LA INTERVENCION MILITAR USA EN SANTO DOMINGO, 1916 — Transcript

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1. 0:00On November 29, 1916, the United States government published the proclamation that made official the
2. 0:06intervention of that nation in Dominican territory. This country and Haiti, especially since they
3. 0:14were not colonies and were not the only independent countries in the island region, offered
4. 0:20problems for the United States. Because there was instability, the United States required regimes
5. 0:28addicted to its orientations both in the political and economic aspects. The economic aspect
6. 0:36was very clear to displace the European powers to prioritize the flow of investments towards
7. 0:48sugar mainly and in the political aspect it was also to have the conditions to avoid
8. 0:58interference, particularly from the danger that loomed in front of the United States, which was Germany,
9. 1:04which was the country that was competing for world hegemony with the United States at that
10. 1:10time. Although the officialization took place on November 29, 1916, in truth the The intervention
11. 1:17had begun in May with the landing of the US Marines. That month, the
12. 1:24US troops took control of the Dominican capital and by the end of July
13. 1:30they already had command of the main military posts in the country when
14. 1:38the execution took place in 1899. From ulis zero the economic and political situation of the Dominican Republic
15. 1:46enters into a kind of Chaos of Chaos both from the political point of view and
16. 1:52from the point of view of its financial conditions installed in Dominican territory
17. 2:00the interveners created their own force military which came to be called the National Guard, said
18. 2:07body came to replace the guard of the Republic and the navy, which were
19. 2:12the military instruments that the Dominican state had, Dominicans from poor and unemployed backgrounds were integrated into said body
20. 2:19and they trained them. In accordance with the regulations
21. 2:25of the United States Marine Corps, among the members of the new National Guard
22. 2:32was Rafael Trujillo, who years later would rise to power and impose a
23. 2:38heavy-handed regime for 31 years at the outbreak of the First World War. So now For the United States,
24. 2:47the need to put this country in its orbit arose, which is why the military intervention of
25. 2:54May 1916 was preceded by various coercive measures of pressure on the Dominican Republic.
26. 3:04Particularly, a threatening note issued by the department was relevant in that sense. of
27. 3:11state to the government of Juan Isidro Jiménez, which was called note number 14 of November 1915, which
28. 3:18called on the Dominican government to appoint a chief of troops who was a citizen of the United States. In other
29. 3:26words, this country no longer had an autonomous army and then an economic controller who already
30. 3:32controlled all the finances that between 19 1899 and 1916 Dominican society is convulsed by
31. 3:43the fights between the caudillos is the famous period of the concho prismo is the stage
32. 3:50of the fights of the bolos and the coludos is the stage in which the two most preeminent figures
33. 3:57in the Dominican political environment, such as Juan Isidro Jiménez and Horacio Vázquez,
34. 4:06since they have all the contextualization of this situation of conflicts of interest, the attitude of the United States
35. 4:17experienced considerable changes as Puerto Rico and to a certain extent Cuba became
36. 4:24part of the new North American empire as the dream of a canal dominated by the
37. 4:30United States that crossed Panama became a reality, the Washington government began
38. 4:37to develop a global naval strategy and Germany began its rapid and successful
39. 4:43commercial incursion into Latin America, the United States began to mobilize to consolidate its
40. 4:50political and military control over the Caribbean area. The United States gained a hegemonic position
41. 4:56in the Caribbean area, displacing, above all, England, Terra and Spain at the end of the century. XIX
42. 5:03this was sanctioned with the Spanish-American War of 1898 in which possession of Puerto
43. 5:11Rico was made as a Colony and of Cuba as a protectorate because in three months and with almost no casualties, Perdón
44. 5:19managed to appropriate Philippine Cuba and Puerto Rico and expel Spain from the The Western Hemisphere
45. 5:28then begins Colonial domination, better said North American neocolonial Imperialist domination
46. 5:34in the Caribbean Basin, the United States took steps to impose itself as an empire at the global level.
