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

to the rain. And Trujillo understood he's got to move fast in doing this because things are not great in the Dominican Republic. You know. Once the US leaves, they kind of set shit up in a way that makes a guarantee that the economy is going to collapse, and sure enough, sugar prices fall through the floor it right after Truheo takes office. This is partly due to the

fact that, like the Great Depression, is happening. So in addition to the shit that the Dominican Republic was already dealing with as a result of the US occupation and the economic regime they set up, now you've got this depression. And so the thing that had kind of kept them limping along as a country previously was that the US would send them loans right while sucking a bunch of

money out of the country. But now that the depression is happening, suddenly we're not as willing to handle them loans. So this is a lot for any government to deal with. But it's particularly a lot because about three weeks after Truhio takes office, a hurricane strikes the capital and it just absolutely devastates. It destroys most of the slums. So like obviously the slums, the buildings there are less able

to withstand a hurricane, so it's just incredibly devastating. There's about eighty thousand people a little less than that living in the capital when the hurricane hits, and more than twenty five hundred of them die, plus another eight thousand are injured and several thousand more are unaccounted for. So like about ten percent of the city is like gone or badly injured after this hits, which you can imagine, like imagining that happening to like wherever you live right now,

Like it's catastrophic. It's a real problem. So Santa Domingo, the capitol had been built in the fifteen hundreds, and it had been built as kind of almost a medieval city, right because the fifteen hundreds, you're kind of right at this sort of like crossroads, you know, heading into modernity. And so it was still divided into different neighborhoods based on like job and social class. You have a neighborhood for the people who do this gig, you have a

neighborhood for like this guild or whatever. And the whole thing had been surrounded by a defensive wall. Like for an example of how slowly shit moved in Santo Domingo up until nineteen hundred, the gate was closed every night like they would people would like blow horns and like lock the gate at night for the city.

the hurricane, but the slums were flattened. Now, trueO responds effectively to this disaster, by which I mean he just doesn't shit the bed, and in not shitting the bed, he kind of lays the foundation for a myth that he single handedly rescues Santa Domingo and it's hour of need.

This is not really accurate, Like he's not he doesn't do anything that like a moderately competent government didn't do, but he does handle it in a moderately competent way and then immediately set his propaganda apparatus to like, wow, he didn't let everyone die after the disaster, look at our hero, which is both like, it's sad where the bar is, but also just like it, this is the easiest way to win, like political points when you've just taken over the government is not.

emergency powers Hitler gets after the Reichstag fire. It is kind of interesting to me that, like a lot of dictators will do the thing where oh, we'll do a false flag or there will be an actual like uprising or something, and we'll use that as an excuse to pass this law giving me total power. Trueheo use is the hurricane for that which I haven't actually run into. In a dictator and is like an actual emergency. Yeah yeah, that is an interesting little spin on the standard story.

Yeah and yeah, So these he starts. Basically, he makes himself the center of the relief effort. So like all of the money and donations that are coming in, all of the international aid, it goes through true HEO, and he is the one handing out Red Cross supplies and

having it handed out and stuff. So he makes sure that even when other people are providing the raw materials, he gets seen as like the person who is doling them out, so that he gets the credit for like all of this shit, he imposes controls over necessities which are being like and he basically puts members of his family and army officers he wants support from in charge of You can hand out the food, you know, you can hand out and make sure everyone knows that you're

doing it for me. But you can also like skim some shit off the top and sell it on the black market and make some money for yourself while you're doing this.

this stuff does get two people who need it. He's not completely shitting the bed on the relief effort, but a lot of it also winds up in the black market, which lets him bribe and start building loyalty from a lot of like what are going to be the new elites under his system because he gives them, you know, cushy jobs handing out this shit, and they're able to make good for themselves from it. A lot of the aid supplies that come in are donations, particularly by Americans.

We don't know exactly how much gets sent to the Dominican Republic because all of that stuff goes into Trueio's pocket. The amount of aid scent was enough though, to both line in his pockets and ensure that there's not like

mass starvation or death from disease. So he does accomplish that, and in short order, Trujillo has both made himself very wealthy and earned the support of the devastated urban poor, and so no one with any say in the matter looked too closely when he used the aftermath of the hurricane for another purpose, which was doing the standard bloody dictatorship of shit of cleaning up the last of his opposition.

