Caribbean Legion
The Caribbean Legion ( Legión del Caribe , Caribbean Legion ) was an informal military unit that existed in the Central American - Caribbean region from 1947 to 1949 and was supported mainly financially and logistically by the government of Guatemala . The most important political goal was the overthrow of the government of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina , the dictatorial president of the Dominican Republic . The Legion failed with this goal.
Origin of the term, composition of the legion and political goals
The term goes on a report of TIME - Correspondent Jerry Hannifin April 1948 Costa Rica and became then of politicians, authorities and used in public.
The members of the Legion were mostly left -wing or left-wing liberal political exiles from Honduras , Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. However, it also included mercenaries and simple adventurers from the environment of Cuban political gangsterismo . The most famous members of the Legion included Fidel Castro , José Figueres Ferrer , who later became President of Costa Rica, and Alberto Bayo Giroud , former fighter pilot of the Spanish Civil War and military advisor to Castro. The American writer Ernest Hemingway , who lives in Cuba , was also briefly accused of being a member of the Legion's staff.
The aim of the Legion was to overthrow the dictators of Nicaragua ( Anastasio Somoza García ), the Dominican Republic (Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina) and the President of Honduras, Tiburcio Carías Andino . In September 1947, the attempt to overthrow Trujillo with a combined sea, land and air operation from the Cuban island of Cayo Confites failed. In March / April 1948, the Legion fought as part of the so-called National Liberation Army in the Costa Rican civil war; their use led to the overthrow of the government of Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia . In 1949 the second attempt to overthrow Trujillo ended in a fiasco after an aerial operation in the Bay of Luperón in the Dominican Republic. In 1950, following investigations by the Organization of American States (OAS), the governments of Cuba and Guatemala withdrew their support for the groups in exile. This meant the end of the Legion.
The creation of the Legion. The operation at Cayo Confites in 1947
The foundation of the Legion was in the context of a wave of democratization in Central America and the Caribbean , which was due to the foreseeable end of World War II and the example of the populist leftist APRA - Party of the Peruvian Haya de la Torre, the model for many political groupings in Latin America has been.
These movements brought about the overthrow of both the Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico and the Salvadoran dictator Maximiliano Hernández in 1944 . Guatemala in particular has now become a refuge for exiles from Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic under the government of left-liberal President Juan José Arévalo. The Guatemalan military willingly provided the logistics for planned invasions in the exiles' home countries. The Cuban government of Ramón Grau San Martín also supported the exile groups, but the military there was much more autonomous than in Guatemala and not always ready to implement the president's instructions in this regard.
The specific reason for the establishment of an effective invasion force against Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic was the escape of the Dominican General Juan Rodríguez García , who managed to leave the Dominican Republic on February 1, 1946 on the pretext of a business trip and carried $ 500,000 with him . Rodríguez, the second richest man in the island republic after Trujillo, had fallen out with the president because he had begun to touch the general's fortune.
The money smuggled out of the country was used in the following three years to buy or rent weapons, planes and ships and to finance the Legion. The Dominicans in exile made up a significant portion of the Legion's staff, but there were also numerous ex-Nicaraguan and Honduran professional officers who intended to bring about the overthrow of Somozas and Carias.
Since the majority of Dominican exiles had lived in Cuba since the mid-1930s, the first attempt to overthrow Trujillo was taken from there. The military method of overthrowing overseas governments by sea was by no means new in the Caribbean. This method of filibusterismo had existed since the 1830s; The governments of Venezuela in particular were constantly threatened by groups in exile who were crossing over to the mainland by ships from the Dutch island of Curacao in order to start revolutions. Particularly extreme examples of this were the cases of the German freight steamer Falke in 1929 and the British steamer Ban Righ in 1901/02.
Arms and explosives were also purchased for the company from the United States . The Legion's liaison in New York was Nicolás Silfa, who deposited bombs and explosives in a warehouse in Manhattan . By early 1947, Silfa had bought enough weapons and hired recruits with military experience so that the men and supplies could be shipped from New York to Cuba on two ships.
In August 1947 the invasion force was complete. She had seven ships: Aurora , Berta , Máximo Gómez (also called Fantasma ), Maceo , Angelita , La Victoria and the Guatemalan Navy speedboats R-41 and R-42 . The air force of the invaders consisted of 16 machines, including a B-24 bomber , six P-38 Lightning - hunters , a B-25 bomber and various transport aircraft . The core of the armament consisted of about 1000 Mauser rifles, the Rodriguez of the Argentine president Juan Perón had acquired 200 Thompson - machine guns , over 2,000 Colt .45 automatic pistols , 15 rocket-propelled grenades Bazooka with 300 missiles, three mortars , three 37 mm anti-tank guns , 2000 hand grenades and steel helmets for each member of the force that officially called itself the Liberation Army of America .
