. However, she doesn’t see that . . . But that party isn’t your firm! Nor is it your property. It isn’t a piece of land. The party belongs to many, not to one person.

The same man’s justification for establishing a new location for meetings shows that the meaning of this action was not so much to profoundly reorganize party democracy as to make a loud public cry for help against injustice, addressed to Santo Domingo: She has made herself owner of the party. That’s what happens, and that also gives us an answer to the question you posed me a moment ago, concerning the renting of another headquarters. Why? Because of that, because we want to force the central committee in the capital, in Santo Domingo, to see the dissatisfaction which is found here . . .

Furthermore, the whole tone of Ramón’s statement quoted above reveals that strong autonomy and independence in persons were not challenged, but supported. He emphasized that he was “a man of attitude”—a man who refused to be given orders. He almost celebrated the value of autonomy in men. As a leader, Miriam had not only the right but also the obligation to act resolutely so that her power became socially recognized. Her political power was that of guts. She was the leader not least because of this quality. Miriam had to know better than anyone that the dismissals of, say, Ramón and Santiago’s brother were acts bound to create conf lict; but she also knew that such events might help maintain old followers and attract new ones provided that she won the public fight. In this context, there was not much public space for hesitation or for displays of fear. In addition, there was a need to gamble with high stakes if one wished to gain or keep the role as leader. To put this in a different language, a normative basis of the exercise of power was not only to “respect” (respetar) but also to “make oneself respected” (hacerse respetar). On these terms, political compromise was not very likely. As Archetti (1984) has pointed out, there is a striking difference in this regard between many Latin American political cultures on the one hand and consensus-propelled North-European political cultures on the other. At this high level of abstraction, where Scandinavian politicians usually place a high value not only on communication of mutual adaptation but also on the verbal suppression of direct rivalry, political actors in many Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean communities

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express and maximize leadership and power precisely through public disagreement—and by displaying individual “courage” (valentía). In the Dominican context, there is often escalation of expressed public conf lict, with a necessary culmination in personal victories and defeats. To recover socially and restore power after a loss requires, to say the least, a certain measure of time. When I left La Descubierta, Miriam’s view appeared crystal clear: whatever might be the outcome of the fight against the factionalists, she doubted that she would ever again make friends with José and Pedro, whom she raged at as traitors. A usual reaction among villagers, however, was that either possible outcome would harm La Descubierta’s Reformist Party in the 1994 election. As they said, Miriam and her closest followers would never gather behind the factionalists’ candidate; and José and the rest of the factionalists had made it clear that they would rather vote either for a candidate from another village or for Miriam’s PRD rival than give her their votes. All this shows how a leadership that systematically generated accusations against the leader for being “bossy” was, to a significant degree, constructed “from below,” how the construction of the authoritarian Balaguer state was tied to processes that are best described as interactive domination and subordination. Active, strategic citizens built the state. An aspect that appears almost completely absent from the local factionalists’ justifications of their own struggle is reference to the fact that Miriam was a woman. Just as Rafael Peguero—as we have seen in the preceding chapter—concentrated on Miriam’s family background or “roots” when asked to explain her power, her enemies in the party, as we shall see, tried to mobilize people (other Reformists) against her on the basis of family loyalty. Their typical discourse included little about men and women—perhaps with the exception of a single incident. One night in the home of Santiago’s brother, Roberto (the absent engineer and Santiago’s nephew) said that, during the twelve years, Balaguer had appointed many officers and many women as leaders, and that many of the women were even married to officers (a reference that obviously applied to Miriam). His point was that the time was overripe for replacing those people with new leaders. Miriam’s view, when I raised the question, was, “Well, really, it is even strange, above all in a region like this one, that, being a woman, I have participated so actively in politics. However, I haven’t felt marginalized as a woman.” Asking herself why, she found no better answer than “Perhaps it is due to my education, to my way of being, to my way of thinking.” She pointed at the same factors—education, social position,

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and personality—in order to explain the fact that, while there were many local women activists, few women became leaders: There are many women who can do the work. Perhaps what they have lacked is the [political] integration [with the men], the boldness, the courage to confront the men; because sometimes there are many men who say “oh no, you are not able to do that.” The woman taking part in politics has to leave many things that should be done [in the household] to others; she must perhaps have a social position which enables her to leave those things to others while she is in politics. That is to say, many things are of relevance.

Granted that most politicians had been and still were men, I shall brief ly outline an answer to the question of why Miriam’s critics rarely played on the gender factor. First, her leadership was typically viewed as directly derived from the power of Balaguer. This vision had been strengthened by the fact that, until 1990, a vote for Balaguer automatically meant a vote for his local candidates (in other words, a vote for Balaguer was automatically a vote for Miriam). Second, in the eyes of the villagers, Miriam’s reputation was tied to that of her husband as an ex-officer. Roberto’s remarks testify to this. Third, and perhaps most importantly, where it really counted, in political decisions on public employment, the fact that power was in female hands made no difference that could have been used by her opponents to shape a politically important gender difference. On the contrary, I have stressed Miriam’s independence and resoluteness. Her use of “masculine” language also adds support to this interpretation. Because of her background and training, she said, she (unlike most other women) had enough “boldness” (arrojo) and “courage” (valentía) to confront the men. Miriam’s use of metaphors in local political meetings even exploited naturally the vocabulary of cock-raising. Her father used to go every week to the cock-fighting arena until he was over ninety.5 Did the fact that La Descubierta had a woman leader make no difference? Not quite. Some women who had had easier access to their provincial deputy were among her most loyal defenders in the village. This applied, for example, to a few women of the same generation as Miriam, with whom she had gone to school. For example, while Tomás and Santiago were not on speaking terms with Miriam during the time of my fieldwork, Miriam discussed their mutual problems with the two men’s wives, her old friends. The general problem of politics in the practical world, Maurice Bloch has written, is “that political action is a matter of joining, not of creating, a political and cultural stream.” (Bloch 1985:xiii) This was, of course, the problem also for La Descubierta’s factionalists, or Miriam’s enemies.

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Their most important attempt to join a local stream while I lived in the village was connected with La Descubierta people’s discourses on the community’s history and on differences between the local families. Roberto (Pedro’s son and Santiago’s nephew), who looked at himself as a new man compared to Miriam, was pleasantly explicit. Evaluating the struggle and their chances, he said that his side was going to win because they were going to mobilize on the basis of family. Since his father was a Mella, and his uncle Santiago signed his name Mella Alba, their main support came from a number of Mellas and Albas. Villagers already spoke wittily of them as the party of the Mellas. Pablo’s son (an Alba) was a guarantor of more Alba following, and even José had a large family. When I left the village, they had even begun to approach some respected Barrancos. All this meant an attempt to both draw on and further mobilize symbolic resources of profound local importance. Roberto’s uncles made connections with earlier times. They emphasized how Jesús María, Miriam’s uncle and the community’s leader under Trujillo, had come to La Descubierta without possessing anything, at a time when their grandfather, the Bonga’s grandson, had been the largest owner of cattle in the area. Jesús María had been dependent upon his hospitality. Their deeply moral argument was that the Ramírez had been newcomers to a place where the founders of the Mellas once controlled the lands and governed everything. Their problems in the early 1990s were therefore seen by themselves as a “double injustice.” Those problems had been caused by an heiress to the same family of outsiders who long ago won possession of most of the family’s properties and of its local leadership. In fact, looked at in this way, Miriam’s injustice only repeated previous ones committed by the local Ramírez against the Mellas. In the same spirit, Santiago’s brother claimed that they were going to prevail over Miriam’s greater power, just as the Mellas and the other old families in the community had beaten her uncle in 1962 (in the first election after Trujillo’s death), though Jesús María had on that occasion—as he said—had access to all the resources in the world. Pablo’s son was not a Mella but an Alba, but spoke just as bitterly as Roberto’s uncles about the difference between local insiders and outsiders. He described Miriam as a latecomer to the local Reformist Party—a party founded by their families (the Mellas, the Albas, etc.). His anger in the following quotation was deeply felt: “You [Miriam] didn’t create the party!” And as we say, since it didn’t cost us anything, we may as well spend it on a fiesta. . . . That’s what happens: what does it matter to me that the party sinks if I didn’t make it? She inherited

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this. Those who created this are the families Mella, Alba, Viñas, Martínez. Yes, our fathers. They were the founders here. We didn’t arrive from elsewhere; we are from here. But they aren’t from here. “You [Miriam] have alternatives.” If the boat sinks, I’m a good helmsman; I save myself, because I have somewhere to go. What does it matter to them that the boat sank: “Let’s go to the capital.” They don’t have a single child living here; they all live in the capital. So what does it matter to them that this may go to hell: “Let’s go to the capital.” Meanwhile, she leaves a sinking pueblo, because I don’t know why the devil everything depends upon politics: the economy, relationships, everything; it all depends upon politics. If you are a bad politician, the pueblo goes under. However, although they know that, what does it matter to them? “What does it matter to me? Now I’ve got the juice from this, now I’ve squeezed this.”

In sum, the factionalist struggle, as well, bore witness to the political importance of local families and their histories. The Maintenance of Control Still, Miriam indirectly retained a large family following. The factionalists’ struggle would therefore be a difficult one. Like her uncle Jesús María before her, Miriam preserved a special tie to La Descubierta’s largest family, the Barrancos, by keeping a number of them employed. In addition, the fight against her enemies involved both a heightened sense of competition and tougher decisions. Among followers, this entailed stronger fear of reprisals such as dismissal. Put under pressure, Miriam exploited her talent to the maximum, and acted in order to keep her old followers from switching sides and to win new members. In these efforts, the key remained her commitment to Balaguer that assured her control over the public sector. This advantage in turn meant that she dominated the public employees, and thereby their households. Let us look at how she managed to hold the party in restraint, and thus how she fared. With factionalist struggle, fear of spying and sanctions was bound to intensify among the public employees—among the clients and the subordinates. While the polite word for “denounce” was delatar, a whole vocabulary was in common usage in order to describe the processes that involved Reformist employees’ regular—often daily—visits to Miriam’s house to inform on their colleagues. A local informer was aptly referred to as one who “takes away and brings” (lleva y trae), or as a “squealer” (calié). They were also called a “kid” or “young goat” (chivato), and their practice “chatter” (cotorreo) (after the word for “parrot,” cotorra), and to “gossip” (meter chisme, meter cuentos). Such docile types were also described as “rag dolls” (muñecos de trapo).

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To a few of these people Miriam granted the most outrageous favors. But in such cases, they worked hard. Such was the case, for instance, of a man in his forties, the former Barranco head’s son, who occupied the job of secretary to the judge and treasurer in the Court House. A drunkard (he got intoxicated each night in households in the barrios), he went every morning to his job and to Miriam’s house, and was indeed among her most loyal and hardworking foot soldiers. In time of rivalry there was special significance in displaying one’s group loyalty publicly by going to Miriam’s house and meetings. In the public offices, one had not only to desist from criticism of one’s own side, but also to attack the opinions of the others. This was so simply because few activities among the followers and their families went unnoticed. To illustrate, a dyed-in-the-wool Reformist (a member since 1966) was suddenly fired from the National Park office while I lived in the village; another partisan, the squealer-drunkard mentioned above, had accused him of daring to speak a few bad words about the head of his office. In short, fear of dismissal because of a show of shaky loyalty was the order of the day when factionalism grew. The immediate result was not only submission to the leadership, but also pronounced and visible gathering around and behind it. When Alvarez Bogaert (at that time the vice president of the Reformist Party) visited La Descubierta in 1992, the public employees and their families boycotted the open meeting on Miriam’s order. (Needless to say, Fernando Alvarez Bogaert was not Miriam’s candidate for next president.) Instead Miriam mobilized a larger village reunion with Luis Toral, the party’s general secretary, on the same day! Strategies to win new followers were not essentially different from those aimed at keeping old ones from changing their loyalty. After the party split had become open, Miriam secured more jobs for nurses from the ministry and recruited women in the village who brought her sufficient loyalty. She also obtained two completely new places of work for La Descubierta from the government—an office of the state Agricultural Bank and a public store for agricultural tools. Both places were thereafter staffed in exchange for votes. Once again we can see how mainly local power struggles generated action in Santo Domingo (or action taken from the top). It was the local Reformist factionalism—or Miriam’s fight against a few villagers—that provoked state expansion in this community at that moment. When I left La Descubierta in 1992, the provincial governor’s son had been awarded a state contract for paving the streets. He had started the work, albeit in the midst of much village skepticism about both his skills and his sincerity. However, in order to be able to deal with the politics of roads, I have first to outline another feature of the village’s relationships.

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Just as some locals, the Fernandistas, had established a direct link to Alvarez Bogaert, so also another of Miriam’s enemies, José, had constructed his own personal relationship with Santo Domingo. However, his link was not a direct one, but went via Duvergé, the largest community in Independencia, to the province’s senator. The senator, for his part, appeared to have his own reasons for fighting Miriam. In that fight, he put José to use as a client. His motives would be hard to guess, but a frequent enough assumption in La Descubierta was that he aimed at reelection—and that one of the few in the province who might be able to challenge him was Miriam. José had a “bottle” (botella): the word “bottle” is used by Dominicans to refer to a monthly paycheck from a state institution to someone who does no work for it. As José himself said, it was the senator who had got him the bottle, in the state Sugar Company, after he had left his job in the Customs and had found himself without Miriam’s help to get a new job in La Descubierta. Between 1966 and 1978, several full-time partisans in La Descubierta provided for their households with “bottles” paid out of the budget of the state sugar mill, which lies a four-hour journey away. José (like a number of the senator’s clients in the area of Duvergé) was employed in the same mill, but went there only on payday. Many in the village also assumed that the factionalists’ headquarters, a rented house in the village center, was paid for with the senator’s aid. In 1992, this connection (between La Descubierta’s factionalists and the senator based in Duvergé) produced a surprising action—a political action that Miriam soon came to see as a virulent attack on herself. Again, the issue was employment. One day the hospital in La Descubierta received a letter from the Ministry of Health. The letter gave notice that a girl in the village had been given a job. The girl, a kinswoman of Santiago Mella, one of Miriam’s principal challengers, and from a poor household in the barrios, had not been recommended by the local party. Miriam immediately struck back. Drawing on her own personal contacts, she managed to get the appointment cancelled, and the job awarded to a different girl, one from her own side. In that way she won a victory of considerable symbolic value. José explained that the factionalists’ aim had been to show the villagers that it was possible to bypass Miriam’s job monopoly—and that they could therefore do without her. Miriam, however, went further. As she put it on the day the letter from the ministry arrived at her home (by chance, while I was there, chatting with her), this meant “war”; she and the senator therefore had “to get dirty” (ensuciarse). Never did her talent for confrontation impress me more.

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Miriam’s version was that the senator’s action resulting in the job allocation to the Mella girl was an infringement of her “territory”: a violation of her political “land rights.” After the election, a deal had been made, she said, under which the senator made decisions with regard to jobs around Duvergé, she governed the two municipios of La Descubierta and Postrer Río, and the provincial capital Jimaní ruled itself. Her answer to the unheard-of affront was to “invade” the land of Duvergé. But unlike what the senator had done to her in La Descubierta, she later said to me, her aim was not to interfere with his decisions concerning already existing jobs, instead, she wanted to show that she could create new jobs, even in his area. When I left La Descubierta, she had started to negotiate with the state Sugar Company and the National Park authorities to obtain more jobs for the people of the senator’s home district. Road politics in La Descubierta in 1992 cannot be understood in separation from this struggle at the top of the province. Miriam herself pointed to the paving of the local streets when asked to explain why the senator had moved against her. Being senator, she argued, he not only saw it as his right to control the state allocation of all public-work contracts in the province, but also, as she put it, liked to see to it that such contracts were awarded to his sons, who were engineers. The contract for the paving of La Descubierta’s streets had infringed this norm. Others in La Descubierta added another interpretation. People in the village believed that Miriam and the governor (whose family and friends were based in the community of Duvergé, like the senator’s) were in the process of joining forces, politically speaking. They saw the road contract awarded to the governor’s son (who was not even an engineer) as a kind of “cement” for such an alliance. If they were successful, so the gossip went, she could become provincial senator, and he could get her position as one of the province’s two deputies. So, given this, it seems understandable that the people of La Descubierta expressed only slight and half-interested criticism of the actual work—the paving of the streets, begun shortly before my departure. From the first day that work bore testimony to a deal intended to favor the contractor and his friends. The governor’s son even recruited labor from his home community, Duvergé, not from La Descubierta. José and his co-factionalists wisely kept their mouths shut; they knew well that they could not fight more than one leader at a time. If they wished to get rid of Miriam, they would need the governor’s sympathy. While a few of the young PLD militants cried out against bad paving, some of their partisans, those employed in the municipal administration, preferred only to whisper their accusation that the PRD mayor (Pablo’s son) had already been paid by the governor not to interfere with the son’s paving work.

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What a blatant case! The villagers finally got their roads paved largely as a result of their local struggles, but in a bad manner—and by a stranger to the community. Yet the actors were trapped in their own relationships, and the only preliminary winner of the ceaseless political battles was probably the governor’s son. He could begin to make plans for a future of individual mobility. The Moral Economy of Rule The networks of rule that produced the Balaguer state in this part of the country were constantly created, re-created, and altered through local forms of agency. They were shaped by, and gave shape to, a myriad negotiations and exchanges. We should recognize the low or miserable wages that the state paid its employees, but also the relative results obtained by many ordinary citizens. People fought ferociously in politics because many were able to achieve varied and substantial favors. In this minimal sense politics at home was, and is, a viable alternative to international migration. It is difficult to overestimate the contribution of intense popular activity to the processes of state formation in the Dominican southwest in the late twentieth century. A perfect illustration is the Dominican process of politico-administrative classification—the process that leads to local areas being classified by the Dominican state as “place” (paraje— the state’s smallest administrative unit), “section,” “municipal district,” or “municipality” respectively. In the early 1990s, followers and leaders often had a common interest in seeking administrative elevation, say, from section to municipal district, and from district to municipio. For the followers this entailed more public funds and more public jobs closer to home (since, e.g., the very status of district or municipio automatically gives certain rights in terms of funds and jobs). For local leaders, it might mean a reinforcement of their own upward connections in the system, since they would most likely deliver more votes to the party pool. The result was continuous pressure from below on deputies and senators over the issue of administrative elevation. In 1992, the general secretary of the Dominican Municipal League spoke of “chaos in the political and territorial organization of the Republic.” He said that the national territory of less than 49,000 square kilometers already contained 50 municipal districts in 103 municipalities, and therefore called on congress members to be far more cautious about elevation of administrative units.6 Processes in and around La Descubierta confirmed this picture. Neighboring Postrer Río, which had been a municipal district in La Descubierta, was elevated to municipio in the late 1980s. While I was in the field, the people

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of one of its sections were already promoting their section’s application for elevation to a municipal district. Some leaders of the largest hill section in La Descubierta were involved in a similar process. Those who built the authoritarian Balaguer regime in the Dominican southwest interacted in accordance with normative principles. They negotiated loyalties, help, and jobs on the basis of particular ideas about justice and order. Their struggles were energized and justified by moral thinking. Concepts of trust and betrayal, of courage and respect, of seriousness and shame, of family and co-parenthood, of friendship and enmity, of aid and progress, of political work and political leadership— these concepts and many others were shared by the vast majority in the Dominican southwest in the sense that they constituted a language, the cultural and moral language that people used to create and recreate relationships. There was a cultural and moral ground for the making of alliances, confrontations, and the state. Suffice it, here, to point to the key meanings of two everyday expressions—“political work” and (the followers’) “right” to a job. As Pablo’s son said instructively in a previous quotation, a party is not like a “piece of land.” A party like the Reformist Party in La Descubierta was not the private property of one person or of one family. Instead, it belonged to all those in the area who worked to cultivate, strengthen, and protect it. A violation of this ownership rule was bound to generate anger. Still, what was the meaning of doing “political work?” Miriam once explained it as follows: “Usually, to perform one’s work means to see to it that one’s family belongs to the party, to recruit new members to the party; and when the party is attacked, to go out in defense of the party.” From this perspective, it followed that the leader not only had a right to employ his or her partisans but also was thought to have a moral duty to do this. The possible choices of a leader were restricted by the followers’ accumulation of a particular merit—the one related to political work. Any significant deviation from this norm evoked loaded accusations of dirty play and betrayal. Balaguer’s own ideas about state building fitted perfectly with those of his followers. Kearney has shown how both Balaguer (between 1966 and 1978) and the two PRD governments (between 1978 and 1986) let the Chamber of Deputies and Senate block bills for more merit-based civil service, bills that they introduced half-heartedly in 1971 and 1981 respectively (1986:146–147),7 so that in the late 1980s: “It is viewed as a traditional ‘right’ for the chief executive to dismiss political enemies and reward friends and party supporters with government jobs” (Kearney 1986:147). Dominican authorities never showed a profound interest in changing the moral, political and legal criteria for the state’s personnel

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recruitment (perhaps with the exception of Bosch’s short-lived government in 1963). On the contrary, the entire preceding analysis testifies to the continued strength of a particular political and moral discourse among leaders and followers—as does the following answer by Balaguer in a press conference in 1992 to a question of why it was impossible to raise the salaries of teachers in the public education system: You [the journalist] cannot be of the opinion that the state should pay the wages that are paid by the private sector; because, in the public sector, the employees amount to thousands, while the private sector operates with the employees it strictly needs. In all the state’s offices, in all the departments of the Public Administration, there is a payroll which is saturated with idle employees—people who have nothing to do, because they are found on the payrolls only in order to collect their wages. However, people are not assigned jobs that don’t exist. The positions that are really needed in the Public Administration are those required to fill some void, to carry out some work. However, for political reasons and with a view to the country’s enormous unemployment, it is necessary to inf late the payrolls, and accept a lot of personnel who have no kind of administrative function. That is why there is that difference between the public and the private sectors. That will continue for a long time, because this is a country which—and I don’t have to say it—is underdeveloped.8

In Balaguer’s Dominican Republic, there was surprisingly little attempt to officially conceal the actual moral economy that shaped the public sector. That moral economy was incessantly created and re-created in everyday life, at the grassroots level across the national territory. In the southern borderlands, the masses and their local leaders shaped the state’s moral foundations from below. They built the state the way they did because they were convinced that it was the proper way. In La Descubierta, nearly all supported the ideas underlying patronage and strongly personalized leadership. The strategies, relations, and exchanges involved in the state-building project in the 1980s and early 1990s were shaped by the past; the patronage forms that existed in La Descubierta in the recent period must be regarded as unambiguously historical, as entirely changeable. The Dominican state was not the “benefactor” of modern colonial governance. The new state did not inherit advanced, twentieth-century colonial administrative systems and practices. The first three decades of Dominican independence were largely characterized by wars with the Haitians and the Spaniards, and by insurrections. Governments were typically short-lived. Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the country experienced limited economic growth. The outcome was

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a weak state with few resources. The 1844–1875 period should be seen as one marked by “loosely structured followings with a regional base, grouped around a leader whose title might indicate military experience, but mostly of a non-professional kind” (Hoetink 1986:288). Exchanges of protection and favors at all levels were of overwhelming importance to the building of the state. With the development of large-scale sugar production from the mid1870s, and with the political stability imposed through the Heureaux regime, more resources came to be channeled through the state system. Heureaux, a general of humble background thrown up by war, headed a state that hardly made clear distinctions between public exchanges and private ones (the general himself constantly mingling the two resource pools, the state’s and his own). Not even direct U.S. intervention in the management of the Dominican finances from the beginning of the twentieth century, or the eight-year occupation from 1916 to 1924, brought about much change in the hegemonic ideas that had for a long time shaped the country’s public sector. However, a set of significant changes took place after 1930. Trujillo managed to both create a private “empire” and expand the state considerably. As Kryzanek and Wiarda (1988:34) have put it, “in his own repressive and avaricious way [Trujillo] did succeed in creating a nation and establishing a common set of governing rules. Unfortunately the nation became the personal estate of Trujillo and the rules of governance were steeped in the traditions of personalism and authoritarianism.” In 1961, after three decades of Trujillo governance, the state system had been massively reinforced across the national space as a system of patronage and clientage—a historically generated politico-moral order of personalized forms of exchange. The nationalization of Trujillo’s private empire meant a colossal increase in the public sector. At the same time agrarian and other policies after Trujillo’s death generally exacerbated rural and village poverty (typically making a few people more wealthy, but many poor) (Turits 2003:261–263). While this led to increased migration abroad, it also created more popular need for a public pay check. La Descubierta in the 1960s provides an example. Up to the late 1950s and early 1960s, members of the largely landless Barranco family, the largest local family, found agricultural employment with the Ramírez. The change from agriculture to the less labor-intensive activity of cattle raising undermined this source of income in the village. From the mid-1960s onward, the Barrancos succeeded in obtaining a number of the local public jobs (based on a close relationship between the Barranco head and Miriam, a niece of the deceased Jesús María, the Barrancos’ first local patron).

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After Trujillo’s death the actual political significance of voting gradually increased. A turning point came in the year 1978, when a “peaceful” transfer of power took place, based on the outcome of elections. These three changes after 1961—the enormous expansion of the public sector, growing pauperization, and the increased significance of every vote—together created a situation characterized by the following features, which have been illustrated in this chapter: (1) the possibility of and premium placed on a public job, poorly paid though it might be, in many ordinary people’s awareness; (2) intense activities by many to obtain access to the state’s jobs and services through highly personalized forms of exchange; and (3) followers’ use of their own and their families’ voting as a resource and a sanction in the constant negotiations with their leaders. The outcome was the construction of dynamic forms of patronage. From the late-1970s, the country experienced economic recession (after the boom of the early and the mid-1970s) and the end of the military repression. Up till 1978, Balaguer personally picked provincial representatives. Since 1986, Reformist candidates have been elected by a provincial assembly. As a result of this delegation of control from the central to the local level (which had already been institutionalized in the PRD) a woman from the provincial capital Jimaní took Miriam’s place in 1986 as Reformist deputy for Independencia province. Four years later, Miriam competed successfully against the rival, and thereby regained her position. These changes from the late 1970s onward only increased the already colossal interest in public jobs and services, and they enlarged the space for possible political agency deep down among the people. The intense competition for access to the state’s resources meant that pressure was daily put on leaders for some kind of help, or a contribution to the household income. In this context we can see the power of a certain political and moral conservatism. The ideas about fairness in exchanges among ordinary people were not only articulated loudly, they also found support in a Dominican one-and-a-half-century-long past of paternalist discourses and practices by the authorities. In the 1990s, Dominican leaders were, to some extent, the prisoners of notions of justice found among the masses.9

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CHAPTER 5 NEGOTIATING RULE: POLITICAL FRAUD AS INTERACTION

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he previous chapter sought to describe and analyze how the networks of rule that produced the Balaguer state in the southwest were created and re-created through forms of interaction. The objective of this chapter is the same, but I shift the empirical focus. I shall examine not how La Descubierta’s leaders and masses gave shape to the public sector, but how they participated in elections. The chapter focuses on the presidential and municipal elections in the 1980s and the early 1990s. A characteristic of the Balaguer regime was the opposition’s constant allegations of political fraud. These were integral to all election processes while Balaguer wielded power in the country (Cabrera Febrillet 1991; Hartlyn 1994; Espinal 2000). Many take for granted that fraudulent elections are a product of imposition from the top of the state, and not a result of a myriad of grassroots-level exchanges across the country. In sharp contrast to such a perspective, I shall show that a sizeable proportion of the people of La Descubierta not only experienced but also helped produce the country’s fraudulent elections “from below.” The fraud that pervaded the Balaguer state was not only imposed (or contested) but also created and maintained in the everyday life of most of the nation’s communities. The tough competition for access to the state that existed in the 1980s and the 1990s led to repeated charges, countercharges, and denials of bribery and fraud. In La Descubierta, there were high stakes and much uncertainty for many. There were high stakes for leaders and their followers, related to the difference between a four-year access to and a four-year exclusion from the state’s jobs and services, and they went through much uncertainty about what “in reality” went on in political arenas, about what one’s rivals “really” did in order to succeed in taking

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home the four-year victory, and about the validity or fraudulence of thousands of voting cards. People had profound doubts about the fairness of others’ strategies and their own possibilities of establishing the truth about the political games in which they took part. The uncertainty in turn promoted both more fraud and more allegations.1 In order to be able to substantiate these assertions, I must first present more of the charges and countercharges. Stories of Elections The content of the local stories about fraud highlight two points. They show (1) that local participation in elections was a continual activity, a part of the everyday life of the community; and (2) that life in the region was governed by ideas about patronage. The display of political photos of candidates was an ordinary aspect of the southwestern (urban and rural) landscape. Yet the spread of photos intensified during the last months leading up to elections. La Descubierta’s building structures, for example, were thoroughly politicized. The painted names of Miriam and Balaguer decorated two centrally located walls. And even though I lived in the village in an electoral midterm, photos of Rafaelito’s face were on permanent display on posts and houses. Inside many homes, frequently high up on a wall, the portrait of Balaguer, Bosch, or Peña Gómez was placed. The latter’s portrait also adorned the wall in the mayor’s office in the Town Hall. Electoral iconography reaffirms patronage. Roland Barthes has written about the spread of photographs of political candidates in contemporary France. Barthes argues that it has a power to transform: “Photography . . . tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections, whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation and the rule of parties.” He maintains that the display of political faces “constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ . . . to the advantage of ‘a manner of being,’ a socio-moral status” (Barthes 1989:98). However, in contemporary Dominican society, the force of electoral photography is less that of transformation than that of confirmation of an already inculcated faith. The names and photos of the political leaders were installed in surroundings that had long been replete with images of saints (Deive [1975] 1988; Davis 1987; Lundius and Lundahl 2000). Individuals’ and households’ relationships to the saints functioned through the idiom of patronage. They were relationships, not to the nation’s president and other leaders, but to God and His spiritual and material helpers.2

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That political life f lourished on interpretations of religious images was made clear to me by one of the factionalists in the local Reformist Party—Pablo’s son, the Fernandista activist. Unusually for a villager, Pablo’s son claimed that God did not exist. He sometimes engaged in verbal duels in which he defended his opinion against contestants who argued in favor of God’s existence. Still, as we saw in the previous chapter, Pablo’s son regarded the acquisition of new Reformist off ices in the village (a striking symbol of the factionalists’ struggle) as a sort of zealous act: that act signified a cry for help from high protectors. Pablo’s son crowned his appeal to the national party leaders in the capital with an image of religious worship; before the Reformist altar of the new village party headquarters, he virtually said, they said the same rosaries and read the same Bible as in Miriam’s home. The charges and countercharges of political fraud were voiced in everyday discussions, both heated and relaxed, and were found in newspapers, on television, and in books. Alfredo, the right-hand man of Rafaelito (the PRD deputy) in La Descubierta, told me about many methods usually employed in the region to organize election fraud. I shall rely on his stories here, not because I consider them to be truer than those of others in the village (though, I confess, Alfredo’s modesty and sincerity impressed me), but because his stories were richer—they were fuller. They cover many of the various bits and pieces offered by other locals on strategies used by politicians and public employees. Alfredo was an experienced community leader of the opposition. His generosity in the face of my curiosity made him add detail on points where many of his co-villagers were content to make only general claims. The La Descubierta stories of fraud were anecdotal and inconclusive. The locals’ charges and countercharges were rarely or never documented.3 However, to concentrate on that aspect would make us miss the point. The spread of the stories functioned as practical communication. We should ask: what did the locals say to each other through the narratives of fraud? I once asked Alfredo if election fraud was performed just during the elections or whether it was continuous: “No, that is continuous. For example, Peña [Gómez] said on the news [on the same day as we spoke, in 1992] that in Los Minas [a popular sector of the capital] they were making false documents, and partisans really do that, those who are really Reformists. So they [Peña’s people] go out [to Los Minas] and make an assessment.” Up to the 1990 elections, three different documents had to be obtained for each voter in progressive order: first, a birth certificate (from the

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Registry office), second, an identity card (from the Personal Identity office), and third, a voting card (from the Electoral Board). Alfredo explained that fraud was carried out in the Registry and Personal Identity offices:4 Alfredo: I worked at the [municipal Electoral] Board. I was the first inscriber when the Electoral Register was formed in 72. But the fraud is in the Registry office. With those who are going to give their vote for the first time but aren’t [really] 18 years of age. They [the local Reformists], what they do is that they make a false declaration [of child birth and parenthood] and they come with ten or twelve children [to the office]. Author: They do that with birth certificates? Alfredo: Yes, that is to say, they set it [the certificate] up late, and even with another name. Because if you have your birth certificate, the person in charge in the Personal Identity office works with that certificate. He works with that, and can’t make any allegations. Author: So he confirms it? Alfredo: Because that’s the way he has to work. And sometimes they give a person a second [identity] card number. [So, on the election day,] The representatives of the Reformist Party take him [for example] to Los Bolos, to Los Pinos or to Bartolomé [names of three of La Descubierta’s municipal sections in the hills and lowlands]. However, that man should vote at Table 8 [in a barrio of the village center]: When they take him there [to Los Bolos or another section], [they gain a] registered vote. And when the substitute [for the person in charge at Table 8] arrives, he returns [from Los Bolos] and [they gain a] vote here. So he votes twice. Particularly in the large towns it is easier [to do those tricks]. . . .

