Part One: Rafael Trujillo: The Most Brutal Dictator of the Americas

But you know, it's interesting because like the Dominican Republic was very nearly a state, like it came within a hair's breadth of being part of the United States, probably would have been wound up more like Puerto Rico is in terms of like its legal status. We are absolutely central to everything that has happened in the history of the Dominican Republic, and most of us are like you know you and like I was, you know before I started reading on this topic, like it's just not a

we like Americans barely hear about it. Right when you do, it's like, oh, someone had a wedding in the Dominican right, Like that's that's I think the normal amount of knowledge most Americans have, which is fucked up because we we've caused a lot of problems over there.

He's interesting because he's both like, in some ways a kind of traditional strong man dictator, but in some ways he might be like one of the smartest dictators that I've come across in terms of how he builds and uses power and how he manipulated his population and exercised control over them. He's really unique in a lot of ways. There's some very interesting aspects of how he kind of wields power that are unique to him. So this is exciting.

We're going to have a good time talking about this horrible, horrible man who did a genocide.

more than thirty years. And that's when when you're when you're in like the thirty to thirty five year range reigning is a dictator that's like absolute goat tier in terms of you know, holding power. You know, those guys are are are tough sons of bitches. But Trujillo was like, right at twenty nine years, so that's a pretty good run as dictators go. He's not he's not bad. Probably shouldn't be talking about these guys like they're like they're

like they're your buddies. I don't know how else to do it at this point.

and the Dominican Republic lays over the bulk of the island. Now, initially all of Hispaniola was claimed by Spain, right, but you know, Spain, they lost interest pretty quickly because people started, they started quote unquote discovering the rest of South America, and like, Hispaniola didn't have a lot of silver, and that's kind of was their whole thing for a while.

It was like how much silver can we get to wreck our own economy via terrible inflation, Like let's really fuck ourselves over for the rest of time by importing way too much fucking silver. So Hispaniola kind of comes a backwater after this initial burst of excitement because you know, Spain, they got their Peru, they got Mexico, They're all all

up in all those blazes, right. So the first slaves start being brought to Hispaniola as a of the fact that like the initial folks that they are working because like, since there's not a huge that you know, they do have some silver mines they have, you know, they're mining some other stuff and they've got some agricultural plantations set up. And initially the people that they're using to work these

plantations are the indigenous Tino and Carib peoples. But they kill a huge number of those people, right, like the majority of the folks who had lived their pre contact. So this importation of slaves two Hespaniola starts because they're like, well, we need more laborers. Right by the start of the sixteen hundreds, friedman on the island outnumbered enslaved people. So it's not initially what it's going to become, this kind of like massive slave plantation system that actually takes a

little while to really get going. Most slave ownership on Hispaniola was more intimate and smaller in scale than the vast plantations that would come to dominate Haiti or the American South. Right masters rarely had much more than one or two enslaved people who engaged in small scale wage labor alongside them and their families. Since cash was in short supply. Most slaves on the island in this early

period were taken through piracy. They were also often stolen French colonial slaves, so like literally like French boats full of slaves would come by and people would you know, raid them and take people off of them. In sixteen ninety seven, there's a big kerfuffle and Spain and France have a treaty over Hispaniola, and this is where France

gets what's going to become Haiti. And the chunk of Hispaniola that becomes Haiti is the colony of San Domain, Right, that's the name of the French colony that's going to

wind up rebelling and becoming Haiti. And the French treated their possessions on Hispaniola just like they treated their possessions on all of the other Caribbean islands where they were involved, So they would just started importing huge numbers of enslaved people, primarily demand sugar plantations, right, that's the big fucking business in this period of time, and it's a pretty shitty thing to farm. You don't want to be a sugar farmer.

It's a not a long life. Now, the Spanish colony that is going to become, you know, kind of the center of what becomes the Dominican Republic, is called Santo Domingo. So you've got the French San Domain and you've got the Spanish Santa Domingo, which is a little bit confusing, which is why we're going to start calling the Dominican Republican Haiti very soon here. And the economy in Santa Domingo is very different from Haiti. Haiti is turning into

this like slave plantation economy. In Santa Domingo. There is still slavery, but it's again it's on a much smaller scale. Much of the economy, rather than being based around like sugar plantations, is cattle ranching, some tobacco growing, and kind

of small scale export of wood in animal hides. And Spain is not thrilled with this state of affairs because it's a lot less profitable than San domin Right, Like this kind of like all this small scale stuff is not making the sort of money that San Domain is making France, but Spain is kind of it's very difficult to actually govern beyond like the city of San Domain.

