Trujillo & the Mirabal Sisters

We should be glad that the 20th Century is behind us. A time of fabulous scientific and technological progress, it was also an era of two dreadful world wars and many murderous dictators. Particularly in the first half of the 1900s, totalitarians and ruthless strongmen held sway not only over vast regions of Europe and Asia, but also many small nations in Central America and the Caribbean.

These unlucky countries included Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. At one time or another, each was ruled by an iron-fisted despot who treated human rights as a joke. Most heinous of the lot by far was Rafael Trujillo, the loathsome El Jefe – “the boss” – of the Dominican Republic, who dominated the bigger half of the island of Hispaniola from 1930 until 1961.

Trujillo’s climb to power began in 1918, when as a young lieutenant in the Dominican National Guard, he was picked to join a prestigious training group led by the U.S. Marines. With that in his background, he reached by the age of 36 the rank of the Army Commander-in-Chief, and three years later took the control of the republic. From then on, he reigned over his 10 million countrymen – either as the president, or through a subservient figurehead – until his death.

Trujillo's rule was not without accomplishments. A good organizer, he was praised for restructuring the state and the economy, building roads and public buildings, reducing the foreign debt, and ushering in an era of stability and relative prosperity for ordinary Dominicans. Meanwhile, his own and his family’s share in the good times was exorbitant – by the 1950s, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Trujillo’s regime was also known for its savagery, and he enjoyed the support of many outsiders, including the U.S. government.

In Legacy of Ashes, his history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner quotes a U.S. State Department official explaining this tolerance. He cites Henry Dearborn, the U.S. Counsel General in Santo Domingo, admitting that Trujillo “had his torture chambers, he had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.”

For the Dominican people, however, the price for their president’s “law and order” was too high. To begin with, they had to put up with his obsessive personality cult. For example, the Dominican Congress, bowing to El Jefe’s narcissism, changed the name of the capital from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo. The province of San Cristobal was renamed "Trujillo," and the nation's highest peak, Pico Duarte, became Pico Trujillo.

Eager to show how “liked” he was by his people, Trujillo organized so-called “civic reviews” where hired henchmen shouted praise for his government. Mass-produced statues of the president were erected all over the country. Churches had to post the slogan "Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra" (“God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth”). Unbelievable as it sounds, one obliging group even proposed Trujillo for the Nobel Peace Prize. Needless to say, he never got it.

But injuries to the Dominican people’s dignity were mere pin pricks compared to the deadly blows that Trujillo dealt to the country’s liberties and democracy.

He made the Dominican Party his personal power tool and, with one exception, the nation's sole legitimate political organization. The only reason why Trujillo briefly allowed the creation of an opposition party was to make it easier to identify candidates for his hit list, who were then blithely killed by the SIM, (the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar), the military secret service. The rest of the time, uncontested or rigged elections kept El Jefe and the Dominican Party in power.

Trujillo, who like most tyrants lived in constant fear for his life, did not shy away even from mass murder. In 1937, he announced that the Dominican Republic was being infiltrated by his enemies from Haiti, the nation occupying the other half of the Hispaniola Island. He ordered the Army to eliminate the alleged intruders – which it did, with an overwhelming force.

In what became known as the Parsley Massacre, the Dominican troops raided both sides of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and killed an estimated 20,000 – 30,000 Haitians. Since Dominicans and Haitians often have a similar physical appearance, Dominican soldiers determined who was Haitian by asking people to pronounce the word perejil, which is the Spanish word for parsley. If someone trilled the “r” in perejil, it was assumed that they were Dominican and they would be spared. However, if the person did not trill the “r,” it was assumed they were Haitian, and then they’d likely be killed.

Trujillo also maintained an execution list of people throughout the world he regarded as his enemies. One of them was Jesús Galindez, who lived for a time in the Dominican Republic. He dared to investigate Trujillo’s corrupt regime and was forced to flee to New York. In March 1956, Galindez was last seen entering a Manhattan subway station. Although his body was never found, he was believed to have been murdered by the SIM and smuggled out of the U.S. aboard a Dominican ship.

An even more brazen assassination attempt was aimed at Rómulo Betancourt, the democratic President of Venezuela. Betancourt earned Trujillo’s personal hatred by charging in the Organization of American States (OAS) that El Jefe had sponsored several attempts for Betancourt’s overthrow. Infuriated, Trujillo ordered his secret service to silence the complaints, and SIM’s agents planted a bomb in the Venezuelan president’s official car.

The bomb went off on June 24, 1960 on the main street in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. Betancourt was seriously burned and international opinion was in an uproar, demanding Trujillo’s removal from power. This time, the Dominican president lost the support even of the U.S. Department of State.

The Murder of the Mirabal Sisters

What crowned – and finished – Trujillo’s vile career was the murder of three sisters who refused to knuckle down to terror that millions of men feared to fight.

Patria, María Teresa, and Minerva Mirabal were born into a well-to-do Dominican family that, like thousands of others, despised Trujillo’s dictatorship. What made the young women the country’s icons was that they translated their passionate opposition into action.

In 1959 they formed an underground group named in the memory of a Dominican Army’s massacre of a small group of Cuban-trained exiles who tried to overthrow Trujillo. The Mirabal sisters’ “Movement of the Fourteenth of June” recruited about 300 Dominicans in all walks of life who secretly distributed pamphlets about the many crimes of Trujillo’s regime, and collected guns, firecrackers and other materials for explosives to be used against the dictator.

Running a clandestine organization in a police state is enormously risky because almost invariably these groups are infiltrated by informers and betrayed to the authorities. According to one account, this is what happened to the plan of Las Mariposas – the codename of the Mirabal sisters – to assassinate Trujillo in 1960 at a cattle fair.

María Teresa, Minerva, their husbands, and Patria’s husband were rounded up and only pressure from the OAS prevailed on Trujillo to order the release of the sisters from jail. But that did not mean that he would leave them unpunished.

While the sisters were free to go home to their children, their husbands were transferred to a jail that was accessible only by a remote mountain road. Although warned about a possible trap, Patricia, María Teresa and Minerva on November 25, 1960 took the road to visit their husbands.

On the way back, their car was ambushed by SIM and the sisters and their driver were strangled and clubbed to death. The agents then put their bodies back into the car and pushed it over the cliff, to make the murders look like an accident.

This time, the entire international community agreed that Trujillo had gone too far. The OAS proclaimed the sisters "symbols of both popular and feminist resistance" to the Trujillo dictatorship, and urged all governments to suspend their relations with the Dominican Republic. Scores of countries did so, including the United States which closed its embassy and, according to Legacy of Ashes, finally took action to help the anti-Trujillo underground.

As the author tells the story, on January 19, 1961, Counsel General Dearborn – who stayed in the Dominican Republic to take care of the embassy – was advised that Washington was shipping three .38 caliber pistols, four machine guns and 249 rounds of ammunition to a group of Dominican conspirators. Dearborn turned over to the same group two rifles left behind by the U.S. Marines who had guarded the embassy.

On Tuesday, May 30, 1961, Trujillo was shot and killed when his blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air was ambushed on a road outside the Dominican capital. The assassins included several high officers of the Dominican Army.

In 1999, the United Nations General Assembly commemorated the death of the Mirabal sisters by designating the 25th of November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.