He also accused Reformists of getting serving soldiers, who were supposed not to vote, to do so when their names were on the register. But, he said, “If one isn’t certain, one can’t make charges.” Therefore, the wild hunt for hard evidence could drive leaders to keep watch in the middle of the night, and could lead to partisans’ nonstop surveillance of the state’s offices—and rounding up a senator’s brother who had hit the road in search of votes for money. At least this was Alfredo’s story about what happened before the 1990 election because the local head of the Registry office was the son of Santiago Mella who, as we know, lost to one of Pablo’s sons in the race for the job of mayor in La Descubierta: Alfredo: Alas! He [Santiago’s son, called Iván, who, let it be noted in passing, held the same job of head of the Registry office while I was in the village] caused a disaster. Still, he obtained no results. He made false certificates, and created many obstacles. When those of other parties

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[the PRD and the PLD] came to the office, they produced all kinds of obstacles. But for them [the Reformists], they made it [i.e., spent hours in the office producing documents] even in the night time. Once Rafaelito [the PRD deputy] assaulted him, one night around twelve. Author: How come? Alfredo: Oh while he was working [in the office], in spite of it being forbidden. And he [Iván] became nervous. Because, “Iván,” he [Rafaelito] said to him, “what were you doing?” Later, they [Alfredo’s comrades in the local PRD] watched over the brother of the senator [of the neighboring province] who arrived from Villa Jaragua [a neighboring municipality] and traveled with a pack of blank certificates. He traveled seeking a head of some Registry office who was willing to sign them for him. He is the brother of Luis José, the senator [of the neighboring province of Bahoruco]. Author: He arrived here from there? Alfredo: Yes, because in Postrer Río they wouldn’t do it for him, and not in Los Pinos and Los Ríos [other neighboring communities]. And they [Alfredo’s PRD comrades in the village] surrounded the [house containing La Descubierta’s Electoral] Board. So he couldn’t do it. They told him, and we managed to stop him. Thereafter they [Luis José’s people] made it [the fraud with the blank certificates] in a batey instead [i.e. in the office on a state sugar plantation].

Later, Alfredo drew a portrait of personalism, patronage, and local patterns of vote buying. The following technical explanations are not easy to understand but one of their plausible interpretations is that Miriam decided to literally bring the equipment of the Personal Identity office into her home in order to counter Rafaelito’s undermining of her power through clandestine vote purchasing. Or, to put it another way, if someone countered Reformist vote buying in La Descubierta through his own vote buying, who else could it be but Rafaelito? Alfredo told his story when I asked him whether, in 1986, it had been true that the Reformists in La Descubierta had indeed taken the electoral register into their home. Alfredo: No, those [the things the Reformists had taken into Miriam’s home] were the documents of the Personal Identity office and the [physical] pieces with which one makes the identity cards. And then they produced cards in her house. They had the cards placed in their cover; and they spoke with the head of the Personal Identity office and had the supposed names to give him. So [that was] also one of the frauds. And [on the election day] they placed [local Reformist] activists on the [village’s street] corners who bought the voting cards so that, in that way, they [i.e. the locals belonging to the PRD and the PLD who let

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them purchase their voting cards] couldn’t vote. Now, that was one vote less [for the PRD or the PLD]. Author: They did it on election day? Alfredo: Yes, already in the early morning they were busy with that. Since the majority know to what party so-and-so belongs, they bought them directly from them. And they [the people receiving money for their voting cards] sold them for a certain time, such as just that day. In that way they decreased the number of votes for the opposition. For she [Miriam] established the rule that those who belonged to her side [the Reformist Party] had to pass by her house [in the morning on the election day] before voting so that they could be checked [on her private list of all those locals who were supposed to be Reformists]. Author: In what way? Alfredo: Well they obtained a [voting card] list, and checked among the Reformists. They had the advantage of obtaining the lists before those of the opposition. And therefore they already knew more or less how many votes they were going to obtain, and whether so-and-so was lacking [i.e. if so-and-so hadn’t passed by her house on the election day, showed his or her voting card, and thus been checked on Miriam’s list (in which case his or her vote could be assumed to have been sold to the rival)]. When they won, nothing left them. Author: All the Reformists have to go first to Miriam’s house? Alfredo: Yes, before voting they must pass by her house. And they checked them on the list. Later, before the last election [in 1990], we [the local PRD] obtained our own list. We made it ourselves [in Rafaelito’s home]. We worked a whole week preparing those lists, and we could finally position ourselves and make an estimate [of the number of votes we were going to obtain].

The stories about fraud in La Descubierta show that charges implicated individuals and groups at most levels of the political and social hierarchy, and a large number of locals with names familiar to everyone.5 In the early 1990s fraud was produced among local leaders and followers, and on street corners and in village arenas. Alfredo once expressed the view that the country had seen even more fraud after 1978—after Balaguer’s repressive “twelve years.” As he said, “before [1978] it was more from the top than from the bottom.” Much of the local communication about fraud was bound inevitably to refer to the national leaderships (those of Balaguer, Bosch, and Peña Gómez), but the storytellers’ most immediate concern was to convey a message about the strength and power innate in forms of agency at the level of the community. The discourse on fraud was shaped by, and shaped, views on courage, alertness, intelligence, cleverness, and cunning. The narratives constructed and reconstructed a perspective

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on the art of winning battles. For example, Alfredo’s story about his leader who stopped Iván in the middle of the night in his office certainly rested on implicit meanings, and therefore appeared modest in both form and moral appraisal. Still, it came close to an honor bestowed on male courage. And so did his story about how the local PRD activists watched over the senator’s brother. These stories confirmed the existence of a tremendous force, inherent in a set of essentially masculine virtues—such as vigilance against rivals, good timing, and steadfastness in the face of risk and danger. Miriam’s will to control the state’s services—such as the services of La Descubierta’s Personal Identity office—was so great that she once physically placed them in her own house. Still, Rafaelito had managed to find his way to exert inf luence. Once we drove to Santo Domingo, he told me about it. His story placed emphasis on his own patience and cleverness, not on the Reformist use of force. He said his relationship with Moreno—the head of La Descubierta’s Personal Identity office—was a personal one; it was characterized by mutual understanding. In reality, he went on, Moreno did the same work for him as he did for Miriam. Rafaelito and Moreno were neighbors in the village. When Rafaelito’s side (the local PRD activists) had wanted to remove Moreno as head of the Registry office and replace him with somebody belonging to the PRD after they had gained power in 1978 and 1982, he had asked them all to withdraw while he personally dealt with his friend and neighbor. “We probably wouldn’t have got rid of him anyway,” Rafaelito said to me, “and if we had tried to hurt him, he would later have become our enemy. Now Moreno even carries out work for us which he could refuse to do according to the law, even though,” as he added, “for the Reformists he does that sort of favor all the time.” “For example,” he continued, “here there live many who have come from a remote hill community. According to the law, they should have a document from their home area confirming that they don’t reside there; but with Moreno we are able to say ‘look, we know he lives here.’ ” While we talked, Rafaelito rounded off his illustrations with the conclusion that, in politics, one must be able to handle all these matters. He then offered another example. La Descubierta’s Electoral Board had three members, who all were Reformists. Miriam controlled two, he explained, “but I have Ricardo [who was another of his next-door neighbors in the village], and he works more and is more efficient than the others, and he alone does just fine. Ricardo tells me discreetly what he thinks I ought to know.” So whereas the Reformists relied on one of Miriam’s cousins for the control of the municipal Electoral Board (the cousin was the head, but

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largely absent from the office), Rafaelito had found his opening through his neighbor across the street, and the latter, he said, functioned just as well as the cousin. Through instrumental friendship, Rafaelito counteracted the pitiless, partisan monopolization of the state. This would not have been possible, however, had it not been for the cunning of his neighbors—his two friends/opponents, Moreno and Ricardo. Both the delicacy and the basic inscrutability of the entire process are evident from Rafaelito’s and Alfredo’s slightly different summaries of it. While Rafaelito said, “I don’t know for whom Moreno votes, maybe he votes for us in secrecy,” Alfredo’s view was that “Moreno is no problem, he deals with all the parties without making trouble. For that reason he clashed with Miriam, saying to her ‘no, listen, the one who arrives [to the office] first, is the one who should be helped first.’ ” Alfredo exaggerated when he claimed that all the parties were treated by Moreno in the same manner. Rafaelito was clear on this point. Having detailed how he himself benefited from Moreno’s services, he blamed the PLD for not having understood how to treat him in his own way. He said, “He doesn’t perform these favors for them.” Alfredo even claimed that the PRD had had to help its “less cunning comrades”—or the local Boschistas. Describing the difficulties of obtaining photos for identity cards, he went on to say that Every party [in the village] has its camera. Our man [for taking photos] was Gustavo [a local]. I managed the money and gave 50 pesos to Moreno [the head of the Personal Identity office] in case they went [to ask him for a card]. We had a person in charge. And he [Moreno] carried out the work for me and I paid him. If there were [for example] 10 people who belonged to the PRD who went to see him, he came to me and gave me a list. . . . However, the PLD had to wait [i.e., couldn’t obtain identity cards] until they came with a camera from . . . I don’t know where, yes from Villa Jaragua [a neighboring municipality in the Bahoruco province]. They had to wait only in order to have their photographs taken. We have our camera; and the Reformist Party has one. We have even taken photographs of those from the PLD so that they could vote against Balaguer.

Still more sophisticated self-portraits of cleverness and inventiveness appeared when Rafaelito came to the subject of vote buying. As Alfredo suggested, an election victory may appear to be secured through the patient accumulation of the required documents for all the partisans, but still disappear elusively out of your pocket in the last hours. Money may counteract years of intelligent labor. But a double dose of cleverness can resist even the power of money.

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To clarify: Rafaelito recognized that some among his own followers were people who represented what he described as a “high risk of sale” (alto riesgo de venta). For each of these he had to acquire two voting cards. It is easy, he said—you claim a card has been lost, and that a new one is needed; on the election day, I check my list and find so-and-so hasn’t voted, and then I seek her out and she tells me she lost her voting card; I only say, “Look, here it is, let’s go vote. I take her to the Table, and get her into the line and see to it that she votes. Those who bought her vote are there as well, of course, but they can’t do anything, since it’s illegal to purchase votes! All this one must be able to handle.” His general point here was the social knowledge one needed to possess, and be able to act upon, as a leader. The entire community of voters had to be carefully assessed. He named a young follower in the barrios (who, as he probably had been told, was one of my good friends). “He is very serious,” he claimed, “they could offer him 10,000 but he never sells. But that one,” and he named another, “is fond of money: she sells her vote without hesitation.” And, he quite elegantly finished, if I was ever into buying, I would need the same knowledge. “Look at José Chauvet, and his two friends Pedro and Santiago Mella [that is, three of the factionalists in the local Reformist Party, Miriam’s enemies]. These are men who are not for sale. But take my brother [a Reformist]: José is without any ideas in his head, and you can buy him!” I have shown that the local stories about fraud were shaped by, and shaped, ideas of political life as very personal relationships and as an oblique, sometimes elusive, and impenetrable world. As will become more evident, these imageries were often closely interwoven with notions of masculinity. The peak season for “fraud rituals” was the time immediately after the voting figures were officially declared. The PRD and PLD charged that Balaguer and his followers never won cleanly. But even though many held this view, many also believed that the other parties lost. Victory and defeat, I shall argue, were not assessed in purely formal terms. Rather victory and defeat were conceptualized and understood on the basis of a broad set of criteria. Victory and defeat in elections were hardly seen in isolation from values like courage, social intelligence, and cleverness. The person who first led me toward this thought was Pablo (the old Trujillista and Boschista, and four-times-elected Balaguerista mayor). What characterized Pablo, in the eyes of probably the whole community, was his honesty and goodness. He was also considered as a man who had not been personally ambitious (since he had spent his entire political life as someone else’s right-hand man). I remember him one evening defending the 1990 election results against two of his sons, who years

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before had shifted to the PRD and then had become a Peña Gomista and a Majlutista (follower of Majluta) respectively. The Peña Gómez supporter claimed that Balaguer had won over Bosch in a dirty manner. As he said, the Central Electoral Board had arranged the results on the basis of fraud. But Pablo and one of his daughters-in-law, a Reformist like him, struck back with a question: “But why don’t they [the other parties] prepare a similar thing?” With this, the discussion quietened down. But the Majluta follower concluded (supporting both the position of his brother and that of his father and sister-in-law): “Here the money wins. Balaguer didn’t win but he is in power.” Others backed Pablo. They believed that Bosch had been beaten. Among the most clear-cut views was that of Mario. He often spoke to me quite passionately about the male ideal of valentía or courage. According to him, the great politicians should ideally be “like men of the pueblos”; they should be men who were respected because they had made themselves respected. Mario prided himself on never having been a Balaguerista (as he said, “not even in heaven”). But he had once been a follower of Bosch. Mario saw a basic difference between Balaguer and Bosch. He tied the difference to masculinity—valentía. Balaguer, he could laugh, was “a man of the devil” (un hombre del diablo). But Bosch, he said, lacked timing when he was put to the crucial test. Rather than practicing ruthless vigilance, Mario asserted with irony, on May 16, 1990, election day, Bosch went to sleep and let the Balagueristas take what belonged to him in the night. Mario therefore reformulated the parallel between politicians and the men of the pueblos, with the PLD leader in mind: “there are moments for eating, and there are moments for sleeping.” Mario said once, “I was a Boschista during the seven months [in the early 1960s]. But I don’t like Juan Bosch because Bosch cackles a lot and the politicians must be spirited, resolute, like the men in the pueblos.” Later he said: “Juan Bosch is a capricious man. That is why they don’t let him be president. For Juan Bosch doesn’t listen to others, and that is not the way you work in politics. In politics, one shouldn’t work on the basis of one’s own whims, but according to the whims of the people, according to the capricious ways of the people. But he doesn’t work like that.” Mario would repeatedly reproach Balaguer both for his destruction of society and for his evil. Even so, he continued to observe an important difference between the two leaders: “They have never wanted to open up for Bosch anywhere. Bosch now [in 1990] beat him [Balaguer]. He beat him. However, he [Balaguer] is a man who knows a lot about political life, very cunning, very intelligent.” Toward the end of our discussion Mario summed up: “Juan Bosch is supported by all the good people of the pueblos . . . but he suffers from two small things, that he isn’t courageous

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and does not ‘turn loose the peso’ [i.e. exchange help for votes]. But then if he had been courageous, he would already have been dead. He wouldn’t have been alive. That was why [Colonel Francisco] Caamaño died [because he was brave].” The only political image on display in Mario’s home, apart from a picture of Peña Gómez (conditioned by the state of the political market), was of Caamaño, the fierce colonel who stood up to defend the Boschista revolution, while Bosch was in exile.6 These views contained a lot of realism. La Descubierta’s municipal accountant provided another example. Federico claimed about the 1990 election that “Bosch won in the ballot boxes, but Balaguer won in the computers.” 7 During the year of my fieldwork, he (like Mario) repeated that Peña would win the next time (in 1994) and that they—the PRD supporters—would then be prepared to do everything to defend their victory. This perspective is crucial to keep in mind. In the late twentieth century the Dominican political game implied keen competition. Not only were the stakes high and the means tough but also up to 1978 a great number became victims of brutal military violence. The entire population became divided. Those who had lost were mercilessly cut off for the next four years from jobs, services, and progress through the state. We must distinguish between “rituals” and “games.” While rituals typically bring about an intensified spirit of community, games inevitably produce a collective reading in terms of a disjunction—a sharp division between winners and losers (Lévi-Strauss 1966:30–32). We have to distinguish between an outcome known in advance (in rituals), and experiences of uncertainty and risk (in games), as Stanley Tambiah explained (Tambiah 1985:128). The warlike nature of the political game in the Dominican Republic in the late twentieth century was tied to the participants’ experiences of tough competition. It was precisely because things mattered deeply that people produced fraud, made accusations, and became obsessed with the idea of disclosing fraud. As we have seen, locals invested their lives and families in the game. When they lost, they might even leave home and migrate. The fraudulent elections in the 1980s and the 1990s developed in an atmosphere in which many were convinced that a lot was at stake. The phenomenon of political fraud has received scant attention from social scientists and ethnographers. When it has been dealt with at all, the explanation has typically focused on purely instrumental causes. Little has been said about fraudulent elections as examples of patterns of meaningfully oriented behavior.8 The stories above testify to the hardships that condition and shape the Dominican contests for access to the state. In addition they stress that elections are outcomes of interaction—products of

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forms of communication, negotiation and exchange. In the next section, I attempt to ref lect on the fraudulent elections in La Descubierta as a sort of communication and negotiation. I discuss the following question: what were the central features of political fraud in the 1980s and the early 1990s, understood as forms of exchange of meaning? Political Fraud as Interaction La Descubierta’s narratives about fraud remind me of those stories—or forms of literature—that some classify as belonging to the genre of Magical Realism. The local stories of fraud were comments on a political reality that was read by leaders and masses in terms of ideas about the commonness of that which should be uncommon.9 How can we usefully understand communication about political impenetrability at the grassroots level? How can we interpret communication about political impenetrability as a form of lived daily reality, and as practice among ordinary citizens, such as the people of La Descubierta? How should we view the processes that constituted and impressed a claim such as “Bosch won in the ballot boxes, but Balaguer won in the computers,” and the narratives about fraud and resistance conveyed to me by a man like Alfredo? In brief, how can we understand narratives about fraudulent elections as a sort of everyday reality in a Dominican community? In his Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, Michael Taussig has claimed that the central features of the social landscape of the Putumayo atrocities at the beginning of the twentieth century were not the “epic” qualities of the popular symbolic exchanges, with their many savage, grotesque, and fantastic images, but, instead, widespread ideas which corresponded to a form of radical epistemological uncertainty. In the same way, I want to argue that the culture of election fraud that permeated Dominican society implied a production of widespread doubt— doubt which regularly carried actors away. Leaders and masses doubted deeply the fairness of others’ political activities. David Riches has argued that political violence means inherent and notorious contestability (Riches 1986:11). Taussig has said that the question of interpretation is the problem that “is precisely what is central to the culture of terror” (Taussig 1984:494). A culture of fraud—like a culture of violence and terror—implies constant interpretation problems. As we have seen, Miriam and Rafaelito and their followers were skilled in the arts of gaining knowledge, reinterpreting what they already knew, and protecting themselves in secrecy against sudden destruction. Yet in this social universe, political truths appeared often to be joined with falsehood, and certainty with doubt.

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The uncertainty caused mistrust, but it also generated much creativity. People sought to find the truth and to dispel the fear of unpredictability. They therefore invented new forms of agency. People in La Descubierta sought to get rid of their most gnawing anxieties. In turn they were driven, for example, to attempt to reveal the production of fraud— falsehood—“on the spot” (remember Alfredo’s narrative about the senator’s brother). Or people felt compelled to spy on others, or systematically obtain two voting cards for those that represented a “high risk of sale.” We can see a paradox in all this. The stories of fraud from La Descubierta are sometimes suggestive of Magical Realism. However, the same narratives also reveal what can be described as a near-obsessive concern with “real” things—in particular, documents. During some periods Miriam, Rafaelito and others in the community seemed possessed by a wish to acquire certificates, identity cards, and voting cards—physical documentation. Yet this concern with “hard” documentation—this hunt for apparently uncontestable, tangible and visible identity documents with photographs—fits perfectly with a social climate saturated by doubt, with an atmosphere in which truth seems often to be closely linked with falsehood. Stories have a powerful political force in all societies. The political force of the Dominican fraud culture did not seem to arise only out of the generally symbolic quality of the tales, however. If we accept that what we perceive as reality is always a social construct, we must say that all people live in and by their fictions—whether they are produced through words or other expressions. However, in social contexts with a notorious production of illegitimacy, the socially fictionalized truths are continuously undermined by fictions of falsehood. What appears to characterize contexts with marked illegitimacy is that many actors have to produce their symbols as more indeterminate and uncertain than is the case under circumstances with profound legitimacy. What for the most part appears elsewhere to be an elitist problem is radically expanded into an everyday problem and a force among the masses. What are frequently democratic and epistemological topics among a minority of political and intellectual experts are more than “just” a philosophical problem. In short, cultures of political fraud such as that of the Dominicans in the early 1990s must be grasped in terms of relationships and interactions deep down among the people—relationships and interactions that lead to many of the actors regularly constructing reality-or-illusion in political and electoral life as indeterminate. History within History The tactics, exchanges and relations I have described were structured by the past. As Rosario Espinal has put it, “It is difficult to speak of fair

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and competitive elections in the Dominican Republic before 1978, with the exception of the 1962 elections” (Espinal 2000:184). High-profile allegations of election-rigging go back at least to Heureaux’s suffocation of opposition in the 1880s and the 1890s. Hoetink writes: “Heureaux saw political activity as artisanry” and “the political structure as a delicate but static whole, as an altar that should not be shaken so that the saints would not topple” (Hoetink 1982:131). Against this backdrop, he describes the part played by congress and elections as follows: The parliament’s role in the criollo dictatorship [the Heureaux regime] was in accord with the . . . artisanal character of the political system. . . . The freedom that the “loyal” members of parliament could permit themselves in their tidy criticism of specific government actions is, therefore, surprising. But the president also had an interest in a harmonious relation with these distinguished followers, often intellectuals. Complaints about pressure and election fraud [including the purchasing and selling of votes] perpetrated with the help of military men were brought to light with great emphasis by some deputies and were studied quite comprehensively according to the rules of the game, although, of course, the result could be predicted beforehand. (Hoetink 1982:133)

Under Trujillo, voting was compulsory in all communities. One’s personal identity card had to have a stamp showing that one had voted in the last election. Although the regime retained a constitutional front and had a National Congress, “senators and deputies were ‘elected’ by the only political party which existed in the country, the Dominican Party, following the personal recommendations of the dictator. Before being appointed, senators and deputies signed a resignation letter with no date, which was delivered to the dictator” (Moya Pons 1990:521). In the words of Galíndez, the Spanish author of The Era of Trujillo, the elections from 1930 to 1961 were “simulations at Trujillo’s discretion”: The figures and data [of typical elections under Trujillo] save all comments on the “truthfulness” of Dominican elections during the Era of Trujillo. That 100 percent of votes in favor [of the candidates of the Dominican Party in all the provinces] is the best evidence of falsification and dictatorship. . . . Not even the great dictators like Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco, dared to proclaim so unanimous an outcome; at least they left a small percentage of votes against, or of blank votes. . . . In the Dominican Republic, the unanimity is perfect. (Galíndez 1958:105–109)

From the second half of the nineteenth century until Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, Dominican political life was infested by fraud (see also

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Betances 1995:57–76, 95–111). Later the 1966 elections, held in the context of the U.S. occupation, were competitive (insofar as two major parties, the Reformist Party and the PRD, participated), but were highly disputed. In 1970 and 1974 the PRD, which accused the government of terror against the opposition and election-rigging, did not put up a candidate. Balaguer and the Reformist candidates “contested” offices mainly unopposed, prolonging an already old pattern of elections as false pretences, faking, and appearances. The opposition’s allegations of fraud were confirmed at last in 1978, when the country saw a new U.S. intervention. In May that year, U.S. president Carter prevented Balaguer from fraudulently continuing in office (Espinal 2000:183–185; Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:52–54). The current wave of competitive elections began with the transfer of power to Guzmán in 1978. From the late 1970s, the country experienced the end of military repression, and economic crisis. Guzmán augmented the number of people employed in the public sector by some 50 to 60 percent; Blanco increased the number by another 40 percent (Black 1986:141). In other words, the public sector expanded considerably even in the 1980s. Up to 1978, Balaguer personally picked provincial representatives. Since 1986, the Reformist Party’s candidates have been elected by a provincial assembly. This delegation of control from the central to the local level has sometimes been accompanied by increased production of (allegations of ) fraud. After Miriam lost the candidature as Reformist deputy for Independencia province by a narrow margin in 1986 (on the basis of election by the provincial assembly), her allies accused the supporters of the winner (the Reformist woman from the provincial capital Jimaní who had successfully competed against her) of having orchestrated rigging (according to Miriam’s friends, with the help of the Independencia senator’s money). These changes from the late 1970s onward not only strengthened the already massive interest in the state’s jobs and services. They also increased the space for political agency and maneuvering deep down among the people. From the late 1970s, the country saw keen competition across the national space for access to the state. In turn the intensified competition led to veritable spirals of charges, countercharges and denials of fraud. With the transfer of power in 1978, fraud came to be organized by the PRD also—not, as before, only by Balaguer followers. To reiterate Alfredo’s claim, before 1978 the fraud “was more from the top than from the bottom.” From the late 1970s, even the orchestration of fraud was turned into an object of democratization. After Balaguer stepped down in 1978, political offices were contested through games that seemed to have less predictable outcomes than the

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earlier ones. The scramble for access to the state’s resources appeared less sharply controlled from the top. This strengthened local leaders’ and followers’ sense of tough, high-stakes competition, shaping not only more fraud and charges of fraud but also local truths about political life as less fixed and more questionable. If elections used to be theatrical events with predictable outcomes, the first two elections in the 1990s looked like actual, keen competitions—or like games characterized by a marked unpredictability about who would win.

CHAPTER 6 CONSTRUCTING MASCULINITY, NEGOTIATING RULE

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n the preceding chapters, we have seen that the Dominican southwest’s most important institutions and practices were not in a contradictory relationship to the state-building project. On the contrary, the appearance and the construction of the state in this part of the country both depended upon and strengthened the region’s well-tried cultural forms and practices. The building of the postcolonial state in the southwest consolidated and reinforced basic institutions like the extended family and compadrazgo. The same applies to the region’s forms of patronage and clientage. The state was produced precisely by means of these institutions. The two preceding chapters have shown that the networks of rule that created and recreated an authoritarian state in this part of the country were constantly made, remade and modified through everyday interaction, and that political agency in the southwest had normative roots. The making of an authoritarian political history had a moral basis. A political and cultural force that shaped the state-building project in La Descubierta was the local version of machismo—the local ideas and practices that helped justify and naturalize male supremacy. If it is right to say that the building of the state in the southwest had a cultural and moral basis, it is also right to claim that a key component of this basis was masculinity imagery.1 To support this claim, I shall now examine in detail the relationship between the construction of masculinity and the shaping of political life. I shall argue that ideas about maleness in the southern borderlands have played, and continue to play, a crucial part in the daily making of political legitimacy—inside and outside the political parties and the state. Notions of masculinity constitute a dominant discourse—or what is summed up by Bourdieu’s idea about a “legitimate problematic” (Bourdieu 1992:172,

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1977:159–197; Bayart 1991:64). A legitimate problematic helps produce a field of what is politically thinkable, and a particular set of power relations. In the Dominican southwest, the legitimate problematic of maleness has entailed a particular confinement of society’s hegemonic political imagination, illustrated by a number of verbal expressions that were used in daily life in La Descubierta.2 Relations between leaders and followers, or patrons and clients, were given meaning in terms of ideas about masculinity. As the state-building project unfolded in La Descubierta, local ideas in part changed and in part were used in new ways. But key everyday forms were not eliminated. The region’s thinking about masculinity testifies to this in a convincing manner. It shows a striking continuity over time, although in this chapter I rely mainly on own data collected in the early 1990s, while Balaguer’s supporters still were at the height of their power. As in many societies in the Old and the New World, a conceptual distinction has been forged between “house” or “home” (casa) and “street” (calle). The streets are said to represent mainly a male world.3 Men’s notions of the social mediation between the “street” and the “home” may throw light on the social distance between men and women, and reveal how specific ambiguities in men’s usual thinking about women stimulated them to produce and reproduce a social and moral space peculiar to themselves, in which they made political culture. Men’s Discourses on Women Men in La Descubierta said both that there existed a hierarchical relationship between themselves and women (which women also said) and that a woman could become powerful and consequently dangerous. What Stanley Brandes has claimed about Andalusian men, could, therefore, also be said here: “It is the fear of women and the self-proclaimed male struggle against them that in large measure impel men to dominate and suppress them” (Brandes 1980:76).4 A man’s clear view of dominance, asserting for example that a man has a right to have up to three or four women (to satisfy his “natural” sexual appetite), could be expressed aggressively. During a day at the beach, while four men were bathing, one started to speak to us of Mike Tyson, who had just been convicted.5 Both the trial and the fate of this boxer must have reminded the men not only of their own struggles with women but also of their conviction that no man—no matter his physical power, money, reputation, and friends— should believe himself to be invulnerable to female manipulation. Tyson lost to a young woman and this would happen sooner or later to men who lowered their guard.

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Nowhere, it seems, were men’s notions of the existence of strong female power more clearly formulated than in the local thinking about saints and spiritual beings. Not only is the Dominican patron saint a Virgin (the Virgin of Altagracia), but at least some of the female spirits are also commonly held to be dangerous, for they know too much about the art of seducing and fooling men. A leading healer in La Descubierta (with whom I used to speak as much about his pantheon as about healing based on possession) explained what Anaísa, one of the female spirits, could make him do when she chose to possess him:6 Those holy females [Anaísa, Santa Marta, Santa Elena, and others], when they f lirt with you, or possess you, they go with you everywhere. For example, if you are somewhere drinking, they may [possess and] transform you [making you behave like them, like a woman] without you realizing it. They also transform you during the night . . . they make one feel that one is with a woman and it’s a lie. Well, for you it’s a lie, but in practice it’s true. You feel satisfied, but when you wake up nobody is there. They come during the night and satisfy themselves with you, and you feel that you were with a woman. They also make you stop seeking women. For example, when you are with a woman, you don’t feel woman; you have an opportunity to sleep with a woman, but when you are going to sleep with her, “no,” it’s a man! She also has the power to do that.

As he claimed at the end, strong female power could generate extreme humility for a man: a woman might be able to cause emasculation; she might make a man appear to himself and to others as “a suppressed woman.” 7 Men’s suspicion and fear could also be read from their talk about Santa Marta. Men spoke of her as “the greatest whore of all women.” The same healer said that though he had Santa Marta’s picture (or chromolithograph) in his house, he actively avoided being possessed by her through ignoring her: She has a serpent. I have her picture [or chromolithograph showing her with the serpent] but I ignore her. [This is so because] I didn’t like that she possessed me [thereby transforming him, making him speak and behave like her], for she is a great disgrace: I feel shame . . . yes, as a man, I feel ashamed because she arrives in me dancing, kicking about, f lirting. . . .

Santa Marta’s nickname is the Dominator. Her symbol is the serpent (seen in the chromolithograph). The serpent is, of course, a strong metaphor for treachery and destruction, which links the Dominican present with the Fall of Man. Furthermore, as Brandes (1980:81) has noted, it is

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hardly without relevance that the word for serpent in Spanish is feminine in gender (una serpiente).8 Men in La Descubierta typically saw women not only as the builders and protectors of families (in their capacities as spouses and mothers), but also as potential destroyers of relationships and well being (in their capacities as temptresses and seductresses). But, a villager said, a woman knows too well how to exploit a partner: From the moment the woman sees that a man has money she makes him proposals. Some [women do that], not all women . . . When you go to get back what you lent her, she will make you a proposal, that you use her. From the moment you did that, and felt that satisfaction with her, you will give her whatever you have, for [when you think about] that moment, you know one gives whatever one has. Therefore they [the women] love money more than the men do . . . No matter what happens, she wins over you, for your money will remain there [with her] but then both will feel the pleasure.

