Dominican Republic - Political Instability
Heureaux left two major legacies: debt and political instability. It was these legacies that finally helped usher in the United States military occupation of 1916. In the six years after Heureaux's assassination in 1899, the country experienced four revolts and five presidents.
National politics came to revolve primarily around the conflict between the followers of Juan Isidro Jimenes Pereyra, called jimenistas, and the followers of Horacio Vasquez Lahara, called horacistas; both men and both groups had been involved in plots against Heureaux.
After a brief period of armed conflict, Vasquez headed a provisional government established in September 1899. Elections brought Jimenes to the presidency on November 15. The Jimenes administration faced a fiscal crisis when European creditors began to call in loans that had been contracted by Heureaux.
Customs fees represented the only significant source of government revenue at that time. When the Jimenes government pledged 40 percent of its customs revenue to repay its foreign debt, it provoked the ire of the San Domingo Improvement Company. A United States-based firm, the Improvement Company, had lent large sums to the Heureaux regime. As a result, it not only received a considerable percentage of customs revenue, but also had been granted the right to administer Dominican customs in order to ensure regular repayment. Stung by the Jimenes government's resumption of control over its customs receipts, the directors of the Improvement Company protested to the United States Department of State. The review of the case prompted a renewed interest in Washington in Dominican affairs.
Cibao nationalists suspected the president of bargaining away Dominican sovereignty in return for financial settlements. Government forces led by Vasquez put down some early uprisings. Eventually, however, personal competition between Jimenes and Vasquez brought them into conflict. Vasquez's forces proclaimed a revolution on April 26, 1902; with no real base of support, Jimenes fled his office and his country a few days later. However, conflicts among the followers of Vasquez and opposition to his government from local caciques grew into general unrest that culminated in the seizure of power by ex-president Alejandro Woss y Gil in April 1903.
Dominican politics had once again polarized into two largely nonideological groups. Where once the Blues and Reds had contended for power, now two other personalist factions, the jimenistas (supporters of Jimenes) and the horacistas (supporters of Vasquez and Caceres), vied for control. Woss y Gil, a jimenista, made the mistake of seeking supporters among the horacista camp and was overthrown by jimenista General Carlos Felipe Morales Languasco in December 1903. Rather than restore the country's leadership to Jimenes, however, Morales set up a provisional government and announced his own candidacy for the presidency — with Caceres as his running mate.
The renewed fraternization with the horacistas incited another jimenista rebellion. This uprising proved unsuccessful, and Morales and Caceres were inaugurated on June 19, 1904. Yet, conflict within the Morales administration between supporters of the president and those of the vice president eventually led to the ouster of Morales, and Caceres assumed the presidency on December 29, 1905.
As a backdrop to the continuing political turmoil in the Dominican Republic, United States influence increased considerably during the first few years of the twentieth century. Pressures by European creditors on the Dominican Republic and the Anglo-German blockade of Venezuela in 1902-03 led to President Theodore Roosevelt's "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the United States would assume the police powers necessary in the region to ensure that creditors would be adequately repaid.
United States military forces had intervened several times between 1900 and 1903, primarily to prevent the employment of warships by European governments seeking immediate repayment of debt. In June 1904, the Roosevelt administration negotiated an agreement whereby the Dominican government bought out the holdings of the San Domingo Improvement Company. Then, following an intermediate agreement, the Morales government ultimately signed a financial accord with the United States in February 1905.
Under this accord, the United States government assumed responsibility for all Dominican debt as well as for the collection of customs duties and the allocation of those revenues to the Dominican government and to the repayment of its domestic and foreign debt. Although parts of this agreement were rejected by the United States Senate, it formed the basis for the establishment in April 1905 of the General Customs Receivership, the office through which the United States government administered the finances of the Dominican Republic.
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