Government by Scalpel

White-suited diplomats filed into Santo Domingo's glittering National Palace. U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey arrived on the run, flushed and hurried over an overlong chat with Peace Corps workers. A few moments later, a 21-gun salute pounded out over the Caribbean and rolled across the Santo Domingo coastal plain, signaling to Dominicans the inauguration of the country's first constitutional President since the military toppled Leftist Juan Bosch in 1963. "I have not come here to put on the uniform and boots of Trujillo," President Joaquin Balaguer told his inauguration audience. "I have come to make an attempt -- a new at tempt -- to make these symbols of op pression disappear from the life of the Dominican people."

With that, "Balaguer launched into the first public details of his program to rebuild the tired, war-shattered nation. "The first step in this direction," he said, "must consist of an austerity policy which will act not as a bomb, but as a scalpel upon the ulcers that must be cut out in cold blood." The ulcers -- inflation, corruption, political favoritism and inefficiency -- would not disappear easily, Balaguer warned, and his surgery would be "painful for all."

As a starter, Balaguer announced that he would halve his own salary to $750 a month, cut the pay of all other government workers, and clamp a ceiling on pensions. To fight corruption and inefficiency in government operations, Balaguer also set up a central auditing operation, banned strikes by government workers, and promised that politicians would be weeded out of government industries (mainly sugar) and replaced by technical men.

To help administer his program--and promote "national unity"--Balaguer announced a Cabinet that drew on every political shade. He named the secretary-general of Bosch's leftist Dominican Revolutionary Party (P.R.D.) as his Secretary of Finance, made the vice president of a minor rightist party another Secretary Without Portfolio.

In the end, Balaguer made it clear that he meant business, and that his country would make it on its own hook, not on U.S. aid. "We cannot live on alms," said Balaguer, "and be proud."

All in all, it was quite a speech for a onetime Trujillo functionary who had been denounced by Dominican leftists as a tool of the military and of the old Trujillo crowd. But it was only a reflection of the new times and new climate in the Dominican Republic--a climate that was growing ever mellower with the final withdrawal last week of OAS peace-keeping troops.

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