Such an account was based on a set of common discourses on money and sex in the man-woman relationship. As men said, a wife could undermine her partner’s happiness because of her ambitions. Single women were seen not only as temptresses but also as disguised “hunters,” as persons seeking a household contribution—whether they were already mothers or not. Once a union or a marriage had been established, so the thinking went, the woman would begin to show her true will—her will to material progress.9 Men feared cuckoldry. Such a relation could threaten the husband’s entire reputation, and be experienced as extreme humiliation—in a word, as his feminization. A basis for this kind of reasoning was men’s conviction that both men and women demanded good sex. To put it in different terms, a man should “work” (servir) not only in terms of money but also in terms of sex.10 What Brandes writes generally about Mediterranean societies applies in this case as well: “A wife’s infidelity threatens the moral reputation of her entire family. But it affects no one so profoundly as her cuckolded husband, who is charged with the responsibility of harnessing her rampant sexuality” (Brandes 1980:88).11 The main symbol of the husband being cuckolded is the goat’s horns (cuernos). Therefore a popular pastime in La Descubierta was gossiping or joking about a “horned one” (cornudo), and about a woman “placing horns on her husband” (le está metiendo los cuernos). From early on, boys were taught distrust of a female partner. For their part, women often stressed their loyalty in encounters with men; in that way they made explicit (whether aware of it or not) the possibility of

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a real danger. A man who was despised as a cuckold (and ridiculed behind his back) when I lived in the village was among the young and educated Boschista leaders. As is typically the case where people are preoccupied with “horns,” he must have been among the last ones to find out that his wife had moved in with another man in the capital. At last, two of his friends told him. His gravest error was committed from then on—as his friends saw it. Rather than rejecting all future connection with the woman, and thereby throwing her (symbolically) out of his home, he argued that “they were still married.” So a man could save face and avoid feminization—but only by throwing the unfaithful wife out.12 Seen from a man’s perspective, female power could end up by destroying a man’s sense of his own masculinity. Men were therefore outspoken about the need for strategy and control vis-à-vis their women, because of their untrustworthiness. Relationships of power which open the way for destructive sanctions almost always lack a measure of authenticity in the eyes of the parties involved, for both parties actively protect their own autonomy by attempting to make out the other’s knowledge about what goes on in the relationship (Scott 1985; 1990). In La Descubierta, men and women seemed to interact on assumptions that appearances were often deceiving. Men (spending most of their time with other men) might keep their mouths shut and twist truths, if they did not lie, in order to control their women. Women dissembled, and hid truths from their partners, for such strategies were among their few available weapons for use in the necessary battles. It is essential to see that this dynamic generation of much unhappiness was stimulated by the very discourses that men reproduced about women.13 A man’s view was that a “good” wife was necessary. As Mario said, “Marriage is compulsory because of many things.” Even so, a man’s view was also that a woman who treated him well might all the same be a bad woman to him one day: not only was femininity “naturally” ambiguous but women also had two different wills, depending on whether the female-male interaction took place before or after the start of a union. Therefore he should constantly keep his guard up. Tragically enough, men’s cultural constructions of the man-woman relationship became self-fulfilling. In the classic Soulside, Ulf Hannerz has drawn a portrait of corresponding dynamics based on complex images of the other gender in a Washington ghetto of blacks (Hannerz 1969:70–104). The comparison is particularly relevant because the melancholy of blues music has its popular Dominican counterpart: bachata music. The bitter ballads of bachata, not the merry tunes of merengue, were what rural people and men of southwestern barrios preferred to listen to when they sat together for hours, or

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days, drinking. The words of the ballads, the songs of the common man, shape masculine passions, deceptions, and failures in relationships with women.14 Since the taste for bachata was generally known to be vulgar among Dominicans, even among the bachata lovers themselves, the widespread cult of this music ritualized ordinary men’s double separation/ distancing—both from their women and from the elevated centers of power. Classifying Men Ordinary men’s categories for ref lecting on, and judging, each other’s and leaders’ maleness may be discussed in terms of five sets of ideas: notions (1) of autonomy and courage; (2) of men’s visibility in public spaces; (3) of the man as seducer and father; (4) of the power tied to a man’s verbal skills; and (5) of a man’s sincerity and seriousness. Let us consider each of these items in turn. A personal treasure guarded by men and women alike was the room for independence or autonomy. This is a well-observed feature of a number of Latin American and Caribbean societies. In La Descubierta, men sought continuously to shape their own independence or autonomy as a kind of “free mobility” when they interacted with others. The formation of groups of men in the streets, in the park, and in the bars was characterized by f low and considerable looseness. Men entered a group alone, or in the company of only one or two friends. Greeting the others in a loud voice, they usually said few words about their activities beyond the group. Commonly, they left as they came—alone, or with a couple of others, mentioning little more than where they were heading. A rule of these daily encounters was articulated sharply one day in the park. With some twenty men, I was waiting for a car that would take us to the cockfight arena of a neighboring village. Along came a man with two others. One of my group called out his name and greeted him with a “Where are you heading?” The man’s response to the salutation, expressed loudly at a few meters’ distance, was that “Nobody asks me where I am going.” A second and inseparable image of masculinity was that of the hombre valiente, the spirited, courageous, and brave man. People in the southwest used two words, valiente and guapo, largely as synonyms. As a man in La Descubierta explained: The man who is guapo is he who knows how to defend himself when he is presented with a problem. Do you see? For example, it is not that I come threatening you, saying that “I’m guapo.” It is when you come to me, that I know how to answer you and that I prepare myself to die

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defending this [i.e., what is mine]; he is the guapo. It is not the man who walks about talking nonsense, it’s not that kind of man. He is a boaster [bocón]. . . . The man who fights when it is necessary to fight, he is the guapo, the valiente; yes, the same man is a man who is valiente, a man who is guapo, he is the one.

The fact that people used the word guapo in this way emphasizes that fighting was not viewed as necessarily destructive or evil. In Spanish, guapo means “beautiful” or “handsome.” In short, some men engaged in fighting seemed beautiful. There was an image here of the beauty of certain forms of male fighting and violence, the forms said to express valentía, or courage.15 The ideal of valentía was tied closely to social reproduction. A man had to be prepared to fight a rival in some situations, because he always needed to protect himself, the family’s respect, and property. However, men in La Descubierta did not assume that respect was derived from causing or provoking a fight; what was cultivated was a man’s practice of fearless, active defense if he was challenged or attacked by a rival: “He who is valiente waits for you to fall upon him. Then he will fight.” Another rule said: “One fights with equals.” A man had to decide whether another man’s position and respect justified fighting him; maybe he is not worth fighting and should be dealt with under the law. However, sometimes, the need to protect what you have must overcome any kind of hesitation. The ideal that says that a man ought to be guapo or valiente was used not only to shape views of the actions of ordinary villagers and local leaders but also to explain and justify the practices of national leaders and presidents. Leaders’ ways of acting in political conf licts and rivalries— such as election battles—were evaluated in terms of these categories.16 People sometimes reproached Bosch with having stayed in exile in the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. They claimed that he let his followers down—those men (like Caamaño) who had chosen to take up arms for the Boschista cause. That Bosch let Balaguer, his principal competitor, “attack” him on May 16, 1990 (as we have already seen, this was how many people saw what took place in that election), and admitted defeat without fighting, only confirmed this kind of discourse on Bosch as a bocón, or “boaster,” and not valiente. On the other hand, many viewed Balaguer as guapo. Balaguer’s active defense of his own power had already been demonstrated many times. A metaphor comparing him to a rugged plant that could withstand attacks of hardship and drought underscored this aspect of Balaguer. Rafaelito’s father, the old follower of Balaguer, said his leader was sometimes called “the political sorghum” (el sorgo político) who knew how to stay in power.

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Another set of ideas revolved around an image of the man as one who should dejarse ver or make himself visible in public spaces. Men’s physical movements are given different meanings according to the cultural and moral horizon of the interpreters. The same has to be said for men’s “public visibility” in the pueblo landscape. For example, one man said of the mayor of La Descubierta, comparing him to the (in his, and many others’, opinion much better) mayor in the provincial capital Jimaní:17 In Jimaní things are like here, there are no resources. But if you go there, you get envious. That park is nice, and the man who is doing it is the mayor . . . with resources that he obtains from absentee villagers: he goes to the capital . . . he writes to them in New York . . . He himself has contributed economically . . . Leonardo [the name of the mayor of the provincial capital] goes out [sale]; Leonardo moves [brinca]; but not this one [La Descubierta’s mayor], he has gone to bed and that’s what we find bad, a bad mayor, because he doesn’t let himself be seen [no se deja ver] . . . He doesn’t participate in social life [no comparte]. One must go to the public places. Look, I don’t go to the cockfighting arena, for I’m not a cockfighter. But I go to the park . . . But he doesn’t go anywhere, nowhere. Leonardo is seen, he is here . . . he is everywhere, he is a good mayor.

The same villager drew a portrait of a man who had died a couple of years earlier, the father of two of my friends in the village: [Speaking first about drinking] Well, if you don’t drink and don’t dance, but are around [está en el medio], it is acceptable, for I can’t force you to drink or dance if you don’t like it; . . . but you should not stay at home all the time. Let yourself be seen in the park . . . go to the wakes, go to a club. Because here there lived a man who died [recently]. Well, you know his sons. That man was “from home to work” [era “de la casa a su trabajo,” i.e., never socialized]. People called him “mad” [and could say] “that man only works. He doesn’t even have two drinks.” [Others said] “No, leave that man alone, for he doesn’t bother you in the streets.” [That may be so] but neither does he bother you in the bar or in the cockfighting arena, not even in your home, because he is “from work to home”!18

Stories of ordinary men’s and politicians’ visibility in public spaces drew meaning from a discourse on the need for, and naturalness of, a certain generosity. The good man spent time and shared resources with his friends, that is, he was un hombre que comparte.19 Moral evaluations of a man’s public visibility said something about that man’s willingness to do others a favor. Mario put it like this: “They don’t see you, you don’t go out, you don’t give money.”20

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Given these notions of the value of ostentatious male giving and generosity, we may see a politico-moral dilemma for the followers of Juan Bosch: Bosch’s aim was to help the common man—or the poor Dominican masses—on the basis of a reformed state bureaucracy. However, many ordinary Dominicans probably interpreted Bosch’s way of “making himself visible in the public space” as a disquieting sign. When Bosch ignored established concepts of giving in politics (or Dominican patronage ideals), and thereby refrained from “making himself visible,” he laid himself open to a collective reading of himself which argued that he did not provide the support which good men should always offer in order to develop society. Mario, whose son had worked for Bosch in La Descubierta since 1973, said The PLD has many young men, who are good men. But what I’m saying is that he doesn’t give . . . They read a lot, are intelligent, but they don’t have pesos, and then how do they convince? I have a son in that party, and when was that poor man given anything? Nothing. He doesn’t make money, there’s nothing. Juan Bosch is a very methodical man [un hombre muy metódico]; no one sees the money, he never has any.

The word “methodical” seems apt in such a context. Basically, Mario’s argument was only to emphasize the value of the kind of political authority that came naturally when a man was seen as un hombre suelto, or as a man who was “loose.” The argument said that legitimacy in politics was derived precisely from producing the kinds of relationships that mixed “kinship,” “friendship,” “business,” and “the public.” In short, discourses that produced a difference between those men who “made themselves visible” and those others “who could hardly be seen” condensed an entire political vision. Men who chose not to strive to promote their own personal visibility in the public spaces could challenge a good man’s idea of what any politics—or, for that matter, all society—should be about. Another powerful concept of masculinity, recognized by both men and women, was that of a man as moving from one woman to the next, changing partners. Such a concept may be said to correspond to an image of man as “nomadic” (Wade 1994:117). An extension of this image is the man as mujeriego or a womanizer, engaged in the sexual conquest of women even when he is married or living in a stable union. An image of masculinity closely linked to that of the man as a womanizer was that of him as one who was always ready to party with his male friends, drinking rum, listening and dancing to music, and telling stories: a man should be a bebedor (drinker), a bailador (dancer), and fiestero (fun-loving).

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There was however a second, rather different notion of what it meant to be a good man. Men said that the man had to be a good father, providing for his mujer, or woman, and children. When a union or marriage broke up, a man continued to have provider responsibility for his children, even if in practice his fulfillment of that responsibility might often be extremely limited, or completely token. This concept of masculinity presupposed that a man should sacrifice himself for his family, be loyal and supportive—in a word, prefer a “settled” life to a “nomadic” one. The tension between these two rather different sets of discourses on what constitutes masculinity has also been noted for the Caribbean in general.21 Logically enough, with the premium on seduction, appearances were important. Locals said that a man had to be “clean” (limpio), not “dirty” (sucio). As one villager put it, if a man wants to develop leadership, “there are three things which are very important: to have money, to have a good relationship to your pueblo, and to be a clean person.” The concept of “cleanness” employed in such a context had several meanings. It was used, for example, to indicate a man’s conformity to the approved appearances in public places. For instance, the municipal Judge and president of the local Reformist Party, Pedro Mella, was criticized by a villager in the following way: “He is dirty. He uses a pair of old shoes and a T-shirt, when the law says that one has to wear a white, long-sleeved shirt. He goes to the party’s meetings dressed like a fool.” In addition, uses of the term “clean” classified a number of other aspects of a man’s behavior— features that ultimately signaled a man’s will to be with others, and act as a “social” type. Someone said of one villager, Tomás (mayor from 1982 to 1986), that he “has a very ugly way of dressing; his shirt and shoes are a total mess. When he goes to the fields, he carries a hoe on his shoulder. It is very well that work doesn’t dishonor; it is true. But each job has its personality.” Uses of the category “clean” were tied to ideas about local social hierarchies and notions of work. Too much (or too exhausting) work could threaten a man’s image as a seducer. It undermined his visibility (or his ability to make himself visible) in the pueblo, that is, it “stole” from that time which he should spend socializing with others, sharing rum and stories, and womanizing. Uses of the clean/dirty distinction therefore condensed linguistically many aspects of the notions of masculinity. The difference between the notions of man as a “nomadic” seducer and a “settled” father was mobilized in order to make sense of politics and state-making. This may be seen, for example, from a conversation I had with Rafaelito’s father, a man with twenty-three children. Thinking back on his life with women, he said: “I think I was a bit careless regarding

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that issue. To be frank, I married a good woman; you know her, the mother of Rafaelito. But we got separated because I was a machista; I had another woman elsewhere. Because of that I don’t really fulfill the conditions [as a complete man], for there I made some errors.” However, his recognition that he had committed “errors” because he had been a womanizer may not have been profound. He said: “The fact that I was a womanizer did not harm my reputation. On the contrary, it helped me in my political leadership. For it meant that the fathers of the women became my friends, and their brothers and all those people. We became friends, and I was introduced to different family networks.”22 That is, having had relations with women in several communities in the province, he had been able to form, and use, ties of compadrazgo (or sanctified friendship)— the cement of the southwest’s politics—in the same communities.23 In brief, men acknowledged a political advantage derived from drinking and womanizing. These strategies helped to construct extended networks anchored in exchanges of trust, services and loyalty, without which the dominant forms of the exercise of power in this society seemed impossible.24 Men and women in La Descubierta also associated the exercise of power with particular men’s gifts for manipulating words. As Roger Abrahams says in The Man-of-Words in the West Indies (1983), people in African American settings often place a high value on verbal control and eloquence. Locals said that men and politicians needed to “have a discourse” (tener discurso). Time and again, authority in politics was explicitly related by villagers to evaluations of verbal skills. For example, locals said about a man that “he doesn’t know to speak” (no sabe hablar), or that “his words come easily” (tiene un verbo fácil).25 In the light of this, two points should be noted. First, cultivation of the use of words had a practical aspect. Villagers ref lected on the use of words because they had an interest in communication as a political activity; they thought about the use of specific words, expressions and texts as a means of achieving tangible ends, such as a public job for someone in the household, or a public-works project in their own community. The head of the Barrancos, the largest family of La Descubierta, illustrates this. He prides himself on being a local man-of-words, and shows his understanding of the manipulation of words as a means of obtaining actual benefits (in this case, the construction of a new barrio or set of houses for the villagers, funded by the state). The day before these words were put on tape, he had delivered a speech at a political meeting, held by the Reformist Party in La Descubierta. Present at the meeting (apart from La Descubierta’s crowd of Reformist supporters) had been his local leader, Miriam, and one of the party’s top

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figures, the general secretary (Luis Toral), who had arrived from Santo Domingo. Here he reproduces images from his speech the day before: Yesterday Luis Toral was in La Descubierta. I spoke to him, and sought to motivate him. I said that the President of the Republic [Balaguer] is a man who rules the country sitting. But he has twenty-nine “thoughts,” and twenty-eight of those twenty-nine he has given to each province; they have been given to the senators so that they govern, and the richest thought, the one containing most resources, he has given to [the city of Santo Domingo, i.e. the capital]. . . . But I also said [to Luis Toral] that the thought of this province hadn’t worked entirely satisfactorily, for the housing situation of the poor [of La Descubierta is disheartening. I said to him that] the thought of the president has “dressed” [meaning that it has constructed a barrio of new houses in] Angostura, it has dressed Duvergé, it has dressed Escondido, it has dressed El Limón, it has dressed Jimaní, and it has dressed Boca de Cachón [names of villages in the province]. So it seems that the entire province beyond Boca de Cachón has God’s clothing, and that La Descubierta has been dressed by the Devil. And I said to Luis Toral that I had nine candles and that I had already lit eight asking the Saints for this barrio, but that I had one left and that I wasn’t going to light any more but that I was going to light the ninth for his saint so that he would talk with the President of the Republic and arrange a new barrio for La Descubierta.

Immediately after the meeting, Miriam says to Luis Toral (while the man quoted here is with them and listens to them): “Well, Luis, this man puts you under pressure, this man has a commitment.” Luis Toral replies “Miriam, the first thing I will tell the president is this: this barrio of La Descubierta; for this man has already said that the last man with whom he will speak about it is me. He says that he had nine candles and that he has only a single one left, which is mine, and that he will not light any more. The man has made me commit myself. Miriam, who is this man? What sort of man is he?” He (Luis Toral) says: “That man has a natural knowledge.” The head of the Barrancos finishes “Yes, I was born with this [gift of speech].” Another village politician, Pablo’s eldest son, said: “The language should be natural and plain . . . without inventing anything;26 in accordance with the countryside. It ought to be adapted to the surroundings. . . . For example, there are technical words which one cannot use, since . . . they [the local peasants] would not understand them.” What was at stake here was what words could produce in social and practical terms. More than anything, control of speech was attractive because it was useful—a source of power.

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Second, what locals classified as being político, or political, had mainly to do with verbal skills. For example, a man said about Miriam’s husband, Piñeyro, “He doesn’t know how to speak. The man doesn’t have words so that he can develop a conversation with you, face-to-face; he isn’t able to do it.” In his The Dominican People, 1850–1900, Hoetink comments on Dominicans’ extended use of the word político as an adjective. As he writes: “ ‘Un hombre muy político’ [a very political man] indicates (even today) of someone that he knows how to move ably and successfully among many, sometimes antagonistic, groups.” (1982:136) The concept of being político can be said to attach itself to the man who is a gifted user of words. This is so because few of the other qualities covered by the label político—for example, what people call “mucho tino” or “a good feel for things”—can exist in a Dominican who is seen by others as a man who often lacks the right words, who “doesn’t know how to speak.” The skilled use of words represents both ammunition and protection at all levels of society; it makes politics and leadership possible. A basic concept was that of the person as serio (or seria), that is, serious. 27 Asked to explain “serious,” one villager said: “There is one condition, that he doesn’t steal, and that he pays you back when he borrows from you, such as in the bar.” To claim that a man wasn’t serious was to imply that he was shameless. Used of men, the label sinvergüenza, or shameless, most often connoted “wrongdoer” or “thief ” (ladrón). Bosch and his followers consistently argued that the other political parties—in particular, that of Balaguer—were in the hands of men who lacked seriousness and were sinvergüenzas, or shameless. This discourse was a powerful one because it mobilized key concepts used in everyday life in all sectors of society. In saying that the other parties’ leaders “robbed” the state, this discourse (the Boschista discourse) attempted to deprive them of any legitimacy. The word sinvergüenza could in addition have a second, less offensive meaning. In the words of Mario: There are two sinvergüenzas [sorts of shameless] . . . for there is one who is sinvergüenza because he enters everywhere [such as in particular gatherings, houses, or offices] without feeling shame. And there is one who is sinvergüenza because he is a wrongdoer. They are two.

The man who imposed himself everywhere was unable to respect informal rules—rules used to define and give form to encounters and situations (Goffman 1959). It was a short step from classifying this type of failure to arguments that a man who “joked too much,” or was seen by others as an excessive “joker,” was lacking in sufficient seriousness. In La Descubierta, people claimed that the serious man did not have

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recourse to the relajo; he didn’t “joke.” The word relajo is semantically complex. As Anthony Lauria has shown, it may refer to a number of joking activities: “Ribbing, riding, kidding all come under the purview of un relajo.” (Lauria 1964:58) An important difference, however, exists between the Puerto Rican case described by Lauria and the Dominican one. While Lauria underscored the legitimacy of frequent joking,28 men in La Descubierta claimed that joking could be dangerous. The relajo was dangerous because it could undermine important social relations, such as relations between compadres. It could destroy the very cement of social and political life. This is not to say that people did not tell stories, or that they did not laugh at each other: but “the man who jokes isn’t well regarded. He isn’t considered a serious person.”29 A tension was built into the relajo as a form of interaction. This tension can be described as follows. A man did not know another man well enough to be able to joke with him unless they had already established some sort of friendship. One did not joke with a stranger.30 The relajo was, to some extent, based on a kind of confianza, or trust. However, precisely those men that a man counted as his trusted others were those that he could least afford to offend. Men in La Descubierta knew this well. They knew that compadrazgo was precious and instrumental (inside and outside politics), and that it therefore should not be sacrificed for a joke. Stories about how a friendship between two men became destroyed by a relajo were commonplace among the villagers. Rather than gambling with a friendship (by joking), men tended to sanctify it by converting it into a compadrazgo relationship. Men and women constructed compadrazgo on the basis of prior friendship.31 One villager said: “Well, everybody has his system. I select a [man as] compadre because of my friendship with him and because of his seriousness. I am not going to give my child to be baptized by a man who is a sinvergüenza.”32 Another basic concept-pair used to characterize actions of both men and women was one that marked a distinction between buena fe and mala fe, between good and bad faith, or between sincerity and insincerity. This distinction, which expressed thinking about good as different from evil, was also shaped in terms of differences in people’s “purity”—or their blood. People and hearts were metaphorically spoken of as sucios (dirty) or limpios (clean), implying evil or good; and the blood of evil and good people respectively was said to be pesada (heavy) and liviana (light), or agria (sour) and dulce (sweet). The saints also were contemplated through such language. Some mysteries were said to be sweet, while others were sour. The classification of people’s buena fe or mala fe, their sincerity or insincerity, was reproduced through everyday encounters. Everything social should develop from the respect signaled by an acceptable saludo, or

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greeting. The proper greeting, and the will to sociability that it expressed, were moral events. Without verbal greetings, both those given and those returned, a person was seen by his others as not very simpático, or not very “pleasant.” The politics of masculinity was shaped in conjunction with the daily reproduction of these most elementary notions that structured people’s classifications of individuals as moral beings. Everyday classifications of men in terms of seriousness and sincerity were constitutive of the formation of relations between friends and compadres, and between local leaders and followers— relations that in turn gave shape to politics and the building of the state. Those ideas and categories that structured the discussions of masculinity in La Descubierta corresponded to a dominant political discourse. The hegemonic discourse on masculinity entailed a certain confinement of society’s political imagination, that is, the reproduction of certain ideas about what constituted political reality, and what represented the politically thinkable. Socially authorized forms of state formation are always culturally anchored. In the Dominican southwest, there was an interplay between ideas about masculinity and political practice. Men’s categories for classifying each other’s and politicians’ masculinity good (bueno) Sincere (de buena fe) clean (limpio) congenial (simpático) serious (serio) courageous (valiente or guapo) makes himself seen (se deja ver) shares/participates (comparte)

evil (malo) insincere (de mala fe) dirty (sucio) not congenial (antipático) shameless (sinvergüenza) boastful (bocón) isn’t seen (no se ve/“indeseable”) doesn’t share/doesn’t participate (no comparte) turns loose the peso (suelta el peso) doesn’t give (no da) generous (desprendido/suelto) not generous (no es desprendido/no es suelto)/“very methodical” (muy metódico) womanizer (mujeriego) not a womanizer (no es mujeriego) has children (tiene hijos) without children (no tiene hijos) eloquent/speaks easily can’t speak (no sabe hablar) (elocuente/tiene un verbo fácil) political (político) not political (no es político)

Since the 1930s, a particular term for labeling certain men’s behavior has established itself as a common one in the Dominican Republic including the southern border region. The central meaning of this label, the tíguere,33 is “survivor in his environment.” The term is used to classify men in a

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wide range of positions (e.g., an engineer or a worker; a doctor or a magician; a congress deputy or a lower-level public employee; a professor or a student). Those whose conduct is classified with this label are mainly men. But the label is also used about women (in which case one employs the female form, tiguerona). According to the first book to be published on the subject of the Dominican uses of the word tíguere, a collection of essays by the Dominican journalist and author Lipe Collado, this label was in the late twentieth century one of the most frequently employed words in the country. As he says, Dominicans abroad “are often called ‘Dominican tígueres,’ for that word is always on their lips; and why not? For they are characterized by ‘a tone,’ a personal style that makes them different from the other Hispano-Americans, and . . . from the other inhabitants of the earth . . . Hence, in order to know the Dominican, one must know the tíguere, that magnificent expression of the [Dominican] ‘creole’ ” (Collado 1992:16–17, 25). The tíguere can be seen as the essence of any successful pragmatism. He is the type who acts according to the situation, is cunning, and has a gift for improvisation. In the southwest, the image of the tíguere represented both an everyday hero and a sort of trickster (one difficult to fully classify in terms of conventional moral notions that people drew on to interpret and debate men’s behavior). Common to most of those men referred to by this label was that they appeared to embody a moral and political power that was ambiguous. The mythology of the tíguere had shaped a man who was both astute and socially intelligent; both courageous and smart, both cunning and convincing; and a gifted talker who got out of most situations in a manner acceptable to others, while he himself at no moment stepped back, stopped chasing, or lost sight of his aim (be that women, money, a job, a promotion, etc.). Like the other labels and categories used to classify and interpret masculinity, the label of the tíguere was mobilized in order to answer questions about what happened politically—that is, in order to construct legitimacy. The most formative period in the history of the image of “the Dominican tíguere” overlaps with the regime of Trujillo. Ordinary men in the capital first shaped the male type who came to be labelled the tíguere; they did so from the early 1930s onward, but particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. Later the use of the image spread to the rest of the country, such as the southern borderlands. This history—the story of the emergence of the cult of the tíguere—shows change; it demonstrates that the nation’s and the southwestern region’s hegemonic masculinity imagery was modified in the twentieth century, it was far from static. This history also reveals that those groups in the capital who first created the image consisted of ordinary men who felt oppressed by the Trujillo state. They shaped the

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male who came to be called “the tíguere” in response to, perhaps as a sort of resistance to, the dictatorship with its patronage structure, marginalization forms, and arbitrary use of force. The spread of the tíguere image was a result of interplay between processes in the capital and processes in the rest of the country. The national “center” and the national “periphery” interacted. Yet nothing in this history suggests that local social and cultural “difference” in the southern borderlands was undermined. On the contrary, this history is telling. The emergence of the cult of the tíguere shows that the building of the state basically entailed consolidation and reproduction of a set of well-established ideas about masculinity—hegemonic notions with deep historical roots—as I explain further below. History, Masculinity, and the Construction of the State To say of a man that he is a tíguere is automatically to say that his behavior evokes several of the images of maleness at which we have already looked. The man who was called a tíguere was a man who was cunning (astuto), and knew how to survive in his particular environment. As Collado (1992:11) has written: “his law is ‘to emerge well’ from every situation.” At the same time, the image of the tíguere evoked a man who was a fighter, didn’t give in, and defended himself, and was therefore guapo or valiente. The tíguere was also said to be the man “who knew everything” because “he was everywhere”; he was a man “who was seen”—in the streets and among his friends. He also used seduction, and was a womanizer. The tíguere’s most effective tool for “emerging well” from every situation was his “tongue.” Tíguere therefore typically evoked the image of the man who was labioso (from labio [lip]), a gifted manipulator of verbal encounters. The tíguere was not only a dominant symbol that f lourished on and condensed different notions of masculinity (so that it might be used in a wide range of situations, and with highly f lexible meanings). It was also a sort of “meta-image” or an image of a kind of masculine “daily hero”: an image of a man able to resolve, in an acceptable way, the dilemmas which had to be faced as a consequence of a tough environment and the ideals of maleness. The moral classification of the tíguere must be viewed as an ambiguous one. I shall argue that tíguere evokes the notion of a “trickster”—that is, an image of the kind of masculine practice that seems difficult to shape fully as “order.” To some degree, the man who was called a tíguere seemed to be able to transcend the limitations imposed on acceptable masculinity by the usual understandings of the categories for discussing men’s actions with which I have so far dealt.

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The tíguere’s “ancestors” were young men who lived in popular residential districts of the capital in the 1930s and 1940s.34 These men drank together, played dominoes, competed in sports, and cultivated fashion, music, and womanizing. In the early 1990s, the word was applied not only in the streets, but also in homes and offices. Expressions such as tigueritos (or “little tígueres”), mi tiguerito (or “my little tíguere son”), mi tiguerona (literally “my tigerwoman” [used, for example, about a woman friend or partner]), and los tígueres de mi trabajo (or “the tígueres at my workplace”)—these expressions were employed in order to address and refer to one’s family and friends. Common greetings were ¿Que tal tíguere? (“How are you, tíguere?”) and ¡Adiós tíguere! (“Goodbye, tíguere!”). When someone arrived “dressed to kill,” he could hear the exclamation ¡Ese es un tiguerazo! (“That man is a gigantic [or smashing] tíguere!”). The tough but irresistible work (or talk) of a bargainer in a bus or taxi—or anywhere else (as in a bar, a company office, a political party, or state office)— might be summarized by others as that of a tíguere. On the other hand, while uses of the label tíguere often meant approval, to be called a tíguere could also imply that one’s behavior was censured. In some contexts, to describe a man as a tíguere denoted disapproval—or, worse, a stigma. The moral “disorder” inherent in the use of the image of tíguere was evident from the fact that for some time villagers had employed the word with two sharply dissimilar ethical connotations. One view emphasized that tígueres were wrongdoers and delinquents; they were dangerous men who had to be avoided and criminalized. As the old Pablo said: “The tíguere is capable of doing anything. ‘Being a tíguere’ [el tigueraje] is a big word! When they call one a tíguere and one isn’t a tíguere, one should complain and say, ‘Why do you call me a tíguere?’ Being a tíguere is a criminal thing!” My landlady in the village, a woman of about fifty with a sister and other relatives living in a centrally located sector of the capital, may illustrate the other perspective. According to her, the man who was a tíguere was not an outsider to society but the man “who knows how to live” (el que sabe vivir), a spirited and cunning man, a smooth talker. Society did not reject him. Instead, he was “everywhere” and “typical.” He was the kind of man who knew how to take advantage of circumstances yet always remained all right. In short, this was the type who knew about everything. He was also, she said, the man who might wear a large golden chain round his neck; the man who was serious was not like that, but the tíguere was—he loved fashion and perfume, and got one woman after the other. But he was not bad. He was in politics, too, she added, for the tíguere was precisely the type who was everywhere. Both the concept of the tíguere as the man who was a delinquent and therefore “on the outside,” and the moral approval which said that the

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tíguere knew public life’s essence and was in the middle of everything, represented widespread views. For example, I remember two best friends in La Descubierta, a couple of men in their forties, who spent most days together. For a moment they disagreed on what kind of man a tíguere was, each emphasizing one of the two mentioned views. Then they agreed that there existed in fact two kinds of tígueres. Since the 1950s, however, it must be social “admiration” and not social “disapproval” that has been most strongly on the increase. This is also the view that Collado’s (1992) book on the tíguere emphasizes and attempts to “canonize.”35 Yet even if we choose to look only at this “majority” perspective on the tíguere, we can see ambiguity. Mario, the agricultural foreman and PRD veteran, defined this ambiguous male as follows: Wherever the tíguere arrives, he arrives playing tricks and making trouble [llega haciendo marrulla y haciendo lío], looking to find out how you button yourself behind, to find out where you put your money. They ask for a bottle, then go without paying. They walk about looking [Van mirando]. Wherever the tíguere arrives, he walks about waiting. The tíguere does not arrive with shame nor is he shameless, for the tíguere lies in ambush. The tíguere is very dangerous and very wise, completely able. [No llega ni con vergüenza ni sinvergüenza porque el tíguere anda acechando. El tíguere es una cosa muy peligrosa y muy sabio, hábil completamente.]