47. 5:41Internally, in that nation, great changes were taking place to promote industrial development and
48. 5:46the exploitation of gold mines and other minerals. All of this occurred at the end of the 19th century,
49. 5:52together with the war of intervention in Caribbean countries, Central America and Asia,
50. 5:59happening in 1914 with The First World War is the First Great Imperialist War in history,
51. 6:05that is, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the one hand, the German Empire, on the other hand,
52. 6:11the Russian Empire, on the other hand, the French Republic with its very marked economic interests,
53. 6:18the British Empire and the The North American Empire and the Ottoman Empire entered into a clash of a
54. 6:25magnitude unknown to humanity, which was the war that took place in 1914, the First World War.
55. 6:31Elía des Acosta Matos is a historian and philosopher, and there a geopolitical situation occurred in
56. 6:39which the interests German economic forces present in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and that had been there for
57. 6:47many years and gave the pretext, along with that power vacuum, the lack of payment of the debt and all
58. 6:55that, to the United States of carrying out an invasion to prevent the territory by
59. 7:03German forces that would later constitute a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere and
60. 7:08could then expand in the midst of the war to another area. By 1905, the external and internal debt of the
61. 7:15Dominican Republic was estimated at 40 million dollars while customs revenues
62. 7:20barely reached The 2 million dollars a year, most of the debts had
63. 7:26been contracted with companies and European powers. In March 1906, the Dominican government began
64. 7:33negotiations with each of its creditors with the purpose of readjusting the debt by less than
65. 7:3950%. In the end, they achieved reduce it to 17 million. In the negotiations, the government of
66. 7:48the United States was present, which by then already had the
67. 7:54country's customs collections under its control. The Dominican Republic and the United States had signed in May 1907 the
68. 8:01Dominican-American convention that, among other powers, gave it granted the administration of customs in the
69. 8:09specific case of the Dominican Republic. In the last decades of the last
70. 8:16century, in the context of the government of Ulises Hero, we contracted a series. The Dominican state
71. 8:25headed by Lilis contracted a series of economic commitments through loans. with
72. 8:34these European powers and the Dominican economy was injured in that sense, that is, we were a
73. 8:42country with strong financial and economic commitments with these powers with the
74. 8:53purpose of eliminating the shadow of the European powers in the country's finances, the government
75. 8:58of the United States. United served as guarantor for a loan of 20 million dollars. With c Line
76. 9:05and Company of New York, the money would be used to settle external and internal debts of
77. 9:1117 million dollars while the remaining 3 million would be allocated to public works and others.
78. 9:19investments In that context, already at the beginning of the 20th century, Americans have opted for
79. 9:28expansion to occupy territories, occupy colonies, occupy overseas lands, to colonize those
80. 9:36lands with white Anglo-Saxon citizens, supposedly a superior race to put
81. 9:43those territories to production, especially in At that time, first the production of
82. 9:49sugar cane and sugar, but also the extraction of minerals, the production of coffee, the production
83. 9:56of cocoa, in short, what an empire could need for its sustenance and development, the
84. 10:01intervention was a mixture of economic conveniences as the determining factor but
85. 10:07also strategic needs in the context of the First World War. At that time the
86. 10:14Dominican Republic was poor and underdeveloped, it had a population of less than 1 million
87. 10:19people, of which 85 percent lived in rural areas. and was dedicated to agriculture, it is estimated
88. 10:26that 90 of the inhabitants were illiterate. The most important cities were Santo Domingo, which
89. 10:34had a population of 211,000 inhabitants, and Santiago, where 14,000 people lived. In the rest
90. 10:41of the country, only Puerto Plata, San Pedro de Macorís, and La Vega had populations of more than 3,000
91. 10:48inhabitants. As the occupation government had its strategy, it was naturally a strategy that was
92. 10:58aimed at creating the conditions to achieve its objective, that is why we are going to find that there are
93. 11:06a series of aspects that stand out as contributions of that period, such as the
94. 11:15beginning of the construction of highways, logically to transport its
95. 11:23troops and also their their I mean not out of generosity after the intervention materialized. In 1916 the
96. 11:31occupation forces launched a plan of public and social works, they developed an
97. 11:37extensive road construction plan, one that linked Santo Domingo with Santiago, another that
98. 11:43linked Santo Domingo. with San Pedro de Macorís and a third that linked Santo Domingo with Asua. The
99. 11:50plan also included the construction of local roads and the conditioning of docks for
100. 11:56customs buildings and educational centers as well as a telecommunications system, as well as the
101. 12:03construction of hospitals and the Importation of doctors from Puerto Rico and the United States also
102. 12:08promoted the cleaning of the cities from the slaughterhouse markets and the installation of
103. 12:14latrines. They also created the General Directorate of Internal Revenue and incorporated a modern
104. 12:20public accounting system and another land registry system later. They tried to civilize the country Not
105. 12:30because they wanted to, for humanitarian reasons, they did it for purely economic reasons.