So you've got this this city that is effectively the colony, and then anytime you're outside of the walls of the city and the hinterland and these hills and mountains and stuff, it's basically ungovernable, right. And this kind of population of what's going to become the Dominican Republic fills up very quickly with a mix of you've got some freed slaves, some escaped slaves from what's going to become Haiti. They intermarry with indigenous peoples and with poor whites, and they

create this kind of creole subculture of ungovernable cowboy bandit types. Right. That's like the majority of the population, because the city is always going to have more people in it, but that's the majority of the land mass is kind of these the very small numbers of these sort of like yeah, cowboy bandit type folks. Historian Lauren Derby writes that they quote hunted wild cattle in the interior and sold smoked meat and tobacco to contrabandists based on neighboring Latortu Island,

locally termed Montero's. These proto peasants were the Dominican equivalent of the hibbarro, the Puerto Rican backlands highlander. This contraband economy of black masterless men was so successful that Spanish authorities had to resort to draconian measures to contain it. In sixteen oh six, for example, Governor Assorio torched northern settlements to the ground in a failed effort to curb contraband by forcing rural inhabitants to move closer to Santa Domingo.

The fact that many of the wealthiest pirates in this pan Antillean maritime community, warmerlados, such as the highly successful Domingo Sanchez Moreno, probably double e galled the crown. So this is a like number one sounds kind of dope.

Like these people have built like a pretty interesting culture for themselves, and the only way that Spain can keep a lid on it is like by periodically massacring huge numbers of them, right, Like that's all you can do is you march your army into the interior and kill and burn whatever you can. But they can kind of just sort of bounce when they see the army coming. And it's not easy to march an army into the antia rear of Hispaniola and have them not die of

all sorts of wild ass diseases. So it's kind of like again a little bit like of an anarchy in most of these.

aren't there isn't slavery. There aren't a lot of like abusive social structures that exist, but it doesn't develop the same preconditions for revolution that you get in Sandomang, right, And as we all know, in Sandomang enslaved people have themselves a revolution starting at the tail end of the seventeen hundreds, and in one of history's great upsets, they

win their freedom from France. Now, this is how we get Haiti, and the rest of the world has never stopped punishing Haiti for this, right We talk about this again in our episodes on Papa Doc and Baby Doc. But basically Haiti's history from this point is being continually fucked over by everyone else on the planet close to it,

not far from it, up to the present day. So in Haiti, you know, they're dealing with, after this period of revolution, pretty continuous incursions from the French until they finally forced Napoleon to get the fuck out of there, and the process of getting Napoleon out and of you know, ensuring their liberty means that they build up a pretty good army, like Haiti has by kind of the late period of fighting off the French repeatedly, they have a

pretty like powerful military. And they are also by the point they're done fighting the French for the most part, they're kind of they're deeply traumatized, right, They've had all of these horrific wars. They are basically constantly aware of the fact that all of Europe and all of the Western world wants them back in fucking chains, and so

they're pretty paranoid. And the thing that they start to focus on once France is less of a threat is the fact that they've got this neighbor, right, They've got Santa Domingo sitting on most of their island, and it's a possession of Spain and Spain if you're not up on your Napoleonic history, for one thing, Spain is kind of briefly a part of Napoleon's empire, at least chunks

of Spain are. So the Haitians are like, well, I don't really like that they're just sitting there a possession of Europe, right, it feels like this they could this could be really bad for us. So why don't we Why don't we take them over? Right? Why don't we

deal with Santa Domingo. And to make a long story short, Haiti invades and they occupy Santa Domingo for about twenty two years from the early to the mid eighteen hundreds, and like all occupations, it's not pleasant, right, Like very rarely do you like occupy a country with soldiers, and everyone is like, we really like being occupied by your soldiers. This is a good time for everyone, right, instant of.

again for like four or five years. So it's not a not a super stable history here, right, pretty messy, Like could you I already feel tired just thinking about it. You can imagine how exhausted someone who was like born in eighteen hundred in the Dominican Republic would be by like eighteen fifty. Right, It's just this carousel of assholes taking your place over, right.