One of his first moves in power prior to the hurricane had been to establish a paramilitary organization, La forty two, which operated with legal impunity as a secret police force. The aftermath of the hurricane would be their first chance to shine. And I'm going to quote from German Ornez here. Since Congress had legalized dictatorship, it was easy for Trujillo to take advantage of the situation to wipe out the

already decimated ranks of the opposition. Thus, many of his opponents, done away with by strong armed squads, were reported victims of the hurricane. The day after the hurricane, Truhiel ordered in Paulino, the head of LA forty two, to secure large quantities of gasoline, and that evening, the dead bodies of the victims of the hurricane, as well as a few killed by La forty two, were drinched with the

fluid and burned. This method of corps disposal was hailed as an ingenious device of the president to save time and prevent epidemics.

And also, if we're going to be burning corpses, I might as well have my secret police murder some of these dudes I've got issue with, and we'll just throw them on the fucking pile and then I'll get credit for it.

Arturo Espala, who participated in some of this campaign, later recalled moving his marine trained troops over marine built roads. The General Lisimo struck again and again. Casiques who wouldn't surrender unconditionally were gunned down. The survivors saw the light. The era of regional warlords was ended. The era of trujillo had begun. In any dictator, you're gonna have to deal with the fact that once you take over, there's the people who were elites prior to your rights to power, right,

and you got kind of two broad options. One is you co opt them, right, you make them your elites, you know, and the other is you marginalize them.

prior to trueO. It had been pretty chaotic and most of these people, most of the peasants were not happy with these casiques, and we're not happy with like the old leadership of the country because they'd been bad at it. The dr had no meaningful middle class prior to True Heo, because it turns out that it's hard to have a middle class when like banditry is the biggest industry and the central government doesn't work past the street lamps, you know.

So Rafael followed military action, and this is where it gets really interesting, with a letter writing campaign. So as soon as he's beaten, you know, his primary rivals militarily, he sends out letters all over the countryside. He's posting up like posts and towns and stuff, and announcements. He's sending like all of these announcement out to people, telling them, telling the peasants, hey I am in charge. Now you are under my protection. If anybody fucks with your property,

come to true. Hero, is your landlord abusing you? Does your village need a schoolhouse? Right, here's how you contact me, tell me what you need. I got you. It's a very kind of like mob thing, but it's he's not starting with the threats to the peasants, right. He's doing that to a lot of these old elites, to these you know, he's very violent to them. But to the peasantry, he's like, what do you guys need? What don't you have?

If you have a general who's really good at shit, that's a rival to your power, But you also need the like it's tough and the only thing if you're going to have this powerful military, you're always going to have some people who might be able to overthrow you.

The only way to make that impossible or at least less likely is grassroots support, right, because these generals, who if you're just a dictator to a normal dictators shit and like cracking down on the peasants, and you're feared more than you're loved, Well, what if I just take out this guy? You know, I got a shot I can make you know, But if the peasantry has your back as the dictator, then suddenly it's a lot scarier as some general to try to take over, you know.

And Truheil understood that most of his personal security in the stability of his regime was going to rest entirely on what amounted to bribing the peasantry and spla rights quote. One of the techniques he used was baptism. Baptism and one hundred dollar bills. Trujillo became godfather to tens of thousands of children, and the parents of each child received one hundred dollars. Truhil also reaped a dividend. It is considered poor form in Latin America to conspire against your

compadre the godfather of your child. These baptisms had to be seen to be believed. Shabbily dressed women of the lower classes holding squalling infants would stream through the heavily guarded gate of the National Palace and lineup outside the palace chapel. The old man would handle the proceedings on a production line basis. He would beam briefly at each mother and child, mumble a few words, then pass on

to the next. The din was terrific, and the atmosphere inside the chapel was stifling, but it went on for hours, day after day. Let no one say that Truillo didn't work hard at being a dictator. So he makes himself a godfather to all of the poor people's kids, and he pays them to become like make the godf and then like, I mean, why wouldn't you be the.