The tíguere seemed to swallow the ethical evaluations of his peers. He was a man seen as both without and with “shame,” as not completely “serious” but not “bad” or “evil” either. Above all, the tíguere offered an elastic symbol with which to make sense of men’s actions by verbalizing them— that is, by talking them over in ways that shaped them in terms of ethical concepts. The symbol of the tíguere (precisely because of its semantic and moral complexity) made it possible to express what otherwise appeared difficult to grasp and classify: paradoxes and ambiguities associated with the exercise of power in relationships. This was so because—according to people themselves—the essence of the tíguere image seemed to be one of ambiguity. Being cunning but not a criminal, the tíguere stretched what was socially permissible and orthodox, but without losing his moral balance; he was dangerous, tough, f lexible and irresistible, but was not rejected by society—on the contrary, he often aroused others’ admiration. Here we can see a version of the comparative theme of the “trickster”: people in La Descubierta and Dominicans in general cultivated an image of a male who seemed to be a champion of daily life because his bold movements, his cunning tricks, and his pragmatic improvisations had shown themselves in practice to represent a social route worth traveling. 36

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Living with the day-to-day dilemmas of money, friends, and women, a man should not only “hunt” but also be “good”—and act thus in what could look like a social and political jungle. Small wonder, perhaps, that many said to each other that the man who managed had to be a hero—or a tiger. The image of the “tiger” was attractive because it offered a view of the exercise of power in human relations that was not only pragmatic but also mystical. This image could look both like male power’s true and essential nature and like its notorious ambiguities and inconsistencies. Anyone who reads Hoetink’s The Dominican People, 1850–1900 will realize that almost all the important notions of masculinity that have been discussed here also existed at that time. I have already mentioned the frequent uses of the term político in the nineteenth century. However, this applies equally well to the notions of valentía; of “making oneself visible” and of sharing (compartir); of being fun-loving ( fiestero) and a womanizer (mujeriego), and eloquent; and of having compadres. While the uses of these concepts, and consequently their practical meanings, have most probably undergone some transformations over the past hundred years, there is nonetheless considerable continuity in common thinking about the politics of masculinity. The existence of a certain political, social and moral basis for the subsequent enormous spread of the use of the symbol of the tíguere can also be read from Hoetink’s study. As we have seen, the cult of the tíguere expressed first and foremost a cult of the social type who was f lexible and pragmatic, the man who acted according to continuously changing contexts. Hoetink has emphasized that society itself (with its high degree of political violence and turbulence, and shifting governments) nourished what he seems to describe as a climate for markedly “situational approaches” to one’s peers: The absence of clear ideological motivation as well as the rapid succession of most of the regimes in the nineteenth century created a general feeling of uncertainty and instability ref lected in the key words of the political vocabulary of that time. Here we have the word situación (or situation), which indicated the government as well as the period of government, and which ref lected the f luid character of alliances and formations. One was a friend or an enemy of the situación; a situación was developing; one spoke of the first days of a situación. The term reaccionario (or reactionary) had no ideological connotation. That anyone who acted against the reigning situación, the government, belonged to the forces of reaction fitted into a neutral, mechanical interpretation of political activity. (Hoetink 1982:136)

Yet irrespective of this continuity with regard to society’s hegemonic notions of masculinity and the political, the current uses of the symbol

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of the tíguere indicate a change—that is, an example of transformation of a people’s ways of communicating about maleness. The image of the tíguere as a source of production of legitimacy was shaped mainly from the early decades of the twentieth century onward. Collado concludes: “Both the word tíguere and the person existed and were in popular usage at the beginning of the Trujillo tyranny, at the beginning of the 1930s. . . . [I]n the 1940s and 1950s, but more exactly in the 1950s, a ‘culture of the tíguere’ seemed to reign, a culture which then served as a model at the national level.” (Collado 1992:30, 36)37 Gendered concepts and their uses are related to, and woven together with, political and social history in a broad sense; such concepts and their uses are often related to processes such as state formation, urbanization and the making of a nation. I shall round off my discussion by attempting, in three stages, to link the spread of the tíguere symbol further to Dominican changes. First, a political and social basis for the construction and spread of the image of the tíguere was the capital’s growing urbanization since the beginning of the twentieth century. That urbanization was itself a product of the development of a large-scale sugar industry and the accompanying national growth that began in the late nineteenth century. To put it another way, the most important formative period in the history of the image of the Dominican tíguere overlaps to a considerable extent with Santo Domingo’s transformation into a national capital and a large city, and with the Trujillo regime from 1930 to 1961. It takes little imagination to see that increased urbanization meant that many men and women in the capital faced new types of situations, relations, networks, and personal dilemmas. These people drew on what was already at their disposal for making sense of masculinity and femininity—that is, established concepts and classifications. However, in addition, the notion of the tíguere was obviously a useful one for understanding the existence of a particular urban type (by naming him)—the man who knew how to “emerge well from every situation” in these more urbanized contexts. In addition, changes in the development of the mass media played a part in the formation of the image of the tíguere. The word tigre was used extensively by Cubans until the 1959 revolution. One implication of this was that Cuban dance music, which was popular in Santo Domingo in the 1940s and 1950s, helped to spread the use of tíguere among Dominicans.38 This development was related to the beginnings of mass consumption of music based on the radio. The first Dominican radio station was established in 1924. From the 1930s and 1940s onward, radio listening in the streets of Santo Domingo gradually grew, and became commonplace (Collado 1992:30–31). Finally, we should bear in

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mind the significance of the Trujillo regime’s repression, censorship, and control of emigration and immigration. The political climate generated by Trujillo’s terror must have strengthened the notorious preoccupation among Dominicans with “the reigning situación”—that is, the social cultivation of the sort of highly situational approaches to one’s peers mentioned by Hoetink under the Heureaux dictatorship. In addition, it may be assumed that the generally strong insulation of Dominican life from its surroundings under Trujillo provided fertile ground for the construction of a special, Dominican reading of the image of the tiger; that reading could be challenged only to a very limited extent through interactions with foreigners, and through traveling abroad, before 1961. On the other hand, after 1961 the military state’s restrictions on all citizens’ movements (e.g., between rural areas and cities) were abolished, and this must have helped to diffuse the image of the tíguere throughout national territory. Second, the historical construction of the Dominican tíguere illustrates the sheer potential that may be built into practices that can be said to shape “politics from below.” The image of the tíguere was made by ordinary men—the kind of men who liked to hang around in certain areas of the capital during the Trujillo regime. To such men, the army was often one of the few opportunities to build a personal career; and, ironically, Trujillo’s army often preferred recruits from the countryside. Given these circumstances, men instead competed through, and consequently cultivated, politically “innocent” activities in the streets, the activities of the tíguere: drinking, dominoes, sport and dancing. In so doing, they shaped an image of a man that was to grow enormously in its relevance and significance. In the late twentieth century, this image of masculinity was in the process of becoming a nationally hegemonic one, an image used by men and women across the country, and also abroad, even in order to answer the question “What does it mean to be Dominican?” Or, to put it differently, ordinary men in Santo Domingo, controlled and oppressed by the Trujillo state, forged an image of maleness that is now put to use even for the purpose of making sense of the Dominican imagined community—or Dominican national identity. To quote Collado one last time: “[Dominicans abroad are] called ‘Dominican tígueres’. . . . For they are characterized by ‘a tone,’ a personal style that makes them different from the other Hispano-Americans” (Collado 1992:25). Third, however, we should not feel tempted to exaggerate the degree of change that Dominican concepts of masculinity underwent in the twentieth century, because the construction of the Dominican tíguere was “rooted” in the country’s previous history of—and already established thinking about—masculinity; that is, the image of the Dominican tíguere built on a set of older notions of what it meant to be a man.

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The people in Santo Domingo who shaped the tíguere from the 1930s onward used old “raw material” in their production of ideas about male and female. A lot of this “raw material” was closely linked to the existing imagery of masculinity and femininity in the countryside; while the population of the city of Santo Domingo was estimated at 6,000 in 1871 and 20,000 in 1898, it was over 1.3 million in 1981, an urban demographic growth which means that many in the capital during the formative years of the image of the tíguere either came from rural areas themselves or had close relatives in such areas.39 When people in the late twentieth century ref lected on and discussed what it meant to act as a tíguere, they used concepts and classifications that went back a very long way—that is, notions and verbal constructs that were discussed in the first part of this chapter. To put it another way, the common meanings of the symbol of the tíguere both derived force from and helped to reproduce (1) basic conceptual boundaries between “sincerity” and “insincerity” (buena fe and mala fe), and between “serious” and “shameless” (serio and sinvergüenza); and (2) a set of other, central images, such as those of the man as “courageous” (valiente/guapo), as a “drinker/dancer/womanizer” (bebedor/bailador/mujeriego), as one who “is seen” (se ve), one who “talks easily” (tiene un verbo fácil), and is “political” (político). An implication of this is that when the image of the tíguere traveled from the capital to the southern Dominican border and La Descubierta, it was not a strange one to the people who lived there. On the contrary, the image articulated closely with their established concepts for making sense of masculinity. In addition, the image provided villagers with an additional resource for making sense of phenomena which thrived on growing urbanization—a growing urbanization that was visible to villagers both in this part of the country and on their frequent travels elsewhere. As I have previously maintained, many analysts posit a mystifying separation of the political and the social (Abrams 1988:58–59; Trouillot 2001:126). They assume that adequate political analysis springs from the separation of the state from civil society, the state from the social. It is, we learn, this distinction that makes explorations of modern politics possible. Yet the state/society dichotomy is of little use. It obliterates what should really attract our attention: the social practices and systems of meanings that give form to the configurations of power historically situated in different parts of the world. The history of masculinity in the Dominican southwest shows with clarity how unsatisfactory the state/society model is. Had we separated the political from the social in the Dominican case, we would have been unable to examine a process of enormous significance: the interplay between the making of masculinity and the building of the

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state. In the Dominican southwest, male and political forms mutually constructed and enabled one another. The negotiation of masculinity and the emergence of the state were woven together. This view of Dominican history does not support the claim that the core of nation-state expansion is that centrally made state institutions profoundly restructure the worlds inhabited and imagined by the members of local communities on the state’s territory. The twentieth-century history of masculinity in La Descubierta contains no cultural revolution. When a limited change in the masculinity imagery nonetheless took place, it was not an outcome of a centrally fashioned state project. Instead, the change was generated “from below.” The image of the Dominican tiger was created in the capital’s popular residential areas—by men on the margins.

CHAPTER 7 MAKING THE NATION

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ation building has often been depicted as a historical process in which the state is able to transform a set of cultural claims that initially seemed strange into something natural. But the southern Dominican border residents’ pre-1937 ideas about Dominicans and Haitians, the island’s two peoples, were not in conf lict with the nationbuilding project as it unfolded in this part of the country under Trujillo and Balaguer. On the contrary, they helped strengthen it. In the late twentieth century, La Descubierta’s people remembered Trujillo as the Dominican ruler who had contributed most decisively to the development of the region. The local discourse understood the transformations headed by Trujillo, not in terms of unwanted imposition, not in polluting terms, but rather in terms of positively assessed nationalization and modernization. The purpose of this chapter and the next is to support these assertions. This chapter attempts to document that key elements of the national identity that the Trujillo and Balaguer state sought to build and consolidate did not represent something foreign in La Descubierta. The next chapter seeks to show how the local population in the early 1990s described the massacre of Haitians and Trujillo’s use of terror. A Divided Island In and around La Descubierta in the early 1990s, many maintained that it was possible to obtain money by making a pact with the devil. The pact meant that a man or a woman accumulated wealth in return for handing over the lives of others. However, if one lived as a devotee of the devil, sooner or later one had to suffer, because, as one man said, “This pact is totally evil since for some time they are well, but when they [the demon’s representatives] come, look, they’re in a hole.”

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This section examines La Descubierta’s devil-pact stories. The point is not to dwell on a set of ideas about magic per se. Instead the aim is to try to substantiate two sets of claims. First, I wish to show that local concepts of magic contained a moral thinking about the island’s division—about Hispaniola’s two peoples. Villagers and peasants in the southern borderlands maintained that those on the other side of the border controlled uniquely powerful magic and sorcery. La Descubierta’s devil-pact stories identified Arcahaie, a place in Haiti, as a center of demonic power, and locals claimed that “the Haitian” had an exceptional ability to produce destructive transformations—evil ones. The Trujillo and Balaguer states’ dominant discourse on the nation was anti-Haitian; it narrated the history of the nation as a fight against savagery (Sagás 2000). The state’s discourses and local magic contained overlapping assumptions; they shared moral premises. Both those who shaped the state’s nationalism and those who shaped magic constructed their arguments about the island’s two peoples, “the Dominicans” and “the Haitians,” by producing a moral landscape, what could be called a geography of good and evil. Together they made, remade, and modified Dominican stories of fear—fear of the Haitian “other.” Second, an overlap existed between the ideas produced by the state and local discourses before the inception of a systematic nationbuilding project in the region, that is before the state’s large-scale efforts to Dominicanize the borderlands. La Descubierta’s devil-pact stories go back at least to the 1920s, and so do Dominican border residents’ ideas about the Haitians’ powerful magic, their dangerous sorcery. The devil-pact stories in the borderlands constituted and shaped views on particular locals’ access to wealth. The stories therefore articulated ideas about money. I shall not discuss these aspects of Dominican devilpact stories but rather attempt to show that the same stories of an evil contract articulated ideas about Hispaniola’s division, in addition to—and more sharply than—visions of economic power (Derby 1994).1 In order to demonstrate how southern border residents shaped differences between themselves and their western neighbors through the symbolic construction of the devil’s money, I shall (1) contextually situate the devil-pact stories by brief ly relating them to widespread Dominican notions of sorcery; (2) discuss aspects of the devil-pact narratives which explicitly identify a place in Haiti as a demonic center; and (3) attempt to show how a couple of the best-known local stories about devil pacts interacted with, and were rooted in, La Descubierta people’s making of their local history, the community’s past. Now, La Descubierta people said, there were a number of magicians who knew how to produce destruction on both sides of the political

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border. Locals took it for granted, therefore, that guilt existed in many forms both among themselves and others. However, they still appeared to skew their own ethnographies of evil in the direction of Haitian roots. It is true that they also mentioned knowledgeable individuals, and potent sorcerers, among themselves. In La Descubierta, many had sought reputed sorcerers in the hills near the town of San Juan de la Maguana. But many had in addition crossed the border on errands of magic. Haitians were both despised and feared as controllers of great sorcery.2 A woman healer from La Descubierta who worked in the capital prided herself on performing only good actions of healing, and—in order to stress her point—told me about a female client who had recently come from New York to see her. That woman had offered her 3,000 dollars for “rendering a female rival inanimate.” But she had answered her with a prayer (which she said was the Magnificat in Latin)—and with these words had told her to go to Haiti, where they could do anything: “Look señora, you must go to a Haitian who works with the two lines. They work with the white line and the black line. They do evil to make money, they do dirty work.” In addition, the many Haitian peasants who migrated to work on Dominican lands were sometimes perceived through visions of dangerous capacity for sorcery. An old woman in La Descubierta remembered this story of how a garden had become barren after a Haitian worked there: “. . . they found a bottle laid in the earth. So, they smashed the bottle and realized it contained many foul-smelling things.” Many in the southwest nourished ideas which explicitly identified the demonic with a place in Haiti (Deive 1988:257–258). This place is the coastal village of Arcahaie situated between Port-au-Prince and Gonaïves, which was generally regarded as an important center of sorcery.3 Such ideas were focused on the evil spiritual power known under the name of bacá. Between a bacá spirit and the spirit’s owner there was a personal contract. Either the bacá protected the owner’s properties or the person received a lot of money. When money was involved, the person had to deliver other people’s—particularly close relatives’—lives. A person who housed a bacá in order to get rich was therefore a seller of people. Those who were sold suddenly died, and were later removed from their tombs and transported to Arcahaie where they were forced to work for the devil. Most bacás were bought from sorcerers in Haiti. In brief, we are dealing with a belief that provided explanations both for cases of unexpected death and for forms of capital accumulation. What follows is how a healer—that is, an expert—clarified some meanings implied when it was said that a man or a woman had a bacá. A few of the details were presumably not shared by others, because bacá stories varied from one person to another. But her main points—the

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contract, the continuous obligation to sell one’s most beloved, the export of the dead to Haiti in the shape of an animal, the drudgery of labor, and the food in Arcahaie that lacked salt—constituted a language which was recognized, and thus shared, even by the villagers who did not themselves believe in bacás. They learned that in Haiti. In Haiti, they make a pact in order to obtain bacá . . . bacá is the evil spirit. So, they make a pact with that person and that person sells you a bacá. They belong to the people who work with black magic. . . . To get a lot of money people go to Haiti. But . . . that which concerns bacá is a very dirty engagement, an evil engagement, I detest it, hallelujah! . . . He who buys the bacá has to fulfill the commandment of the bacá. From all the people who have bacá, they always demand the person they love most, be it their most loved child or be it their mother or their wife. Then that person dies like that, without being ill, and it’s the bacá that takes the person away. . . . After the most loved person of the bacá owner dies, it gives him lots of money, it makes him rich. . . . Then, having given it the first people, the most loved, then they may give from the pueblo, any person from the pueblo. . . . The person who is sold dies at home and they bury him. But after three days, they take him out of the tomb . . . when they see that the grave sinks, they say “Oh, it’s that they took him out,” “That one was sold.” . . . After three days, at midnight, they take out the body . . . and [the bacá] takes it away like it were a head of cattle, or like it were an animal, it converts it into an animal . . . it takes it to Haiti, like a cow. But after entering Haiti, it turns it into a person again. The sold are kept in Arcahaie, a place in Haiti which is named Arcahaie. There people cannot go visiting; for if they don’t know to defend themselves, they are left nailed there. . . . And they give them food without salt and use them for working. . . . They have estates, and those workers are dead that they killed here . . . they are people like sleepwalkers, who don’t have that spirit, but do what they order them to do. They spend the day working like an ox and don’t feel, they don’t feel anything, only work like an ox. For that do they use them.

Bacás may be found in the form of any animal or person. As one man said, “it even becomes a dog, it turns itself into a cow, they say; it turns itself into a person, it turns itself into a woman.” Two processes should be stressed concerning the thought on the place of Arcahaie. First, we are definitely dealing with mythical geography. Many viewed this remote area across the border not only as the demonic center but also as containing such activity that it should not be approached unless one was equipped with sufficient knowledge for one’s defense. Second, however, this power rooted in Arcahaie not only stimulated fear. It also propelled thought on the self and the other in terms that

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distinguished humanity from slave-like or animal-like existence. The discourse on salt eating is a key to these views. Those who were sent to Arcahaie were only given food without salt. This is the same criterion as Taussig has told us that the Whites and Spanish-speaking Indians of the Putumayo used in discriminating indios from infieles—Indians from infidels (Taussig 1987:97). In line with this comparison, those who were sold to Arcahaie were transported across the deepest possible division— beyond the threshold of savagery. When asked why Arcahaie only provided food that lacked salt, some were without an answer. But some said that it was for a reason, which a healer in the village gave in words that point to Taussig’s first marker of difference, the one dependent on communication through words: “If they give them food with salt, they get out and speak. They don’t speak, they have become silent . . . and they can’t give them salty food because already they [are] like animals without reason. And if they give them food, they give them food without salt . . . so, it’s said that they keep them there detained. But there, nobody speaks, because if you speak then you know that is different, and they cannot speak because they keep them detained like that.” These—sometimes, it must be confessed, impenetrable—discourses on Arcahaie and bacás classified radical alterity.4 In addition, all said that the bacá ended by taking the life of the owner also. If one lived as a devotee of the devil, sooner or later one had to suffer: “This pact is totally evil since for some time they are well, and when they come, look, they’re in a hole.” Those who were accused of housing a bacá were of different types. Some might be owners of cattle; others had land; others owned houses in the village—or simply a tiny shop in a barrio or hill hamlet. Several people were said to own bacás while I lived in the community. Stories about a bacá seen in a household as a crab pervaded the whole village after a young man fell from a truck on the road and died. The young man’s relatives were then told by a magician who had sold him. A letter that reached me in 1993 explained that a friend had lost his life in a similar accident, and that it was thought in the neighborhood that he had been traded. What follows shows that the stories about bacás also interacted with, and were rooted in, La Descubierta people’s making of their local history. Some of their stories of the community’s past maintained the bacá belief. The central themes of these narratives shaped visions both of the power of the Ramírez and of the Dominican-Haitian relationship. The local woman who married the first Ramírez who settled in La Descubierta, Emilio, was named Isabel.5 She had been married in Port-au-Prince, and already possessed her own small capital when she was married again to Emilio. A villager around ninety, who used to take

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cattle to Haiti with Emilio in the 1920s, spoke about this woman, and about a bacá she brought into the family: Isabel married a Frenchman; not a black man [negro], not a Haitian, a Frenchman from France. . . . I knew them. I even went to their home where they lived in Haiti . . . they lived in the capital. . . . Then, later, there came a thing going, extra-legal, like bacá, it’s said with bacá . . . . Then the bacá asked his woman of him, of the Frenchman, and he didn’t want to. And “pao,” they took him [instead]. So, the woman remained a widow there. She asked her family here, the Martínez, to go bring her back . . . they went with six mules to carry that removal load. And it appears that the woman then entangled herself in something, with the damned what do I know, and brought it here. And here those two persons [Emilio and Isabel] made it.

Most of the community appeared to know this story in some brief version; in Emilio’s home, there was a bacá, because Isabel had returned from the other side with one. Furthermore, the tale was closely connected with another, a story that explained the relationship between two local people’s deaths. The person who first lost her life was a daughter of one of Emilio’s contemporaries, perhaps a rival to his community role; his name was Evaristo. Thereafter occurred the death of Isabel. A woman, who had frequented the house of the Ramírez since her childhood, narrated it like this: “Here lived a girl [the daughter of Evaristo]. She never married. She was a tall girl. She was a dressmaker. And that girl died like this. She left for Barahona and traveled by train; and returning from there, she fell off and got killed. . . . Thereafter her father realized that they had sold her and this man traveled to Arcahaie. And he saw her there, and spoke with her. She told him ‘Look, it was Isabel Martínez who sold me.’ So, he sought [sorcery knowledge], and he killed her.” This tale states that Evaristo accompanied his daughter right into the sorcery center, where he obtained the truth about the genesis of her death. Then he made the woman who had sold her wither away herself. Different versions existed of precisely how Isabel lost her life. But they contained a shared feature: that before dying in an ugly manner she turned her secret evil into public knowledge by naming all those locals she had sold. In the words of one: “Father and mother told me stories. The old people, they have said that she was a dangerous and evil person. When she died, they even had to cut off her tongue.” Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the Dominican state’s discourses on the nation have shaped and consolidated a memory of three heroes who struggled against the Haitians in the 1840s. These three are Juan Pablo Duarte, Rosario Sánchez, and Ramón Mella. In the late

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twentieth century most Dominicans described them as los tres padres de la patria, or the Three Fathers of the Fatherland. One of Balaguer’s books carries the sentimental title El Cristo de la Libertad: Vida de Juan Pablo Duarte (The Christ of Liberty: The Life of Juan Pablo Duarte) ([1978] 1987). It narrates the anti-Haitian struggle of Duarte, named universally by Dominicans as the principal of the three Fathers of the Fatherland. Duarte inspired the liberation in 1844, and Balaguer’s exemplary tale is one about patriotism, victory and martyrdom.6 The Three Fathers of the Fatherland are commemorated across the Dominican Republic on Independence Day, 27 February. While Balaguer, the president, narrated the history of the nation through depicting Duarte, the Father of the Fatherland, as a Christ-like figure (thereby implying that the Haitians’ domination of the whole island, against which he fought, was the product of the power of the Anti-Christ), villagers told the history of power in La Descubierta in terms of a genealogy connecting local power with a specific evil spirit in Port-au-Prince. Both the past of the former (and that of the patriotic historians on whose texts he relied and elaborated) and the past of the latter drew attention to the island’s boundary as a morally constituted one. The story of Isabel and Emilio states that the devil pact was literally imported through a marriage link to the Haitian capital. The state’s arguments about the other side of the island as a breeding ground of evil, about the destructive implications of boundary crossings, about not only savagery but also “cruelty” emanating from the western part (remember how Isabel died), and about the need for clear segregation of kin and outsiders are all evident in this narrative. The story sends the message that Isabel died in a terrible, but justified, manner after events that had resulted in a wrong mestizaje—one linking a Dominican family to the Haitians and to France.7 The bacá stories about Isabel’s marriage in Port-au-Prince and the death of Evaristo’s daughter must have originated during the period from before 1917 to 1930. I base this assumption on the following: (1) according to Jesús María Ramírez’s autobiography, Emilio and Isabel had already entered into a union after her first marriage when Jesús María visited them in La Descubierta in the year 1917 (Ramírez n.d.). (In 1917, Jesús María lived in Neyba. He settled in La Descubierta in 1921.); (2) Evaristo’s daughter died in the late 1920s; (3) according to the observations made during the fieldwork, bacá stories came into being immediately after a person’s death, and could be already f lourishing during the period of the wake. Other bacá stories circulated in this part of the country in the 1920s and the 1930s. Old people recalled that they were warned against eating

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bread traded in La Descubierta in the 1920s and 1930s. The bread had been sent to the village by the father of Alejandro (who was a trader and cattle raiser in the community of Duvergé); because the father was said to have a bacá, the bread was believed by some to be dangerous. Derby (1994) has reconstructed life in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands during the period from 1900 to 1930. Her work shows that the Dominican ideas about magic and Haitians outlined above were characteristic of the entire border region. Derby is worth quoting at some length: While Dominicans participated in the popular rituals of vodoun and frequently sought out vodoun priests for their curative powers, amulets, and blessings, they defined it as something uniquely Haitian. . . . The perceived secrecy of the magic of vodoun created an invisible but nonetheless real boundary between Haitians and Dominicans in the border, distinguishing the two groups from one another. . . . Haitians were treated with awe and deference in certain situations . . .

For example, one elderly Dominican farmer who employed nineteen Haitian coffee pickers Used a Haitian intermediary to deal with all conf licts and a carefully orchestrated set of rituals surrounding the payment of his employees. . . . But concerning their magic, he attributed seemingly unlimited powers to Haitians that enabled them to transgress the limits of rational human behavior. . . . Haitian control of vodoun enabled them to access a range of mystical forces and superhuman powers, thus rendering them powerful and at times even dangerous. . . . Haitian magic provided them with protective bakas . . . Haitian spirits were also called upon if someone had damaged the crop and vengeance was called for. . . . There was a link between popular grievances and the state’s desire to redefine the national boundary in a new way. . . . However, during the bloodbath of 1937, the border lost the Haitians, but not their magic. (Derby 1994:517–519, 525–526)

The national identity that the post-1937 state sought to build in the Dominican borderlands did not represent something artificial and arbitrary in La Descubierta. In the early 1990s, many of La Descubierta’s inhabitants had backed Balaguer since the mid-1960s. In the late twentieth century it was apparent that many of the southwestern population’s cultural forms and practices not only fitted in with the state’s nation-building project, but also reinforced it massively. The remainder of the chapter seeks to document this in more detail.8

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Stories of Fear Although what Paul Veyne (1988:103) has claimed in general about historians—that they “are merely prophets in reverse [who] . . . f lesh out and animate their post eventum predictions with imaginative f lourishes”— seems a gross exaggeration, it nonetheless applies to those who founded Dominican historiography in the nineteenth century. An important work has been a history in four volumes published in Santo Domingo from 1867 to 1878 by the Dominican José Gabriel García. García fought himself in the wars against the Haitians. In his History of Santo Domingo 9 he chronicled the birth of the nation by describing the years from Columbus’s arrival until the 1870s. García’s text is built on the principles of Catholicism, Hispanicism, and anti-Haitianism (Moya Pons 1986c:255). Yet it seems incontestable that García is the principal father of patriotic Dominican historiography (Moya Pons 1986c; San Miguel 1997a:15–100).10 While the History of Santo Domingo devotes less than 350 pages to over 300 years of colonial history (or the period from 1492 to 1810), and around 250 pages to the subsequent thirty-four years, the national origin time with the wars against the Haitians (or the period from 1844 to 1877) is allocated more than 800 pages. The inf luence of this work among Dominicans can hardly be overrated.11 Used as a textbook in the state schools, García’s History socialized several generations before it was replaced in 1922 by another work, the Summary of the History of the Fatherland12 written by Bernardo Pichardo. The Summary is a shortened version of García’s History to which Pichardo added a brief chronology for the period from the late 1870s to the year 1916. Pichardo’s book socialized those generations of Dominicans who went to school between 1922 and the early 1970s, and was the history book used in La Descubierta’s secondary school in the mid-1970s. As Balaguer ([1947] 1989:173–174) himself once wrote in a portrait of García: “José Gabriel García is the creator of Dominican history. . . . [H]is judgments . . . still apply.” In the early seventeenth century, buccaneers established settlements on the island of Tortuga, the small island located immediately north of Hispaniola. García’s History describes this and its consequences as evil’s conquest of a sector of the island (García [1878] 1982:149)13 He chooses to describe the bulk of the seventeenth century in the Spanish colony in terms of two waves of “invasions”: first invasions over sea (el período de las invasiones marítimas), then invasions over land (el período de las invasiones terrestres) (García [1878] 1982:134–176). In the early twentieth century, however, Dominican fears of military invasion from the other side had given way to apprehensions about a

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“peaceful invasion.” Dominicans feared that Haiti might insidiously gain hegemony over all of Hispaniola through the infiltration of its more numerous population onto Dominican territory (Martínez 1995:44). At the time of the fieldwork, a frequently heard expression in Dominican society was that of la invasión pacífica or “the peaceful invasion.” Many in La Descubierta and in the rest of the country used it to classify the Haitians who were on Dominican territory. It implied that even during periods of absence of military or open conf lict, destructive forces that had emanated from Haiti attacked the Dominican people in secret and had therefore to be expelled. People symbolically transformed individually immigrating (black) Haitian peasants and workers into a collective force threatening to eliminate the (light-skinned) Dominican people and destroy the nation. They constructed poverty-stricken itinerant peasants from the other side as a violent, imperialist force. For example, Miriam, La Descubierta’s leader, once explained to me why a Haitian invasion had to be feared more than an American invasion: The Haitian danger is more latent than the American danger. It is much more difficult for the Americans to carry out an invasion of, for example, the Dominican Republic than an invasión pacífica, like the one which goes on here with the Haitians who cross the border. . . . They don’t have a piece of land on which to work; the deforestation is terrible. This side [of the island] offers an opportunity to change that kind of life, and therefore the fear. . . . From one day to the next we can wake up encircled by Haitians. Why? Because nothing prevents them from crossing the border; that’s the danger.

A recurrent allegation among Dominican nationalists was that “the Haitian” had an innate inclination to commit atrocities. In La Descubierta, villagers would draw attention to “the twenty-two years” (1822–44) and claim that they had been replete with Haitian cruelty. For example, Pablo said It was very bloody. They came waging war, and in order to occupy the Dominican Republic. . . . So I say: “May God see to it that it doesn’t happen again.” . . . For imagine that they came in the way they came during the years from [’]22 to [’]44. But they will not have the success that they had in those days, for today the Dominican is better prepared, and we are more. . . .

A majority in La Descubierta seemed also to know a set of local stories that nurtured the same ideas. Pablo provides us with yet another example: There is a lot of distrust. For example, we rarely let him [the Haitian migrant laborer] sleep much in the same room where we sleep ourselves, for the Haitian is capable of doing many things, [I know] because it has

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been proved. [It is a fact known by Dominicans] along the border from one end to the other; along the entire border, the Dominican knows that he cannot trust the Haitian, for it has been verified that the Haitian is a thief and a criminal. . . .

As an example, he told a story of murders by a trusted Haitian employee. In sum, the state’s discourses on the nation were backed by a set of local narratives, narratives about the Haitian’s notorious untrustworthiness and deep-rooted disposition for cruelty.14 It is common for production of nationalist discourse to involve molding of a naturalized identity between “people” and “place,” between the national population and the homeland (Anderson 1991:5; Malkki 1992:30). The construction of the relationship between the people and the place is frequently based on uses of notions of descent, images of roots (Verdery 1999). The Dominican case provides a good example. Today the remains of the Three Fathers of the Fatherland—Duarte, Sánchez, and Mella—are preserved in the center of the capital, in what is called the Pantheon of the Fathers of the Fatherland, a monument in Independence Park. In La Descubierta, one of the first questions I was asked in the household that received me was: “Who are the fathers of the fatherland of your nation?” The story that described the Dominicans as the descendants of Duarte, Sánchez, and Mella, had become reified to a tremendous extent. Towns and villages across the country often had centrally located streets that carried the names of Duarte, Sánchez, and Mella. In La Descubierta, I lived in Mella Street. In La Descubierta’s park, there is a Duarte monument. Pablo said, “Sánchez, Duarte, and Mella. They were the three who faced the situation. As a memory to what they did to liberate the Dominican Republic, as Dominicans, there is a huge monument in Independence Park in Santo Domingo. That is for those who didn’t have the opportunity to know them alive, so that they may see them as statues.”15 A History of Mestizaje Dominicans produced a paradoxical truth, a truth that states that the majority of the Dominican masses are indios, but indios understood as mestizos—people of mixed heritage. The twentieth-century state consolidated this truth. Today a majority of the country’s masses classify themselves, and are classified by others, as indios, that is, as people of a light color—indio—and the product of a history essentially characterized by the mixing of light-skinned natives’ or Indians’ blood with the blood of white Spaniards. The use of the term indio has made it easier to continue

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to shape ideas about essential differences between the Haitians seen as blacks and Dominicans seen as whites and light-skinned mestizos—or indios. In 1998 a Dutch political scientist asked rhetorically: “But are there no black Dominicans?” He answered: “Of course there are, but these Dominicans of African descent were included in the Dominican nation by calling them indio, thus alienating them from their African origin so to enable their inclusion in a Spanish nation.” (Fennema 1998:211) A Dominican novel has been crucial to the construction of the notion that the Dominican masses are indios (Sommer 1991). Enriquillo appeared for the first time in 1882. The novel narrates the story about the Indian Enriquillo, the son of one of Hispaniola’s caciques, who married a mestiza at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Before he wrote Enriquillo, Manuel de Jesús Galván was among the country’s leading politicians. This book, required reading in the state school system for more than a century, has been the Dominican national novel par excellence (Franco 1971:67; Sommer 1991:1–29).16 As we shall soon see, the ideas in Enriquillo, the novel, were echoed in La Descubierta.17 In a move to displace “Africans” in favor of “Americans,” or blacks in favor of light-skinned indios, Galván’s Enriquillo recreated Spain’s conquest of Hispaniola in, and as, literature. It has been called an “indigenist” text, but, as Doris Sommer dryly summarizes it, “Galván could not possibly have been concerned to protect already extinct Indians. But thanks to his myth of an originary mestizaje . . . the Dominican Black and Mulatto masses ‘are’ Indians. This distinguishes them from the ‘Africans’ of Haiti who had threatened ruling whites like Galván by invading the Dominican Republic in 1822” (Sommer 1990:80). The plot of Enriquillo, which is narrated with many “historical” details, is simple. It is the story of a noble Indian youth, Enriquillo, the legitimate chief of surviving natives, and his cousin Mencía, a mestiza, with whom he falls in love. Disaster befalls the pair when Bartolomé de las Casas, who protects them, departs from the island. Though Enriquillo and Mencía are now married, he is made a slave by a Spaniard, who also attempts to seduce Doña Mencía. Enriquillo returns to his native people in what is today the southwestern region of the Dominican Republic. He leads a protracted Indian revolt, but submits peacefully to the Spaniards when las Casas once again returns to Hispaniola. In 1861, the Dominican president Pedro Santana asked Spain to re-annex its first American colony. This desire to try going back to colonialism arose from views that took for granted that the inhabitants of eastern Hispaniola had to choose the protection of a “civilized” dominator over the “barbarism” of their western neighbor. Nevertheless, after 1861, not so many found the Spaniards’ renewed rule acceptable.