far away from the continental United States. And if you know much about America in like the late eighteen hundreds, we've got this kind of big attitude that like, we don't want Europe fucking around and what we consider to be our backyard and all of Latin America and the Caribbean is basically our backyard in our eyes, right in this period of time. I'm not saying this is right,

this is just how DC is thinking about things. And so a lot of American politicians are like, well, we don't like the Europeans are not doing clearly not doing a good job keeping things stable in the Dominican Republic, and this place is in our sphere of influence. So in eighteen sixty five we have US a vote on whether or not to annex the Dominican Republic, and it fails by a single vote. So US influence will remain kind of indirect after this point for a while, but

it's not going to stay indirect forever. But you can see just how close it came to like presumably probably being like a possession like Puerto Rico is in a legal sense, you know, like that's kind of I think a realistic way to look at how it might have

gone down. Who knows, but the constant warring between the Dominican republican Haiti and they have there are regular conflicts between the two countries kind of in the through the eighteen hundreds, means that politics in the Dominican Republic early on is just kind of a succession of strongman generals, right, because when you're dealing with all of this sort of governmental turnover, all that really matters is like can you keep other people out right? Can you actually effectively defend

the country. And within Dominican politics, there's a vicious split between these kind of liberal and conservative parties, all of which are headed by these sort of strong man military types.

And when we say liberal and conservative, and I'm not talking in like the modern US, since the Conservatives, broadly speaking, a big thing that they are advocates for is being annexed by the United States, right, because they're looking at number one, how powerful the US is, particularly after the Civil War, and going like, well, shit, they can probably stop this constant turnover, right, Like, things would probably be a lot more stable, we would probably be in better

economic shape if they were to come over. Whereas liberals are like, we don't want to be governed by yet another foreign power. We would like to be something that approximates a modern state. And these liberals will usually give the US Constitution as kind of the ideal example of

the structure of a government that they want. But there's pretty universal agreement among these political elites that even though they like the idea of how the US government is supposed to be set up, they don't believe that Dominican peasants can be democratic citizens. Right. And these kind of rich, educated people who are a very small fraction of the population are like, well, these like these are uneducated, wild cowboys. You can't have them, you can't give them any rights, like,

they wouldn't know what to do with them. That is very much the attitude that these people have. They're not like nice folks, right. This attitude is well represented by the words of Americolgo, a Dominican writer. In one of these kind of intellectuals, he argued that the state needed to lead from the top down until the citizenry could be educated to a higher degree responsibility. He called the peasants quote degenerate due to racial mixture, a tropical environment,

and a poor diet. Thus, he said, the working class of the Dominican Republic can never be governing but rather governed classes. So pretty rough stuff.

that far after this point. There is this kind of attitude among a lot of elites that like, you can whiten the population in some ways, and that's going to become more of a thing later on, Right, So just keep that in your head because we will be talking

about that once the thirties come around. Here. Outside the urban parts of the Dominican Republic, politics revolved very heavily around little strongmen who are like, in a lot of ways, kind of many dictators over you know, a few towns, a chunk of the countryside, and you know, the best of them were kind of able to keep areas of the interior relatively stable and protect their peasants from banditry

and unrest. Depending on the book, you'll hear these guys kind of referred to as either cadillos or caciques, which is a casique is an older word taken from the social order on the island in the days kind of before Columbus arrived, right, And it's kind of it kind of gets applied to these more modern figures. Who are they are in every sense of the word. Their warlords, right, you know, small scale ones, but not that's an accurate

way to look at them. Now. I found a lot of interesting sources for this episode, but the strangest and most entertaining is a biography of Trujio written by one of his generals, the guy who wound up running his intelligence division for a while. This dude's name is Arturo Espiat, and Arturo was the son of one of the two or three wealthiest countries or families in the Dominican Republic, and so his family are some of these warlord types

right in this sort of pre Trujio era. And he is an untrustworthy piece of shit, which you can tell because he opens his book by repeatedly denying he tortured anybody. And I want to reach you a quote from this because it's really good. I remained neither a shame nor regretful of my years as an intelligence officer. I earned my nom de guerre Navahita, the Blade, not because I was guilty of any atrocities. The name stemmed from my tendency to plunge straight to the heart of any problem

or situation. I believed in direct simple action. However, there is not a single Dominican who has ever or can come forward to prove that I caused him to be tortured, Nor can any Dominican family charge that one of its members died at my hands or my I don't know, bro, I feel like people who don't torture anyone never need to say.

