During this period, a movement led by Hugo Blanco organized peasants into unions, staged strikes and seized land. The movement engaged in little which could be termed guerrilla warfare, using its meagre arms to defend the squatters, and was easily and brutally put down by the police and army, apparently without significant American assistance other than the routine arming and training of such forces.

By 1965, however, several guerrilla groups had evolved in the eastern slopes of the Andes, cognizant of the bare truth that organizing peasants was, by itself, painfully inadequate; some would say suicidal. Inspired by the Cuban revolution, impressed with the social gains which had followed, and, in some cases, trained by the Cubans, these sons of the middle class met in May to plan a common strategy. Guerrilla warfare began in earnest the following month. By the end of the year, however, a joint Peruvian-American counter-insurgency operation had broken the back of three rebel groups, two of them in less than two months. Those guerrillas who remained alive and active were reduced to futile and impotent skirmishes over the next year or so.7

The role of the CIA in this definitive military mop-up has been concisely depicted by the former high official of the Agency, Victor Marchetti:

Green Berets participated ... in what was the CIAs single large-scale Latin American intervention of the post-Bay of Pigs era. This occurred in the mid-1960s, when the agency secretly came to the aid of the Peruvian government, then plagued by guerrilla troubles in its remote eastern regions. Unable to cope adequately with the insurgent movement, Lima had turned to the U.S. government for aid, which was immediately and covertly forthcoming.

The agency financed the construction of what one experienced observer described as a miniature Fort Bragg in the troubled Peruvian jungle region, complete with mess halls, classrooms, barracks, administrative buildings, parachute jump towers, amphibious landing facilities, and all the other accoutrements of paramilitary operations. Helicopters were furnished under cover of official military aid programs, and the CIA flew in arms and other combat equipment. Training was provided by the agencys Special Operations Division personnel and by Green Beret instructors on loan from the Army.8

In February 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara summed up this effort in a Senate hearing: In Peru, the Government has already made good progress against guerrilla concentrations, and U.S. trained and supported Peruvian army and air force units have played prominent roles in this counter-guerrilla campaign. 9

Typically, and ironically, such training would have included instilling in the Peruvian officers the motivation for doing battle with the insurgents in the first place. As US military affairs scholar Michael Klare has pointed out:

Many Latin American military officers would rather command elite units like jet fighter squadrons, naval flotillas, or armored brigades than slug it out with the guerrillas in long, unspectacular jungle campaigns. U.S. training programs are designed, therefore, to emphasize the importance of counterguerrilla operations (and to suggest, thereby, that the United States will reward those officers who make a good showing at this kind of warfare).10

The extent to which American military personnel engaged directly in combat is not known. They did, however, set up their headquarters in the center of an area of heavy fighting, in the village of Mazanari, and in September 1965 the New York Times reported that when the Peruvian army opened a major drive against the guerrillas, At least one United States Army counter-insurgency expert was said to have helped plan and direct the attack. 11

In the urban areas a concurrent round-up of guerrilla supporters was carried out, based materially on CIA intelligence: the list of subversives regularly compiled by Agency stations throughout the world for just such occasions.12 The CIA is usually in a much better position to collect this information than the host government, due to its superior experience in the field, funds available for hiring informants, technical equipment for eavesdropping, and greater motivation.

While this was taking place the war in Vietnam and the militant protest against it had already captured the front pages of American newspapers, and the isolated New York Times dispatch referred to above easily passed into oblivion. Yet, the American objective in Peru-to crush a movement aimed at genuine land reform and the social and political changes inevitably stemming from such-was identical to its objective in Vietnam. And the methods employed were similar: burning down peasants huts and villages to punish support for the guerrillas, defoliating the countryside to eliminate guerrilla sanctuaries, saturation bombing with napalm and high explosives, even throwing prisoners out of helicopters. 13

The essential difference, one which spelled disaster for the Peruvian insurgents, was that their ranks were not augmented in any appreciable number by the Indian peasants, a group with little revolutionary consciousness and even less daring; four centuries of dehu-manization had robbed them of virtually all hope and the sense of a right to revolt; and when this sense stirred even faintly, such as under Hugo Blanco, it was met head-on by the brick wall of official violence.

