The history of the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, the island the Taíno called Quisqueya or Ayiti. It was the first place in the Americas that Spain colonised, and the destruction of its Taíno people under Spanish rule set the pattern for the conquest of the hemisphere; the enslaved Africans brought to replace them formed the first plantation and maroon societies of the Americas. After centuries as a neglected Spanish outpost, the colony passed through French rule, a brief independence and 22 years of Haitian government before declaring independence in 1844. Its first century as a republic was marked by caudillo rule, foreign debt and a United States occupation, followed by the 31-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Since the 1960s it has moved, unevenly, from civil war and authoritarian elections to regular democratic transfers of power.

Hunter-gatherers reached the Caribbean islands around 6,000 years ago, coming from Central America or northern South America. During the first millennium BCE Arawakan-speaking farmers began moving north from the South American mainland through the islands, and by around 600 CE their descendants had settled Hispaniola. Over the following centuries they developed the society known as Taíno. Taíno communities lived in villages called yucayeques around central plazas, grew cassava and other crops in heaped mounds of earth called conucos, fished and made pottery. Inheritance passed through the female line, and religion centred on zemis, spirit beings represented in carved figures. They played a ceremonial ball game on courts called bateyes, which may also have served to settle disputes between communities.

When Europeans arrived in 1492, Hispaniola was divided among five chiefdoms, Marién, Maguá, Maguana, Jaragua and Higüey, each ruled by a cacique: Guacanagarix, Guarionex, Caonabo, Bohechío and Cayacoa. Nobody knows how many people lived on the island. Estimates range from tens of thousands to well over a million; the Library of Congress country study cites a figure of about one million.

Christopher Columbus, sailing for Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, reached the island in December 1492 and named it La Isla Española. Guacanagarix received him kindly, and after the Santa María was wrecked on Christmas Day Columbus left a garrison at a fort he called La Navidad. When he returned on his second voyage the fort had been destroyed by Caonabo, whose people the garrison had abused. Columbus founded La Isabela on the north coast, which nearly failed, and in 1496 Santo Domingo was founded on the south coast. It became the capital of Spain's first colony and the base from which the Spanish Empire launched its conquests of the Caribbean and the mainland.

Spanish rule was catastrophic for the Taíno. Settlers seized food, abused women and forced the people into gold mining. A Taíno uprising was crushed in 1495. Columbus granted settlers both land and the labour of the people who lived on it, and in 1503 the crown formalised this as the encomienda, under which Taíno were assigned to Spaniards who were supposed to protect and Christianise them in return for their work. In practice it was forced labour without limit. In 1503 Governor Nicolás de Ovando had Anacaona, the ruler of Jaragua, and some eighty chiefs seized at a meeting presented as peace talks; the chiefs were killed and Anacaona was later executed. Overwork, hunger, violence and new diseases such as smallpox, carried in the Columbian exchange, destroyed the population: about 60,000 Taíno were counted in 1508, and by the 1540s only a few hundred remained in Spanish-controlled areas. Many historians describe what happened as genocide. In 1511 the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos denounced the settlers from the pulpit of Santo Domingo, starting a long debate over the treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Resistance continued. The cacique Enriquillo, nephew of Anacaona, fled to the Bahoruco mountains in 1519 and fought the Spanish for fourteen years, until in 1533 they agreed a treaty giving his followers their own town. Taíno ancestry survived through intermarriage with Spaniards and Africans, and Taíno words, foods and place names remain part of Dominican life.

To replace Taíno labour the crown allowed the import of enslaved Africans, the first of whom arrived in 1503, opening the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. Sugar cane came from the Canary Islands, and the first sugar mill in the Americas was built on Hispaniola around 1516. On 25 December 1521 enslaved Wolof Muslims rose on the sugar estate of Diego Columbus, the admiral's son, in the first major slave revolt in the Americas. Many of the rebels escaped to the mountains, and by the 1530s bands of cimarrones, maroons, were so numerous that Spaniards travelled the countryside only in armed groups; a churchman in 1542 put their number at 2,000 to 3,000.