about themselves right. So he gives us an idea of how elites and Dominican society in this period wanted to pretend that things worked right, and the way that he frames this period of Dominican history is that these regional strongmen were kind of ungovernable by the central government and would periodically overthrow it to put their own guy in charge.

are your volunteers. Please return the rope. Man, I got plenty of boys, but ropes cost money, homie, Like, bro, I.

kind of just be like this guy sucks. I'm going to like hike for two days, and then you know there'll be a different strong man or no one at all, and you know, I can try to figure out my shit. But it's basically impossible for the government to set up large scale agriculture or to trade or do anything that would allow them to function the way that like a nation functions, because everything outside of the capital is just like a mix of banditry and like small scale peasant

farmers and stuff. It's very unstable. From an early age, the Dominican economy, such as it is, relied heavily on the United States, and this was a calculated choice by several of the more liberal general types who wound up running the country in the late eighteen hundreds. In eighteen ninety one, they signed a reciprocity treaty that made the United States officially the main trading partner of the country.

We leased one of their ports so that our navy would be able to do boat stuff there, and we started handing out loans to them right because the government is trying to get into a more stable position so that they can govern the Dominican Republic. And we're like, oh, we got money. We'll give you guys money to do that. Don't worry. The terms are not ruinous. We are absolutely not working on a way to fuck you over, just like we did Deahiti. Next door promises, Pinky swears, sounds

of it. This is never going to happen again, Kat, But all of the money we give them winds up in the hands of local strongmen, and none of it goes towards like helping regular people or making the country function better. I know it won't happen again. Not so weird, Yeah it would be. It would be crazy if after this we just flew a palette of billions of dollars in cash to a country let's call it smarrak and then lost it all. Like that would be wild if

we'd done that. All good stuff, good stuff. So in a yeah, the US is like, ah, you got to pay us back for all these loans that just got robbed by your you know, the assholes running the country. You know what We're going to do for you guys, because you're such good clients. We're going to appoint a private company to handle getting you to pay back your

foreign debt, and we do that in eighteen ninety two. This, you know, leads to a series of events that in nineteen oh four culminates in the United States creating the

Santo Domingo Improvement Company. Now, the job of this country is to take control of their entire custom system, to regulate customs for the Dominican Republic at all of their ports, skimming money off of the top through these like in export taxes and shit to repay debts to American Like at this point, a lot of it's privately owned American companies that can't be met by the Dominican government. By nineteen oh five, the United States controls all custom houses

in the country. So we're just like running you know, all of that stuff for the Dominican Republic, not for them. We're running it so that we can skim off the top money that would otherwise theoretically go into like taxes and shit.

in those days. Economic collapse brings about political unrest. The President of the Dominican Republic is assassinated in nineteen eleven, and in nineteen sixteen President Yemenez has a little civil war with the former Minister of War. The US government looks at all this unrest in the Dominican Republic, which we absolutely had not helped to cause, and are like, boy, they might not be able to repay all of this additional money that they now owe us in excess of

the money that they ever borrowed from us. You know what we should do. You know, also nineteen sixteen, we're kind of worried if things get any more unstable, Germans could come in, right, the Germans could take over the Dominican Republic, and that'll be bad for everybody, mainly US. So we do a thing that we're going to do repeatedly from this point forward.

The Americans sent a concerted force and took the city that wasn't the end of the resistance. In November, Governor Juan Perez of the city of San Francisco di Maceroy refused to recognize the occupation government hold up in an old fort. He was eventually driven out by the Marines.

And so you know, we take over. And if you're anywhere kind of from your late twenties on, you and most of us have watched the US and vaden Ocaia by a couple of countries, and what happens in the Dominican Republic is more similar to like what we do in Iraq than what goes on in Afghanistan. Right, we set up a military government and we have the Marines start training and equipping a local military so that we can leave and have a country that will be, in

our eyes kind of a pliant client state. Right, that's the goal here, right, so that we can get some fucking money out of them again, right, Like that's what we're doing in this case. Now, this concludes the historical background portion of the story. So as we've left off the historical background, the US Marines are occupying the country and we are trying to get it into a stable enough position that we can continue sucking on it like the vampires we are. So let's move back over to

our bastard for the week. Finally, Raphael Truhio, because he is going to be one of the young Dominican men that the US Marines pick out of poverty and obscurity and are like, here's a gun we.