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Dominicans spent the subsequent years in war with Spain and Santana’s political party. As a consequence of the war against Spain, the attempts in eastern Hispaniola to construct a Dominican identity in terms of Hispanic roots were for a time in a state of some crisis. However, the rapid expansion of U.S. imperialism in the country in the early twentieth century revived public interest in the Dominican Republic’s Spanish-ness.18 Galván’s story communicates through silence (Trouillot 1995). His smartest move was to push his narrative back to “the origins”—the days immediately after the Conquest. Enriquillo narrates the years from 1503 to 1538: “By pushing his story so far back that blacks seem not to figure in Dominican origins, by squinting at the Dominican crowd to create an optical illusion of racial simplicity, Galván manages to write a national identity by erasing. Thanks to Galván, ‘in Santo Domingo there are no blacks. When a dark-skinned man fills out his official identity card, in the space for color he writes, Indian’ ” (Sommer 1991:251).19 To be Dominican meant not to be black. Galván transformed the island’s blacks into outsiders and foreigners. So also did people in La Descubierta. In the quotation below, for example, Miriam develops a set of claims about the country’s past. She insists that there is a Dominican essence. This essence has been constituted outside any mixture with blacks (whom she simply calls Haitians): The patriotic values are respect for, and admiration of, the Fathers of the Fatherland, the ideologues of Dominican Independence. . . . Above all, we have to stress the courage of Enriquillo, the indio or native Enriquillo, who was from these areas [the southwest] . . . he had to leave for the Enriquillo lake [in the southwestern region], running away from the Spaniards. He is the first man of America who makes the King of Spain send an emissary to sign a peace treaty, the agreement with [Francisco de] Barrio-Nuevo [the royal emissary]. . . . Dominicanness is something that you carry within you, something that makes you feel and act in a way that is completely different from that of the Haitians.

A local version, less polished, may sound like the one below. In this story of the island’s history, which was told by Ramón, himself an indio (and among La Descubierta’s Fernandistas), we should note the degree to which the national origins are explained in a way recalling Galván. Ramón pushes the origins of the nation as far back as possible, almost to the beginning of Spanish colonialism: We are two different nations: African black [negra de africano]; and we descend from Spain and indios. However, after those people had come here, they brought slaves. The Spaniards brought slaves and put them

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there, in Haiti. . . . Then came the wars and things, and so they stayed with us. That’s why we are the way we are. If not, we would have been handsome people, [with] green eyes and indios with fine hair, for that was the race [raza] that was found here, indios with Spaniards [indios con españoles]. Those Haitians, those Africans, damaged the raza. They crossed the border and, well, you know, good-looking women, pretty women, who were indias, cross-breeding with Africans; so how could the raza then be saved? That damned raza, that’s why we don’t want to have anything to do with them.

The strength of this way of reasoning—but also its inherent selfcontradictions—can be seen from a conversation I later recorded with the same man. When I asked Ramón if a Dominican woman may marry a negro or black man if the latter is not a Haitian but of Dominican nationality, he answered, “Yes, they can marry.” So I asked, “How are they regarded?” He said, “Well. Because he is of Dominican race, but indio. For we classify the blacks from here as Dominicans, indios.” And he added, “Here one doesn’t use negro about the Dominican [aquí no se le pone negro al dominicano].” The locals represented negros or blacks as foreigners. As Fennema has put it, “If anywhere the nation is an imagined community, it certainly is in Santo Domingo.” (Fennema 1998:211) A dark-skinned peasant in La Descubierta said: “[Something like] a Dominican black woman [negra dominicana] doesn’t exist. There are black women [negras] who come here, who come here from Haiti.” Another peasant, a completely dark-skinned Dominican in his twenties, made the following joke (?) before a group of friends one day in the hills only a couple of kilometers from the border, after the friends had ridiculed those of the other side, the negros or blacks: “The only negro whom I trust is José [his own name] [El único negro en quien confío es José].” To this José’s own brother immediately replied: “And you are the only one who trusts him.” Negrophobia is produced at the level of everyday and ritual practices. We can observe it as incorporated into individual consciousnesses, as integral parts of particular selves. In La Descubierta, people would prefer, as they formulated it, to “refinar la raza” or “refine the race.” They would prefer sexual and marital partners with whom they could seek to blanquear or whiten. In addition to skin color, the locals classified lips, noses, and ears, as well as colors of eyes and colors and textures of hair—and, of course, forms of being and interacting. For example, Ramón said about his family while we sat alone in his living room: [He pointed at a picture of his mother on one of the walls.] Look at my mother. She is my mother Mella [her family surname]. However, look

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at my father. [He identified the picture of his father on the wall.] The great-grandmother of my father was a Haitian. But look at my mother Mella! Those are the Mellas from here, pure, good-looking, whites [blancos]; and like that were all my aunts and uncles. That’s what one looks for. However, this is my father, his great-grandmother a Haitian. A sergeant, he arrives here and marries my mother, and so we are born this way, with a f lat nose. But it’s because one seeks that bad race. Don’t you see that my nose has come from my father? Yet, look at that brother of mine, who is dead [showing me another picture]. Look, he has the nose of my mother.

Unions between Dominicans and Haitians were seen as bad. A peasant said, “[Those who live with a Haitian are] mad. Mixing Dominican and Haitian blood, that isn’t good. If it had been a Dominican man with a Dominican woman [it would have been OK], but that child will become an arellano [offspring of a Dominican-Haitian relationship], and that doesn’t work. I will never do it . . . for the arellanos aren’t Dominicans nor are they Haitians; [they are] mixed.”20 And the same man added, “It’s very rare that a Dominican woman wants a negro. The man yes. The man is a devil. But not the woman, for she doesn’t want to mix her blood with that of a negro. But a Dominican man can love a [black] woman and leave her, leave that negra and go. But [in the case of ] the Dominican woman, it isn’t very likely that she will want a negro.” Local practices seemed to support him. Except for a number of mixed unions (consisting of Dominican peasants and Haitian women) in the hill hamlets close to the demarcation line, such cases appeared to be rare in and around La Descubierta.21 In short, it was not all “mixing” that was seen as objectionable, far from it. The kind of mixing which was rejected was the one that resulted in arellanos, the nationally “impure” offspring of Dominican-Haitian unions.22 For as a man in La Descubierta said, “We Dominicans are indios and whites. Yes, we are mestizos [people who are mixed].”

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CHAPTER 8 BLOODY MEMORIES

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n the Dominican southwest, people often described the Trujillo regime as a crucial transition—from lack of progress to a more civilized life. Many in La Descubierta claimed that the dictator had begun basic modernization. As the head of the Barrancos, La Descubierta’s largest family, put it “We were pulled out from there by Trujillo. From that time until now it has been opened up.” Miriam maintained “This region was totally archaic. And no matter what people say, it is Trujillo who pulls us out and makes us take off.” Old people vividly recalled the dictator’s use of terror and the massacre of Haitians. Yet they argued that the region and the nation had needed development and Dominicanization, and that Trujillo had taken care of both. This is not to say that there was no cultural ambiguity. Most villagers also recognized that Trujillo’s regime had demanded sacrifices that had been too large. They claimed, for example, that Trujillo had been both terribly selfish and incredibly cruel. A small minority would mostly condemn his rule. Most often, however, people said to each other that Trujillo had been right, that the political and social transformations that he headed had been not only necessary but also legitimate. This chapter seeks to substantiate this claim, in relation to the Haitian massacre and the use of terror against Dominicans.1 Memories of the 1937 Haitian Massacre: Violence, Evil, and Nation

One day I asked Pablo, La Descubierta’s mayor from 1968 to 1982, how he explained the origins of the island’s two peoples. He said The two races were formed many years ago. I cannot say how they were formed, but they were formed. One stayed over there, and one

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here. [Pause] I have told you previously that the Dominican feels threatened by Haiti. They [the Haitians] feel bitterness because of el desalojo [the eviction/dislodging] ordered by Trujillo in [’]37, [which was] a total desalojo 2 . . . . Trujillo held that the land that they used here was Dominican land, and that those who should use it and work on it were the Dominicans. That is why they feel this bitterness towards the Dominican Republic, because it was a complete eviction. But . . . for them [it was] almost a peaceful eviction; for [only] a minority [were killed?] in the Haitian family. For the Dominicans also remember the Dominican-Haitian war, which occurred from [’]22 to [’]44. Those who have to feel resentment because of the war between 1822 and 1844 are we the Dominicans. They hurt the Dominican more than the Dominican hurt them, for [it was] a bloody withdrawal [for Haiti that time], a criminal withdrawal, a withdrawal that destroyed Dominicans.

Like Pablo, others in La Descubierta constantly drew connections between the 1937 events and “the twenty-two years.” A conservative estimate is that between 35 and 50 percent of the population of the eastern sector of the island disappeared between 1795 and 1819—after the foundation of Haiti and the invasions of Toussaint and Dessalines. Most of this reduction was due to people simply leaving the island for other areas such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela (Moya Pons 1984a:245; 1986d:38–39; Marte 1984:53; Deive 1989:7–10). The Trujillo state infused new life into the Dominican stories of the Haitian cruelty of the nineteenth century. After the 1937 massacre, the state shaped its discourses on national history as vigorously antiHaitian: “Between 1941 and 1961, Dominicans were daily bombarded with this nationalist ideology” (Moya Pons 1992:24). 3 A speech written by one of the state’s principal ideologues, the historian Manuel Arturo Peña Battle, and delivered in the border community of Elías Piña in 1942, expressed the need for a closed border in the following terms:4 The clear-sighted statesman [Trujillo] has seen: On one side, the traditional desolation and abandonment, the total negation of a border policy. That is the Dominican side. And on the other side we find the desperate reality of a people whose inf luence and negative forces infiltrate persistently and slowly, but certainly, the Dominican side. . . . If we do not act resolutely and strongly, the moment shall come when the evil among us will be impossible to cure, as it is on the other side. There is no government of the genuinely cultivated and civilized world that would not adopt definite measures against such a serious and vital threat. (Peña Battle 1954:64–65, 70)

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Addressing a hostile international audience while acting Dominican ambassador to Colombia in 1945, Joaquín Balaguer formulated the official Dominican line on the massacre and the Dominicanization: [B]y 1935 there were 400,000 Haitians in our country, and their number was increasing in an alarming manner. . . . The voudou, the Haitian national religion, a kind of African animism of the lowest origins, became the preferred cult among Dominicans of the border area. The Haitian currency, the gourde had replaced the national currency. . . . The peasants were learning from the Haitians anti-Christian customs, such as incestuous unions. The Dominican population of the border areas . . . had lost their awareness of nationality to such an extreme extent that, even today, many of our families maintain deep down in their hearts an incredible feeling of belonging to the fatherland of Dessalines. The Dominican Republic was therefore about to disappear, absorbed by Haiti. (Balaguer 1945 in García 1983:170)

These state discourses with which Dominicans were bombarded for twenty years were rooted in a political cosmology. They not only conveyed ideas about the island’s unavoidable division. They also expressed ideas about a necessary fight against evil, destructive forces. La Descubierta people’s memories of the massacre related to events that took place in this part of the country—in the local hills, in the village, and in nearby communities. Villagers confirmed that it was Trujillo’s military apparatus that organized the eviction (García 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1983:51–71; Vega 1988:383–385; Turits 1997:506–508). But the military and police were assisted by civilians—local peasants and villagers. A villager, a former member of Trujillo’s armed forces who had been eighteen years old in 1937, recalled the patrols that organized el desalojo (the eviction): When the patrol went out, it was to destroy and annihilate [cuando la patrulla salía, era acabar que iba]; they burned down their homes, their fields were laid waste, and the Haitians [were] still there, always entering and leaving [the country]. Here many people were killed. . . . .5

In a discussion of Mayans’ memories of la violencia or the violence in Guatemala during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kay Warren (1993a) has claimed that there was a reluctance to discuss la violencia in any detail: people usually responded to questions from anthropologists and others with generalizations. Warren concludes: “The first legacy of la violencia was silence” (32). I found a similar pattern in the Dominican borderlands. People did not hesitate to refer to el desalojo or the eviction, and were not unwilling

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to discuss it. But they usually provided few details (like the man quoted above). And their stories were often general or condensed. This dimension of the memories of the 1937 events is difficult to convey. Suffice it to try to illustrate with a couple of brief examples. The above-quoted man can be seen as typical. His entire first reply after I had asked what he could tell me about el desalojo was as follows: Well, here, that is almost impossible to describe, because that was a disaster. Here, that was a disaster. Everywhere one ran into a [dead] Haitian. Well, when they didn’t want to leave voluntarily, for there were many who didn’t want to leave. So they issued the order that they shoot them everywhere they find them. Well, and it was like this for a while.

An old peasant in the village, who voted for Balaguer, gives us another example. The following words are an excerpt from a conversation which took place between the two of us one day in his house: “You participated in el desalojo [the eviction]?” “Oh yes, damn! [Brief pause] Yes, we had to work a lot in those hills in order to make them like this.” “Work in what sense?” “Well, driving them out, driving them out so that they left this, the Dominican territory. They left; we gathered them and they left. And he who didn’t want to leave, we killed him in those hills, and there their bodies remained.” “It was a carnage?” “Oh yes, yes, [we responded] with the same force; there were a lot of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, many, many negros, and they didn’t want to leave.” “Why did Trujillo order el desalojo?” “Well, because he saw that the Republic was replete with Haitians, and they had their own country. They had their country and we had ours.” These men backed important local views on the eviction and the massacre—views that one of La Descubierta’s local leaders instructively conveyed one evening. Old Rafael, Rafaelito’s father, had already accounted for the eviction, when I asked whether many got killed. He said: “Not so many. You know how things are. If Trujillo doesn’t do that, the Haitians take this. This region was already full of Haitians. After Trujillo repatriated them, he founded the agrarian colonies. He brought people, even Spaniards, Japanese.”6 We ought to see these attempts to justify the Dominican use of violence in light of a set of powerful discourses. The people of La Descubierta had long shaped the island’s two nations in terms of radical difference. A local healer and ritual expert (who backed the leaderships of Balaguer and Miriam) said this about what he described as two different categories of spirits—Haitian and Dominican spirits respectively: Those spirits over there [in Haiti] do good things also. But they often do things that are more evil than good. The mysteries or spirits that possess

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those people—they call it “lua” or “gagá”—turn them [the possessed] with their feet upwards and the head downwards. . . . They are different from the Dominican spirits.

Miriam saw the relationship between the island’s two peoples in terms of the spread of Christianity: We have some beliefs here [on the Dominican side] introduced by the Haitian, [for example] beliefs in the bacá. These are beliefs inculcated by the other side. But the Christian religion, which is what the Spaniards established here, is against all those beliefs. All we who are truly Dominicans therefore have beliefs that are different from theirs, and we therefore act in a way that is totally different from their way.

People feared what they saw as a set of dangerous and destructive forces that emanated from the other side. The massive violence that the Trujillo state deployed against the Haitians in the late 1930s must have been experienced by many Dominicans—both in the borderlands and in the rest of the country—as a powerful “argument” in itself. It must have reinforced the already germinating ideas in society that said that the Haitians had to be kept out. Two illustrations drawn from other contexts may serve to stress the potential for this form of “logic.” Frank Graziano’s (1992) study of the Argentine “dirty war” (1976–1982) has revealed the built-in “logic” of a military-junta mythology. The study shows how the military regime symbolically constructed its own fear in the shape of “subversives” (or enemies of Christianity and the West) whom it then set out systematically to convert into the “disappeared” (desaparecidos). It thereby “explained” the very reality of the sources of its fear in the first place. Graziano demonstrates that rational people, within a given construction of reason, can shape grotesque inf liction of suffering as a legitimate defence of civilization. Kapferer’s (1988) analysis of Sinhalese riots against the Hindu Tamil minority in Sri Lanka in 1983 shows another—but ultimately parallel—interaction of meanings. Sinhalese constructions of personhood and nation operate as what could be called a double power. They not only shape Tamils as linked to evil and understand their presence within Sinhalese society (as many Dominicans have understood the Haitian presence in their society) as a source of danger and destruction, but also turn them into necessary objects of subjection and expulsion. Both their own violence and Tamil violence appear to testify to the truth of their beliefs: “In their violence . . . [the Sinhalese] are oriented to the reassertion and restoration of . . . their power. . . . Tamils, the agents of evil, set

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to break the overarching unity of the Sinhalese state, are rooted out” (Kapferer 1988:101). La Descubierta memories of the slaughter in the late 1930s revolved around ideas about “order”—or around a form of national classification. The memories were permeated by narratives of purity and danger (Douglas [1966] 1989; Ricoeur 1967:25–46). For instance, when an old peasant in the village, who supported Balaguer, was asked whether he had been forced to join the patrols in the hills during el desalojo, he replied: “No, they summoned me, and I said to them that I wanted to take part in that task, which consisted of cleaning my own place, my republic.” Another peasant, who backed Balaguer, claimed: “Previously we had trouble with the negros [or Haitians] but not today. Now it’s a clean thing. Now it’s clean. We’re not struggling with negros, for the negro is a bad nation.” Mario, the foreman and PRD supporter, said, “When the border is open, there is much disorder. The mixture of Dominican and Haitian is not good.” Asked what sort of disorder, he replied Both make disorder, but the Dominican more [than the Haitian], for the Dominican inside Haiti, that’s the worst. . . . If they went quietly to trade and do business, it would have been very well. However, that mixture is no good, because Trujillo left us in a clear position [nos dejó claro a nosotros]: he threw those people out.

A villager who backed Balaguer said about the island’s division in the future: “For my part, I don’t think things will change, because the idea of a negro . . . the negro is trouble, one cannot trust him. It depends on who is in charge, whether they want to mix or not to mix them [i.e., the island’s two sides]. And even if they join together the two sides, he’s still negro. Negro is negro.” There have been narratives of “infiltration” and stories of “disease” as corollaries of this concern with purity and danger. As Pablo said, for example, when he told me about the eviction, “[After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961] they have been infiltrating again.” In the carefully prepared words of Balaguer from 1945, “infiltration” had been replaced by another image, the image of “absorption”: “The Dominican Republic was therefore about to disappear, absorbed by Haiti” (Balaguer 1945 in García 1983:170). Dominican stories of infiltration operated, and resonated, in a context of biblical notions of diabolical power and possession: “In the New Testament ‘infiltration’ by demonic forces often endowed the possessed (‘subversive’) with supernatural strength or knowledge, calling all the more for special resources . . . and decisive, innovative action on

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the part of Christ’s vicars struggling to exorcise the evil” (Graziano 1992:129). As Miriam put it, “We have some beliefs here introduced by the Haitian. . . . These are beliefs inculcated by the other side. But the Christian religion, which is what the Spaniards established here, is against all those beliefs. All we who are truly Dominicans therefore have beliefs which are different from theirs.” Leaders and the masses saw the Dominican-Haitian border as an absolute limit, marking the line between constructive and destructive forces. Another image used in narratives of the eviction and massacre was the “disease trope.” People not only constructed the nation as a living organism and a body; they also shaped evil as a danger or pain inside the Dominican body politic, and as infectious agents spreading death: “If we do not act resolutely and strongly, the moment will come when the evil among us will be impossible to cure, as it is on the other side” (Peña Battle 1954:70). This idea was echoed in Pablo’s words about Haitians as typically criminal, quoted earlier, and Miriam’s view that “The Haitian danger is more latent than the American danger.” The discourses on infiltration and disease share an important feature, one that has been dealt with by René Girard. According to Girard, such discourses imply that “active” and “passive” roles become reversed. The legitimacy of violence is symbolically constructed while the discourses describe the active agents, those inf licting suffering and death, as the original victims. Once the “impure” attributes have been stored in the Enemy, the members of the latter category who are placed “on the inside” logically appear as the source of the “trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them” (Girard 1987:91). Girard has stressed the relevance of this for comparative understandings of justifications for violence: At the time of the Black Death, foreigners were killed, and Jews were massacred, and a century or two later, “witches” were burned, for reasons strictly identical to the ones we found [and we presently find] in our myths. . . . The imaginary crimes and real punishments of these victims are the crimes and punishments we find in mythology. Why should we have to believe, in the case of mythology only, that if the crimes are imaginary, the punishments and the victims themselves cannot be real? Every sign points the other way. The texts that document historical atrocities— the judicial records of witch-hunts, for instance—offer the same fantastic charges as myths, the same indifference to concrete evidence, and the same unexamined and massive conviction that everything is true. (Girard 1987:86–87)

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In the late twentieth century, La Descubierta people took as their basic premise that Trujillo had been right. Not only the borderlands but the whole nation also had needed Dominicanization, the state-led attempt to purify the Dominican collectivity. The euphemistic term typically used by southern border residents to describe the eviction and the massacre, el desalojo, seems “logical.” The word suggests that someone was thrown out after having violated a rule of the house. The expelled and slaughtered Haitian peasants and laborers had violated the norm that said that the Dominican house or homeland had no room for negros or haitianos, those of the other side. El Masacre (“Massacre River”) is the fateful name of the river dividing Dominican and Haitian territories in the northern province of Dajabón. The name dates from the colonial period, when a labor dispute erupted into a slaughter of Taino Indians near the river (Derby 1994:488). Freddy Prestol Castillo’s El Masacre se pasa a pie (“Across El Masacre on Foot”) is the Dominican novel par excellence about the 1937 bloodshed. In 1937, the author was employed by the Ministry of Justice in Dajabón. It is worth quoting a couple of paragraphs of that novel. The book, which was written at the time of the massacre and thereafter kept in secrecy during the Trujillo regime, was published for the first time in 1973. It discloses scenes from the carnage: . . . The plain is vast. The “cédula”—an identity document required according to the laws of Santo Domingo—was the pretext. Under the pretext of seeking those who were breaking the law that made it compulsory to carry an identity document, the soldiers rounded up large masses of Haitians, driving them toward remote plains. Far from the hamlets, they can carry through the homicidal feast more thoroughly. The Haitians went quietly, in long rows. The old, like Tamí, the beggar; young men and girls. Their rustic garments were of different colors. The soldiers drank rum repeatedly. “Boys . . . rum! For we’re going to work,” said the sergeant . . . Cries of horror silenced by tragic death. Dread death rattles. And silence. And again the cries of others whose turn was approaching. One shouted: “Don’t kill me . . . I dominiquén! [‘Dominican’ pronounced in Creole]” 7 (Prestol Castillo 1989: 22–27)

Memories of Trujillo’s Terror The Trujillo regime had a system of espionage, detention without trial, and liquidation. The extent of military surveillance and control over Dominican territory during those thirty-one years was instructively described by Piñeyro, Miriam’s husband: It was controlled to an exceptional degree, the people [were] controlled. Let me give you an example. In 1955, I was a sergeant, and was transferred

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to San Juan de la Maguana [in the southwest]. When I arrived there, the commander, a major, put me in charge of the patrols in the countryside. Every mayor [alcalde] had to report to me, the commander of the patrols, on whether some inhabitants of their rural section were missing. No one could transfer himself or herself even from one section to another without permission from the local commander, far less settle down in a different pueblo. If I went by a house that was closed, they had to tell me why that house was closed, where those who lived there were; [they would say] “they are in their conuco [on their land]”; when I went by in the evening, I had to see them or be told the whereabouts of those people by the mayor.

As I have previously mentioned, Trujillo’s general strategy was not one of elimination of opposition by assassination. Far more efficient was the spread of fear. The state produced fear of the arbitrariness of the authorities. In La Descubierta, only a very few men were physically eliminated by the Trujillo regime. As Jesús de Galíndez, the Spanish exile from the civil war, wrote in the 1950s in The Era of Trujillo: “Far more efficient is hunger, the knowledge that it is impossible to make a living without showing one self to be an active supporter of the regime. . . . [T]he number [of political assassinations] is small compared to that other, diffuse terror. . . . Trujillo and his agents need in few cases to resort to assassination” (Galíndez 1958:129, 139). The factor of vague pervading fear, which had a parallel in Guatemala (Green 1994:230, 227), was specified by Galíndez: “One can mention cases of persecution of individuals, even assassinations; but these sharp cases do not reveal something more basic which does not leave traces, the diffuse air of terror sealing the mouths and perverting the souls. The feigning of thinking which today saturates the Dominican people cannot be proved in a documentary manner, it can only be felt living together with them during months” (Galíndez 1958:128). State terror was also the order of the day in “the twelve years” from 1966 to 1978. Some four thousand Dominicans lost their lives during the particularly intense “anti-communist” terror during the first eight years of the Balaguer regime, from 1966 to 1974 (Moya Pons 1990:528). In La Descubierta, even the young men whose fathers were local Reformist heads or served in the armed forces risked detention and harassment. In one case, a leftist son of a Guard in La Descubierta was treated with such savagery by the military in the capital that he was transported back to the village barely alive, but was nonetheless renounced there by his father. Only with the Guzmán government was the repression brought to an end. The year 1978 was therefore viewed by the opposition—PRD and PLD supporters—as the turning point. Mario, the PRD veteran, told it like this: [During the era of Trujillo] one couldn’t even look at a Guard. There were Guards that could not even be looked at, it was enough just to look

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at them. . . . This is the way we were raised, under a dictatorship. After they killed Trujillo, came the PRD. . . . Then they were angry in their barracks, they said that they were the Guards. They overthrew Bosch. . . . Thereafter came Balaguer and grabbed those twelve years, and they [the military] returned and finished with us. But then Don Antonio Guzmán came and destroyed all that. We are badly off, things are expensive, but nobody beats us, nor attacks us, and we can talk. For we have to speak the truth: Balaguer is bad, but we can talk and we can say it. . . . It was very strong, but not any more. After the government of Guzmán, things have changed a lot; everything has changed, because the Guard isn’t the same Guard.8

The increased traffic over the Dominican-Haitian border that followed after 1978 entailed a considerable expansion of officers’ and soldiers’ illicit businesses tied to the border (Hartlyn 1998:149). Some high officers made fortunes. As La Descubierta people saw it, therefore, officers and soldiers had changed. Previously they had exercised repression, but after 1978, they had increasingly given all their attention to making money. So it can be said that many Dominican officers now had a high vested interest in the reproduction of the Dominican hegemonic vision of the nation as it had been established. This vision turned “the Haitian” into the savage and feared “other,” and such a vision was precisely what secured a high military presence and a military monopoly of control along the border—the preconditions for hidden transactions and accumulation by the military. In the late twentieth century, the Trujillo regime continued to give shape to individual and collective memories. In so doing it continued to exercise power in society. In what follows I shall try to give further proof of this. The aim is to document what I view as two key features of the local memories of the dictatorship’s use of terror. First, southern border residents’ narratives of Trujillo’s terror testified to a repressive regime’s ability to silence a society: to create a historical and social space in which almost only a single voice, that of the authorities, is heard in the public arena and even in homes. Second, the local memories of the dictator’s use of terror show that the silencing was produced through what looked like veritable shows or spectacles of military violence. Or—to put it better, perhaps—the silencing was produced and reproduced through rumors and stories of violence as spectacle. At first sight, spectacle and silencing seem to produce contradictory effects, thereby working against each other. Nevertheless, both sets of processes were central dimensions of the Trujillo regime’s terror. Writing about Guatemala in the 1980s and the early 1990s, Green (1994:239) has claimed that “Silence imposed through terror has become the idiom of social consensus in the altiplano.” In such extremely repressive

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contexts, it is as if self-censorship resulting from fear has become an innate part of being a citizen. As Pablo once said about the necessity to show that one was a supporter of Trujillo, even in one’s heart, “There was no other way out. No sir.” Pablo’s oldest son said about secrecy during those thirty-one years You even feared those in your own home. You couldn’t speak in this way [the way in which we talked] about Trujillo in your own house because you knew that someone could be listening outside the walls. . . . Fear was felt so much here during the Era of Trujillo that you would arrive here and, automatically, there would be people who looked at you as a stranger and asked “and what does this man want here?” If he sat down in the park, they would either hardly greet him or for some reason say that he was an informer, or that he was an enemy of the regime. I remember that when I was in the army one spoke with one or two persons, two friends who at least played [the parts of friends], but one trusted nobody. . . . Also in the army, one felt that fear; yes, the Guards lived with that fear.

The last words should remind us that when a military state terrorizes, it seems to be the case that, as Bertold Brecht put it in Europe in the 1930s, “Fear rules not only those who are ruled but the rulers too” (Brecht 1976:296–297). What can be described as a culture of terror can also be called a culture of fear. Galíndez stressed how the state created a number of other deafening silences during those thirty-one years: [T]he best proof of the tyranny of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and above all of its growth during the first years, can be found in its newspapers. In the silence of the Listín Diario [among the country’s oldest newspapers] from the mid-1930s, and in its new literature of eulogies after the arrest of its director in 1933. In the constant eulogies of Trujillo . . . in the absolute lack of criticism . . . For those who live in the Dominican Republic, many more proofs are found in the universities, where the topics of controversy are shunned; in the abrupt silence of a group in a café when someone who doesn’t enjoy absolute trust suddenly enters . . . (Galíndez 1958:129)

When each individual is driven to live in a state of loneliness and secrecy, and to not “see” what people are not allowed to see but everybody nonetheless can see, does this mean there is erasure of memory? Not typically. Instead, as Taussig has claimed, an almost opposite effect is produced. “The point about silencing and the fear behind silencing is not to erase memory. Far from it. The point is to drive the memory deep within the fastness of the individual so as to create more fear and uncertainty”

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(Taussig 1992:27). The memories in La Descubierta of Trujillo’s spread of fear, articulated more than three decades after his death, support this. While southern border residents narrated their constant trouble with the Guards and the daily self-censorship, they mentioned few cases of local villagers and peasants murdered by the regime. Explaining that there was no political opposition in these areas, many would comment that “around here, we were all Trujillistas.” The locals who were most actively persecuted, and of whom at least a couple were murdered by the military, were villagers and peasants smuggling Haitian liquor (clerin) on remote paths in the hills. Villagers attributed the persecution of those who traded and consumed Haitian liquor to a wish on the part of the authorities to repress competition, claiming that the sale of clerin undermined the sales of Dominican liquor. Yet local memories included also frightening killings committed by the state in the region. Two features of these memories stand out. The most feared man during the Trujillo regime in this southwestern part of the country was an officer named José María Alcántara. According to La Descubierta’s narratives, he was part of a small group of exceptionally feared officers used by Trujillo in the different regions of the country. His name was synonymous with fear.9 In the words of Pablo and then of Mario Alcántara was the one [of Trujillo’s trusted officers] most familiar with this region, since he was raised in a frontier community. He traveled frequently through all the areas here. He always came. . . . I [once] got to know him personally, and he was a man who was feared, and he spoke with you laughing. [He was] a man, very strong. All those crimes that he had committed and that he was committing! And [in spite of that] I met him. When he [Trujillo] wanted to set a pueblo straight, he sent Alcántara. And when the people knew that Alcántara was there, everybody walked trembling.

Alcántara was said to have repressed the smuggling of Haitian liquor zealously and without mercy. A local who used to serve under his command said, “That man was terrible. He didn’t sleep. He knew that people in this area were smuggling clerin into the country, [and] he spent the night thinking ‘where are they doing it?’ . . . And he called in some Guards at midnight . . . when he didn’t go alone.” This brings us to the second characteristic feature of these narratives about the local Trujilloist repression. Many would tell a story of two local people who were killed by Alcántara and his men after being caught smuggling rum. According to these stories, the dead bodies of the two were “designed” in particular ways by the military in order to produce

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increased fear. The everyday but diffuse terror was intensified by means of a sudden display of militarized state power as an arbitrary but absolute force. Pablo told it like this: The two men were denounced, and were surprised while smuggling that rum. One of them belonged to a family here in the pueblo, a young man; the other was a man from Llenas [a hill section]. What happened is that they arrested them, and a week later they brought their dead bodies down from the hills. And having brought them dead, they hanged both men from trees, where the people could see them hanging. In Llenas, [they hanged] one from a tree, in full view. And here, in the pueblo of Postrer Río, close to the road that goes up into the hills, they climbed a small ridge which is located there; they hanged him up so that the public should see him and believe that they had hanged themselves. It wasn’t them. They brought them dead and hanged them there with a written note on the chest: “Now I will not transport clerin again.” How is it possible that he, the dead, hanged himself voluntarily? No, it was they who killed them.