The colony's importance soon faded. After Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico in 1521 and Peru's silver was found, most colonists left for the mainland and new emigrants passed the island by. In 1561 Havana was chosen as the gathering point for the treasure fleets, and Santo Domingo became a backwater. French corsairs raided the coasts, and in 1586 the English privateer Francis Drake seized Santo Domingo and held it for ransom. Poverty loosened colonial racial lines, and a largely mixed population of Spanish, African and Taíno descent emerged, living from cattle ranching and contraband trade.

To stop smuggling with the Dutch and English, Spain in 1605 forcibly moved the population of the north and west coasts towards Santo Domingo, burning their towns. These "devastations" cost many lives, and they left the west of the island open to French and English buccaneers, who settled Tortuga from 1629. In 1655 an English fleet sent by Oliver Cromwell failed to take Santo Domingo and seized Jamaica instead. In 1697 Spain recognised French rule over the western third of Hispaniola, which became Saint-Domingue. That colony grew into the richest in the Caribbean, with half a million people, most of them enslaved, while Spanish Santo Domingo, with about 125,000 people in 1790, of whom some 60,000 were enslaved, lived largely by selling cattle and hides to its neighbour.

The Haitian Revolution that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 transformed the whole island. Spain, defeated in war with France, handed Santo Domingo over by the Treaty of Basel in 1795, and in 1801 Toussaint Louverture entered the city and proclaimed the abolition of slavery. Napoleon's army soon took control, but was defeated in the west, where Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804. A French garrison held on in Santo Domingo and restored slavery; in 1805 Haiti's emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines invaded, and his retreating troops sacked Santiago and Moca, killing many residents. Local landowners under Juan Sánchez Ramírez defeated the French at Palo Hincado in 1808, and Spanish rule returned in 1809, a period Dominicans remember as España Boba, "foolish Spain", for its neglect.

On 1 December 1821, amid the Spanish American wars of independence, José Núñez de Cáceres declared the independent state of Spanish Haiti and sought union with Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia. Before any answer came, Haiti's president Jean-Pierre Boyer marched in with 10,000 troops in February 1822 and unified the island. The 22 years of Haitian rule are remembered in Dominican tradition as a harsh occupation, though historians describe a more complex picture. Boyer's government abolished slavery for good in the east, but it also expropriated land, including that of the Church, closed the university, which had no students left, pressed peasants to grow export crops and taxed the east heavily to pay the indemnity France had imposed on Haiti. Many landowning families emigrated. In 1838 Juan Pablo Duarte and his companions founded the secret society La Trinitaria, and on 27 February 1844 they declared independence. Haitian armies invaded repeatedly over the next twelve years and were driven back each time.

Power passed quickly from the idealists of La Trinitaria to the caudillos, regional strongmen with private armies. Pedro Santana, a cattle rancher, seized control in 1844, exiled Duarte and alternated in power with his rival Buenaventura Báez, each printing paper money to enrich his followers. Fearing another Haitian invasion, both sought a foreign protector, and in 1861, with the United States absorbed in the American Civil War, Santana handed the country back to Spain. Spanish rule provoked a national revolt, the War of Restoration, launched in August 1863. Guerrillas confined the Spanish army to the towns while yellow fever killed thousands of its soldiers, and in 1865 Spain gave up and withdrew.

The restored republic remained unstable: between 1865 and 1879 there were 21 changes of government. In 1869 Báez negotiated annexation by the United States, but the US Senate rejected the treaty. Sugar transformed the economy from the 1870s, when Cuban planters fleeing war at home built the first mechanised mills in the south-east, and migrant cane cutters from the Leeward Islands and later from Haiti came to work them. Ulises Heureaux, known as Lilís, ruled as dictator from 1882 to 1899, borrowing heavily abroad; when he was assassinated in 1899 the national debt was some fifteen times the annual budget.

With European warships off Santo Domingo pressing creditors' claims, President Theodore Roosevelt announced in 1904 that the United States would make Latin American states pay their debts, and from 1905 American officials collected Dominican customs revenue. After renewed civil conflict, and a year after occupying Haiti, the United States landed Marines in May 1916 and in November imposed a military government. It built roads, schools and a national constabulary, but censored the press, jailed critics, and through a 1920 land law dispossessed thousands of peasants who lacked formal titles, to the benefit of mostly American sugar companies. In the eastern provinces peasant guerrillas, called gavilleros, fought the Marines for years. The occupation ended in 1924. Its most lasting legacy was the National Guard, whose commander, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, would soon rule the country.