not come from impressive surroundings. His hometown was a small village on the Southern Coast, and his father, Pepito, is generally described like one biographer literally just calls him a non entity. He is not a big deal, you might say, and he's not really around a lot. You get the idea, now. Trujillo would later commission court biographers to tell a very different version of his upbringing, one that is more rarefied and that paints his family is coming from the upper

middle class. This is not accurate, right, this is him. He's kind of insecure about his origins and he will he will exaggerate them as a as a you know, an adult in power. Most there's not a lot of great context as to his early life, his childhood, but all of the credible biographers that I've read tend to say, like, yeah, they were pretty poor, right, Like, they were not unusually poor. They were not like, you know, the worst off, but they were not They did not come from the upper

middle class. The Truiello children went shoeless because there was no money in the family for shoes. His dad was a minor postal clerk and often went without income because he had sold his salary for a short term loan, which is a thing that a lot of men who work for the government do right, You'll basically be like, I need money, now, I will give you, you know, interest basically, and so you get my salary for a period of time. It's a really it winds up being

a pretty abusive situation. I probably don't need to explain how, but like a lot of guys get trapped in this in this period of time.

a thing in American right wing politics. It's not always the case, right, and in this in the Dominican culture, Like that's just not a thing trueho feels would benefit him. Or it's unclear to me because I'm not obviously I'm not an expert. It's unclear to me if it's more that he didn't think it would benefit him, or that he just legitimately had hang ups right, Like he's just actually kind of ashamed of his humble circumstances and didn't want to be honest about them.

everyone around them was. So, yeah, they were poor enough that like because his dad is regularly going without income because he's sold his salary for a loan. His older brothers have to do cattle wrestling to make ends meet, which is also really common. A lot of people would will do this because there's both wild cows and just like farms outside of the city. So you bust in one night, you cut down a fence, you steal a cow or two. That's food, that's money. You know.

and she ensured that Raphael and his siblings learned to read. Later, he would attend grammar school, but his attendance was a regular since he he very nearly died of diphtheria as a little kid, so he doesn't get to do a lot of school. And aside from these broad strokes, we

you don't know a lot about his childhood. It's pretty likely that he's dropped out of school by the fourth grade, so most of the education that he does get comes from his grandma, who I think was pretty much self taught, just like a very smart person, and who sees it as important that he learned to read and that his

siblings learned to read. And one of Trujillo's better biographies, Trujillo Little Caesar of the Caribbean, German Ornez writes quote, but if the children did not learn much as school, at school, the dusty street was separated. In those days, the monotonous rows of San Cristobal shacks provided them with an excellent schooling in lawlessness. To survive the rowdyism of the neighborhood kids, a boy had to be tougher than the others, or, at least, as in the Trujillo's case,

he had to belong to a large, clannish family. In frequent street brawls, the solid front of the Trujillo boys proved good enough to lick all opposition, a fact they'd never forgot later in life. From such an environment, Rafael emerged as a resourceful, headstrong character. As a boy, Trujillo was always in trouble. Recall one of his neighbors always trying to cheat someone always bragging about how he would

one day make big money without much effort. I do think that's cool that, Like he had a lot of brothers, so they kind of worked as a gang together. They're like, well, if we're gonna get into a fight, like, at least I've got siblings, I could Collin. I love that.

an obsessive order of caps from sodas and beers. He hated the nickname, but like he got the nickname because not only did he collect these, but he would like beat people up to take their bottle cap, Like he would get his brothers to get back. He was like running a bottle cap racket so that he could.

he's he's good at like talking to people. He's got a lot of social intelligence. And Teodulo is a drunken a womanizer who like writes poetry in prose, but is all as seen as like so he's this like he's too drunk to be like a really good con man. He's kind of just like like they're each half of a good con man. So as a young adult, he gets offered a job working security at one of the local sugar plantations. Like all but one sugar company in

the Republic, Rafael's employers were American. It's likely that his charming because we control all of the big business in the American rehol right right, Like we've taken over these sugar companies in part is like a well, you know, if you let American companies in to dominate this this industry, you know, that's how we can take out some of

this debt that somehow still keeps ballooning every year. So like all but yeah, so his employers here, he's working for the Americans, and his it's pro probably Teodulo, his uncle who gets him this job because he's just like drinking with the dude who's doing the hiring, but we don't really know. Most casual summaries of Raphael's past will describe him as working as a security guard for the Sugar Company. This is inaccurate. Truhello was an informer for

the sugar company. His job was to make friends with labor organizers who were like getting ready to organize unions and like go on strike and then help take them out. So that is his job. He is a spy, like to crack down on the labor movement for these American companies, and he loves this gig.