Or, in the words of Mario, “He did it publicly. If Alcántara killed someone, it wasn’t hidden. . . . Trujillo didn’t have secrets, very few. . . . Trujillo’s things were public. He had his law.” Pablo therefore concluded, “One lived, not with a little, but with much caution. . . . For they didn’t bring them dead and then buried them; no, they put them in visible places. And I said to people ‘well, may you take care; may we all take care.’ ” These memories of the Trujillo regime bore witness to the authorities’ use of atrocities as “theater”—that is, spectacle. The crucial meaning of such violence is that it is witnessed. This creates maximum fear. Society knows the horrendous crimes of its own authorities (“it was public”), yet cannot speak out about what it knows (public silence). Rather, the individual is kept in a state of uncertainty regarding fundamental social mechanisms, and this gives life to fear. Uncertainty is evident in the words of Pablo quoted above. These words even suggest some of the theatrical effects that are produced in order to create terror. Pablo’s claim was that the dead bodies of the two locals were displayed by the military in a particular way. The Guards constructed a simulacrum—a representation of the illusion of representing the real. Such a deliberate state construction, as Coronil and Skurski have argued on the basis of data from Venezuela, rests on the controlled tension between what is read by most people as “fact” and as “appearance”: “between attention to evidence and disregard for conf licting information, and thus on the willingness to allow cracks in the performance to reveal the arbitrariness of authority. Fear grows out of these cracks” (Coronil and Skurski 1991:310).

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In this case, the “allowed cracks” are seen from the circumstances recounted. According to Pablo, it must have been clear to everybody that the two locals had been killed by the military. Nonetheless, their dead bodies had been left in a way that appeared to suggest that the two men had taken their own lives by hanging themselves—and in highly public places. In addition, one of the bodies carried a note saying, “Now I will not transport clerin again.” It must have been the shared, secret knowledge about the absolute arbitrariness of such power that terrorized. “As in detective stories in which certain clues are left behind in order to induce a misreading, the visible marks of artifice in the misrepresentations of politics are not necessarily to be treated as faults, but as signs to be deciphered” (Coronil and Skurski 1991:310). As Pablo’s son told us, repression produced a society governed by the principle that “one trusted nobody.” This is an inevitable product of severe repression (see e.g., Corradi et al. 1992; Sluka 2000). The other side of this is that ordinary people in fact become subjects (and not only objects) of the repression: they are transformed, and transform themselves, into active agents in the processes of silencing (again there is a parallel in Argentina’s “dirty war”: Graziano 1992:75). A result of the everyday activities of informing in La Descubierta was that fear was used as a weapon by locals competing for leadership in the Dominican Party. It was used as a weapon among kin and neighbors. Galíndez’s The Era of Trujillo claimed that “the Dominican individual who has not collaborated with the regime is very rare” (1958:143). The Trujillo state’s terror fed on society’s internal tensions and conf licts, and on a myriad divisions. Local memories confirmed this. They indicated that some villagers helped shape the repression directed against others in the community through selective and manipulative uses of “facts.” There was also a more subtle, yet more pernicious manner in which the Trujilloist terror generated complicity by shaping its victims, ordinary people, as participants. To be able to grasp this dimension of the Trujillo regime we must return to its shaping of its own repression as spectacle. The violence was a public and visible process. In La Descubierta, the bodies of the men who were killed for trafficking clerin were displayed so that the locals could take part in the enactment of the truth of their crime (a truth that, to be sure, was created by the military regime). This, in a nutshell, appears to correspond to the drama of a population living in a context of repression—forced to fulfill the role of (silent) witnesses or to play the role that Graziano calls that of the “audience-guarantor” that the

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oppressive state requires and shapes. Graziano has described the core of this social process in the following way: The Argentine public [1976–1982] aware even nebulously, even against the insistence of government and intrapsychic denial, of the “grotesque piece of compensatory drama” under way in the detention centres thereby fulfilled a role as “neither actor nor bystander” similar to that played by the chorus of Greek tragedy. Bernard Knox noted that the chorus, as “an anonymous crowd with only a group identity,” creates a peculiar sensation “as if the audience itself were part of the acting.” That last quoted phrase describes precisely the role of a population under repression: The public is “audience” because it “witnesses” . . . and is “actor” because its status as audience—however passive it may appear—is a function integral to the efficacy of the spectacle by which power is being generated. On another level the population of a country under totalitarian rule is also “neither actor nor bystander” because it is reluctant to fully realize one position or the other, because it generally vacillates between competing positions and therefore is never situated effectively in either. The public’s avoidance of commitment and recognition predisposes it to further manipulation by the repressive system that f lourishes in an ambience of nonresolution. (Graziano 1992:76; italics in the original)10

The message of terror reinforces this climate of deep ambiguity. For while the general facts of the Trujillo state—that innocent people were arrested and killed in savage ways by the authorities—were known by the people, the greatest crime was to speak of these “secrets.” Only a small number of citizens, during the long Era of Trujillo, had the privilege of being able to believe in what they knew to be the truth. Graziano observes that in Argentina identification with such an elite of the military state’s truth-makers “was perhaps the most prominent mechanism by which the Argentine public feigned an escape from its eerie uncertainty,” and attempted to solve the dilemmas of fear and nonresolution (Graziano 1992:76). Acting in such a way, people could, to a certain extent, merge into the truth which terrorized them by allying themselves psychologically and socially with those who dominated the process of truth-making (or silencing). As Graziano goes on to explain, these dynamics “were nowhere as apparent as in the refrains Por algo será (‘It must be for something’) and Algo habrá[n] hecho (‘He/ she/they must have done something’)” which were typically repeated by Argentines witnessing the military state’s abductions—words that desperately sought to make sense of the apparently senseless taking place before their eyes; “acknowledgment of the ‘secret’ truth (the something

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of the refrains) momentarily halted their vacillation between the roles of actor and bystander by situating them psychologically in the former position” (Graziano 1992:77). Or, to put it in different terms, the audience helped in this manner to construct the military truth at the cost of marginalizing it. In the Dominican case, a similar process was manifest in La Descubierta people’s memories of the Trujilloist terror. As we have previously seen, a saying among many villagers and peasants was that “Trujillo wasn’t bad. He was bad with the bad” (Trujillo no fue malo. Fue malo con el malo).11 Like the Argentine popular refrains, these curiously studied words about Trujillo (producing sociohistorical justice through a strange logic) seemed both to respond to a popular thirst for meaning in the face of the confusing and meaningless, and to contribute toward reinstating moral order and affording social and individual comfort. The words “Trujillo wasn’t bad. He was bad with the bad”—and even more the public attitude they conveyed—were conservative, counterproductive to the creation of a profoundly anti-Trujilloist force in society. Such words implied that the terror had become glossed with a kind of consensus of purpose (as Mario explained, “Trujillo had his law”) and a certain compliance, and that the arbitrary had been converted into the legitimate through the process involving ordinary people-as-witnesses with the theatre of violence staged to repress them. “Trujillo wasn’t bad. He was bad with the bad” appeared therefore to convey an efficient silencing through terror; the words gave symbolic shape to, and condensed, many everyday choices that had implied deference in practice to an oppressive regime. At the same time, villagers (including those who said that Trujillo had only been bad with people who themselves had been bad) would curse the Trujillo state’s atrocities. A Balaguerista peasant who five minutes earlier had spoken approvingly about the Era of Trujillo—saying, “All men worked the land and there wasn’t any stealing . . . it’s now that there is this vagrancy. The men had to be on the fields; the one who didn’t have [the required minimum of ] 10 [cultivated] tareas [0.63 hectares of land] during the Era of Trujillo, was sent to prison; there were no men of nonsense, no men like they are now”12—concluded when the conversation had turned to his memory of Alcántara, “He and Trujillo were equally bad, [they were] bad.” And Pablo said, “But Trujillo killed anybody. . . . ‘Kill him,’ that was his remedy. Oh yes [one knew that this was so] because both in the capital and in the provinces dead people turned up, who should not have died in that way. . . . Trujillo shouldn’t have governed this country. Before he became president, overthrowing Horacio Vásquez [in 1930], one already knew that he was a criminal, for he had already shown that he acted like a criminal.”

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It is the ambience of uncertainty and nonresolution—an ambience constitutive of political terror—that appears best to explain this mixture of different ideas about Trujillo and the Trujillo state. It was as if the diffuse terror, as Galíndez aptly described it, had penetrated not only subjective personal experiences but also the social memory of those thirty-one years. The head of one of the community’s largest families once put it like this: “They say that Trujillo was bad. But 85 percent of the time Trujillo was a good president.” Linda Green has claimed that social reparation is “a necessary requisite to healing the body politic” after years of terror (Green 1994:241). Each society has its regime of truth, its politics of truth (Foucault 1980:131). Sharply repressive social orders attack and silence truths, and produce truths. This is aptly conveyed by the name of a new institution, the “Truth Commission” (Wilson 2001). From Argentina and Uruguay to Guatemala and South Africa, the creation of a truth commission has signaled a will for social reparation. It has meant recognition that the body politic needed a new history, new individual and collective memories. But the Dominican Republic never saw a truth commission. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. After that, the regime’s systematic spreading of fear was never broadly investigated. Balaguer stepped down from power twice, in 1978 and 1996 respectively. His use of terror as a weapon against the opposition in the 1960s and the 1970s was not officially mapped and examined. Balaguer’s leadership was perceived by most of his compatriots as one that had grown directly out of Trujillo’s. The Balaguer state could not have placed a stigma on the Trujillo state without having simultaneously undermined its own right to claim authority. The many ambiguities embedded in what Balaguer said and wrote about his own public role between 1930 and 1961 testify to this.13 It is little wonder that late-twentieth-century discourses on the Trujillo state and the man who incarnated it appeared notoriously ambiguous and self-contradictory. Any discourse on Trujillo’s rule should be understood as contextually situated. La Descubierta people expressed shifting ideas about the dictator according to the memory’s context. Sometimes they described him as a producer of terror. In other situations, they remembered him as a guarantor of order. In yet other situations, they constructed him as the builder of the nation-state—the twentieth century’s most important source of progress. It has often been assumed that modern state building and nation-making are processes lacking in legitimacy among the population of out-of-the-way places within a state’s territory. Yet villagers imagined Trujillo appreciatively as the Dominican ruler who had contributed most decisively to the construction of the state in the region, and to the region’s integration into the national collectivity.

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CHAPTER 9 CONCLUSION

T

he global context for examining authoritarian histories has changed. After the 2001 Al Qaeda attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the ensuing United States leadership in worldwide remilitarization, well-known stories of autocratic rule have been reformulated and recirculated and Iraq’s former ruler has been transformed into the contemporary world’s ultimate despot. But this only underscores how necessary it is to think more about how we may understand authoritarian histories and discourses on despotism in today’s world. The analysis in this book has been shaped by a set of basic assumptions. I would like to brief ly restate these assumptions, in three points. First, authoritarian state-systems ought to be treated as enormously dissimilar. They vary considerably from one historical and social context to another. I must emphasize that I have no wish to unduly trivialize crucial differences between autocracy and democracy, or belittle the forms of violence, terror, fear, tragedy, and suffering seen in authoritarian state formations. What I am saying is that if we want to understand the field of power relations and cultural processes that we call authoritarianism better, we should examine it with a sufficient will to acknowledge diversity. Authoritarian state formations—like democratic state formations—ought to be examined concretely.1 Second, we should seek to avoid operating with a veil separating the state and society. In a way modern states are “the fantasized or utopian wholeness and coherence” par excellence (Scott 1998; Aretxaga 2003). Much of the problem entailed in the industry of mainstream studies of forms of dictatorial and authoritarian rule lies in a lack of ability to recognize this. In a sense states exist for the most part as imaginaires, as ways of imagining the social totality with its system of authority and control. Too much social science continues to buy into the narratives states tell of themselves. This applies not least when the object of study is

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a form of authoritarian rule. A considerable part of the literature on forms of authoritarian rule has, ironically enough, had a tendency to “take the most grandiose, even paranoid, claims of world-rulers seriously, assuming that whatever cosmological projects they claimed to be pursuing actually did correspond, at least roughly, to something on the ground” (Graeber 2004:65–66). Third, we need to study forms of authoritarian rule as power relations, everyday practices, and culture. An authoritarian state formation is the outcome of myriads of situations where social actors negotiate power and meaning. This shifts the focus of analysis to the many practices of power and the mundane, routine, and ritual forms that constitute a form of authoritarian rule. It invites us to produce ethnography, or to investigate in depth how a form of authoritarian rule is made, remade, and altered in those contexts and encounters where the state bodies’ representatives and individuals and groups interact. We need more understanding of authoritarian histories, to be achieved with the aid of inquiries into everyday practices and everyday relationships, studies “from below.” The cultural forms that help to constitute an authoritarian regime are not outside history. On the contrary, they are historically constituted and open to change. They are most often the outcome of a long history of global connections, a history that includes Western colonialism and its aftermath. There is an evolutionist, standardizing story of authoritarian rule in the contemporary world. This narrative constructs authoritarian and democratic rule, or dictatorship and democracy, as a Manichean struggle between violence and peace, no social acceptance and broad social acceptance, irrationality and rationality, savagery and civilization. We should see this dichotomizing and demonizing discourse primarily as an effect of the global system’s power relations. It is a discourse that produces sharply polarized and hierarchical notions of the world, of the enlightened global “center” and its “others.”2 Above all, it is a discourse that suppresses the fact that the roots of most contemporary forms of power and politics, both in the global core and in the global periphery, lie in colonialism and imperialism (Hansen and Stepputat 2005). The history of the southwestern part of the Dominican Republic told in this book shows a more complex and nuanced history of a form of authoritarian rule. In the Dominican southwest, people remember Trujillo in a surprisingly positive light. A considerable number of villagers and peasants in the region backed Balaguer from the mid1960s to the mid-1990s. People in La Descubierta argued that the years under Trujillo and Balaguer had brought enhanced progress and modernity through construction of the nation-state. Underlying many researchers’ analyses is the supposition that marginal local populations

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view the networks, practices, and ideas by which the modern state is constructed in threatening and polluting terms. But this does not square with the history from La Descubierta. On the contrary, “the outside world”—perhaps better described as the process by which the state was made—was seen, not in terms of danger, but rather in terms of coveted “progress.” The local people welcomed state development. Villagers and peasants participated in the building of the state. State infrastructure and development were created not only from the top of the system but also by many who already lived in that part of the country. This perspective is important. Many felt they had achieved a great deal. * *

*

The Dominican elections of 1994 triggered allegations of massive fraud. In 1996, the ninety-year-old Balaguer stepped down for the last time. Once again he had been forced to resign amid the greatest possible lack of credibility (Hartlyn 1998:251–254). In 1996, Dominicans elected PLD candidate Leonel Fernández to the nation’s highest office. Fernández, who had been brought up in the United States, secured more than 51 percent of the votes through an alliance with Balaguer. Before the election, he worked to move the PLD toward a less radical or more “centrist” position, advocating economic liberalization and privatization of state enterprises. National and international observers saw the 1996 election as fair. Four years later, the PRD’s Hipólito Mejía won the presidency. Again the election was seen as fair. Although old and ill, Balaguer continued to head the Reformist Party and wield conspicuous power up to his death on July 14, 2002. On March 13, 2002, the Balaguer-friendly newspaper El Caribe published the results of an opinion poll that had been carried out by the firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. The poll indicated that Balaguer, four months before his death, was the most popular national leader in the country and that his popularity had been on the increase since the year before (El Caribe, March 13, 2002, 1, 3). La Descubierta changed little between 1992 and 1998. In 1994, both Miriam and Rafaelito were reelected deputies for their province in congress. While Balaguer was forced to cut short his term of office in 1996, those who won the 1994 congressional and municipal elections were elected for a period of four years. The municipal elections in La Descubierta gave the PRD almost 47 percent, the Reformist Party nearly 41 percent, and the PLD about 10 percent. After 1994, Rafaelito continued to climb in the national political hierarchy. In 1996, he won a top position in the Congress: he was elected

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President of the Chamber of Deputies. He was reelected to this post in 1997. In 1998, he was reelected Congress deputy for his province. After the election, his goal was to keep his position as President of the Chamber of Deputies. But in 1998 the PRD did not back his candidature; it wanted instead to give this top position to another from the party. Even so Rafaelito managed to get reelected. At the last moment before the election in Congress he struck a deal with the PRD’s two competitors: he secured the support of the PLD and the Reformist Party to be reelected to the post. After this the PRD was furious and expelled him from the party. A year later the PRD allied with Balaguer to stop Rafaelito being reelected once more to the position he had occupied since 1996. In August 1999, he lost the position; he was replaced with a Reformist. The big loser in 1998 was the Reformist Party. Its representation in the Senate fell from fourteen to only two seats, and in the Chamber of Deputies from fifty to twenty-two. The PRD won twenty-four of thirty Senate seats and eighty-three of one-hundred-and-forty-nine seats in the chamber. The outcome, though, was not all that bad for the PLD. In the Senate it grew from one to four seats and in the chamber from thirteen to forty-nine. The municipal elections in La Descubierta gave the PRD around 63 percent, the PLD almost 34 percent, and the Reformist Party less than 3 percent. Shortly before the 1998 election, the Reformist Party’s commission in charge of its municipal and congressional election campaign expelled ten leading party members. They included several persons who still worked as deputies in congress, including Miriam from Independencia province. The decision was reached without a prior hearing. It was speculated in the press that the party members were helping opposition candidates, against the better interests of the party. In 1994, Independencia province elected a candidate from the PRD to the Senate. In 1998, the Reformists lost also their seat in the chamber. The PLD won the province’s second seat in the chamber, the position Miriam had filled. Four years later, the loser in La Descubierta and in many other communities was the PLD. The congressional elections in the province in 2002 gave the PLD 9 percent, the PRD almost 45 percent, and the Reformist Party and its allies around 44 percent. A PRD leader from Duvergé and a Reformist from Jimaní won the two seats in the chamber. The province reelected its PRD senator. The municipal elections in La Descubierta gave the PLD around 10 percent, the PRD 32 percent, and the Reformist Party and its allies 53 percent. The big winner in La Descubierta was Balaguer’s party with its allies. Why so? After being expelled from the PRD Rafaelito acquired his own political party. Some say he “bought” the small Partido Popular

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Cristiano or Christian Popular Party. The advantage of “buying” the party was that it already had enough signatures to merit its recognition by the Central Electoral Board. Before the 2002 elections, Rafaelito decided that he would challenge the province’s sitting PRD senator; he wanted to win the province’s Senate seat. In late 2001, Balaguer and the PLD’s national leader entered into an agreement. The two parties agreed to support twenty-nine common candidatures for the Senate—fifteen from the Reformist Party, eleven from the PLD, and three independent figures. In Rafaelito’s province, Balaguer and Fernández backed his candidature. In the elections, Rafaelito’s Christian Popular Party allied with Balaguer’s Reformist Party. These two parties were “The Reformist Party and Allies” in the province where I carried out fieldwork; the two parties backed common candidatures. At the level of the province 29 percent voted for the Reformist Party and about 15 percent for Rafaelito’s party. In La Descubierta’s municipal elections Rafaelito’s Christian Popular Party obtained around 35 percent and the Reformist Party less than 18 percent. It was as if Rafaelito and his La Descubierta following in 2002 had come full circle. Their opponent was the PRD. Rafaelito and his brothers now worked together with Balaguer’s party, the party that old Rafael, their father, had helped to build. Rafaelito lost the race for the Senate seat by a narrow margin: his PRD rival got around 46 percent, Rafaelito around 44 percent. Less than two months later Balaguer died.

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NOTES

1 Introduction 1. I have borrowed this term from Richard Lee Turits (2003:1–23): from the first chapter of his book on the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) in the Dominican Republic. Turits’s chapter is called “Introduction: The Paradoxes of Despotism.” In this book, I have been inspired by the works by Turits (1997, 2003) and Lauren Derby (1998b, 1999, 2003) on the Trujillo regime. I shall return to this. 2. On the southwestern region and the Dominican borderlands, see, for example, Garrido ([1922] 1975); Palmer (1976); Baud (1993a, 1993b); Derby (1994); Turits (1997:427–577); Ramírez (2000); and Lundius and Lundahl (2000). 3. For a set of works see Geertz (1980); Foucault (1979, 1980, 1991); Corrigan and Sayer (1985); Abrams ([1977] 1988); Kapferer (1988); Herzfeld (1992); Joseph and Nugent (1994); Nagengast (1994); Nugent (1997); Steinmetz (1999); Mitchell (1999); Hansen and Stepputat (2001); Ferguson and Gupta (2002); Navaro-Yashin (2002); Aretxaga (2003); Das and Poole (2004a); Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (2005); Sharma and Gupta (2006). 4. A clear-cut example is Robert D. Crassweller’s 1966 biography Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator, an inf luential yet not strictly scholarly work. The most cited treatment of the Trujillo dictatorship is probably still this book, published only five years after Trujillo’s assassination (Turits 2003:7). Crassweller’s book is permeated and driven by an idea of the ruler as all-powerful, brutal, voracious, and eccentric, and focuses only on the very top of the state-system. Another example is a brilliantly written novel—the Dominican author Viriato Sención’s They Forged the Signature of God (1995). (The Spanish edition of the novel, Los que falsificaron la firma de Dios, appeared in Santo Domingo in 1992.) Sención’s novel, a tale of political tyranny and deceit set in contemporary times, gives a thinly disguised, harrowing portrait of the country’s rulers. When it appeared in 1992 the story rang so true that President Balaguer went on TV to denounce the book. 5. Linz borrowed the term “sultanistic” from Weber (1978:232); but for Weber, the classic location of sultanistic authority remained the Near East. In the 1950s, Linz had worked on Spain’s Franco regime. He had realized

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

that the model of the “totalitarian” state then current, based on the history of Nazism and Stalinism, did not fit. The outcome was the conceptualization of a new type, the “authoritarian” regime. In an edited volume from 1998, Sultanistic Regimes, Houchang Chehabi and Linz describe how Linz thereafter discovered Trujillo, and how that resulted in the invention of yet another category, the sultanistic regime. Just as Franco’s rule became the archetype of an authoritarian regime, Trujillo’s became that of a sultanistic regime (Chehabi and Linz 1998b:4–5). A series of rulers from various parts of the world have been classified as sultanistic. Apart from a chapter on Trujillo’s Dominican Republic as the archetype, Chehabi and Linz’s Sultanistic Regimes (1998a) contains studies of the Batista state in Cuba, the Somoza state in Nicaragua, the Duvalier state in Haiti, the Pahlavi state in Iran, and the Marcos state in the Philippines. See, for example, Bosworth (2007) on everyday life in Mussolini’s Italy; Verdery (1996, particularly 19–37) on Communist party rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before 1989; Siegel (1998) on cultural and political practices and processes in Jakarta during Suharto’s New Order regime (1966–1998); Coronil (1997:67–230) on two oppressive regimes in twentieth-century Venezuela—General Juan Vicente Gómez’s long dictatorship (1908–1935) and General Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s military rule (1948–1958); Levine (1998) on political, economic, and cultural processes in Getulio Vargas’s (1930–1954) Brazil; Gould (1990) on peasants, workers, and popular movements in Western Nicaragua during the Somozas’ rule (1936–1979); and Huneeus (2007) on the political and economic foundations of the protracted Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) in Chile. See in addition James’s (1994) and Neiburg’s (2003) fascinating explorations into Peronist Argentina between 1946 and 1976. See also Das (2004) and Asad (2004). For a few thought-provoking anthropological examinations of the connections between a set of symbolic forms and practices on the one hand and a particular authoritarian political history on the other, see Geschiere (1988) on Cameroon; Stoller (1995) on Niger; Nugent (1997) on Peru; Siegel (1998) on Indonesia; and Verdery (1999) on Eastern Europe. Trujillo was not a mere client of U.S. interests. Rather, as Roorda (1998a: 274) has formulated it, “he employed all the [material and symbolic] means of [U.S.] imperial control that he could adapt . . . to assert his independence from the empire” (see also Roorda 1998b). To avoid possible misunderstanding, as I see it ethnography is a method that may be used in order to reveal and document everyday practices, sociocultural ambiguity and sociocultural complexity; but it is not a privileged access to a deeper truth that is in and of itself critical of forms of political authoritarianism—or more generally, forms of domination or social inequalities. That all depends on the position and intentions of the

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ethnographer. Many ethnographic studies reproduce a fairly static, and often conservative, view of society with its power structure and meaning formations. 12. The total transcribed material covers over 2,700 pages. 13. Inevitably many details are lost when the anthropologist only takes notes—and only after the conversation. La Descubierta’s leading magical healer, whom I interviewed, was used to talking almost without pausing and so fast that I necessarily lost a good deal of what we said while we were talking together. Even the secretary in Santo Domingo (an educated native speaker, who had lived her whole life in the country) found it very hard to understand him, but finally managed to transcribe it all. 14. The names are Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC), Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), and Partido de Liberación Dominicana (PLD). The next chapter sketches the three parties’ histories.

2

Island, State, and Community

1. The colony of Santo Domingo had an early sugar industry, worked by enslaved Africans, which shipped sugar to Europe from around 1516 (Ratekin 1954; Mintz 1985:32–35). However, this industry stagnated rapidly. After 1580, Spain’s Caribbean colonies produced little sugar for export. 2. Between 1809 and 1822, Spanish colonial rule was restored in the eastern sector of Hispaniola. It is a good illustration of the political chaos at the time that it was in fact the British Navy, not the inhabitants of the Spanish part, who managed to expel the French from Santo Domingo (Moya Pons 1984a:248). 3. The expansion of North American imperialism during the period in question is well known. One illustration is Spain’s cession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States in 1898. 4. For a comprehensive study of the eight-year U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, see Calder (1984). On the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, see Trouillot (1990, in particular 100–108). 5. For analyses of international and internal Dominican factors that were important in creating and shaping the new industry, see, for example, Hoetink (1982:1–18, 64–93), del Castillo (1985), Baud (1987, 1992, 1995:147–173), Franks (1995), and Martínez (1995:33–43). 6. The main symbol of this enclave status in the Dominican geographical and social landscape is el batey, the name of the easily recognizable, usually destitute, living quarters on the Dominican sugar plantations, strongly associated with its Haitian inhabitants-workers (Moya Pons 1986a; Martínez 1995). 7. At the time of Trujillo’s coup in 1930, Haiti was still ruled by an American military government, and the fact that Trujillo was a former officer trained by the U.S. Marines must have seemed like a guarantee that both parts of the island would remain at “peace.” Although U.S. diplomatic

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

representatives had tried to prevent Trujillo’s coup, once confronted with it they accepted him, considering Trujillo a better option than his enemies. During his entire thirty-one-year rule (except for a two-year period after the Second World War and the final two years), Trujillo enjoyed U.S. support. For more on the relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic following Trujillo’s seizure of power, see Roorda (1998a, 1998b); see also Turits (2003:259). The Era of Trujillo (La Era de Trujillo) began as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. See Moya Pons (1990:710) and Turits (2003:269) about Galíndez’s book as a source of information. On the Trujillo dictatorship’s terror and repression see Vega (1985, 1986). In his research on the Trujillo regime’s agrarian policies, Turits (1997, 2003) has found that the Trujillo state—contrary to what has often been claimed—mobilized and received considerable peasant support in most regions of the country because it had something positive to offer: “Judging by the statistics, as well as peasants’ own recollections, the regime’s efforts at economic development and land distribution were fruitful” (Turits 1997:8, 10). Since then, the international tourist trade has significantly altered many areas of the country, in particular in the north and southeast, and in the towns and cities. In the mid-1980s, the tourist industry had “replaced sugar as the prime generator of foreign revenue and key source of employment” (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:119). Since 1966, the Dominican economy has grown far more diversified. In addition to the long- established export production of sugar, coffee, cocoa, and tobacco, the country has developed tourism, mining, and a number of duty-free zones containing industry of multinationals and small independent firms; the free zones are found as enclaves scattered around the country (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988:135–137; Betances 1995:128–129). The bulk of the Dominican population drew relatively little benefit from the growth of the 1970s. As Black (1986:65) has said, “the new prosperity of the 1970s was narrowly distributed. It made the old rich richer, created new categories of new rich, and expanded the middle class, but it did not trickle down to the poverty-stricken majority.” Even so, the transfer of power from Balaguer to Guzmán in 1978 was highly irregular: Balaguer only left office and thereby transferred the presidential power to the winner of the election after open pressure had been put on him by the Carter administration in the United States. For example, Dominican stereotypes say that Haitians are superior in genital endowment and sex drive. They also say that the Haitians practice less hygiene, and are dirty. Haitian women in the countryside washing clothes are said to reveal their bodies in a way unacceptable to a Dominican woman. At the same time they used the word moreno (“brown”) in an affectionate manner to refer, for instance, to one of their children who had a skin color between trigueño (“brownish-golden”) and negro (“black”). In nearly

NOTES

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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every family, children were born of differing colors, of who one was often called either negro/a, moreno/a or rubio/a (“light-skinned with fairly blond hair”) by parents and neighbors throughout his or her life. For example, in the household in La Descubierta where I lived, the mother addressed her only son as negro. Across the street, a young couple lived with the husband’s parents. The mother, an old woman, had never been called by name but just la negra (“the black”); people called her daughterin-law morena. I do not know these women’s names. For a fine discussion of the contextual uses of color terms inside, and outside, Nicaraguan families, see Lancaster (1994:211–234). For the party names in Spanish, see note 14, chapter 1. A fourth party mentioned below is the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Independiente). For sociological analyses of the Dominican political parties, see Jiménez Polanco (1999) and del Castillo (1981:7–85). Peña Gómez died in 1998. Cf. the article “Ideología y Propósitos de ‘Lo que Diga Balaguer,’ ” in Listín Diario, August 3, 1992, by A. Mota Ruíz. The PLD claimed that 94,000 duplicated personal identity cards were fabricated for Reformist voters by the state, that the voting cards of 300,000 persons were bought in order to prevent them from voting, and that more than 10,000 from the military and police (who were not permitted to vote) and Reformist minors cast votes (Cabrera Febrillet 1991:135–136). Balaguer and his allies won by a narrow margin of 25,000 votes. The source for the data on population and production in this paragraph and the next is Secretariado Técnico de la Presidencia (ONAPLAN) et al., Estrategia de Desarrollo para la Región Suroeste (1992:3–5). In all the Dominican border provinces, population density is low. In 1981, the average for the northern and southern border provinces was 37 persons per square kilometer; the average for the country was 136 (Oficina Nacional de Planificación et al., 1987:73). Travel time depends on traffic and military checks. During the fieldwork, the main road from the border in Independencia to the town of Azua included more than five permanent military checkpoints. Between the provincial capital in Independencia and the village of La Descubierta, the traveler was checked several times. The soldiers looked for Haitians without the required documents and illegally imported merchandise. These wages apply to the 1992 situation. For example, in 1992, the price of a pair of ordinary shoes in a shop in Santo Domingo was between 400 and 500 pesos. In La Descubierta, any small household needed to spend minimally 50 pesos a day on food items. Village houses were valued at 50,000 pesos. In order to build a house oneself, probably between 30,000 and 40,000 was needed. Pejorative statements, however, were not absent: when the aqueduct service broke down some explained this by asking, what you could expect when the water was left in the hands of “Haitians”? The eighty-year-old

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

NOTES

was from a southern community and settled as a young man in La Descubierta, but knowing this did not seem to matter sometimes. It is outside the scope of this study to outline the grave ecological problems related to deforestation and erosion caused by agricultural practices in the dry southwestern hills. For data on those problems, see, for example, Secretariado Técnico de la Presidencia (1992:3–10). An instructive analysis of the organization of Dominican coffee production is found in Sharpe (1977). Since Sharpe’s study, nothing seems to have changed for the better for hill coffee growers. Palmer (1976), Oficina Nacional de Planificación et al. (1987), Baud (1993a, 1993b), and Derby (1994) may together provide an overview of frontier agriculture. Peasant associations affiliated to the Independent Peasant Movement (on this movement, see Black [1986:98]) existed in La Descubierta in the early 1990s, particularly in the hills, but these had little strength, and were divided in terms of personal networks and party loyalties. The use of cheap Haitian labor in Dominican agriculture apart from the sugar industry has become widespread. See, for example, Grasmuck (1982) and Georges (1990:185). Many Haitians also work in the Dominican cities, for instance, in construction in the capital. Avila (1988:25–68) contains a detailed analysis of the typical work operations and the economy of charcoal production. According to Secretariado Técnico de la Presidencia (1992:5), southwestern production of charcoal satisfied most of the national demand. For another Dominican example, see Walker (1972:84–119). See also Georges (1990, particularly 19–20) and Brennan (2004, particularly 123–131). For historical material on the relations between men and women in colonial society, i.e., in Spanish Santo Domingo, see Moya Pons (1976) and Deive (1997:95–130). For Cuba, see Martínez-Alier (1974). On Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles and Guyana, see Clarke (1966); Wilson (1973); and Smith (1988, 1996). For a general perspective on African American cultures, see Mintz and Price (1992). The population of the border provinces grew annually at an average rate of 1.6 percent between 1970 and 1981. The corresponding national figure was 3.1 percent. This suggests heavy out-migration all along the border (Oficina Nacional de Planificación et al. 1987:66–69). Census data for La Descubierta indicate that the population hardly grew between 1960 and 1970. From 1970 to 1981 it grew a lot more, though the migration continued. Trujillo’s regime controlled movement, and villagers said that it was not common to travel to Santo Domingo before 1961. The fact that the poor had been internal migrants, while only the locals who had been relatively comfortably off had been able to go to the United States, is in accordance with much research on Dominican migration (Ugalde et al. 1979; Pessar 1982; Grasmuck 1984; Georges 1990; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Pessar 1995). La Descubierta’s migrants to the United States seem not to have behaved like the typical migrants of the Cibao region. The latter have not only

NOTES

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drawn heavily on their local networks to form “chains” of migrants (cadenas), but have also sent substantial remittances and gone home to invest in their native areas (Georges 1990). See also Levitt’s (2001) study of migrants to the United States from a southern community close to Baní. 34. Most women managed to get legal residence in Spain after a short period (e.g., a year), which meant that they moved freely and charged higher wages. 35. For works on Dominican migration to the United States, see Hendricks (1974); Georges (1990); Grasmuck and Pessar (1991); Portes and Guarnizo (1991); Pessar (1995); Levitt (2001); Ricourt (2002). See in addition Derby (1998a, in particular 470–481).

