It was a difficult moment when he went from leader of the then largest mass party, the PRD, Dominican Revolutionary Party, to the head of a small group of followers, the PLD, Dominican Liberation Party. .
More than four decades have passed. They tried to infect him and his fledgling organization with a heinous and disgusting act.
There was political confusion. Certain old coots like now that have not yet recovered from their frustrations, slander. Despicable. They crashed with history, certainty and truth.
Juan Bosch even told his closest associates after the murder of Orlando Martínez on March 17, 1975, that the motive for this heinous act was to be found in the publication of tape recordings provided by the then most famous telephone numbers of the Dominican Republic’s telephone calls. .
Bosch claimed that Martínez’s letter of acid to President Joaquín Balaguer in February 1975 actually provided the pretext for the crime, although those who had him murdered were influenced by the conversations made public by El Nacional’s columnist and Now magazine with the issue of the battle between the army in mid-1974.
The Dominican Communist Party, Orlando Martínez’s PCD, pursued a political tactic of closeness and alliance with a sector of the prevailing reformism in 1975, and understood that by attacking one of Balaguer’s military sectors, it achieved the political goal that it had suggested. This tactic cost Martinez his life, Bosch claimed.
Professor Bosch went through a very uncomfortable situation after the murder of the journalist.
The Dominican Liberation Party was barely 15 months old at the time and police tried to accuse members of the PLD Political Committee, Norge Botello and Cheché Luna, and PLD leader Diómedes Mercedes, of the murder.
Mercedes had been a leader of the PCD but had resigned long ago and was one of the founders of the PLD along with Botello and Luna. The police even tried to question Bosch about the crime.
Martínez, after writing the famous acid article against Balaguer in February 1975, wrote another piece entitled “What the Professor Didn’t See”, in which he criticized the things that Juan Bosch understood to be good and which he had verified in Cuba during his first visit to the island after the triumph of the socialist revolution.
The PCD and Martínez in reality – Bosch told us – were upset that Fidel Castro visited him and spoke in Protocol No. 1 residency for heads of state, and – Bosch added – the pecedeist heads pretended to have a monopoly on relations with the revolution Cuban.
In early March 1975, writer Mario Vargas Llosa released an interview he had at the time with President Balaguer, who said he and Bosch were friends, even though Bosch had been overcome by communist ideas.
Juan Bosch, seeing the statements that Balaguer had given to Vargas Llosa, called a press conference. I was one of the journalists covering this press conference in which Bosch made it clear that he was not and had not been a communist, although he was a Marxist because he used Karl Marx’s method to analyze society and history.
These statements by Bosch received a series of critical articles about Martinez. Reports reached the PLD that they were induced by the PCD lead.
It took place on the fateful March 17, and the criminal hands and their orchestrators took advantage of the recent articles to try to get the PLD and its leader involved.
Telephone espionage
The telephone conversations were mainly published by the journalist in 1974. If you look at the copies of El Nacional from May and June of that year, you will see the revelations that later led to the arrest and deportation of the famous telephone interceptor.
Martínez quotes these conversations literally, even with quotation marks.
It is important to emphasize this data when in Listín Diario on Sunday, November 24, 2013, reformist leader José Osvaldo Leger confirms that Balaguer has sent him through him to tell Martínez to take care of the army, although Leger does not specify which of the groups of Balaguerist soldiers vying for control over the commands and privileges of the twelve-year-old regime, he meant.
But what becomes clear is that saving the journalist’s life depended on the will of the president of the republic, stopping the killers or the owners of the medium he worked for by ceasing to publish issues operating in a semi-dictatorial system, and had cost him his life.
For so many people who ignore him, Pepín Corripio entered the media business during the evening of La Noticia, which we founded on June 11, 1973, a group of journalists who left El Nacional in January 1973. The shareholders of La Noticia were Pepín, the Vicini family, José Antonio Caro Álvarez, José A. Brea Peña and the journalists who bought shares with a loan from Banco Popular Dominicano.
The main owner of El Nacional de Ahora in 1973 was Rafael Molina Morillo. And in 1975, he controlled the entire editorial aspect of the evening, as director Freddy Gatón Arce was displaced. It should be noted that at the end of December 1971, Molina Morillo resigned Radhamés Gómez Pepín as editor-in-chief of El Nacional. Radhamés, who was one of the founders of the newspaper in 1966, could not return to El Nacional until after Pepín Corripio bought the evening newspaper in 1979.
Those statements by José Osvaldo Leger in the 2013 Listin Diario about Orlando Martínez and his murder reveal many things that he does not describe in detail, but that are being cleared up for the first time. Leger then indicated that President Balaguer had given Orlando some advice that Leger explains, emphasizing communication between the two.
Then the question would be whether the newspaper’s director and owner stopped publishing such an offensive article against the president of the republic, the life of a journalist would be saved at a time in national life where democracy and the state that did not exist. of current legislation.
I and a group of colleagues had to leave El Nacional in January 1973, two years before Orlando’s death, because the director and his owner did not want to publish a letter from me addressed very respectfully to the director of Listín in connection with a report of mine, published in El Nacional on Agrarian Reform Laws. In addition, Don Rafael Herrera later published my letter in the LISTÍN after we left El Nacional.
Would Orlando have been saved by scrutinizing his writing through the normal controls exercised by an editor? Or the Council of Balaguer that Leger is talking about?
Orlando living today might be a great writer raising the country’s name.