sugar in the early nineteen hundreds. Everybody so good, good stuff. So tragically, and this is sad cat. His promising career murdering union organizers is cut short because he rapes somebody.

is based primarily on other people's recollections. But it seems like he probably went to jail for this for a period of time. Yeah, it's a little unclear. He is going to be a prolific rapist and sexual assault throughout

his entire adult life. And it's it's interesting because if you when you read these there's a lot a lot of the first biographies I read about this guy are written in like, you know, the the sixties or whatever, and they they will describe it as like a ladies man with a wandering eye, and their critical biographies, but the men writing them like just don't see the fact that he's don't see what he's doing as serial sexual assault.

And then when you get more modern coverage of true Heo, it becomes very clear like, oh, yeah, he was like a terrible, terrible rapist, like he was.

kind of a low level gangster. He runs a forgery racket, he does some cattle rustling, and more than anything else, he becomes a pimp. Right, he is a very successful pimpsus his I probably shouldn't say this, but like you get the feeling he treats the the women that he is working with the way he used to treat bottle caps, including these, stealing from them from other pimps using violence.

That's the feeling one gets. Again, there's not terrible tremendous detail about it, right, but he is a very successful pimp, and knowing what we know about him, that's probably an ugly story, right, I think that's fair to say, given

everything we know about this guy's background. And this is where are two stories, the history of the Dominican Republic up to this point in the US occupation and the life of Rafaeltruhio intertwine in nineteen sixteen, when the US comes in, Trueheo is about twenty four years old, and despite how his career as a spy for the sugar companies had ended, he left with some connections and a

good recommendation. The Marines have now invaded the Dominican Republic and their mission is to maintain domestic tranquility, and this is code for make the company stable enough for American investors to profit. One local historian would like it was the landing of the American Marines which brought Truheo his opportunity to rise from obscurity, and this is certainly true. Prior to our involvement, Raphael was the organized crime equivalent

of a minor casiqu right. He probably first interacts with the Americans through getting arrested for forgery. He might have also gotten arrested for cattle wrestling. He probably goes to jail again. We don't know, because in nineteen twenty seven, a mysterious fire destroys the Supreme Court building with all of the criminal records in it. What is likely true is that he runs into a little bit of trouble with the new regime because he's a criminal and his

uncle Tao Dulo is able to smooth it over. Tiodulo has made friends with an American customs officer, a guy named James MacLean, and McLean is one of these Americans who's been in the country the longest. He's like working in as one of these you know, because we take over their customs like stations, so he is there before the Marines arrive, and when the Marines arrive, they're like, well, this guy knows the country and he's one of us, so let's give him a job now that we're running

things right. And Taodulo drinks with MacLean. The two of them are hardcore alcoholics and they are just getting wasted together all the time. So when the military government comes in, they make McLean a colonel because they're like, well, this guy knows the country, and Taodula's like, hey, can you give a job to my nephew, Like he's a good kid,

you know, he only occasionally commits horrible crimes. Albert Hicks, an American journalist working in the country at the time, describes McLean as a man who, quote, when sufficiently sober, found a profound satisfaction in the company of Harlot's, which is, you know, probably another reason why he likes Trujio, because Trujio is a pimp in this period of time.

I can satisfy your needs, you know, And this gets him in good with the Americans, and you know, he moves on quickly from giving McLean prostitutes to supplying prostitutes to American Marines, which is a great way to get the Marines to like you historically. Now, once MacLean is kind of hooking Trujeo up with the occupation authorities, Truio

starts finding other ways to police American officers. He starts acting as an informer to basically go into communities that are like resisting the American occupation that are like harboring insurgents, and he'll make friends in there, and then he'll go back to the Americans and be like, here's who you go massacre, right, these are the people who like, are are you harboring these folks? W are who are resisting

the regime? And he soon as a result of this, falls in with the absolute bloodiest of the Marines that are in the country. A guy named Captain Murcley, So this is Merclay, is an American who is running the pacification campaign in the east of the Dominican Republic. And he makes trueO his right hand man, and together the two of them cut a bloody swath across the countryside.

