Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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of the world, while the State Department heralds constant improvements
and President Reagan lauds the dictatorship for its “determined
opposition” to “Cuban adventurism” and its support for “private
enterprise and economic reform.” 162
The first extensive study of Wilson’s invasion of the Dominican
Republic appeared 60 years after the war ended, in 1984; 163 here we
have more important concerns. Wilson’s invasion was undertaken to
block constitutional government and ensure “complete satisfaction of
U.S. demands for economic and military control.” It initiated a brutal
five-year counterinsurgency campaign and an eight-year military
occupation that instituted legal-economic arrangements “which
condemned the republic’s population to one of the lower standards of
living in Latin America,” while US investors prospered, taking over most
of the domestic economy, geared to sugar exports as food production
declined. The military government “favored the [US] corporations” and
on the major issues, “completely capitulated to foreign interests, ignoring
those of the Dominican people.” Its actions “advanced the fortunes of
the country’s existing planter and merchant elite” and “proved a
tremendous boon to foreign agricultural interests,” confirming “the
republic’s place in the world as a producer of agricultural commodities
for the industrially developed North Atlantic nations.” Under the US
military government, “the quantity and quality of public education
steadily declined” and its staff was “decimated.” School enrollment did
not pass the 1920 figure until 1935, when it comprised one-third of
school age children in a much larger population.
There was also a “positive side,” Piero Gleijeses observes, including
three major roads (“largely for military purposes”) and some public
health development. But “these material achievements,” such as they
were, “were accomplished with Dominican money.” The US occupying
forces took over the Dominican share of customs receipts—“an