On this date in 1973, Col. Francisco Caamano was (perhaps*) captured by forces of the Dominican dictatorship and summarily executed while trying to organize a guerrilla resistance.
Caamano was heir to a long family military tradition; his father had been a Defense Minister for the dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Unsteady governments followed Trujillo’s 1961 assassination. Caamano came to prominence by mounting a 1965 coup against a military junta and in favor of the constitutional regime it had overthrown two years earlier. The coup was an initial success — Caamano was temporarily the de facto head of state — but also triggered an American intervention against the distrusted leftist government.
Caamano licked his wounds in Cuba for a few years before mounting a small landing in early February 1973 with a handful of followers, looking to foment a peasant revolution — a play right out of the Cuban Revolution, but considerably less successful. Harried by the military, the operation was crushed within weeks with only three survivors.
A Spanish-language tribute to Caamano is here. Another more general educational page (also in Spanish) is here.
* This is the guerrillas’ version. The government’s version was that Caamano was killed in battle.
Note: Title corrected.
On this day..
- 1938: Herman Hurmevaara, Finnish Social Democrat
- 1919: Heinrich Bosse
- 1917: The only triple hanging in Montana
- 1906: Robert E. Newcomb and John Mueller
- 1943: Mildred Fish-Harnack, an American in the German Resistance
- 1894: Joe Dick, "allowed to go anywhere he desired"
- 1318: Dukes Erik and Valdemar Magnusson
- 1943: Toralf Berg, Norwegian resistance member
- 1912: Thomas Jennings, fingerprinted
- 1939: The only triple execution in Manitoba
- 1535: Etienne de la Forge, John Calvin's friend
- 1495: William Stanley, Lord Chamberlain
Headline fail! Thanks for that catch.
Nitpick. He wasn’t Dominica’s would-be Castro, he was the Dominican Republic’s. They’re two rather different places.