Manifesto from the Supreme Chief of the Revolution, 1930
[by Rafael Estrella Ureña printed in La Información newspaper, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, February 24, 1930. Military dictators always issue a self-serving proclamation in hopes of justifying to the people their overthrow of the government. This one is typical. Try to identify the “issues,” real and bogus, that the military claims required their action. Another common feature: the new president's first name is always General.]
To the Nation
The Dominican people are worried about the serious situation that affects them at this hour. They, unanimously, demand a rapid and energetic action to stop the breakdown of the Republic. A solution that would save it from the economic collapse of The National Treasury that faces a crisis that will lead to the tremendous bankruptcy, which in the Institutional Order, as a denial to our purely democratic organization, inherited from the lofty principles of the French Revolution, is harming the traditions of the republican ideal.
As an interpreter of that unanimous longing, of that common aspiration, which is in all the spirits illuminating over the dark perspectives of our future the last rainbow of hope, I launch myself today to render viable the longing that is carried by all classes of the country in their torn hearts, raising again, with the soul at the same time embittered and convinced, the flag of the ideal that has found no medium in the field of civic-mindedness and that finds itself compelled to seek refuge in that other field of abnegation and rebelliousness where free men enforce their principles of civilization and democracy under the banners of armed protest.
I have been the first to proclaim in my political programs, as well as in the people's tribune, the need for keeping the peace that is so indispensable for the country's happiness. That is why, together with the other directors of the Alliance, I have requested, by all legal means, the reform of the current Electoral Law, which takes away from the act of suffrage all the guarantees and all the liberties required to become the truthful and free expression of the citizens' conscience. These efforts have been useless, given the stubbornness that men in power interpose to perpetuate themselves, making tenure in office elastic and tossing blots of ignominy over the white tunic of institutions.
We cannot cross our arms, in an attitude of indifference and cowardice, in view of the current situation fraught with dangers for the future of the Republic. The economic disaster provoked by the squandering of eighty-six million pesos in less than six years of administrative blunders; the ruin of commerce and national industry, due to the lack of a far-sighted regime that would put into practice a series of wise and energetic protective measures; the stagnation of agriculture; the reduction, increasingly alarming, of our export activity; the prostitution of justice; the corruption of education, in whose classrooms politics has entered with its entourage of shadows that negate the moral authority of the Dominican teacher; public disconcert; and as a banner of ridicule that floats over all this accumulation of betrayal, the moral anarchy planted in the country's heart for the scandalous impunity with which fraud thrives in all sectors of public administration and for the outrage which with each step the supreme law that governs the institutional life of the state is ignored every step of the way.
To place a retaining wall to that general disconcert, ruinous for the future of the teetering nation, I face the men in power with weapons in hand, since I cannot carry, unfortunately, the discredited codes of the laws mocked so many times. I am resolved to offer the country, under an oath of honor, economic stability, moral tranquility, protection of commerce and industry, now in ruins, judicial peace, electoral freedom, and to establish, finally, in the heart of Dominican society the rule of the democratic principles that today force us to travel once more to the dark paths of the past.
And now, may the national conscience, dispassionate and austere, condemn the real culprits and may posterity reserve for them the curse of history.
Rafael Estrella Urena, Commanding General of the Revolutionary Troops
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