In July 1947 the Legion was moved to the island of Cayo Confites in northern Cuba. Five battalions were formed, each commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Teniente Coronel : Antonio Guiteras , Luperón , Máximo Gómez , Sandino and José Maria Cabral . The island was in no way suitable for the longer stay of the 2,000 legionnaires. The first cases of illness appeared after just a few days, especially since initially there was no weather protection .
There were also strong tensions between the various political groups from various nations. According to various contemporary witnesses quoted by the American political scientist Charles D. Ameringer, some of the Cuban members consisted of criminals who were hoping for prey in the Dominican Republic. The company also involved US mercenaries who served as pilots and were to be paid for the company with $ 10,000 each. According to Ameringer, the pilots were previously part of the Flying Tigers .
The company collapsed in mid-September 1947 due to a lack of coordination and demoralization of the members. The mercenary pilots fled, paralyzing the Legion's air force. Although some of the troops left Cayo Confites in some ships, due to a lack of supplies they were forced to either call at neutral ports or call at a Cuban port under the protection of the Cuban Navy . Fidel Castro , who had embarked on the Aurora , jumped overboard in time and thus escaped capture . Those arrested were interned at short notice, but released on October 3, 1947.
The causes of the company's failure were controversial. The lack of coordination was one of the causes, but more important was that the original operation - a secret landing of a few hundred men in the Dominican Republic - became a real invasion by the Cuban participants, including airplanes, and the troop population was extreme had been inflated.
Despite this failure, Rodriguez did not abandon his plan to overthrow Trujillo. But for that he practically had to take a detour via Costa Rica. Instead of Grau in Cuba, President Arévalo in Guatemala offered him exile and the opportunity to first overthrow another alleged despot .
1948: The Costa Rican Civil War ( Guerra civil de Costa Rica )
Prehistory. The Rafael Calderón government, 1940–1944
The background to the Costa Rican civil war, the outcome of which led to the establishment of the 2nd Republic in 1948, is still controversial today. Above all, there is no serious study of the Legion's actual opponent, the then President of Costa Rica, Rafael Calderón of the “Partido Republicano Nacional”. In the broadest sense, Calderón was a left-wing populist who had continued the job creation programs of the previous government of Leon Cortes Castro from 1940, but on the other hand gave up the state gasoline monopoly in favor of foreign oil companies.
One of his first measures was the (re) establishment of the Universidad de Costa Rica on August 26, 1940, which had been closed as the Universidad de Santo Tomás in 1888. He introduced social security, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor he declared war on Japan before the USA , which he then declared on the German Reich and Italy . German and Italian citizens were temporarily interned and their property was enriched, which intensified the already existing reputation of the Calderon government as corrupt. What made the Calderon government almost unique not only in Latin America, but worldwide, was the fact that it was supported by both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of Costa Rica, the Partido Vanguardia Popular under Manuel Mora Valverde.
With the introduction of the Código de Trabajo on September 15, 1943, important social law conditions were introduced such as maternity protection , the 8-hour day, limitation of night work to six hours and the regulation of overtime , which is with a 50 percent surcharge normal hourly wages should be paid.
Under the successor government of Teodoro Picardo Michalski, supported by Calderon and also supported by the Vanguardia, civil war-like relationships developed between the factions as early as 1946: On the one hand Calderon's Partido Republicano Nacional and the Vanguardia , on the other hand the Partido Unión Nacional , the Partido Demócrata and the Partido Social Demócrata .
On December 16, 1947, the so-called Caribbean Act was concluded between General Rodriguez from the Dominican Republic, Argüello for Nicaragua and Figueres for Costa Rica. The Guatemalan President Arévalo took over the patronage. Rodriguez became commander in chief of the Liberation Army for the Caribbean and Central America ; Miguel Angel Ramirez became chief of staff and the two Honduran colonels Rivas Montes and Morazán were deputy chiefs. While Figueres pleaded for immediate action in Costa Rica, the committee did not want to wait until the February 1948 elections. Therefore, a Nicaraguan group made an attempt to deposit weapons in Nicaragua in January 1948, but was caught by the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua .
The outbreak of civil war
The Costa Rican civil war was triggered in February 1948 when the previous President Calderon defeated his candidate “Picado” by fraud against the national opposition candidate, Ulate. After the assassination of Ulates advisor, Carlos Luis Valverde, Figueres saw the possibility of a military attack. Since the constitutional army of Costa Rica consisted of only 300 men and was poorly trained, victory seemed to be attainable relatively quickly.
