Freedom for Braulio Vargas!
Another leader of the Dominican Popular Movement, Braulio Vargas, of Navarrete, was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison. Vargas is the most recent victim in a 55-year campaign of repression by the state to destroy the MPD, the longest standing Marxist-Leninist organization in the Dominican Republic. Despite the state terrorism, the MPD continues to oppose imperialist intervention, the exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations, and the oligarchy’s domination over the immense majority of Dominican workers and peasants. Throughout its long history of state terrorism and corruption, the Dominican government has received the economic and military backing of Washington.
Building up the Police State: The Aftermath of Invasion
In 1965, the U.S. government invaded the Dominican Republic with 42,000 troops in order to repress a popular rebellion against the dictatorial government that aimed to restore the democratically elected president, Juan Bosch. After two years of US military occupation, U.S. military personnel stayed to train the Dominican National Guard and State Police.
The hated, foreign backed government was determined to destroy any organized opposition to the regime of the Reformist Party. The corrupt elections, again overseen by the U.S. government, placed Joanquin Balaguer into power from 1966 to 1978.
This period of Dominican history is popularly known as “the 12 years of terror.” Balaguer’s state police. Executed more than 3,000 leaders of the MPD and other left parties. This covert war resembled COINTELPRO’s efforts to destroy national liberation movements in the United States. Fearing repression, leftists were forced to operate clandestinely; study groups would rip the covers off of communist literature so as not to be spotted reading forbidden material.
In 1961, the national office of the MPD was reduced to ashes by Trujillo’s police and paramilitary forces. U.S. intelligence unleashed a public relations campaign to defame the MPD throughout Latin American as declassified Pentagon documents have shown.
Under the cover of the Cold War, the CIA set up operations in DR in order to infiltrate the MPD with the goal of taking out its leadership. Dan Mitrione, a CIA agent, helped set up the Banda Colorada (Red Gang¬—red was the color of Balaguer’s Reformist Party ) death squads.
Amin Abel, one of the most brilliant and charismatic youth in Dominican history, was assassinated at 28 years old. Abel had led the struggle for open admissions for working class students at the first university of the Americas La UASD (La Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo). The police shot him to death in his home in front of his family.
Maximiliano Gomez “El Moreno” was born to a peasant family in the impoverished province of San Pedro de Macoris. Gomez was forced to drop out of school because he could not afford shoes to go to school. Possessing a humble demeanor, a great command of Marxist theory and an unwavering commitment to struggle, El Moreno was elected the Secretary General of the MPD in 1966. The MPD freed him in a hostage exchange for State Department Colonel Donald J. Crowley, but in 1971, he was poisoned to death in Brussels while in exile.
Numerous other revolutionary leaders were assassinated: Otto Morales, Amaury Germán Aristy, Roberto Figueroa (Chapó), Tito Montes, Henry Segarra Santos, Stalin García, Juan Pablo (Pelayo) Félix.
All were veterans of the Dominican people’s war against the 1965 imperialist invasion and students and practitioners of Marxism. Though the Dominican state stole the lives of an entire generation of bright and brave youth, preventing them from taking their rightful place among their people, other leaders emerged and the struggle for a worker’s revolution in Santo Domingo continued.
The FALPO (Broad Front of People’s Struggle) faces state assassinations
The revolutionary generation of El Moreno has inspired the present-day generation to continue the class struggle in the factories, the countryside, oppressed communities and in the streets. Forced to go underground, el MPD organized a popular front in the oppressed neighborhoods throughout the country called “el FALPO.” The greatest weapon of the workers, peasants and unemployed has been direct struggle with “the general strike” used to shut down entire cities.
The demands of the FALPO have been access to basic services, electricity, running water, education, health care as well as an end to the drug trade and government corruption. Risking their own lives, Braulio Vargas and other leaders of the FALPO have led this decisive struggle. The Dominican police, trained by the Miami and New York City Police Departments in military combat and counterinsurgency, gunned down dozens of the FALPO’s youth leadership.
Youth leaders such as Jesus Rafael Diplan Martinez “El Chu,” Yito Gomez, Junior Espinal, Elvin Amable Rodriguez “Ony”, Osvaldo Torres “El Fury”, Jonathan Duran, Jose Aquiles, Jose Rodriguez among others have been shot and killed in cold blood by the armed forces.
As the leader of the FALPO in Navarrete, Braulio Vargas demanded a popular tribunal to try the local government for the misuse of public funds. Vargas openly denounced the systematic theft by the mayor Amantina Gomez and brought to light the role Mayor Gomez played in the drug trade. The FALPO also has a campaign demanding that Law 176-07 about Participatory Budgets approved in July of 2007. This would mean the community itself would determine which public works to prioritize and the mayor’s office has to publicly announce how the city’s funds are distributed.
After waging this campaign, Vargas was persecuted, subjected to raids of his home in the middle of the night and forced to go underground. Finally captured and imprisoned on trumped up charges, Vargas’ trial was filled with inconsistencies, with corruption and open intimidation revealing its political nature.
The state is hoping to send a message to the revolutionary movement as a whole: you will be killed or put in jail. But the people have refused to cease their struggle.
Repression Breeds Resistance
According to the World Bank, nearly half of the Dominican population continues to live in poverty—although the real figure is likely be even higher. Without economic opportunities in the countryside, millions of families have been forced to flee to the cities. Without a place to live, they build makeshift homes from zinc, wood, cement blocks in neighborhoods that have no urban planning, employment, education nor basic services. Sixty percent of the population lives in urban encampments without any escape from poverty. Basic staple foods prices continue to soar. School breakfasts have been suspended.
Because of the widespread suffering and unemployment, foreign capital is able to set up “Free Trade Zones” as the only source of work. These sweatshops which produce everything from Fruit of the Loom, to Timberlands to Tommy Hilfiger only pays $70 for a fifty-hour work week. Now the Free Trade Zone workers are also encouraged to bring their piece-work home in order to sew more clothes.
For opposing this economic exploitation, the leadership of the left has been assassinated during strikes, physically incapacitated, and illegally incarcerated. But the revolutionary forces continue to fight on the road towards victory, today more determined and united than ever.
Despite more than four decades of an uninterrupted war of state repression against the Marxist-Leninist movement in the Dominican Republic, the anti-imperialist movement continues to fight back and grow. From the belly of the beast, the PSL stands with the MPD and all the progressive, anti-imperialist organizations of the Dominican Republic in demanding freedom for Braulio Vargas and all of the political prisoners of the Balaguer, Hipólito Mejía and Leonel Fernández governments.
