This time the forces were polarized between the followers of Buenaventura Báez, who after the death of Pedro Santana represented the big haterps and a commercial bourgeoisie that was still essentially foreign and annexationist, constituting the conservative or Red Party.

The Luperón government and the three biennial regimes under its influence: Meriño, Heureaux and Billini-Woss y Gil, continued a political line of nationalism and the promotion of agriculture and industry, which ultimately produced significant economic growth in the country.

The forced peace of the Heureaux (Lilis) regime and its inefficient and corrupt administration, they created the conditions for a superior development of agriculture and particularly of the sugar industry; but they ended up plunging the country into monetary insolvency and growing financial and political dependence on North America.

The bankruptcy of commerce and agriculture, the drop in sugar prices, the lack of economic resources to keep local leaders under control, and the country's fatigue with his dictatorship, precipitated his assassination and the subsequent fall of his regime in 1899.

With Lilis, the economic policy of a blue partisanship was characterized, with regard to the development of the national economy, by a manifest surrenderist tendency that translated into concessions,favors and privileges to foreign captains.

Corruption and the personalist regime as an administrative norm led to the liquidation of democratic and liberal principles, and the restriction of national capitalism based on sponsoring foreign investment.

[3] After the fall of Heureaux, regional caudillism was accentuated, although under the guise of two new national leaders: Juan Isidro Jiménes, a merchant from Montecristi who received the support of the old caciques, the hateros, the Catholic Church and the bourgeoisie of Santiago; and General Horacio Vásquez, who relied on the new leaders, the farmers of Cibao, the positivist intellectuals forged by Eugenio María de Hostos, the bourgeoisie of the capital, Puerto Plata and Este, and by North American imperialism.

After the overthrow of Jiménes by Horacism in 1902, the country fell into a state of almost permanent civil war, while North American demands for greater economic and political control that would allow the free expansion of its interests, sharpened the situation.

After a Dominican-American Convention signed in 1905 that was not approved in the North American Senate, perhaps due to its ultracolonialist nature, it was finally concluded in 1907, by virtue of which the United States not only began to control all customs of the country and retain at least 40% of its income, but they established the prerogative of the North American government to deliver the rest of the proceeds to the Dominican government that recognized it as legitimate and the prohibition of new loans being contracted without its consent.

In the political order, this regime, called "enlightened despotism" by some, enjoyed full North American support, which was evident with its military incursion and machine-gunning of Villa Duarte and the Jimenist besiegers in February 1904, which allowed Morales defeated the formidable insurrection that opposed him.

In this situation, the northwestern guerrilla leader Desiderio Arias emerged, of Jimenist origin, dominant in Cibao, who represented the opposition of that sector of the rural petty bourgeoisie to a centralized government subject to American imperialism.

The new Jiménes government, despite its constitutional basis, was faced with passions even more intense than the previous ones, since together with a North American government impatient to impose its will, which already in 1915 intervened militarily in Haiti, it had to face to an emboldened Desiderio Arias and much more powerful than ever in his capacity as Minister of War and Navy and with his supporters in control of the Ministry of the Interior and Police, the capital's weapons command, the Republican Guard and the majority of the positions of the National Congress in the hands of Jimenism.

The Dominicans then selected Dr. Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal as president, but when he did not comply with North American designs, they ignored their government, declared a military regime under their absolute control (1916), dissolved the congress, disarmed the country and suppressed public liberties.

The US military government changed land, immigration and customs legislation so that sugar mills could expand rapidly and hire Haitians as low-cost seasonal workers, exempting them from all taxes.