Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic: Government and Politics
ing of the threat of military incursion into politics. Trujillo
assumed power in 1930 as head of the country's military; during
the thirty-one years he controlled the country, he vastly
expanded the budget of the armed forces, while manipulating
the military to his advantage. Following his assassination, the
military retained considerable influence, and during the 1960s
became deeply enmeshed in civil-military plots. Under the Balaguer
presidency during the 1966-78 period, the military
remained a powerful support group of the government and
occasionally a potential threat to Balaguer. Numerous generals
were forced to resign under PRE) governments (1978-86), however.
In the 1990s, as a result of the successive changes, the
Dominican military combined patrimonial elements, partisan
balance, and financial constraints. The military was not the
professional, partially insulated, democratically controlled
armed forces that reformers had sought to develop. Different
administrations also carried out their relations with the military
ignoring established legal norms. The PRD administrations
managed to weaken the institution of the military and to
promote individuals loyal to the president to high posts. Following
this pattern, Balaguer brought back to active service
officers who had been loyal to him. However, during the ten
years of his presidency (1986-96), the armed forces increasingly
became a weak, underpaid, top-heavy, and largely unprofessional
institution.
The first dramatic change to the military came on the day of
Guzman's inauguration in 1978 when he forced the resignation
of several generals who could have proved a threat to his
regime (see The PRD in Power and Balaguer, Again, ch. 1).
During the next two years, more than thirty generals either
were retired, demoted, or sent abroad. In addition to taking
additional steps to remove the military from partisan politics,
Guzman also instituted a more concerted policy of rotating
officers to break up regional pockets of civilian-military alliances
that had become established under Balaguer. Guzman
earned the trust of the remaining military both through his
conservative views and anticommunist policies and his endorsement
of Balaguer's last-minute generous salary increases for
the military, as well as additional modest budget increases. By
the end of his administration, Guzman could number several
military among his closest and most loyal associates.
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