Murclay is so out of hand that the US Senate eventually investigates him and finds that he has quote a policy of repression that has been carried out by the forces of the occupation and is inherently unwise, which reacted primarily upon peaceful civilians, and as the result of which many atrocities were undoubtedly committed. So like, this guy gets so out of pow that the US Senate in like nineteen seventeen is like, we can't have you occupying the

Dominican Republic your two fucking nuts? Now, this passage from the biography tru Heio, Little Caesar of the Caribbean, gives us more context as to what he was doing with Mercley. Another competent observer, the historian and economist Melvin M. Knight, says, in Americans in Santo Domingo, a number of Dominicans. We may be certain that nobody knows exactly how many were put to death offhand by the Marines, and some were tortured without ever having their day in court at all.

In fairness, however, it must be said that Captain Merkley's end was appropriate to his corrupt practice. The assassinations by Captain Merkley were repudiated by his superiors, and he committed suicide while awaiting for trial, asserts Knight. Knight's version is supported by Sumner Wells in his aforementioned book. Nevertheless, if Merkley himself paid dearly for his cruelty and sadism, his methods unfortunately did not disappear. With him and young Trujillo.

He left behind a keen, proficient disciple who was carried on the sadistic tradition long after his teacher's name is no longer remembered. So he gets his boss, Mercley, and they massacre and torture probably hundreds of people to try to pacify the eastern chunk of this of the Dominican Republic. The Senate gets involved and is like, wow, you need to come back here and stand trial because what you have been doing is so out of hand. And Merkley

fucking kills himself leaving. Trueheo to be like, well, it's sad he's dead, but at least he taught me how to be a real piece of shit. So yeah, a proud chapter in US Marine Corps history right there.

accepted into this program. He gets commissioned as an officer, and he rises very quickly through the ranks due in part to the fact that Colonel MacLean is running the constabulary, so like he's basically bribing his boss with prostitutes in order to get promoted to the point where he's running the constabulary. So he goes from second loot yeah, yeah, yeah. Any there are more allegations of rape and extortion against Hi during this period of time. He gets court martialed

for rape, but like nothing happens to him. He keeps getting promoted because he's providing prostitutes to the Marines, so they don't want him out of there. And he's kind of he has this reputation of being because he's worked with Mercley and he knows how to like kill a shitload of people. He's like the guy if you're having trouble in an area, if like there's you know, uprisings or whatever, He's this guy you can send in because

you don't want to do it yourself. You saw what happened to Merkley, right, It's bad business for the Americans to go committing massacres directly. But you can send this guy in with some dudes, with some Dominicans and he'll fucking kill people, right, and then you can you don't have to get in trouble yourself and commit suicide after

a senate investigation. So, prior to US or military involvement, most of the military power in the Dominican Republic had been in the hands of these kind of local warlords who'd maintained private militias and sometimes sent the scraps of their militias down to the central government when they had a war to fight with Haiti or whatever. And officers, inasmuch as they existed, had always been members of a

small wealthy class in the country. The Americans wanted to change this, in part because the Kadillos were their enemies, right. They didn't want to like these guys to continue to have all the military power. So one of the first things we do is we disarm the countryside. So we take weapons both from the militias that these guys have had and from peasants. We wind up confiscating about three million firearms, which is enough to arm every man, woman

and child in the country three times over. And that gives you an idea of how hard it was to control this place. They have three guns for every person in the country out in the just out in the sticks, you know, very heavily armed little land. Before we come there and we take all of their guns and we dump them into the sea, and then we build roads so that this new constabulary that we're training can access all these isolated areas of the rural interior.

put in place. And you know, this this military force we're building, we call it a constabulary because its goal is primarily policing, and we don't want it to become like another militia like all of the other ones that have run the country. So we avoid hiring from the groups who had traditionally run the Dominican military, right and particularly who had provided officers for the Dominican military, and instead we start promoting as officers the absolute dregs of

Dominican society, poor peasant type people. Now, the Marines are always good at finding the absolute dregs of society, That's what they do. And one of the guys that they're going to pick is like, oh, this dude is like exactly who should be running this policing force is Rafael Druhio. And to talk about how that happened, I'm going to read a quote from the book The Dictator's Seduction by