106. 12:37A country infected with yellow fever and malaria cannot be productive. A country without roads, its
107. 12:43wealth cannot be exploited. A country without a port. A country without customs that work well. a country without
108. 12:49railways a country without communications without mail cannot be a country that can
109. 12:55then be put to produce intervention except for the few incidents that occurred in 1916
110. 13:04and the peasant struggle that developed in the east after 1917 was confined to a war of
111. 13:11words there was a national resistance that the military part was the least noticeable let's say
112. 13:19not less important but less noticeable Because in addition they managed to demonize those those
113. 13:25people they managed to sow a matrix of opinion in the public opinion that they were bandits that they
114. 13:31were savages that they could not be dealt with that they had to be exterminated when
115. 13:35we reflect on what the intervention of 1916 meant, I start more than anything from
116. 13:46situating how the Dominican people who are going to be the object of this outrage react in all their
117. 13:56excerpts starting because the first measures of repression of the United States are
118. 14:06going to be expressed in the censorship of the press in the disarmament of the population in the military occupation
119. 14:16of all of our geography truth to the peasant resistance of the east North American forces
120. 14:23decided to call him gavilleros, it was a way to denigrate and project bandits.
121. 14:30So when the Americans arrive, a new government comes that must be fought. These
122. 14:36gentlemen do not accept these already veterans called gavillero. Gavillero means sheaf of
123. 14:45a member of a sheaf that is a criminal group but it was a way of disqualifying
124. 14:50them by the governments. So they get up where they get up, especially
125. 14:59at the beginning in the months immediately after May in the surroundings of Santo Domingo. That
126. 15:05is the original area of ​​the gavillero Roberto casá is An accredited historian in the last 11
127. 15:11years has served as director of the general archive of the nation and then when the
128. 15:17American troops enter San Pedro de Macorig in January 1917, that is when the gavillero gains strength and becomes
129. 15:25an unprecedented massive phenomenon. Why that would take a fairly extensive analysis
130. 15:33because the sugar industry left a trail of personnel Surplus especially in the period
131. 15:43of downtime social uprooting So it was very easy for unhappy poor peasants in
132. 15:52the process of being expelled from the land to find something to live on through recruitment into
133. 16:01these groups of chronic rebels, of course, at the same time they had a motivation against
134. 16:11military intervention, the vast majority not because of Patriotism. Casa maintains that these were people
135. 16:17who were simply fighting for their survival after several years of fighting. In 1922, the so-called
136. 16:25gavilleros accepted an amnesty, their most prominent leaders laid down their arms, among them
137. 16:33Ramón Natera Pedro [ __ ] Vicente evangelista Martín Peguero José piña Luciano Reyes Félix
138. 16:42Laureano Andrés Polanco and Marcial Guerrero, other significant violent events in pursuit of achieving
139. 16:49national sovereignty were that of Gregorio Urbano Gilbert in San Pedro de Macorís, who confronted
140. 16:55several Marines, resulting in the death of an officer of that corps, and Gilber was sentenced to
141. 17:01death. Although Then his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Another relevant event was
142. 17:08the Battle of La Barranquita that occurred in Mao on June 3, 1916, where some 80 men
143. 17:15led by Captain Cabral faced 800 North American Marines. In
144. 17:22said battle, 26 Dominicans died among them. They maximum Cabral He was years old At the time of his
145. 17:30death he was a member of the General Staff of General Desiderio Arias so that they let him work just because
146. 17:43and the major battle took place politically, including the international one where it was achieved that international public opinion
147. 17:54condemned the intervention and did not support and support the demands of the
148. 18:00Dominican people for evacuation and withdrawal, the North American military regime had imposed
149. 18:05censorship in the country's media in the face of this reality, the campaign to seek
150. 18:11sovereignty The former president of the Republic Francisco moved to other lands Enriquez
151. 18:17y Carvajal traveled through several countries in America to denounce the occupation, censorship, torture,
152. 18:25military courts and restrictions on public affairs. Enriquez y Carbajal had been chosen
153. 18:32as provisional president on July 25, 1916 after the president's resignation in May.