Figueres operated from his farm finca La Lucha in the highlands, which was difficult to reach in terms of traffic. He took up a defensive position and was waiting for reinforcements to be flown in from Guatemala by air. Figueres was supported logistically by the US Public Roads Administration, which maintained a construction site for the Panamerican Highway ( Panamericana ) and even had its own hospital. The deployment of a guerrilla group in the San Ramón area was also planned .
The civil war began on March 12, 1948, when Figueres occupied San Isidro Airport and captured three DC-3s belonging to the TACA airline, which formed the core of its air force. With these machines the connection to Guatemala was made and weapons, ammunition and personnel were flown in. On March 14, the battle for the key position on the Panamerican Highway, El Empalme, began. Frank Marshall Jiménez played a particularly important role in these fights; a Costa Rican of German descent who had received paramilitary training from the Hitler Youth in Germany in the late 1930s .
The end of the civil war
On April 10, 1948, the Liberation Army succeeded in taking the second largest city in Costa Rica, Cartago . The local population sympathized anyway with the opposition around Ularte. On April 11th, Puerto Limón , which was connected to Cartago by a railway line, was captured. Weapons that were ready in Cuba were to be landed in Limón. At El Tejar, near Cartago, the worst fighting in the civil war broke out on April 12 when the Empalme battalion led by Frank Marshall Jiménez and Rivas Montes thwarted an attempt by government troops to retake Cartago.
On that day Picado resigned and handed the capital San José over to the diplomatic corps . The negotiations between the ELN and the Picado government were led by the priest Benjamin Nuñez. Since the communist party of Costa Rica, the Vanguardia Popular, and the workers' brigades it led had announced resistance to the extreme, Figueres negotiated directly with party leader Mora in Ochomogo on April 15 in what is known as no man's land. Figueres guaranteed the maintenance of the labor protection laws that had been introduced under the Calderon Guardia.
Meanwhile, a group of Calderonists in Managua tried to persuade President Somoza to attack Costa Rica. This enterprise was brought to failure by the intervention of the US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis. In the so-called pact of the Mexican embassy on April 19, 1948, a peace agreement was reached, which enabled an orderly takeover of the business of government from Picado to Figueres as interim president. The Liberation Army marched into San José on April 24, 1948.
Plans to overthrow Somoza
To this day it is unclear whether Figueres ever seriously considered overthrowing Somoza with the help of the Legion's Nicaraguan exiles. These were formally part of the Liberation Army and demanded the invasion of Nicaragua at all costs. A group led by Major Julio Alonso Lecler, a former officer of the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua , formed the guerrillas Los Vengadores ( The Avengers ) in open rebellion , stole some weapons and secretly tried to cross the border into Nicaragua to wage guerrilla warfare . The group was intercepted by the Costa Rican police on the way to the border and detained for several weeks .
After the end of the civil war, the Nicaraguan members of the Legion founded a government in exile under the leadership of a triumvirate , which also included the Guatemalan university professor Edelberto Torres Rivas. The invasion of Nicaragua to the overthrow of Somoza was finally abandoned because Somoza Torres on the plane hijack left and to Managua deported .
1949: Luperón and the end
Juan Rodriguez began new plans to overthrow Trujillo in December 1948. Logistical support came again from the Arevalo government in Guatemala. A combined land, sea and air operation was envisaged. One rebel group was supposed to reach the Dominican Republic with two speedboats by sea, another with airplanes. A third group was supposed to invade by land from Haiti .
In May 1949, the Legionaries bought seven aircraft in total: a Curtiss C-46 Commando, two Douglas C-47, two flying boats of the type Catalina , a Lockheed Hudson and Anson V . Mexican and American pilots served as mercenaries. The planes were to take off from Cuba and Guatemala.
But as before, Trujillo's intelligence service had learned of the intentions of his opponents and intervened with the Cuban government. The number of rebels is unclear; in June 1949 300 men are said to have stood ready in Cuba; 500 other legionaries were supposed to be flown in from Guatemala to be shipped as well. In fact, there were two speedboats, the Alicia and the Patricia , belonging to the Guatemalan Navy. June 18, 1949 was planned as the day of the attack.
The company was laid out amateurishly from the start. The four mercenary pilots Ralph Wells, Bob Hosford, Pablo Herrera and Arturo Camacho deserted a few hours before the start of the company with a C-47 to Mexico . Only one Mexican crew remained loyal. Although some subordinates advised that the operation should be abandoned, General Rodriguez insisted on it going through. As a replacement for the deserters, two Guatemalan planes were provided, which apparently flew with regular national badges and crews.