As common in the Third World as it is ludicrous, the bulk of the armed forces employed to keep the peasants pacified were soldiers of peasant stock themselves. It is a measure of the ultimate cynicism of the Peruvian and American military authorities that soldiers were stationed outside their home areas to lessen their resistance when the order was given to shoot.14

But it all worked. It worked so well that more than a decade was to pass before desperate men took to arms again in Peru.

29. Dominican Republic 1960-1966

Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy

On the night of 30 May 1961, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, mass murderer, torturer par excellence, absolute dictator, was shot to death on a highway in the outskirts of the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo.

The assassination set off a chain of events over the next five years which featured sustained and remarkably gross intervention into the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic by the United States, the likes of which had not been seen in Latin America since the heyday of American gunboat diplomacy.

The United States had been an accomplice in the assassination itself of the man it had helped to climb to power and to endure for some 30 years. It marked one of the rare occasions that the US government acted to overthrow a right-wing despot, albeit anti-commu-nism was still the motivating force.

Whatever repugnance individual Washington policy makers may have felt toward Trujillos incredible violations of human rights over the years, his fervent adherence to American policies, his repression of the left, and, as a consequence, the vigorous support he enjoyed in Congress (where Trujillos money was no strangerj and

in other influential American circles, were enough to keep successive United States administrations looking the other way.

When, in January 1959, Fulgencio Batista fell before the forces of Fidel Castro in nearby Cuba, a reconsideration of this policy was thrust upon Washingtons agenda. This historic event seemed to suggest that support of right-wing governments might no longer be the best way of checking the rise of revolutionary movements in Latin America, but rather might be fostering them. Indeed, in June a force of Dominican exiles launched an invasion of their homeland from Cuba. Although the invasion was a complete failure, it could only serve to heighten Washingtons concern about who was swimming around in The American Lake .

Batista is to Castro as Trujillo is to was the implicit assumption, and

Washington wanted to ensure that it could help fill in the blank, is the way one analysis formulated the problem. As a result, the United States began to cast about for a way to get rid of Trujillo and at the same time to ensure a responsible successor. 1 Ironically, it was to Trujillos Dominican Republic that Batista had fled.

The decision to topple Trujillo was reinforced in early 1960 when the United States sought to organize hemispheric opposition to the Castro regime. This policy ran head-on into the familiar accusation that the United States opposed only leftist governments, never those of the right, no matter how tyrannical. The close association with Trujillo, widely regarded as Washingtons protege , was proving increasingly to be an embarrassment. The circumstances were such that President Eisenhower was led to observe that Its certain that American public opinion wont condemn Castro until we have moved against Trujillo. 2 (The presidents apparent belief in the independence of the American mind may have been overly generous, for Washington was supporting right-wing dictatorships in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and elsewhere before and after Trujillos assassination, yet the American public fell readily into line in condemning Castro.)

As early as 1958, the then-CIA chief of station in the Dominican Republic, Lear Reed, along with several Dominicans, had plotted an assassination of Trujillo, one which never got off the ground.3 What the Agencys motivation was, and whether it was acting on its own or at the behest of higher echelons in Washington, is not known. However, in February 1960 the National Security Councils Special Group in Washington gave consideration to a program of covert aid to anti-Trujillo Dominicans.4 Two months later, Eisenhower approved a contingency plan which provided, in part, that if the situation deteriorated still further: the United States would immediately take political action to remove Trujillo from the Dominican Republic as soon as a suitable successor regime can be induced to take over with the assurance of U.S. political, economic, and-if necessary-military support. 5

Seemingly unaware of the currents swirling about him, Trujillo continued to live up to his gangster reputation. In June, his henchmen blew up a car carrying Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt, an outspoken critic of the Dominican dictator. As a result, Washington came under renewed pressure from several of the more democratic Caribbean countries for action against Trujillo. Betancourt, who had survived the blast, told US Secretary of State Christian Herter: If you dont eliminate him, we will invade. 6

For a full year, the dissidents and various American officials played cloak-and-dagger games: There were meetings in New York and Washington, in Ciudad Trujillo and Venezuela; Americans living in the Dominican Republic were enlisted for the cause by the CIA; schemes to overthrow Trujillo were drawn up at different times by the State Department, the CIA, and the dissidents, some approved by the Special Group. A