Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is the island country of the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola, the second largest and second most populous of the Antilles, with Santo Domingo as its capital. The Taino divided the island into five chiefdoms before Columbus claimed it in 1492, and Santo Domingo became the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. Dominicans deposed the Spanish governor and declared independence in November 1821, only to be annexed by Haiti in February 1822. True independence came twenty-two years later in 1844, after the Dominican War of Independence led by La Trinitaria, the secret society Juan Pablo Duarte had founded in 1838, with Pedro Santana's army behind it. What followed was seventy-two years of civil wars, dictatorships, Haitian invasions and a brief return to Spain, ended by the Restoration War of 1863 to 1865. The United States occupied the country from 1916 to 1924, Rafael Trujillo ruled from 1930 to his assassination in 1961, and after the civil war of 1965 and Joaquin Balaguer's long rule the republic moved toward democracy.