At 4 p.m. on June 18, 1949, four Legion planes took off from the San José de Guatemala base on the west coast. They flew over Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala and signaled the start of the action to the flying boat waiting there. But the flying boat could not take off immediately due to overloading, which was not noticed by the other aircraft. They got caught in a heavy storm; one plane had to make an emergency landing on the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan , the other three planes reached the island of Cozumel to refuel . But the Mexican authorities confiscated all four machines.
The Catalina was meanwhile alone on the way to the Dominican Republic without knowing that the invasion had already failed. She flew over the Islas del Cisne , Jamaica and the north coast of Haiti and landed at 7.15 p.m. on June 18, 1949 in the Bay of Luperón near Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The military crew consisted of eight Dominicans, three Nicaraguans and one Costa Rican. The crew consisted of three US mercenaries from Miami .
The landing in the bay went perfectly, but shortly afterwards the invaders got into a fight with Dominican police officers. An attempt to escape with the machine failed because it was stranded on a sandbank. Except for a doctor who remained on board with a few wounded, the rest of the troops tried to escape by land to Haiti, a good 130 km away. The Catalina was meanwhile set on fire by a coast guard cutter; the occupants burned to death on the plane.
The escape of the other invaders also failed. The three American mercenaries, who had hoped to be treated with consideration by Trujillo's troops as crazy gringos , were executed immediately after their arrest to deter further mercenaries. The five survivors were caught and arrested on June 22nd: Horacio Julio Ornes, Miguel Feliú Arzeno, José Rolandez Martínez Bonilla, José Felix Córdoba Boniche and Tulio Arvelo. Contrary to all expectations, they were neither tortured, ill-treated nor executed, but used by Trujillo for propaganda purposes, where he stylized himself as a "victim of international communism, personified in the rulers of Cuba, Guatemala and Costa Rica".
As part of the suppression of the expected uprising, over 200 people were killed by government forces in the Dominican Republic, even in the weeks after the invasion, in the province of Puerto Plata alone. Trujillo was relatively well informed about the structure of the internal resistance movement through smuggled agents.
A final attempt to overthrow Trujillo from the outside was planned in late 1949. Several planes were to take off from the Cuban airfield L'Amelie near Guantánamo in order to kill the dictator and part of his family in an air raid on the Estancia Ramfis , a family estate of the Trujillos. High Haitian government officials and army officers were apparently also involved in the plot. This plan was eventually abandoned because Trujillo's agents had infiltrated this exiled group as well.
Due to pressure from both the US government and other members of the Organization of American States (OAS) who saw security in the Caribbean at risk, the governments of Guatemala, Cuba and Costa Rica stopped supporting the groups in exile, marking the end of the Legion meant.
literature
- Charles D. Ameringer: The Caribbean Legion. Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946-1950. Pennsylvania, PA 1995.
- Charles D. Ameringer: Don Pepe: A Political Biography of José Figueres of Costa Rica. Albuquerque, NEW M. 1978.
- Charles D. Ameringer: The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945-1959. Coral Gables, FLA 1974.
- Tulio H. Arvelo: Cayo Confites y Luperón: Memorias de un expedicionario. Santo Domingo 1980.
- General Alberto Bayo [Giroud]: Tempestad en el caribe. Mexico, DF 1950.
- Juan Bosch : Poker de Espanto en el Caribe. Santo Domingo 1988.
- Enrique V. Corominas: In the Caribbean Political Areas. New York 1954.
- Abelardo Cuadra: Hombre del Caribe. Memorias presentadas y pasadas en limpio por Sergio Ramírez . 3rd edition, San José / Costa Rica 1981.
- Piero Gleijeses: Juan José Arevalo and the Caribbean Legion. In: Journal of Latin American Studies. Volume 21, No. 1, 1989, pp. 133-145.
- Piero Gleijeses: Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton, NJ 1991.
- Robert H. Holden: Armies without Nations. Public violence and state formation in Central America 1821-1960. Oxford 2004.
- Esther Jimeno et al. a .: Estudiales sociales. Nuestro Mundo actual: Una visión del Mundo, América y Costa Rica. San José / Costa Rica 1987.
- Rafael Obregon Loria: Conflictos Militares y Políticos de Costa Rica. San José / Costa Rica 1951.
- Horacio Ornes: Desembarco en Luperón: Episodio de la lucha por la democracia en la República Dominicana. Mexico, DF 1956.
- David Rock (ed.): Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions. Berkeley / Los Angeles, CA 1994.
- Robert L. Scheina: Latin America's Wars. Volume 2.
- Nicolás Silfa: Guerra, traición, y exilio. 3 volumes, Barcelona 1980.
- Jaime Suchlicki: University Students and Revolution in Cuba, 1920–1968. Coral Gables, FLA 1969.
- Guillermo Villegas Hoffmeister: La guerra de Figueres: crónica de ocho años. San José / Costa Rica 1998.