Lauren Derby. Widespread resistance to becoming part of the United States led force meant that recruiters were forced to enlist what a witness described as the worst rascals, thieves, and assassins in the country. If the military had previously been a millions of social assent for the respectable poor, it was now open to the anonymous crowd. Trujillo and the other young officers pulled from the ranks of the obscure

never forgot that the United States was their benefactor. In his book, Arturo Espiallet describes how Trujillo and his fellow News soldiers pacified the interior with the Marines and the impact that it left on them. It may be considered a left handed compliment to the Corps, but Trujillo always thought of himself as basically a Marine Corps officer and

damned proud of it. It was typical, for instance, that of the forty to fifty decorations conferred upon him during his long career, Trujillo was proudest of a faded, threadbare medal attesting to his service with the Marines. So that is interesting. This guy who's going to become a dictator considers himself a United States Marine.

This is why Smedley feels that way because one of the long term results of US occupation is that the Marines trained true hero and make him basically a made man to enforce this regime that exists to send money to US companies, and he is going to be a pretty brutal dictator using the things that he's learned from

the Americans. The US occupation of the Dominican Republicans in nineteen twenty four and policing authority is handed over to the constabulary as at the same time as the Marines leave, the United States takes over as the largest foreign exchange producer in the country, and they start flooding the Dominican

Republic with duty free US goods. Now, if you're contact with the phrase duty free is in an airport, that may sound great, right, you get all the cheap cigars and liquor you could want, But this is actually a real problem because when you are forcibly making it that like your country gets to sell duty free products in another country what that means is that US products are

able to undercut every single national industry. So all of the Dominican people's money is flowing back to the United States, but local Dominican companies are not, Like the government is not drawing taxes on those transactions, and local Dominican companies can't make money because they are never going to be as cheap as mass produced US products that are being sold duty free in the Dominican Republic. So it kind

of inherently cripples the economy. Like we leave and say, by the way, we're making it impossible for you guys to ever get on your own feet. Fuck you you know USA number one and they were here, Yeah, yes, yes, exactly, Yes. This is just you know, this is an this is an escalation from controlling like the customs ports. So this all necessity that the government take on more debt in order to survive, and we all know historically how that

goes for countries on the island of Hispaniola. Now, the interim president of the Dominican Republic had been a guy named Horatio Vasquez who adopted Rafael as a pupil and put him in charge of the constabulary. And again This is supposed to be a policing force, but as soon as the Americans leave, Rafael spends his first few years running it, turning it from a policing force into a

proper army. He puts his own picked men in positions of command, and in nineteen thirty he's in a situation where he feels like he can carry out a coupdettas against the president. Now, part of how he does this is he makes a deal with Like in many countries where the US is set up a leadership, there are rebels, right and as soon as the US leaves, these rebels start fighting the central government. The rebels in the Dominican

the most powerful faction is under a guy named Rafael Urina. Now, in exchange for putting Urina in power, Truhillo agrees that you know, basically true. He agrees, I will stop the military from fighting the rebels so that you guys can take over the government, and then you have to carry out new elections, and I have to be allowed to

run for president in the new election. So they work this out amongst themselves to make it seem like there's been a legitimate rebellion against Vasquez and now they're having a free election and that Trohillo is going to win it. It's not going to be a free election. Right, This all works like Gangbusters. The rebels march on the capitol, Trujillo doesn't stop them. Vesquez steps down as president, and yeah, there's an election and Urina and Trujillo run on a

joint ticket and Trujillo becomes the president. So you know that's how that shit goes. Good? Stuff worked, well, yeah, it does, It does work more or less. Well, so, yeah, what followed is the kind of dictator, fake presidential election stuff that we're used to on this podcast. Right, he is the president, the military threatens to murder or at least allow the murder of anyone who runs against him. So he gets ninety nine percent of the vote in

this election. He in fact, gets more votes than there are voters in the Dominican Republic, which we as the United States, who are basically keeping an eye on everything to make sure that the money keeps flowing. Like the US ambassador is like, yeah, this is a scam election, Like he absolutely has just made himself dictator, and everyone in Washington is pretty much like it's fine, Like he's basically a marine, right, like we can trust him to do the shit that we want him to do.