Before Columbus, Hispaniola was inhabited by the Taínos ,
an Arawak group that had migrated up from the Amazon basin and
maintained an advance culture on the island for centuries. This all
came to an end in 1492, when Christopher Columbus
"discovered" the New World. After stopping off at the Bahamian
island of San Salvador, Columbus landed in what is today the
Dominican Republic, where he encountered the Taínos. Attempting to
circle around the island, his ship the Santa Maria grounded
against a coral reef on December 25, 1492, forcing him to set up a
small fort there - which he named La Navidad, leaving 25 men there
before heading back with his remaining ships.
Upon returning in late 1493, Columbus found his fort burned and
the settlers killed. He established his first small colony further
east - La Isabela , today the village of El Castillo - where
he set up a trading settlement to trade cheap European goods in
return for large quantities of gold. La Isabela soon fell apart.
Settlers died in the hundreds from malaria and yellow fever, and
one disgruntled colonist hijacked a ship and headed back to Spain
to complain. Columbus followed him back in 1496, and during his
absence the colony was abandoned, with most Spaniards re-settling
at Santo Domingo along the mouth of the Ozama River. When Columbus
returned in 1498, the colonists refused to obey his orders, and in
1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains.
Spain's King Ferdinand replaced Columbus with Nicolás de
Ovando , with instructions to impose order on the unruly
outpost. Ovando instigated the monumental construction in today's
Zona Colonial and engaged in the systematic destruction of Taíno
society, apportioning all Taínos to Spanish settlers as slaves and
forcing their conversion to Christianity. Lacking resistance to Old
World diseases and subjected to countless acts of random violence,
the Taínos were quickly exterminated through overwork, suicide and
disease.
To make up for the steep decline of forced labour, the Spaniards
began embarking on slaving expeditions throughout the
Caribbean and Central America in 1505, laying the foundation for
future Spanish colonies. By 1515 the Spaniards had wiped out enough
Native Americans that they began looking to slave labour from
Africa, setting in motion the African slave trade. Santo Domingo's
power slowly eroded as Spain branched out across the Americas, and
by the end of the sixteenth century was little more than a colonial
backwater. The French began encroaching in 1629, settling
the island of Tortuga and branching out from there onto the western
side of Hispaniola. When the French colony's slaves revolted in the
early nineteenth century, they had little trouble invading and
occupying Spanish Hispaniola, ruling it for 21 years. Only in 1843
were the Spanish colonists able to boot the invaders out, and for
the first time establish the Dominican Republic as an independent
country.
But this independence did not last long. A series of warlords
known as caudillos tore the country apart in their quest for
money and power, and in 1861 strongman Pedro Santana sold the
island back to Spain. The Spaniards didn't last long, though;
almost immediately a new revolutionary movement was formed, and the
occupiers were forced to withdraw in 1865. A renewed period of
extended civil warfare between caudillos ensued until the
United States intervened in 1914. The Americans stayed for
over eight years, successfully reorganizing the nation's financing
but instituting a repressive national police. When the US left,
this new police force took control, and its leader Rafael
Leonidas Trujillo maintained absolute totalitarian control over
the Dominican Republic for three decades. In the late 1950s,
though, Cuba's Fidel Castro took an interest in overthrowing the
dictator, and concerns about a possible Communist takeover prompted
the CIA to train a group of Dominican dissidents, who
assassinated Trujillo in a dramatic car chase on May 30,
1961.
Upon Trujillo's death, Vice President Joaquín Balaguer
rose to power, and continued his totalitarian practices. Balaguer
was deposed in a popular 1965 uprising, but the US military again
intervened and soon placed him back in control. Only in 1978 was he
forced to hold free and fair elections - and was promptly thrown
out of office, only to win it back in 1986 after an extended
economic crisis. Balaguer managed to edge out his rivals again in
1990, but left the presidential race in 1994 when it was obvious
that he would not beat Leonel Fernández , who ran a slick,
centrist American-style campaign and edged the competition out by a
few thousand votes. 1998 saw the first back-to-back free and fair
elections in the Dominican Republic's history, as Fernández gave
way to political opponent and current Dominican President
Hipolito Mejia . The Dominican Republic has also enjoyed the
highest economic growth rate in the entire hemisphere (though this
has slackened of late), and the outlook today for the nation is
better than it has been in centuries.