154. 18:39Juan Isidro Jiménez Enriquez y Carbajal was prevented from serving as president and left
155. 18:46the country on December 8 after the intervention became official on November 29. In his efforts
156. 18:54to recover the sovereignty of the Republic, in 1919 he created the
157. 19:00Dominican nationalist commission in Washington. which sought to have the United States Department of State appoint an
158. 19:06advisory board to prepare the conditions for the return to a civil government. By then,
159. 19:12other instruments of Struggle were also created, such as the Dominican national union, which demanded
160. 19:17outright unemployment, the National Union. Dominican It was chaired by Emiliano Tejera and was
161. 19:24made up of Américo Lugo Fabio Fayo Max Enrique Sureña César Tolentino and many others. The request
162. 19:32for the reestablishment of national sovereignty had a great impact at the international level. All of these
163. 19:39groups viewed the struggle of the Dominican people with sympathy and supported it. anarchists,
164. 19:44socialists who were anti-imperialists by definition, feminists because here there was
165. 19:49a lot of resistance among women, students constantly wrote in the press,
166. 19:54rallies were held, denunciations were made, Letters were sent to the North American president and it created
167. 20:01continental sympathy towards the cause of the Dominican people. and that I think it played an
168. 20:07important role in the end of the occupation, I maintain that it is in the context of this event
169. 20:14in which Dominican women emerged in an organized manner in terms of participation, among
170. 20:22the most prominent female fighters of that time are erilia pepín Abigail Mejía
171. 20:28Luisa osema pellerano rosa is mester mélida del Castillo eduviges Rosa Consuelo Guerrero homeland
172. 20:36Mella and many others The peasant women of the east These women get involved and participate in
173. 20:46public spaces for the rescue of sovereignty through talks through complaints through
174. 20:56marches through activities such as patriotic week to raise
175. 21:05funds to support the struggle of Dominican nationalists, several factors paved the way
176. 21:12for the recovery of national sovereignty, including the national and international campaign
177. 21:18against the intervention, the election of Warren G Hardin as the new president of the United States
178. 21:24and the return of a new economic crisis as a consequence of the end of the flourishing stage
179. 21:29known as the dance of the millions that occurred due to the rise in sugar prices
180. 21:35during During the First World War, when the quintal of the product reached prices of up to
181. 21:3922.5 in 1920, sugar prices fell to minimum levels that made the activity unprofitable,
182. 21:54the pound reached a cent or so, the cost of production was higher so
183. 22:02that the economic motive of subordinating the country through direct intervention through
184. 22:14of legislation everything they did in the 8 years of intervention or still in is at that
185. 22:21time they were less they were 4 years it began to lose validity no no the intervention came to an end
186. 22:30after the agreement of the Hux Pedo plan of 1922 said plan was named of its negotiators on the
187. 22:37Dominican side Francisco J Pedo and on the part of the United States Secretary of State Charles Evan Humes
188. 22:44the plan stipulated the installation of a provisional government organization of elections by
189. 22:50the provisional government recognition of the legal acts of the military government in favor of
190. 22:55third parties recognition of the customs tariffs established by the military government in 1919
191. 23:02which favored more than 945 products from that nation validity of the Dominican
192. 23:09American convention of 1907 until the Dominican Republic finished paying its
193. 23:15external debt control of customs by the States United until the Dominican Republic
194. 23:20pays off the foreign debt withdrawal of North American troops after the election of a new
195. 23:26president in accordance with the Hux plan combed in October 1922 ASSUMES as provisional president Juan
196. 23:34Bautista Vigini Burgos who called elections in the elections of March 15, In 1924,
197. 23:42Horacio Vázquez was elected. By August of that year, the evacuation of the troops was completed. Although the
198. 23:49United States government remained in control of customs until the mid-
199. 23:541940s, The American always interferes, we will make him hit the ground with a machete. "
200. 24:06The Americans cannot rule," said Calvar, Palau video cinema, René Fortunato's official channel on YouTube,
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