When a revolt broke out against President Horacio Vásquez in February 1930, Trujillo kept the army in its barracks, and in May he was elected with 95 percent of the vote after his troops intimidated opponents. For 31 years he ruled through the army and secret police, a single party and a vast personality cult; after a hurricane destroyed Santo Domingo in 1930 he rebuilt the capital and renamed it Ciudad Trujillo. He and his family came to own perhaps half the arable land and most of the country's industry. Opponents were imprisoned, tortured and murdered at home and abroad.

In October 1937 Trujillo ordered the killing of Haitians in the north-western border region and parts of the Cibao. Over several days soldiers, using rifles but mostly machetes, knives and bayonets, murdered Haitian men, women and children, including many Dominican-born people of Haitian descent; those who fled were cut down as they crossed the Dajabón River. The regime tried to blame Dominican civilians, but American investigators found army rifle bullets in the victims' bodies. Estimates of the dead range from about 14,000 to 40,000, with many scholars settling on around 20,000. The killings became known as the Parsley massacre, from accounts that soldiers made victims say perejil and killed those who could not pronounce it in the Spanish way, though historians doubt how widely this test was used. Under pressure from the United States and Haiti, Trujillo paid an indemnity of $525,000, roughly $30 per victim. The massacre was part of a policy of "Dominicanising" the frontier and of an anti-Haitian racism that also led Trujillo to welcome white European refugees, including Spanish Republicans and Jewish refugees who settled at Sosúa during the Second World War.

During the Cold War Trujillo presented himself as a staunch anti-communist ally of Washington, but his crimes eventually isolated him. In 1959 he crushed an invasion by exiles backed by Fidel Castro's Cuba, in 1960 his agents tried to kill Venezuela's president Rómulo Betancourt in Caracas, and in November 1960 his men murdered three of the Mirabal sisters, prominent opponents. The Organization of American States imposed sanctions, and the government of Dwight D. Eisenhower cut sugar purchases. On 30 May 1961 a group of Dominican conspirators, with encouragement from the CIA, ambushed and killed Trujillo on the road to San Cristóbal.

Juan Bosch, a writer who had led the opposition in exile, won the country's first free election in December 1962. His reforms alarmed the army, the Church hierarchy and the elite, and he was overthrown by a military coup in September 1963. In April 1965 officers and civilians calling themselves Constitutionalists rose to restore him; loyalist forces bombed the capital, and on 28 April President Lyndon Johnson sent in US troops, fearing what he called a second Cuba. Some 27,000 American soldiers and Marines, later joined by an Inter-American force, separated the sides, and between about 2,850 and 4,275 Dominicans, mostly civilians, died before a settlement was reached.

Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's last puppet president, won the 1966 election and ruled for twelve years. His government presided over rapid growth in the early 1970s, but security forces and allied groups killed, tortured or disappeared thousands of opponents. When he tried to overturn his defeat in 1978, pressure from the Carter administration forced him to accept the victory of Antonio Guzmán, the country's first peaceful transfer of power between elected presidents. Balaguer returned in 1986 and won elections in 1990 and 1994 marked by fraud; under US pressure he cut his last term short and did not stand in 1996.

Since 1996 power has changed hands regularly through elections. Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Liberation Party, founded by Bosch, governed from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2004 to 2012, separated by the term of Hipólito Mejía, whose presidency was hit by a banking collapse in 2003. Tourism, free-trade zones and remittances from a large diaspora, centred on New York, drove some of the fastest growth in Latin America, though poverty and inequality persisted. Relations with Haiti remain the most sensitive issue in national life. In September 2013 the Constitutional Court ruled that children born in the country to non-citizen parents after 1929 had never been Dominican citizens, a decision that left many Dominicans of Haitian descent at risk of statelessness and drew international criticism.

Luis Abinader of the Modern Revolutionary Party won the presidency in 2020, ending sixteen years of Liberation Party rule, and was re-elected in the first round in May 2024. His government began building a fence along much of the Haitian border in 2022 and took a hard line on migration from Haiti, which was popular with many voters. On 8 April 2025 the roof of the Jet Set nightclub in Santo Domingo collapsed during a concert, killing 236 people, the deadliest disaster of its kind in the country's history.