Pierre Schorri writes: In two articles in nlr (numbers 40–41, 1967), James Petras analysed the situation in the Dominican Republic. His analysis is not only out-dated but, worse, very partial in favour of the small Trotskyite June 14th Movement and, consequently, highly critical of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano, the party which played the dominant role during the 1965 revolution, and which was up till October last year led by Juan Bosch. Petras’s accusations against the prd are inaccurate and misleading.
The prd is ‘a personalistic party, almost totally dominated by Juan Bosch and primarily geared to electoral acitivity’. Petras insinuates a conflict between the ‘conservative party leadership’ and ‘the militant prd masses’, and that the prd parliamentary group is continuing the Party’s position of defending ‘the profit interests of the small and medium businessman against the hungry rural workers’. He sums up: ‘the Party leadership clearly defines itself a bourgeois collaborationist opposition, its popular base is disoriented or tends to pass on to other more active political forces’. Petras’s worst accusation, however, is that ‘during the insurrection of 1965 he (Juan Bosch) asked the State Department permission to lead the April revolution while US marines were landing’.
He recognizes, however, in the first article, that the revolution of April was an authentic popular uprising against military corruption and dictatorship, and that ‘the top leadership was primarily professionals from the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano’; ‘the command units were made up and led by Catholic trade unionists (casc) and June 14th militants in addition to prd militants’.