14th of June Movement

Reproduction of the flag of the 14th of June Movement (1J4)

The 14th of June Movement, abbreviated 14J (and 1J4) was a leftist clandestine group opposed to the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo contrived by the Dominican lawyer Manolo Tavárez Justo, that covered almost all the Dominican Republic territory, with some 300 engaged of all the social sectors.

On 14 June 1959, troops of the Movement for Dominican Release, a group of Dominican exiles, after a period of time gathering funding, teams and people, met in Cuba to train for a guerrilla warfare with Fidel Castro’s support. They disembarked in the northern villages of Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo under the direction of the Commander Enrique Jiménez Moya.

This effort to overthrow the tyranny was defeated from the military point of view by the army and the aerial strength of Trujillo, but it succeeded in planting the seed of rebellion among the Dominican population.

This was the inspiration for the name of a political group organised for the internal resistance: The 14th of June Movement, secretly called 14. Manolo Tavares Justo was the president of the group. A man called Rafael Miguel 'Pipe' Faxas Canto was its general secretary, and Leandro Guzmán was the treasurer. Soon after the failed invasion, the Movement for Dominican Release organised other conspiracies, which continued into the early 1960s.

Political party

In 1960 they initiated the talks to establish a movement that grouped and consolidated all the anti-Trujillo sentiment that existed. And in effect, in the last meeting to treat this subject, made in Mao, Valverde, decided to found a "Revolutionary Organisation" of name 14th of June Revolutionary Movement, in homage to the Dominican men of the "Feat of Constanza, Maimón and Estero Hondo", of those who adopted also the "Minimum Program"

They went out in the cold nights of January, subjected to the boys to the death, other so many received the tortures and the majority was to stop to the "40", where the pain was the norm and the interminable night. Manolo was to stop to that prison, until it was moved to the Prison of Port Silver, but already the plot was forged. Move to Manolo to Port Silver, had the aim to force to the Sisters Mirabal, married two with the prisoners, to travel continuously to that city, and to use the dangerous road tramontana. This served so that the diet fraguara his more hideous crime. The three sisters, the three butterflies were cobardemente killed while they returned of Port Silver, in a lóbrego place called "The Summit", where today exists a school that carries his name. With this frightful crime, the dictatorship accelerated his decadence.

The cruel repression desatada against the members of 14th of June produced a feeling of indignation generalised in the Dominican population increasing significantly the levels of dissatisfaction already existent against the diet.

Gone out of the secrecy

On 8 July it announces its exit to the public light and its organisation as a party, on 30 June 1960 they organised the constitutive assembly with delegates from all the country.

Members

1963 actions

The “14th of June”, turned into the third largest political party and the main anti-imperialist organisation, through his leader, Manuel Aurelio Tavárez Justo (known as "Manolo") had alerted to the president Juan Bosch, the possibility of a coup d'état against him supported by the Church, the bourgeoisie, the High Military Control and the Embassy of the United States. To a gathering in the Count's Gate in Santo Domingo, Tavárez affirmed: "Hear this reactionary gentlemen, if you make impossible the peaceful fight of the people, the "14th of June" knows very well where are the steep mountains of Quisqueya; and to them…, to them we will go, following the example and to make the work of the Heroes of June 1959, and in them will keep lit the torch of the freedom, the spirit of the Revolution…. Because it will not remain us, then, another alternative, that the one of Liberty or Death!"

After the coup d'état of 25 September 1963, and a triumvirate was installed, the Revolutionary Movement “14 June”, started on the night of 28 November, to an insurrection, with six guerrilla fronts, that had as purpose the return to the institutional order and the return of the Constitution of 1963.

In the most important of the fronts, situated in Las Manaclas, was Manolo Tavárez Justo, the one who at the same time was the General Commander of the guerrilla.

With a feeble and poor physical and military preparation, beside some national political surroundings dominated by the right and with an urban resistance-social scarce and inefectiva, the insurgent movement was quickly decimated, to the extreme that to 21 days of initiated four (4), of the six (6) fronts, were desmembrados, with the aggravating, as it consigns in the Newspaper of the Guerrilla of The Manaclas, that more than half of the members of the main front guerrillero was on the brink of collapse or captured. Twenty-nine (29) men lost the life, and Manolo Tavárez Justo was captured alive and fusilado, although they had given him guarantees that his life would be respected.

The shooting of Manolo Tavárez Justo caused the renunciation of the chairman of the Triumvirate, Emilio de los Santos, and served of inspiration to the fight against which had made the coup d'état in 1963.

The Guerrilla

In the middle of protests and strikes against the Triumvirate, the Movement 14 June headed a guerrilla in different points of the country suing the restablecimiento of the constitutionality.

The aim was that each group operated like an independent operative unit with ends insurreccionales. Therefore they did not have to be neither very small neither very big, this last by the danger of the espionage.

The fronts in that it organised the Guerrilla were:

More advance, in the second half of the year, conformed new groups, between which, apparently, projected three, whose locations in mountainous places reveal the priority that happened to concede to the guerrilla:

1965 Dominican Civil War

With their leader dead, captured and shot in Las Manaclas, the 14th of June had a critical internal situation endangered as a mass organization.

The 14th of June, still with its internal crisis, had a protagonical integration to the fight in the Dominican Civil War that organised and directed the Dominican Revolutionary Party with José Francisco Peña Gómez in command; from 25 April, when his Provisional Central Committee took the decision to deepen the developing armed movement.

Its political influence was such that even so it directed the greater part of the commandos of resistance to the United States troops in Santo Domingo, form of armed organisation that gave the village to confront to the local and foreign counterrevolution.

The 14J members were active part, beside the Dominican population, the constitucionalists soldiers, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) and the Dominican Popular Movement (MPD), of the main military events occurred during the Revolution of April, already went in the Battle of the Duarte Bridge, in the Operation Cleaning of the Zone North of the Capital articulated by the counter-revolution, in the fights anti-Yankees of the 15 and on 16 June or in the attempt of round to the National Palace where would die, among others extraordinary combatientes, the Colonel Fernández Domínguez, the leader in this moment of the Revolutionary Movement “14 June” Juan Miguel Román, and other very stood out leaders like Euclid Morillo that also had participated in the upraising guerrillero of the 1963, among others.

Dissolution

After the War of April 1965, the crisis of 14J sharpened, as they discussed that their role already had come to an end, this crisis would culminate with his disintegration like political organisation in 1968.

References

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