3

Kin, Friends, and Leaders

1. The topic of compadrazgo—the links established between parents and godparents in Catholic societies—has received a good deal of attention from researchers (Mintz and Wolf 1950; Wagley 1953; Gudeman 1972; Bloch and Guggenheim 1981; Friedrich 1986). In an early text, Mintz and Wolf (1950) analyzed the historical trajectory of compadrazgo in the West. Their focus was on the idiom’s changing social uses, and on compadrazgo as a highly f lexible mechanism for extending or intensifying different types of relations defined by specific contexts. Research in Latin American settings since this essay has demonstrated the compadrazgo idiom’s extreme social malleability. In the Dominican case, compadrazgo served as a cultural idiom for forging and transforming political alliances before, during, and after the long rule of Trujillo. 2. Dominican electoral history is documented in Campillo Pérez (1986) and Jiménez Polanco (1999). 3. At the turn of the century, or around 1900, the principal communities on the Dominican side of the border were San Juan de la Maguana in the south and Monte Cristi in the north. However, both these communities were situated at a certain distance from the border; one had to spend eight hours on horseback to go from San Juan de la Maguana to the border line. The only “true” border villages on the Dominican side were Las Matas de Farfán and Comendador in the southern/central borderlands. The majority of the population lived scattered throughout the countryside (Baud 1993b:41). 4. The new border control established in 1907 was viewed as an attack on frontier trade and therefore generated strong resistance. According to Clausner’s study, “during the first twenty-eight months of the receivership a total of eighteen American customs officials were killed or wounded in gun battles with contraband gangs.” (Clausner 1973:142) For more on this resistance and on border smuggling before and after 1907, see Baud’s two essays (1993a, particularly 18–21, 1993b, particularly 49–57). 5. According to Baud, “Fort Verette(s) was a marché (market) in southern Haiti in which, as it was reported in 1887, ‘the cattle and the rest of the

204

NOTES

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

commodities produced on our land are sold weekly’ [quotation from the Dominican newspaper Eco de la Opinión, 421, 26–11–1887; “El comercio fronterizo”]. At the end of the century, Croix des Bouquets, some twenty kilometers from Port-au-Prince, was converted into the most important cattle market. The wealthy ranchers organized their sales themselves. They brought their animals to their preferred spot on the market place where they sought to sell them. The smaller producers probably sold their animals to traders who gathered the cattle and other products for exportation” (Baud 1993a:11). The words in italics are the place names in Creole. Consider also the following excerpt from Victor Garrido’s (the Dominican politician) written recollection of his childhood in San Juan de la Maguana at the end of the century: “Everybody traveled to Haiti to sell their cattle and brought back what they needed of imported goods. . . . Everything the country did not produce, typically French manufactured goods, crossed the border legally or as contraband goods” (Garrido 1970:17). The locals use the word familia. It is best translated as “extended family.” However, the meaning implied by its use among Dominicans varies according to social situation. It may refer to a tiny kin group or to an extremely widespread network using the same name. Emilio’s and other locals’ development of agricultural activities in this period should be viewed as representative of a broader set of transformations in the borderlands. As Palmer, for example, has shown in his work on land use in the San Juan Valley and its westward extension, the Central Plain of Haiti, a gradual shift from cattle raising to farming took place during the first decades of the twentieth century (Palmer 1976:103). Emilio’s erection of a sugar mill may also have been typical. Palmer claims that three cash crops, cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco, were grown in both Elías Piña and Belladere (on the Haitian side) for sale in Haitian markets and notes, “It has been estimated that in the area between Las Matas and El Llano there were over 200 of these sugar mills in operation during the 1920s. They became extremely rare in Elías Piña after the 1940s when Trujillo, in effect, taxed them out of business in order to increase the sales of refined white sugar” (Palmer 1976:104–105). As Turits himself emphasizes, these conclusions are in no way meant to deny that the Trujillo policies were, in some instances, sharply contradicted by other measures that fostered latifundias: “These included arbitrary appropriations by Trujillo and the political elite as well as brutal evictions stemming from state policy occurring predominantly in the later years of the regime” (Turits 1997:330). Between 1935 and 1960, the rural proportion of the Dominican population declined only “from 82 to 70 percent—the latter being the third highest in Latin America. In contrast to the Trujillo years, the rural population fell dramatically between 1960 and 1985 from 70 to 44 percent” (Turits 1997:328, note 188). Wenceslao Ramírez was the most powerful man in the southwestern part of the country around the turn of the century. Wenceslao, born in

NOTES

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

205

Azua in 1843, obtained the confidence of the dictator Ulises Heureaux, who controlled Dominican politics from 1880 to 1899. Until his death, in 1927, Wenceslao “was unrivalled as the most inf luential man in the San Juan Valley, and much of his inf luence was transferred to his son ‘Carmito’ Ramírez” (Lundius and Lundahl 2000:41, note 26). The Haitian massacre under Trujillo started in the northern borderlands in October 1937. The following year the dictator ordered the expulsion of thousands of ethnic Haitians from the southern border areas, many of whom were killed. For a detailed study of land settlement during the Trujillo regime, see Turits (1997:17–19, 427–557; 2003:181–205). As Turits (1997:428–429) writes, colonies ranged from “state-supervised communities that effectively provided peasants with a wide range of services (housing, agricultural assistance, clinics, schools, and churches) in addition to generally ten to one hundred tareas of land [.63 to 6.3 hectares], to poorly supported settlements that offered the means for only marginal subsistence.” Turits argues that overall colonization was a key dimension of the Trujillo regime’s agrarian reform program for distributing lands to the landless while simultaneously boosting peasant production, but that “frontier colonization [which the Trujillo state continued to sponsor throughout the regime] never became more than a minor part of the overall colonization program [which embraced lands situated in many different parts of the country]. In 1950, only fourteen of the forty-two agricultural colonies were considered ‘frontier colonies,’ and they comprised merely 295,184 tareas out of 1,241,021 tareas and 2,935 of 12,949 colonists” (Turits 1997:534–535). For more on the Trujillo regime’s use of forced labor for public works, see Inoa (1994:105–152), San Miguel (1997b:266–288), and Turits (2003:300–301, note 100). One part of the Dominicanization in this part of the country was the creation and establishment of Jimaní, a completely new frontier town situated closer to the Haitian-Dominican border than either Duvergé or La Descubierta. Jimaní, founded in the early 1940s, became the new administrative center of the province and was provided with a customs office, a hospital, a market, a church, a post office, a school, an aqueduct, and a park. Jesús María Ramírez also portrays the terror and the lack of certainty and trust under the dictator. He describes situations and incidents where he became frightened or terrified and felt deep-seated fear that particular representatives of the regime would be able to hurt him or a friend (Ramírez 2000:91–116). This covers both what Julian Pitt-Rivers has called “lopsided friendships” (for example, those between villagers and Jesús María) and friendships with relative equals (Gregorio, Pablo, and others) (Pitt-Rivers 1954:140). As Georges writes, with the election of Balaguer in 1966, “cattle raising became the object of a vigorous campaign of promotion by

206

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

NOTES

the state . . . [T]he goal of the Balaguer regime was to promote exportoriented production of meat . . .” It was aided by state assistance and higher export prices, and “as beef production became reoriented toward export and domestic supply shrank, the result was a sharp rise in domestic prices as well” (Georges 1990:179). I have borrowed the expression “gut knowledge” from Douglas (1978:276–281). Independencia’s senator had always been recruited from Duvergé because of that community’s large proportion of the province’s votes. The province’s two deputies had typically been from either La Descubierta or Jimaní. In addition the deputy for the PRD, Rafaelito, was totally besieged by his followers whenever he went home. Hence, although we met and talked in the village, we agreed on the tranquility of the capital for in-depth interviewing. For example, on one occasion Rafaelito even “escaped” to his Reformist neighbor’s house in the village in order not to be woken up in the middle of the night by his supporters. The words perredeísta (PRD supporter) and perredeísmo (PRD political activities/practices) are derived from the Spanish pronunciation of PRD. Alfredo’s opinion was that the PLD, or Juan Bosch’s new party, had already shown in practice (in communities where the party won the municipal elections in 1990) that this party, too, exclusively employed its own followers. We shall soon see how the practices of the PLD in La Descubierta after 1990 confirm Alfredo’s view. Many of these situations required great prudence, tact, and delicacy in order not to undermine authority. For example, Rafaelito once described to me how difficult it had been for him to avoid explaining to a local who wanted him to ask Peña Gómez for a fridge that he could not, in fact, take such an issue directly to their leader. The word peledeísta (PLD supporter) is derived from the Spanish pronunciation of PLD. The Congress system of exemptions was also used particularly to intensify party activities in periods of need. For the 1990 elections, for example, the Reformist senator for Independencia was granted an extra exemption (his third in the term) in order to convert it to money to be distributed in his campaign for reelection. Also based in the south and a friend of Miriam, rather than of Rafaelito, was the general secretary of the Reformist Party and head of the Central Bank, who in the streets and the press was often accused of large-scale corruption. See, for example, Listín Diario, August 9, 1991, 10. On the accusations about relations between politicians in the south and the drug business see, for example, El Nacional, May 19, 1992, 5; and Listín Diario, June 22, 1992, 12. I return to the histories written by Pichardo and Peña Battle in later chapters.

NOTES

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29. On the notion of power-brokers as it has commonly been used in anthropology, see Wolf (1956, 1966), Adams (1970), and Blok (1975:7–8). An analysis of local Dominican leadership in terms of interactionist theory and ideas about brokers may be found in Geffroy’s (1975) study of a rural township in the late 1960s. 30. Jesús María often called Trujillo El Jefe (“the Chief ”).

4 Negotiating Rule: The Reformists and the Public Sector 1. The details in this and the subsequent paragraphs apply to the year of my fieldwork, i.e., 1991–1992. 2. I saw such cooperation in practice: as a Reformist militant and a teacher, my landlady in La Descubierta sat on the board of the local ADP with peledeístas and meetings were regularly held in her home. 3. However, when both the teachers’ union and employees in the hospitals went on a general strike that filled Dominican headlines for more than three months in 1991, Balaguer increased salaries by practically nothing. 4. Approximately sixteen years later, just before the presidential elections of 1994, or less than two years after I left La Descubierta, Alvarez Bogaert switched political sides; he struck an agreement with Peña Gómez. The agreement involved Alvarez Bogaert becoming the PRD’s candidate for the vice-presidency, and his factions across the country voting for the PRD (Hartlyn 1998:239). 5. We may say that this supports Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994:9) when they argue, in the introduction to the book Dislocating Masculinity, “that the male/female dichotomy has no intrinsic biological or other essential reality. Rather, this dichotomy is a potent metaphor for difference in Western cultures whose import must be understood in terms of historical and ethnographic specificities . . . there are no fixed ways these metaphors are grounded or employed in social life. They are only one among many other sets of metaphors used in the construction of human identities.” 6. See an interview with the general secretary in Listín Diario, July 6, 1992, 3. 7. As Kearney writes: “Although Balaguer publicly supported the bill in several speeches that year [1971], he did not push it through the congress. The task would have been a simple one since the legislative branch virtually rubber-stamped everything Balaguer submitted to it. One must assume that a merit-based civil service was low on the list of Balaguer’s priorities . . . It was ten years later under his successor, Antonio Guzmán, that the Dominican Republic came within a whisker of enactment of a civil service bill . . . However, the congress was not the same docile creature that Balaguer had commanded . . . Introduced before the House of Deputies on February 27, 1981, the bill was approved on May 27 without significant modifications. The Senate approved a similar version

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on May 26, 1982 (same session), and sent it to the Deputies with one slight substantive modification. The waning session expired before the lower house could act on the Senate version. Although the bill has been reintroduced on three occasions, it has not received serious discussion in either house since 1982. The government of the Dominican Republic has continued to operate with a spoils system despite substantial advantages that are promised by a merit-based civil service” (Kearney 1986:146, 150, note 7). 8. The source is Listín Diario, June 12, 1992, 10. 9. Similarly, E.P. Thompson showed how the English masses in the eighteenth century were more conservative, politically speaking, than the capitalist and ruling elites. The hunger riots of the poor were based on religiously informed patronage ideals—or ideas that dated at least from the sixteenth century—the emergency measures in time of crisis being codified in the Book of Orders. This moral and political thinking became a weapon of the weak in their struggles with representatives of the ruling groups over rights and obligations (Thompson 1971:79).

5

Negotiating Rule: Political Fraud as Interaction

1. The plentiful idealizing rhetoric about Western democracy aside, we have to recognize that election fraud has played a part even in the heart of the West. The Gilded Age in the United States has been associated with trickery and cunning, and with fraud and corruption, ever since it got its name from the title of the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. An illustration is the expression “to gerrymander” (used as a synonym for “to produce political fraud”), derived from the name of a governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, his administration enacted a law redrawing the state’s senatorial districts, consolidating the Federalist Party vote in a few of these districts and giving disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans. An artist, Gilbert Stuart, converted one district’s outline into a salamander, but was told by the Boston Sentinel editor, “Better say a gerrymander.” The word caught on, meaning to divide electoral districts unfairly or simply to manipulate so as to reach undue conclusions. 2. See also Wolf and Hansen (1972:108–117, particularly 109–112) on the role of religion in Latin America. 3. The charges of fraud in the Gilded Age in the United States were rarely or never documented; instead they were everywhere anecdotal, unsystematic, impressionistic, and inconclusive (Argersinger 1985:669–670). 4. A reform was prepared before the election in 1994. A new act was passed, which specified issuing of a new personal identity document to all Dominicans that would serve as a voting card. Until the 1990 election, the following documents were required in order to be able to vote: the identity card (cédula) and the voting card (carnet electoral). The act merged the two documents, thereby reducing the possibilities of fraud,

NOTES

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

209

and the two institutions responsible for producing identity documents, the Registry and Personal Identity offices, were integrated in the Central Electoral Board. In spite of these changes, the election held on May 16, 1994 may have been the most fraudulent in recent Dominican history (see, for example, the Spanish newspaper El País, May 18 and 21, 1994 and August 12, 1994). Argersinger claims that election fraud in the Gilded Age in the United States profoundly permeated rural areas as well. For example, he describes “massive vote-buying in rural Ohio, with up to 90 percent of the voters in Adams County selling their votes in the 1880s” (Argersinger 1985:673–674). Colonel Francisco Caamaño was murdered in February 1973 “after being taken prisoner in the mountains while trying to establish a guerrilla foco similar to that attempted by Che Guevara in Bolivia . . . When he reached the Dominican mountains in February 1973 eight years after the revolt of 1965, the country had changed enormously . . . Many of Caamaño’s old comrades had changed during these eight years as they watched their colleagues fall victims to the government’s terrorism. Others joined the world of business in an expanding economy” (Moya Pons 1990:529). Such a remark is strongly reminiscent of one of Argersinger’s illustrations from the Gilded Age elections: “The notorious William M. Tweed himself admitted . . . for New York: ‘The ballots made no result; the counters made the result’ ” (Argersinger 1985:678). Anthropologists and other social scientists will no doubt note the existence of exceptions to this pattern. They exist, but are unfortunately not many. The following two studies contain deeply fascinating examinations of political fraud in Nigeria: Miles (1988) and Apter (1999). For a set of works which have in common that they discuss political campaigns and elections as examples of symbolic and ritual life, see Abélès (1988); McLeod (1991, 1999); Borneman (1992:316–319, 2002); Lomnitz et al. (1993); Gutmann (2002); and Coles (2004). This should not surprise us. The Cuban author Alejo Carpentier is usually said to have discovered the real maravilloso or the “marvellously real” in a part of Hispaniola—in Haiti in 1943. In the prologue to his book The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier has said about his stay in Haiti that time that I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henry Christophe [second Haitian Chief of State (1807–1820; King Henry I from 1811 to 1820)], an incredible monarch, far more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists [in Paris]—those who are so fond of imaginary tyrannies, regimes which they never endured. At every step I found the marvellously real. But I realized, moreover, that this presence and force of the marvellously real was not unique to Haiti, but patrimony of all America . . . But what is the history of all America if not a chronicle of the marvellously real? (Carpentier 1976:98–99)

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As Michael Taussig has claimed, Carpentier’s story about his “discovery of lo real maravilloso in 1943 bears all the marks of the marvellous itself ” (Taussig 1987:166).

6 Constructing Masculinity, Negotiating Rule 1. For works that have powerfully brought out the need to examine modern state-building processes everywhere as gendered concepts and practices, see Dore and Molyneux (2000) and Alonso (2005). See in addition Mosse (1985, 1996) and Bederman (1995). 2. See in addition the following two works: Derby (2000) and de Moya (2004). Both these studies support the basic view that I advocate here. 3. A Dominican saying is that “Men belong to the street, women to the home” (Los hombres son de la calle, las mujeres de la casa). However, Dominican women walk the streets of their pueblos and towns constantly. Women run errands, run a business, go to their job, visit the park, go to discos and beaches, and travel. In short, what counts is that women’s actions (like men’s) conform to local moral values; if they do, the women in question are said to be in “the house/home” and not in “the street.” 4. Still, we should note an important difference: while the Andalusian men described by Brandes linked women explicitly with the Devil on religious grounds, and said that “Man is good, woman evil” (Brandes 1980:77), men in La Descubierta constantly changed their position or perspective. They said frequently both that there existed no woman who was good, and that there were good and bad women, and that a man could destroy his own marriage and his own household through his own bad conduct. 5. The discussion also implied strong support for Tyson. 6. I have been struck by two characteristics of Catholic and magical notions in the Dominican Republic: first, by their ramifications and complexity; and second, by their local variety. The first characteristic means that the bulk of the beliefs found near the southern border exist in similar or overlapping forms in the whole country (Davis 1987; Deive [1975] 1988; Lundius and Lundahl 2000). Magic among Dominicans corresponds to a thoroughly transnational process and should be seen as part of 500 years of knowledge circulation of a global scale. But the second striking characteristic—that of local variation—is just as noteworthy (for more on this, see, for example, one of Melville Herskovits’s classic essays, “African Gods and Catholic Saints in the New World” ([1937] 1966:323)). In La Descubierta, villagers lived in no absolute agreement regarding names and characteristics of spirits and saints—or concerning a multitude of details connected with ritual procedures. Baptisms, for example, whether those of infants, or those of the specific saints who possessed specific healers, could be performed in different ways in the village. Still, we may say that many general understandings were widely shared. They include belief in a struggle between the opposed forces of God and the Devil, which defines two main roads for human beings—those of good or evil actions. God also

NOTES

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

211

commands as His helpers many spiritual beings, whose portraits are seen in the chromolithographs of the saints, found in most households. Nearly all people must relate to the saints to some extent, but only some have a particular relationship, one that involves saints and spirits more or less regularly occupying their bodies. Those who experience possession are said to be “mounted” (montados) by “mysteries” (which is another word for “saints” or “spirits”) and are called “horses” (caballos); a few of them achieve expert positions as magicians (called curanderos, brujos or hechiceros)—that is, as healers and sorcerers. The most common, general reference to a person who practices healing, fortune telling, or destructive magic in the southwestern region is simply “one who knows” (uno que sabe). Men’s fear of being emasculated by a woman is such a common theme that no bibliography is given. However, for some basic metaphors among men who use the Spanish language, see Brandes (1980:84–96, 103–106). In fact, when the leading village healer, in the quotation above, said about Santa Marta that “she has a serpent,” he pronounced the word as una serpienta. This error consisting of pronouncing a (instead of e) at the end of serpiente (or the general linguistic form of the female gender) supports the view that the serpent is connected with female power. It is interesting to note the similarities between this discourse among Dominican men and what Peter Wade has described from the Pacific and Atlantic coastal regions of Colombia—two regions which (unlike the white/mestizo Andean interior of that country) have been strongly inf luenced by black slave populations. He writes: “[T]here is a further concept of femininity, again recognized by men and women, but represented differently by them. For women, there is the notion of an independence in motherhood which serves to protect them to some extent. Men tend to represent this in the concept of women as materialista (mercenary), that is, as grasping and trying to exploit men economically. Men may also assert that women try to ensnare them and even render them helpless by magical means” (Wade 1994:120). Needless to say, Wade’s argument that men and women interpret the same events differently applies also to the Dominican case: the phenomena which men in La Descubierta considered as evidence of female exploitation of themselves, and of the existence of a dangerous femininity, were understood rather differently by women. Gilmore (1990:35) has pointed to the complexity of the verb servir (literally translated as “to serve”) in relation to men’s performance. When people in La Descubierta said about a particular man that no sirve (“he doesn’t work”), it could refer either to his power as provider, or to the power associated with his sexual organ, or to both. There is a large literature on the cuckold in relation to the notions of honor and shame in Mediterranean societies. See particularly Pitt-Rivers (1971), Peristiany (1974), Blok (1981), Wikan (1984), and Gilmore (1987a). The deepest fear was not adultery per se, but not being able to pass the public test of manhood if your friends suddenly forced you to face yourself

212

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

NOTES

with a pair of “growing horns.” In this connection, I shall argue that neither Julian Pitt-Rivers nor Brandes is completely right (although the latter is more right than the former) when they disagree on who places the horns and thereby deprives a given man of his masculinity. Pitt-Rivers’s original interpretation was that it is the male rival who puts on the horns (the horns, in this case, being understood as the symbol of the cuckolder’s masculinity), while Brandes argues—and I agree—that it is the wife who places horns on her husband (Pitt-Rivers 1971:116; Brandes 1980:90). Still, it seems that there is also a sense in which a deceived man for ever puts on and fastens his own horns, and in that way feminizes himself in the critical moment—that is, when he suddenly looks at himself as a cuckold and, remaining passive, is unable to do what a man must do. This is not to say that other factors did not also play a part in shaping the man-woman relationship, such as the social distribution of income and education. For discussions of social and cultural aspects of bachata music, see Pacini Hernández (1989a, 1989b, 1992). See also Davis (1994), Mateo (1996), and Austerlitz (1997). For a comparative volume on the role of music in the construction of black ethnicity in the Caribbean and South America, see Béhague (1994). For an essay that discusses connections between notions of masculinity in the Pacific and Atlantic coastal regions of Colombia and the popular Colombian (coastal) musical genre vallenato, see Wade (1994). A discussion of Argentine tango and masculine concepts may be found in Archetti (1991). Specific imageries of the beauty of violence have also been noted for many other parts of the world. See, for example, Moeran (1986), Keesing (1991), and Harris (1994). For example, Mario explained that he had once been a follower of Bosch, but had changed his political loyalty. As quoted in the preceding chapter: “I was a follower of Bosch in the 1960s. But I don’t like Bosch, because Bosch cackles a lot, and the politicians must be guapos, like the men in the pueblos.” In La Descubierta, I even heard men (from Balaguer’s and Peña Gómez’s parties) say that “Bosch is not much of a man” (Bosch es poco hombre). The mayor at the time in La Descubierta (Pablo’s son) represented the PRD. The mayor in the provincial capital represented the Reformist Party. However, in the context of the statement that we are considering here, political party seemed to have no relevance; in addition, the speaker himself, who criticized his own mayor and praised the mayor in the provincial capital, was a member of the PRD. This vision has to be seen in a broader Caribbean and Latin American context. For example, Roger Abrahams has written about the Englishspeaking Caribbean that to be distrusted as a selfish person is in fact similar to shyness: “[because] value is placed on keeping company . . . social pressure is often brought on the selfish (shy) person or the garden man (loner), who are distrusted because of their lack of sociability” (Abrahams 1983:59;

NOTES

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

213

emphasis in original). There is an instructive parallel here: between the moral denunciation of “the garden man (loner)” in the settings analyzed by Abrahams, and of the man described as “a man who is ‘from home to work’ (de la casa a su trabajo).” The image of the generous man (the man who spends his days, and shares rum—or beer or wine—stories, money, and other things with his male friends) is of course characteristic of many Caribbean and Latin American societies. See, for example, Wilson (1973); Abrahams (1983); Lancaster (1994); Wade (1994); and Gutmann (1996). A useful discussion of concepts of sharing and generosity among men in Andalusia can be found in Gilmore (1987b). This image of what constituted good masculinity was thrown into relief, for example, when Mario described Jesús María’s leadership during the Era of Trujillo: “[ Jesús María] danced a lot. He drank a lot, oh, when he drank rum, he lasted four days drinking rum and offering rum to everyone who wanted and food as well. In those days there were some large mango trees there [close to his home]; . . . the whole pueblo went to dance and drink, attentive to him; he carried out up to eighteen cases of rum, for everyone to drink. He made himself famous.” Both these discourses, of course, seem related to notions of masculinity among Europeans and North Americans. See also Peter Wilson’s classic book Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (1973), which was one of the first analyses to focus on how masculinity in some Caribbean societies is produced in a tension/balance between two sets of discourses—those on womanizing and drinking (in Wilson’s terms, “reputation aspects”) and domestic stability (“respectability aspects”). In the Dominican case, as in many others, conf licts do not develop simply between “masculinity” and “femininity” seen as univocal opposites in a relationship that is marked only by “male dominance.” Rather, we should say that the conf licts emerge from tensions and conf licts between different aspects of concepts of masculinity and femininity. For the same general argument based on Mexican and Colombian data respectively, see Gutmann (1996) and Wade (1994). See also Lancaster (1994:34–47) on machismo and wife beating in Nicaragua. The interaction between drinking and womanizing on the one hand and the building of relations with the women’s kinsmen in such a case is conditioned: the womanizer offers his services. For example, Rafael helped his women establish small shops run by the women themselves—a basis for household viability and the upbringing of their children—and he showed himself as useful to many in the local areas in question, for he acted as a broker vis-à-vis others, such as state representatives (helping people if they needed a loan for agricultural purposes, for example, or a public document). Mario emphasized that a political leader had to be a man who acted as the seducer: “If you arrive where there are five or six girls and have a drink,

214

24.

25.

26.

27.

NOTES

soon you f lirt with all of them. But if you don’t drink and dance, you cannot do that. Nothing . . . A man has to be a drinker and a dancer; if he isn’t, he isn’t valiente [no tiene valentía]. [Note that such a use of the word valentía directly links the hombre valiente or the hombre guapo—or the image of man the courageous fighter—to notions of the use of seduction and ideas about male beauty.] The man must be a spender, a drinker, clean, he cannot be dirty. The leader has to be a man who gets in contact and speaks with others.” A note on the case of Balaguer: a Dominican poet once called Balaguer “the only monk in the country.” A bachelor and without heirs, he lived his whole life surrounded by women—his mother and seven sisters. Balaguer’s home in the Dominican capital was a two-f loor annex situated at the back of the mansion of his sister. Every Sunday he spent an hour at his mother’s tomb, the largest of the cemetery (see, for example, José de Cordoba’s article “Dominican President with Strong Domination” [Presidente Dominicano tiene fuerte dominio de función] in Listín Diario, June 11, 1992, originally published in the Wall Street Journal). While villagers in La Descubierta sometimes mentioned Balaguer’s lack of children, it is nonetheless slightly surprising that his shy and ascetic style seemed hardly to threaten his respect as a man. However, Balaguer “scored” well with regard to other male virtues. Above all, he was seen by others as a man who had a gift for seducing others with words, and as one who was engaged in the construction of the nation. My guess is that Balaguer’s results in the public sphere had in fact been so strikingly visible that they had mostly placed the issue of his masculine strength and power beyond discussion. Or, as Miriam, the local leader, once put it: “The word is important. It is primordial.” Since I have referred to Abrahams’s study, let me note explicitly that there are of course significant differences between the English-speaking societies analyzed by him and the Spanish-speaking Dominicans; his detailed findings are difficult to apply in the Dominican context. For example, it is of no relevance to use two main categories developed analytically by Abrahams in order to discuss the West Indian man-of-words—those of good talking (or talking sweet); and broad talking (or talking bad)—among Spanish-speaking Dominicans (Abrahams 1983:3). As we may see from the emphasis placed on “natural” and “non-invented” language, men in La Descubierta are—at least at a level of conscious strategies—not much, or not at all, into the uses of words that Abrahams has analyzed from St. Vincent as talking nonsense: “Talking nonsense [as opposed to talking sense] means a number of interrelated things: selfconsciously departing from a logical or factual basis of argument; talking in creole; being hesitant or indecorous; or being totally out of control of the language; that is, making noise” (Abrahams 1983:90; italics in original). Here, as with the other symbols that I consider in this chapter, I shall discuss only the meanings of “serious” that applied to men. The classification

NOTES

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

215

of a woman as either “serious” or “shameless” (seria or sinvergüenza) was focused on the issue of sexual/marital fidelity. Needless to say, this was not the case for men (though, as we have seen, a man should not only be a “seducer” or mujeriego but also a “good father”). Lauria wrote: “We must emphasize that joking, riding, kidding, banter, the ironic sally, are among the salient characteristics of all encounters between men, except in the courtroom, in churches, and during parts of the work process” (Lauria 1964:60). Lauria recognizes that “Respeto [respect] and relajo are sometimes seen as antithetical; ‘si tú no respetas y te pones a relajar con cualquiera, nunca te respetarán a tí’ (‘if you do not defer properly to others and fool around with everyone, no one will respect you’) is a statement frequently made to children—and to ethnographers” (Lauria 1964:63). The point is that in La Descubierta, grown men said this not only to those who were ignorant and helpless (like the anthropologist and children) but also to each other. For example, a villager explained to me, the stranger/anthropologist, while we had one of our first conversations: “Right now I cannot use any relajo with you, for I don’t know who you are or how to joke with you; nor do I know whether you would like it if I were to joke with you. Therefore I respect you as you are so that you respect me as I am. Do you see?” As the preceding chapters have attempted to show, such friendship had most often a lot to do with practical motives and interests. Indeed, the point is precisely that friendship and compadrazgo in this social setting were useful and necessary in terms of politics, trade, employment, agriculture, and so forth. However, for a compadrazgo between two men to be useful, it was necessary that the men liked each other, and basically saw themselves, and were seen by others, as “good men”—men worthy of respect. This is in accordance with Lancaster’s analysis of compadrazgo, friendship, and provisioning among urban poor in Managua (1994:52–68). Men typically took great pride in communicating the number of their compadres, the most evident sign of their own moral and political accumulation. The father of Rafaelito once told me that he liked cockfighting, but had stopped going to the fights, for in the cockfighting arena (in many ways a symbol of masculinity and relations between men) he couldn’t find anybody to bet with; in the cockfighting arena, he could only find his friends! Such a statement captures nicely the extent to which friendship and compadrazgo between men were both a delicate business and precious symbols. The word tíguere is spelled the way Dominicans typically pronounce tigre, the Spanish word for “tiger.” The information in this chapter about the genealogy of the social classification of the tíguere in the Dominican Republic is based on Collado’s brief discussion of the term’s linguistic and social origins (Collado 1992:13–24).

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NOTES

35. In this connection, “canonization” is not a randomly chosen word. Collado’s book’s preface was written by Francisco Comarazamy, editor and book reviewer of the traditionally most prestigious newspaper in the Dominican Republic, the Listín Diario. 36. The theme of the trickster is not unknown in other African American settings. For example, in his study Soulside, Hannerz has described the daily construction of myths of a “trickster” among black men in a Washington ghetto (Hannerz 1969:112–117). 37. Even so, the word tigre used to label a type of men has a much longer history. Collado mentions that the word was used in the early nineteenth century by J.B. Lemonnier Delafosse, a Frenchman in Hispaniola (Collado 1992:23, quotation from Lemonnier Delafosse, Segunda Campaña de Santo Domingo. Guerra Domínico-Francesa de 1808 [1946], Santiago, Dominican Republic: Editorial El Diario). 38. Collado therefore asks the interesting question (but without having an answer to it) of why it is that the image of the tíguere took root among Dominicans while, as he claims, the Cubans did not develop the tigre as an important social type (Collado 1992:20–22). 39. For the demographic data, see Hoetink (1982:43–44) and (for the year 1981) public census data.

