The Boundaries of Democracy
IN A VIRTUAL INSURRECTION IN APRIL
over demands by the IMF, at least 70 Dominicans
died. The Dominican Republic has always been close
to our hearts. The impetus to form NACLA in 1966
came, after all, from a group of Christians, academ-
ics and activists angered by the Johnson Administra-
tion’s dispatch of 23,000 U.S. troops into the country
the previous year. Today, the Dominican Republic
continues to raise questions about the nature of
democracy that are fundamental to our work.
Often, Report on the Americas addresses those
issues through a major news story, such as elections
in El Salvador. At other times, we delve into the
problems posed by less well-known countries. One
result was our November-December 1982 Report on
the Dominican Republic. We called it “a study of
constraints.” We asked, “Can a country be said to be
democratic because it holds elections, if at the same
time it represses strikes with military force?” And we
reflected on the travails of democracy in a country
besieged by international creditors.
I N EARLY JUNE, GULF AND WESTERN AN-
nounced that it was selling its 264,000 acres of
land in the Dominican Republic. For many people,
the corporation and the country were synonymous.
Under the tutelage of chief executive Charles G.
Bluhdorn, G&W became the largest private employer
in the country. At the height of the cane-cutting
season, its sugar mills gave work to 37,000 people.
There was more: hotels in the capital of Santo Do-
mingo, tennis, golf and riding clubs, the Casa de
Campo resort complex. And a Latin American novel-
ist searching for an image to sum up the ironies of the
continent might have invented the G&W masterpiece:
the Altos de Chav6n, a complete replica of an 18th
century colonial village, designed to promote local
artists but opened by Frank Sinatra.
It was not only the rightist Balaguer regime, itself
the squalid offspring of the 1965 U.S. intervention,
that welcomed Gulf and Western’s activities. The
Social Democratic government of Salvador Jorge
Blanco, too, found G&W a paragon of multinational
behavior. “We’re grateful for the way the company
conducted its operations,” said presidential spokes-
man Luis Gonzilez Fabra after the pullout. All well
and good, but only as long as sugar profits were
running high, the local currency sound and the sweet-
heart deals thriving.
But Bluhdorn’s death last year of a heart attack, as
he flew back from his adopted home in the Domini-
can Republic, changed the picture. Sweetheart deals
JULY/AUGUST
were a thing of the past: in 1979, the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission had sued Bluhdorn over
secret sugar speculation. And today’s sugar prices
have not recovered from the slump that began in
1979. G&W’s new chief executive, Martin S. Davis,
points out that, “Sugar no longer fits in with the
company’s long-term strategic plan to concentrate on
higher return, consumer-oriented products, financial
services and leisure-time businesses.” That attitude
has taken G&W away from Dominican sugar fields
and into the lusher pastures of Paramount Pictures-
whose latest success is the movie “Gremlins”–and
the vast publishing house of Simon & Schuster.
Davis goes on to explain that the pullout “was
accelerated by the instability of the Dominican peso
over the past year, followed by severe peso devalua-
,tion and the peso exchange restriction on sugar export
revenues and dividend remittances.” G&W is just
one of several corporations deserting the troubled
Dominican economy: Alcoa recently closed its baux-
ite operation at Pedernales, and Falconbridge has
reduced the scale of its nickel mining at Bonao.
J ORGE BLANCO MAY HAVE LEARNED THE
hard way that the profits to be harvested from
“Gremlins” will always be more important to a
corporation than the fate of 37,000 Dominican sugar
workers. But there is more to this tale than a moral
lesson on the avarice of multinationals. The G&W
pullout is also tied to the paradox of democratizing a
country which is hostage to the bullies of the IMF.
And Jorge Blanco may be slower to learn that Ronald
Reagan is no more reliable a friend of his young
democracy than the fickle executives of G&W.
Washington has made a fetish of elections. The
mere fact that they are held is deemed to be enough;
the context is of little importance. All that matters is
that the patient puts on a presentable suit of clothes
every four or five years; not that the body beneath
may be ravaged by a wasting disease. As Sara Sleight
points out in her timely article in this issue, the debt
crisis and the political crisis of democracy are in-
separable. President Jorge Blanco was crudely re-
buffed when he sent a personal message to Ronald
Reagan last January warning that IMF negotiating
terms could threaten Dominican democracy. In mid-
April, Jorge Blanco bent to the IMF demands. By the
dawn of Tuesday the 24th, anniversary of the out-
break of the 1965 revolution, his government had
launched a military onslaught on protesters in the
poor barrios. Many of them were executed in cold
blood; the rest are paying fivefold price increases for
essential items such as medicines. It is a pitiful ad-
vertisement for democracy.
