Fifty years ago today, four hundred United States Marines landed on the shores of the Dominican Republic, beginning a fourteen-month occupation of the country.
Dubbing it “Operation Powerpack,” President Johnson’s administration sold the invasion with gruesome lies that played off mid-sixties anticommunist hysteria and a manufactured national security risk. On April 28, 1965, Johnson alerted the American public of the operation as it was happening in a brazen White House press conference, saying it was necessary to “protect American lives.”
The US had long viewed Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator, as an ally who helped offset the political influence of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But after Trujillo’s assassination, Juan Bosch, a liberal reformer and one-time political prisoner, was elected president.
Bosch supported labor unions and peasant movements, endorsed agrarian reform laws, and encouraged the education of all Dominicans. The military elite left over from Trujilo’s rule grew unnerved by the increasing democratization of the country and their loss of control over the country’s resources (particularly its sugar and mineral deposits).