7

Making the Nation

1. Narratives about dirty money and an evil contract can be found in many countries and should be analytically approached as a cultural form with many possible meanings. In a paper confronting aspects of Michael Taussig’s general thesis about devil-pact stories in the book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980) (Krohn-Hansen 1995), I argued that the devil-pact stories in the Dominican setting did not at all represent a radical or progressive perspective, nor for that matter a subaltern perspective, on normal bourgeois exploitation, as Taussig’s text would lead us to argue. Rather, they were grounded in ways of reasoning among the people that served to define money as a buttress of living. What was being condemned (when locals accused particular individuals of having an evil contract) was not money, which was part of human relations, but certain ways of acquiring it. For authors who have criticized Taussig’s work, see Trouillot (1986), Appadurai (1986:11), Parry and Bloch (1989:9, 19), and Edelman (1994). 2. An instructive, though tragic, parallel to the process that I discuss here is found in Taussig’s book Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man (1987:3–135). This book attempts to analyze the cultural dynamic of a social landscape in which Indians of the jungle in the Putumayo region— rather than blacks—both carry a stigma and at the same time are actively sought for their particular knowledge. 3. According to Deive (1988:257–258), Arcahaie is also considered to be a center for sorcerers who prepare and sell zombies, that is, dead persons

NOTES

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

217

who are removed from their tombs and revived through magic in order to put them to work. By alterity I mean identity differences, the opposition of self and other. As I have described in detail previously, La Descubierta’s f lat irrigated lowlands were largely owned by the Ramírez family. Their accumulation began in the early 1920s. When I lived in La Descubierta, many said that the earlier generations of the Ramírez—or Emilio, Jesús María, and Alejandro—were “dirty” people, meaning that they accumulated wealth with the aid of bacás. The generation that dominated in the early 1990s was represented by Ramirito, Alejandro’s son. The locals differed in their views of him. A few villagers’ deaths had been blamed on his having sold them, and he kept away from wakes with the possibility of these accusations in mind. However, a majority of those who held bacá notions claimed that Ramirito’s bacá was just for the protection of his land and cattle, not for selling people. As a man said, “[Ramirito’s bacá is] for having cattle . . . Ramirito’s bacá isn’t for doing anyone evil.” Duarte was forced into exile immediately after the liberation in 1844. Dominican patriotic history has represented the contact and relationship with France (instead of with Spain) as a “downfall.” As Moya Pons has written, “[t]he surrender of [the colony of ] Santo Domingo to France [as a part of the Treaty of Basle] in 1795 ranks as one of the great traumas in the history of the Dominican nation. It disrupted the Spanish colonial system and plunged the country into a turbulent torrent of [black] revolutions, [the Dominican-Haitian] wars and [Haitian] invasions [up till 1857]” (Moya Pons 1984a:245). See also Martínez (1997). Martínez (1997:228) writes that the images of the country’s origins among the poor residents on a Dominican sugar plantation with whom he did fieldwork “surprisingly . . . sooner conform to than contest officially-approved versions of history, that glorify the Spaniard, sanctify the Native American, ignore the African, and demonize the Haitian.” The Spanish title is Compendio de la Historia de Santo Domingo. The first of two writers (the other being José Gabriel García) who are commonly said to have created Dominican historiography was Antonio Del Monte y Tejada, whose four-volume work on life in Hispaniola during colonial times was begun in 1816 after he had emigrated to Cuba because of a Haitian invasion. As a Spaniard, Del Monte y Tejada wrote in order to explain and justify the Spanish presence in Santo Domingo (Moya Pons 1986c:253–254). In this paragraph, I rely heavily on data in Moya Pons (1986c:255–256). The Spanish title is Resumen de Historia Patria (Pichardo [1921] 1974). For more on the hegemonic Dominican discourse on the nation and the island of Tortuga, see the book La isla de la Tortuga (The Island of Tortuga) written by the Dominican historian Manuel Peña Battle ([1951] 1988b). Peña Battle was among Trujillo’s principal ideologues and producers of anti-Haitian discourses after the 1937 massacre. His La isla de la Tortuga

218

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

NOTES

contains a history of the seventeenth century in Hispaniola. See also Peña Battle’s history of the frontier question in Hispaniola (Peña Battle [1946] 1988a), and Torres-Saillant (1999:78–82) for a critical discussion of the part played by Peña Battle in the formation of the twentieth-century Dominican nation. Lauren Derby, the historian, has written the following: “The accusation that Haitians were somehow behind a constant, silent drain of Dominican cattle across the border is a rumour circulated constantly in the border from the early part of this century until today. . . . There is no archival evidence supporting this assertion, yet the charge continues to circulate nonetheless. Why?” (Derby 1994:520–521). Tragically enough, the country’s anti-Haitianism gained strength from the mid-1980s onward. Moya Pons claims in a work published in 1992: “The lack of political stability in Haiti since 1985 and the recent crisis produced by the election and fall of Jean Bertrand Aristide have exacerbated anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic, and have again opened the field for a reformulation of the anti-Haitian and nationalist ideas which the Trujillista ideology knew to exploit very efficiently. Today, those ideas enjoy ample support among the Dominican people” (Moya Pons 1992:31). Senses of nation-ness have often been evoked and shaped on the basis of particular literary products (Bhabha 1990; Sommer 1991; Skurski 1996). Shortly after I had arrived in La Descubierta to conduct research, Miriam and her husband Piñeyro chose two books from their library to lend me. The two were Enriquillo and Freddy Prestol Castillo’s famous novel about the 1937 Haitian massacre, El Masacre se pasa a pié (Prestol Castillo [1973] 1989). As part of a nationalist resistance against the United States’ eight-year occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), the country saw “a generalized return to the myth of the [Dominicans’] Hispanic characteristics among that time’s leading intellectuals” (Cassá 1976:72). See also Mateo (1993: Chapter 3); Fennema (1998). Sommer quotes from Franklin J. Franco, Trujillismo: Génesis y rehabilitación (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultural Dominicana, 1971:67). For an attempt to define “arellanos” for sociological purposes, see El Batey (Moya Pons 1986a), a socioeconomic study of the company compounds for cane workers (bateyes) on the Dominican Republic’s sugar plantations. El Batey defines arellanos as persons “between the Haitian and the Dominican,” and “with one of his or her ancestors of Haitian origin” (“sociológicamente hablando, entre el haitiano y el dominicano se encuentran los ‘arellanos’ ”/“[una persona] con uno de sus ascendientes de origen haitiano”) (Moya Pons 1986a:27). This is not to say that these mixed unions have not taken place at all since 1937. Moreover the typical living quarters on the Dominican sugar plantations have their own demographic pattern, one that also includes a number of Haitian-Dominican unions (Moya Pons 1986a:27–28).

NOTES

219

22. The term arellano is used to label those who seem to be neither “insiders” nor “outsiders” but instead are what Victor Turner has described as “liminal” entities, distinct for having a highly ambiguous classification since they appear to be “neither here nor there” (Turner 1977:95).

8

Bloody Memories

1. Since the 1980s, anthropology has produced a substantial body of work that explores the intersections among violence, modern state building, and memory. See, for example, Taussig (1987, 2005); Kapferer (1988); Feldman (1991); Bloch (1992); Warren (1993b); Malkki (1995); Nordstrom and Robben (1995); Daniel (1996); Kleinman et al. (1997); Das et al. (2000); Sluka (2000); and Coronil and Skurski (2005). In this study, I have benefited greatly from this whole literature. 2. This term, el desalojo, means both “eviction” and “dislodging,” and was perhaps the most common term used by southern border residents when they referred to the 1937 massacre of Haitians. 3. The state’s anti-Haitian discourses were at their strongest during the years from 1942 to 1945, when they accompanied the beginning of the program of Dominicanization of the border area (Vega 1988:16). 4. “The Meaning of a Policy” is commonly viewed as having been the most important of the speeches that attempted to explain and justify closing of the border and Dominicanization (Cassá 1976). 5. Turits writes the following about Dominican civilians’ role in the massacre, and about differences between the development of the violence in the northern and southern borderlands: Dominican civilians played disparate roles in the massacre, from helping Haitians hide and escape to assisting outside military units to navigate, locate, and identify “Haitians.” Soldiers also forcefully recruited some civilians to participate in the killings, generally prisoners or local residents linked to the regime’s informal repressive apparatus. Above all, the difficult task of burying the dead fell on civilians . . . The October massacre was concentrated in the northern frontier and western parts of the Cibao. The extensive Haitian population in the southern frontier would also suffer from Trujillo’s wrath though their fate was somewhat different. At the end of 1937 and during the first half of 1938, Haitians would be steadily evicted and deported from this region, a process during which probably hundreds were killed. Unlike in the north, however, prior warning was given to “Haitians” to abandon the country. The population was exhorted to leave for Haiti, rather than being deliberately prevented from doing so. As a result, most Haitians from the southern frontier reportedly managed to escape with their lives. (Turits 1997:507–508) 6. On the Trujillo regime’s limited efforts at white or foreign colonization, see Turits (1997:540–553). Turits notes that the regime “made only

220

NOTES

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

limited efforts at white immigration during the first nearly twenty-five years of its rule,” but encouraged some Spanish and then Japanese immigration in the 1950s (Turits 1997:546, 547–548, 552). As Turits (1997:507) has written, “During this slaughter, the basis for distinguishing ‘Haitians’ from ‘Dominicans’ was not obvious. Were Haitians who had lived several generations in the Dominican Republic and spoke Spanish f luently still ‘Haitian?’ And how should children of Haitians and Dominicans be identified? The military’s litmus test for deciding who was ‘Haitian’ was language or accent, as color was not a distinguishing characteristic and birthplace was considered irrelevant. Soldiers demanded that those captured utter ‘perejil’ (parsley) or ‘tijera’ (scissors) or numerous other phrases with the letter ‘r.’ Inability to pronounce the Dominican ‘r’ served as a telltale sign of Haitian identity.” Even so, in order not to lose here a sense of change as relative and contextual, we should recall the brutal use of military force by Blanco’s PRD government in Santo Domingo in April 1984: after negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Blanco’s government attempted to take advantage of the Holy week holidays to raise the prices of all essential products. The result was a popular uprising that was only quelled after three days during which the army killed more than seventy people. This case of state repression was among the most violent in all the Latin American countries that faced both the IMF and popular riots during that period (Ianni 1987; Walton 1989). The Trujillo regime’s two main penal colonies were El Sisal and Julia Molina, situated respectively in Azua and Nagua. Both were operated by the military. Turits (2003:193) writes the following about Colonel Alcántara: El Sisal, the penal colony located in Azua, “became an institution defined by terror . . . when Colonel Alcántara was appointed as its supervisor in 1952. Alcántara used the colony as a conveniently withdrawn site for the torture and murder of political prisoners as well as for the forced labor of others . . . Alcántara is still remembered for his brutal and capricious system of terror, including randomly killing a number of prisoners.” Graziano’s quotations are from Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz, with Gordon Armstrong, Golden Age of the Theatre, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979, 22; Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 20. This is in accordance with the picture drawn by Malcolm Walker from a different Dominican community, Villalta, studied by him in 1967–1968: “While relatively few,” Walker writes, “actually shared in these benefits [which the Trujillo state provided in Villalta, such as a number of homes and a hospital], the poor remember them vividly and speak of Trujillo’s generosity and his concern for the poor. . . . As to Trujillo’s tyranny, most Villalteros say they had little to fear as long as they had ‘respect’ ” (Walker 1970:495). See also Turits (2003:206–231).

NOTES

221

12. Such sayings were very common when people recalled the times of Trujillo. People said again and again that there was order (“there wasn’t any robbery”), and that all people worked (as they maintained, “everybody had to have the 10 tareas,” referring to the obligation for households to cultivate at least that amount of land). 13. For example, one may compare passages on the Era of Trujillo in Balaguer’s two books La palabra encadenada ([1975] 1985) and La isla al revés ([1983] 1990).

9

Conclusion

1. For an overview of the anthropology and ethnography of (forms of ) democracy, see Paley (2002). 2. In today’s world, polarized ideas about democracy and dictatorship may be observed in many different contexts. In his book The Magical State, an ethnographic study of the construction of a modern oil state Venezuela, Fernando Coronil shows how Venezuelans tend to culturally shape the country’s twentieth-century history, its past, present, and future, in terms of a mystifying dichotomy, the democracy-dictatorship dichotomy (Coronil 1997).

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INDEX

(Please note that page numbers appearing in italics indicate end notes.) Abrams, Philip, 7–8, 155 African Political Systems (Radcliffe-Brown), 7 agriculture Haiti and, 22–23, 42, 91, 92 Trujillo, Rafael and, 57 Alba family, 59–62, 67, 69–71, 87, 98, 106–107 Alonso, A.M., 7 Alvarez Bogaert, Fernando, 77, 86, 99, 108–109, 207 Anderson, B., 167 Archetti, E.P., 103, 212 Ares family, 59 Aretxaga, B., 191 Argersinger, P.H., 208, 209 Austerlitz, P., 212 Avila Suero, V., 202 Báez, Buenaventura, 23, 44, 58, 79 Balaguer, Joaquín 1994 resignation, 192–195 authoritarian rule and, 1–5, 6, 13, 15 early years, 29 economy and, 30–31, 43–44 elections, 31, 36–37, 58 Georges, E. on, 205–206 Guzmán, Antonio and, 200 Haitian massacre (1937) and, 175 infiltration and, 178 legacy, 18–20

masculinity and, 134, 139, 144–145, 214 Miriam and, 73–76 nation building and, 157–158, 163–165 networks of rule and, 92–93 Peña Gómez, José Francisco and, 34–37, 83 PLD and, 36–37, 88–89, 195 political fraud and, 117–118, 122, 124–128, 131 PRD and, 76–77 PRSC and, 35 public sector and, 95, 97, 99, 104–105, 107, 111–113, 207 race and, 65 Rafaelito and, 83, 85–86 Reformist Party and, 29 state terror and, 181–182 support for, 29–30, 31, 69 They Forged the Signature of God and, 197 Trujillo, Rafael and, 8, 9–11, 30, 189 United States and, 11 Barranco family, 59, 62, 67, 70, 71, 92, 95, 106, 114, 143–144, 173 Barthes, Roland, 118 Baud, M., 25, 26, 32, 51–52, 56, 203–204 Bayart, J-F., 9, 134 Béhague, G.H., 212 Betances, E., 27, 30, 131, 200

242

IN DEX

Bhabha, H.K., 218 Black, J.K., 2, 8, 31, 131, 200, 202 Blanco, Salvador Jorge, 30, 34, 76, 131, 220 Bloch, Maurice, 105, 216 Blok, A., 207, 211 Bloque Institucional, 34, 80 border provinces, 14, 28, 37–38, 51–52, 54, 91, 201, 202 Borneman, J., 209 Bosch, Juan election, 29 Mario and, 89, 212 masculinity and, 137, 139, 141, 145 Miriam and, 87 moral economy and, 113 overthrow of, 71, 182 Piñeyro and, 74 PLD and, 206 political fraud and, 122, 124–128 PRD and, 34–36, 76, 78 Rafaelito and, 78–80 support for, 69–71, 118 Bosworth, R.J.B., 198 Bourdieu, P., 10, 97, 133 Bourgois, P., 97 Brandes, Stanley, 134–136, 210, 212 Brecht, Bertold, 183 Brennan, D., 202 Bryan, P.E., 25 Cabrera Febrillet, F.N., 117, 201 Calder, B.J., 199 Campillo Pérez, J.G., 203 Carpentier, Alejo, 209–210 Carter, Jimmy, 31, 37, 131, 200 Cassá, R., 22, 27, 33, 219 caudillo, 23, 34, 44, 57–58, 67 Chauvet, José, 77, 100, 125 Chauvet family, 60 Chehabi, Houchang, 6, 198 Christian Popular Party, 195 Christian Social Reformist Party (PRSC) Balaguer, Joaquín and, 18 formation, 18, 34, 35–36

PLD and, 36, 90 public sector and, 98, 101 Christianity, 175, 177, 179 civil war, 27, 29, 74, 181 Clarke, E., 202 Clausner, M.D., 24, 203 Coles, K., 209 Collado, Lipe, 148–149, 151, 153–154, 215, 216 Communism, 8, 29, 79, 88, 181, 198 compadrazgo authoritarian rule and, 4 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 15 local communities and, 71 masculinity and, 143, 146, 215 nation building and, 49, 62, 133 political significance of, 93–94 study of, 203 Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA), 26 Cornwall, A., 207 Coronil, F., 11, 185–186, 219, 221 Corradi, J.E., 186 Corrigan, P., 197 Crais, C., 9 Crassweller, Robert D., 197 Cuba, 21, 29, 153, 174, 198, 199, 216, 217 Cuello, H., 28 Daniel, E.V., 219 Das, V., 9, 197 Davis, M.E., 118, 210, 212 de Moya, E.A., 210 Deive, C.E., 21, 50, 118, 159, 174, 202, 210, 216 del Castillo, J., 25, 34, 36, 199, 201 Derby, Lauren, 11, 13, 24, 26, 32–33, 50–52, 57, 158, 164, 180, 202, 218 Dominican Republic before 1930, 23–26 after 1930, 26–31 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) 1978-1986, 76–78 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 37

IN DEX

Bosch, Juan and, 29, 36 factionalism and, 31 Guzmán, Antonio and, 30–31 La Descubierta and, 43–45, 75–76 Peña Gómez, José Francisco and, 31, 34–35 period following Trujillo’s death, 69–71 PLD and, 88–90 political fraud and, 119, 121–127, 131 public sector and, 95–97, 100, 104, 110, 112, 115 Rafaelito and, 79–86, 92, 95 recent elections and, 193–195 Reformist Party and, 71–72 state-sponsored terror and, 181–182 Dominican-American Convention, 24 Dominican-Haitian treaty, 23, 24, 28 Dore, E., 210 Douglas, M., 178, 206 Duarte, Juan Pablo, 162–163, 167, 217 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 31, 198 Edelman, M., 216 el desalojo, 174, 175–176, 178, 180, 219 El Jefe, 8, 27, 207 El Sisal, 220 elections, 34–37 Era of Trujillo, The (Galíndez), 27, 130, 181, 186, 200 Espinal, Rosario, 117, 129–130, 131 Feldman, A., 19, 219 Fennema, M., 32, 33, 168, 170, 218 Ferguson, J., 197 Fernández, Leonel, 193 Fiallo, Viriato, 69 Fiehrer, T., 28 forced labor, 27, 66, 220 Foucault, Michel, 5, 7, 189 Foundations of Despotism (Turits), 11–12

243

Franco, Francisco, 130, 197–198 Franco, Franklin J., 168 Franks, J., 25, 56, 199 Friedman, J., 11 Friedrich, P., 203 Galíndez, Jesús de, 27, 130, 181, 183, 186, 189, 200 Galvan, Manuel de Jesús, 168–169 García, J.M., 175, 178 García, José Gabriel, 165, 217 Garrido, Victor, 26, 204 Geertz, C., 197 Geffroy, J.L., 207 Georges, E., 41, 202–203, 205–206 Geschiere, P., 198 Gilmore, D., 211, 213 Girard, René, 179 Goffman, E., 145 Gonzalez, N.L., 32 González, R., 57 Gould, J.L., 198 Graeber, D., 192 Grasmuck, S., 202 Graziano, Frank, 177, 179, 186–188, 220 Green, Linda, 181, 182, 189 Gregory, S., 10 Guarnizo, L.E., 203 Gudeman, S., 203 Gupta, Akhil, 9, 197 Gutmann, M.C., 209, 213 Guzmán, Antonio election, 30, 37, 89, 131, 200 political repression and, 30, 91, 181–182 PRD and, 30, 34 public sector and, 30, 131, 207 Rafaelito and, 80 Haiti agriculture and, 22–23, 42, 91, 92 border conf licts with DR, 1, 14, 22–23, 28, 113 exiled Dominicans and, 59 La Descubierta and, 4, 38, 68

244

IN DEX

Haiti—continued nation building and, 157–171 pre-1930, 49–54 race and, 31–33, 35, 61, 64–65, 182 Ramírez, Jesús María and, 54, 56 revolution, 22 smuggling and, 43, 184 study of, 16, 18 trade with DR, 24–26 United States and, 24 See also Haitian massacre (1937) Haitian massacre (1937) details of, 14, 28, 205 memories of, 157, 173–180, 219 Peña Gómez, José Francisco and, 35, 217 support for, 14 Trujillo, Rafael and, 1, 20 writings on, 218 Hannerz, Ulf, 137, 216 Hansen, T.B., 192, 197 Harris, O., 212 Hartlyn, J., 30, 99, 117, 182, 193 Harvey, Penelope, 7, 9, 66 Hendricks, G., 203 Herskovits, Melville, 210 Herzfeld, M., 197 Heureaux, Ulises, 24, 114, 130, 154, 205 Hicks, A., 28 Hispaniola, 21–23 Haitian rule of, 22–23 history, 21–22 sugar production, 22 Hoetink, Harry, 23, 24, 26, 114, 130, 145, 152, 154 Horacistas, 24 Howard, D., 32 Huneeus, C., 198 hunger riots, 90, 208 Ianni, V., 220 Incháustegui Cabral, H., 33 Independent Revolutionary Party (PRI), 34, 201

indios, 33, 61, 161, 167–171 See also skin color infiltration, 174, 178–179 Inoa, Q., 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 30–31, 220 Irigaray, Luce, 4 James, D., 198 Jiménez, Juan Isidro, 24 Jiménez Polanco, J., 201, 203 Jimenistas, 24 Joseph, G.M., 9 Kapferer, B., 87, 177–178 Kearney, R.C., 30, 112, 207–208 Keesing, R., 212 kinship, 15, 16, 62, 67, 77, 88, 141 Kryzanek, M.J., 27, 30, 37, 114, 131, 200 La Descubierta before 1930, 49–54 continuity and change, 91–94 leadership (1930–1961), 63–69 leadership (1961–1965), 69–71 leadership (after 1965), 71–76 leadership of Rafaelito, 79–86 local families, 54–62 networks of rule, 91–94 overview, 37–47 PLD and, 86–90 PRD and (1978–1986), 76–78 Lancaster, R.N., 201, 213, 215 land consolidation, 56, 58 Lauria, Anthony, 146, 215 Leach, E., 60 Levine, R.M., 198 Lévi-Strauss, C., 127 Levitt, P., 203 Lindisfarne, N., 207 Linz, Juan, 6–7, 197–198 Lomnitz, L.A., 209 Lundahl, Mats, 22, 25, 50–51, 118, 197, 205, 210 Lundius, M., 118, 197, 205, 210

IN DEX

Majluta, Jacobo, 34, 80, 126 Malkki, Liisa, 11, 19, 167, 219 Marte, R., 22, 174 Martínez, S., 25, 32, 166, 199 masculinity, 133–156 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 134, 139, 144–145, 214 Bosch, Juan and, 137, 139, 141, 145 classifying men, 138–149 compadrazgo and, 143, 146, 215 construction of the state and, 149–156 men’s discourses on women, 134–138 Piñeyro, Miriam Méndez de and, 143–145 Reformist Party and, 142–143 Trujillo, Rafael and, 153–154 Mateo, A.L., 28, 212, 218 Mbembe, Achille, 7 McLeod, J.R., 209 Mejía, Hipólito, 193 Mella, Alejandro, 62 Mella, Alfredo, 78–79, 81–82, 84–86, 89, 119–122, 124, 128–129, 131, 206 Mella, Pedro, 75, 96, 98, 101, 125, 142 Mella, Ramón, 162, 167 Mella, Santiago, 100, 109, 120, 125 Mella family, 59–62, 70, 71, 101, 106–107, 110, 167, 170–171 migration economic growth and, 15 Haiti and, 28, 51, 91, 159, 166 La Descubierta and, 38–40, 42, 46–47, 77 moral economy of rule and, 111 patronage and, 90 PLD and, 88 political fraud and, 127 political issues and, 54 sugar trade and, 25–26, 51 Trujillo, Rafael and, 114, 154 Miles, W., 209 Mintz, S.W., 10, 25, 202, 203

245

Mitchell, T., 197 Moeran, B., 212 Molyneux, M., 210 Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E., 50 Mosse, G.L., 210 Moya Pons, Frank, 2, 22–23, 25, 26–31, 53, 87, 99, 130, 165, 174, 181, 217–218 municipios, 38–39, 53, 93, 95, 110, 111 Nagengast, C., 197 nation building, 157–171 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 157–158 compadrazgo and, 49, 62, 133 divided island, 157–164 fear and, 165–167 mestizaje and, 167–171 Piñeyro, Miriam Méndez de and, 166, 169 Trujillo, Rafael and, 20, 157–158 National Civic Union (UCN), 69–70 nationalization, 15, 26–27, 114, 157 Navaro-Yashin, Y., 197 Neiburg, F., 198 Nordstrom, C., 219 Nugent, D., 9, 197, 198 Pacini Hernández, D., 212 Paley, J., 221 Palmer, C.E., 197, 202, 204 Parry, J., 216 Party for Dominican Liberation (PLD) elections and, 34–36 history, 86–94 La Descubierta and, 18 masculinity and, 141 political fraud and, 121–122, 124–126, 201 PRD and, 76, 78 public sector and, 95–97, 110, 206 Rafaelito and, 80, 85–86 recent elections and, 193–195 state terror and, 181 Passerini, L., 17

246

IN DEX

patronage authoritarian rule and, 4 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 29 Barranco family and, 70 border provinces and, 38, 49, 51, 54 hunger riots and, 208 La Descubierta and, 15, 67–68 masculinity and, 133, 141, 149 PLD and, 90 public sector and, 113–115, 118 Ramírez, Jesús María and, 92 Trujillo, Rafael and, 28 Pax Americana, 29 Peguero, Rafael, 44, 69, 71–72, 85, 93–94, 98, 104 Peña Battle, Manuel Arturo, 87, 174, 179, 217–218 Peña Gómez, José Francisco Alvarez Bogaert, Fernando and, 207 death, 201 leadership, 34–35 local community and, 118, 206 political fraud and, 122, 126–127 PRD and, 207, 212 race and, 31 Rafaelito and, 45, 80, 83–86, 92 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 198 Peristiany, J.G., 211 Pessar, P.R., 202, 203 Pichardo, Bernardo, 87, 165, 206, 217 Piñeyro, Miriam Méndez de Balaguer, Joaquín and, 3, 72–75 Chauvet, José and, 77 La Descubierta and, 18–19, 193–194 leadership, 92–93 masculinity and, 143–145 nation building and, 166, 169 PLD and, 86–90 political fraud and, 118–119, 121–125, 128–129, 131 public sector and, 95–96, 98, 104–110, 112, 114–115 Rafaelito and, 80–81, 83–96 Ramírez, Jesús María and, 15 on religious beliefs, 176–177, 179

ties to community, 44–45, 55, 61–62 Trujillo, Rafael and, 173 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 205, 211–212 political fraud, 117–132 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 117–118, 122, 124–128, 131 Bosch, Juan and, 122, 124–128 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) and, 119, 121–127, 131 elections and, 118–128 history within history, 129–132 as interaction, 128–129 Piñeyro, Miriam Méndez de and, 118–119, 121–125, 128–129, 131 Reformist Party and, 119–126, 131 political parties, 34–37 political reform, 95–115 discourse and, 101–107 factionalism and, 98–101 maintenance of control and, 107–111 moral economy of rule, 111–115 Portes, A., 203 Prestol Castillo, Freddy, 180, 218 Price, R., 11, 202 PRSC, See Christian Social Reformist Party public sector Balaguer, Joaquín and, 95, 97, 99, 104–105, 107, 111–113, 207 Christian Social Reformist Party (PRSC) and, 98, 101 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) and, 95–97, 100, 104, 110, 112, 115 Guzmán, Antonio and, 30, 131, 207 Piñeyro, Miriam Méndez de and, 95–96, 98, 104–110, 112, 114–115 Reformist Party and, 95–97, 99–101, 102, 104, 106, 107–108, 112, 115 Puerto Rico, 21, 146, 174, 199

IN DEX

race, nationality and, 31–34 See also skin color Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 7 Rafaelito La Descubierta and, 44–45 leadership, 49, 76, 79–86 networks of rule and, 92–94 Peguero, Rafael and, 69, 72, 139, 142–143, 176 PLD and, 88–90 political fraud and, 118–119, 121–125, 128–129 recent elections and, 193–195 Ramírez, Alejandro, 217 Ramírez, Carmito, 205 Ramírez, Jesús María 1930–1961, 62–69 1961–1965, 69–71 after 1965, 71, 73 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 15 Carretero, Rafael, 57–58 compadrazgo and, 62 La Descubierta and, 50, 53–56, 106, 107, 163 on state terror, 205 Trujillo, Rafael and, 15, 92–93, 213 Ramírez, Wenceslao, 204–205 Ratekin, M., 199 Reformist Party after 1965, 71, 73–75 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 18–19 elections and, 34–36 founding of, 29, 35 La Descubierta and, 44, 181 masculinity and, 142–143 Miriam and, 55, 92 PLD and, 87–90 political fraud and, 119–126, 131 PRD and, 77–78 public sector and, 95–97, 99–101, 102, 104, 106, 107–108, 112, 115 Rafaelito and, 78–81, 83–86, 94 recent elections and, 193–195 Ribero, Antonio, 71

247

Riches, David, 128 Ricoeur, D., 178 Ricourt, M., 203 rituals, fraud, 125, 127 Roorda, E.P., 8, 11, 25, 27, 198 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 11 Sagás, Ernesto, 31–32, 33, 35, 158 Samuel, R., 17 San Miguel, P.L., 56, 165, 205 Sánchez, Rosario, 162, 167 Sánchez family, 59, 83, 167 Santana, Pedro, 23, 168–169 Santo Domingo, 8 Sayer, D., 197 Scott, J.C., 137, 191 Sención, Viriato, 197 Sharma, A., 197 Sharpe, K.E., 202 Siegel, J.T., 198 Silié, R., 21 skin color, 33, 170–171, 200 See also indios; trigueños Skurski, J., 11, 185–186 slavery, 21, 23, 50, 168, 169, 199, 211 Sluka, J., 186, 219 Smith, R.T., 202 smuggling, 21, 38, 43–44, 52, 77, 184–185, 203 Sommer, D., 168–169, 218 Spain Dominican Republic and, 23, 217 emigration to, 46, 91, 203 Franco, Francisco and, 197 Hispaniola and, 21–22 Santana, Pedro and, 23, 168–169 sugar trade and, 199 Treaty of Aranjuez and, 22 Treaty of Basle and, 22 spirits, 135, 159–160, 163, 176–177, 210–211 state terror, 2, 20, 27, 29, 91, 128, 131, 154, 157, 173, 191, 205, 209, 220 state-sponsored terror, 14–15, 29, 180–189

248

IN DEX

statue politics, 8 Steinmetz, G., 197 Stepputat, F., 192, 197 Stoller, P., 198 sugar export of, 12, 21, 200, 204 foreign ownership of plantations, 14 growth of industry, 24–30, 114, 153 history of industry in DR, 50–52, 91, 199, 217 La Descubierta and, 37–38, 56 labor and, 202, 218 smuggling of, 43–44, 77 state Sugar Company, 109–110 sugar production post-1930, 26–30 pre-1930, 24–26 surveillance, 15, 27, 59, 76, 88, 120, 180 Tambiah, Stanley, 127 Taussig, Michael, 128, 161, 183–184, 210, 216 terror, state, 2, 14–15, 20, 27, 29, 91, 128, 131, 154, 157, 173, 180–189, 191, 205, 209, 220 Thompson, E.P., 90, 208 Three Fathers of the Fatherland, 163, 167 tíguere, 147–155, 215, 216 Tolentino Rojas, V., 65 Tonkin, E., 17 Toral, Luis, 108, 144 Torres-Saillant, S., 32, 218 tourism, 30, 37–38, 91, 200 Treaty of Aranjuez, 22 Treaty of Basle, 22, 217 Treaty of Ryswick, 22 trigueños, 33, 44, 200 See also skin color Trouillot, M-R., 7, 11, 22, 51, 155, 199, 216 Trujillo, Rafael aftermath of death, 78, 91–93, 115 agriculture and, 57

Alvarez Bogaert, Fernando and, 99 anti-Haitianism and, 52–54 assassination, 29, 130 authoritarian rule and, 1–15, 26–28 Balaguer, Joaquín and, 29 early years, 26 el desalojo and, 173–178, 180 elections and, 130 Guzmán, Antonio and, 30 Haitian massacre (1937) and, 28, 35 La Descubierta and, 38–39, 44, 49–50, 63–71, 78, 106, 180 masculinity and, 153–154 memories of terror under, 180–189 nation building and, 20, 157–158 nationalism and, 31 Peña Gómez, José Francisco and, 35 personal empire, 54, 114 race and, 33 Rafaelito and, 79 rise to power, 24–25, 59 support for, 62 tíguere and, 148 Turits, Richard Lee on farming, 56, 66–67 on forced labor, 66 on Haitian land policies, 23 on Haitian massacre, 175 on land consolidation, 56 on nationalization of Trujillo’s land, 114 on Trujillo regime, 11–14, 26–28 Turner, Victor, 219 Twain, Mark, 208 UCN, See National Civic Union Ugalde, A., 202 urbanization, 37, 153, 155 Vásquez, Horacio, 24, 53, 58–59, 63, 188 Vega, B., 14, 28, 33, 53, 54, 59, 175, 200, 219 Verdery, Katherine, 8, 11, 167, 198 Veyne, Paul, 165

IN DEX

Viña family, 59, 70, 107 Vincent, Stenio, 28 violence, memories of, 173–189 1937 Haitian massacre, 173–180 Trujillo’s terror, 180–189 Wade, Peter, 141, 211, 212, 213 Wagley, C., 203 Walker, Malcolm, 202, 220 Walton, J., 220 War of Restoration, 24 Warner, Charles Dudley, 208 Warren, Kay, 175, 219

249

Weber, Max, 10, 197 Whatever Balaguer Says movement, 35, 75 Wiarda, H.J., 27, 30, 37, 114, 131, 200 Wikan, U., 211 Williams, E., 11 Willis, Paul, 80 Wilson, Peter, 189, 202, 213 Wolf, E.R., 202, 203 World War I, 25 World War II, 26, 200 Yunén, R.E., 32