Duas vezes Jorge: o silenciamento como permanência do autoritarismo na República Dominicana

Abstract

In this article I analyze the trajectory of the youngest person to be tortured by the Dominican government as a case where the absence of political transition engenders its own experience of time. This is a development of my PhD dissertation about former combatants of the 1965 April Revolution, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. During the fieldwork I met the men that was a teenager when tortured by Joaquín Balaguer secret service government in 1968. His story, commented on the newspapers of that time, brings about a problem to the contemporary understanding of the revolution: if, for many of the former combatants it was a successful endeavor, and it is also recognized by the current government as a national event, part of this story remained silenced. The democratic transition expected by the revolutionaries transformed itself in twelve years of tyranny, endorsed by popular vote. The case brings the temporal key of the extended effects of the aftermath of the 1965 Revolution, the authoritarian comeback, and its dissolution on a supposed democratic regime. I aim to demonstrate that the story of this elder, in which one can find many common fragments to most of the low-income afro-Dominican civilians that participated in the Revolution, narrates a kind of plot that seems to approximate “democracy” experiences of peripheral countries – far from the universal fictions of the North Atlantic.