degree of wealth. Right. Peasants are not constantly being drafted to fight wars, no, nor are they living solely. They're looking at the mercy of a strong man, true he o, but not at a bunch of warring local strongmen. Right, So you're not having to deal with this like, Okay, I'm under this guy right now, but this dude is more powerful and like if I like back him in this and I got out, Like, you're not worrying about that kind of shit all the time. Right, As long

as you're good with Trueio, you're generally pretty good. And because he brings this form of peace to the country, the economy starts doing a lot better and over the coming years of his reign, over the time the Trio's in power, the population of the Dominican Republic is going

to triple so he is obviously a dictator. He's extremely strict on government employees, which is part of what makes him popular because state employees previously, a lot of them hadn't this is a really normal thing and a lot

of kind of failing states. State employees are like often you bribe someone to get the job, and you give them a cut of your salary, but you don't actually have to do the job right, Like once you've gotten yourself in there, you don't do shit, and so like there's not services like shit that you need, Like I need to be able to get a driver's license. I need to be able to like fucking send letters and stuff, and you can't do that because the government just doesn't

fucking do anything right. The state employees are not functional under true heo, there is a functional state, and part of it is because he treats every state employee like a member of the military. Failure to show up is punished the same way as it is of like a soldier deserts, right, like he puts them under a military justice system for government employees, and as a result, they're services for citizens like people are able to do things.

stop with True Heo because he's the dictator. So he's like, I am going to punish people they don't do their fucking job because that'll make people angry. And if the peasants are angry because shit still doesn't work, I'm less safe,

you know. Yeah. Uh Now, Obviously a massive concern for him is the loyalty of the military, and it's this problem you always have with a dictator's army, right where you need competent officers to enforce what is a military dictatorship, but you also have to be able to keep control and officers who get too good or a danger to you. And one of the ways that he manages this is an idea I have not well, it's similar to some

things other people do. So there's this growing understanding of fitness in this period of time in the thirties, right, fitness culture is starting to become a thing, and Trueheo has a conversation with a doctor who tells him that the best thing to do for his health is go on long walks, right, that that's really good for you. So he becomes a devoted walker, and he makes it be mandatory for military officers to come follow him on

his walks. But he's not like, he doesn't have a super set schedule all the time, so you never know when the walk is going to start. You just have to show up outside of his palace and like the late afternoon and wait around for hours until he's ready to go on a walk, and it might take hours,

and then he might be out for hours. And as a result, you're always you have this big thing that's going to take a huge chunk of your day and your energy, and it's kind of it's not entirely predictable how long it's going to take, and so that just takes up a lot of time that you might spend plotting, right, like you, that's all This is a thing other dictators do. Again, it's weird. He's like a lot of what he does is like the slightly healthier version of normal dictator stuff.

Stalin's version of this was every getting everyone drunk. Yeah, we're all going to get drunk and watch cowboy movies and the middle disrupt your life and stop you from being able to plot against me. Truio's version is, We're all gonna like go on long walks with like shake weights in our hands so that we stay fit.

And you know, this is part of how he ensures loyalty. And when this stuff doesn't work, there was always rampant brutality. One of the last Codillos was Sergeant Enrique Blanco, who like rebelled from the military and led this like regional rebellion against Trujillo's rule pretty early on. And when he's finally killed, Trujio takes his corpse and he parades it through the towns where this guy had been popular, and he makes local peasants dance with this guy's rotting corpse

until Truhio's like, I think you got the point. So again, not a verse to brutal shit, right, Like he does that too?

the government? You know, it had been theoretical outside of era, So he understood one of the things he has to do is build a sense of nationalism. Part of how he did this was in the capitol every day he would raise the flag and order the national anthem played, and then he would like sit out in his palace with a telescope and watch how people responded to like see if they were paying enough attention to the national anthem,

and when he noticed people weren't, he took action. As this passage from Espala's book describes, one morning, soldiers clad and civilian clothes swarmed into the square. They claborate everyone who didn't stand up for the anthem and flag. This went on for several days. Then people began drifting out of the square just before each ceremony. Truhia responded by throwing a cordin of troops around the area. People eventually

got the message. Dominicans were soon leaping frantically to their feet at the sound of the first notes of the anthem.

he rechristened the capital Siadad Trujillo. He also changed the name of Duarte Peak to Trujillo Peak. At ten twenty eight feet, this Apex and the Dominican Cordillera is Central is the Caribbean's highest mountain. It is about a third the height of Mount Everest and surpasses the measurement of

any North American mountain east of the Mississippi. Legend has it that a geographer laboring under Trujillo feared that even the peaks impressive height would not be enough to police the president, so he recorded the height at three thousand, one hundred and seventy five meters ten thousand, four hundred and seventeen feet instead just actually one hundred twenty eight It's not even that big a lie, right, he's just adding like three hundred feet like, h yeah, because meters. Yeah,

but it's interesting, yeah, changing them. I mean, first off, changing the name of the capital city to be your name. Classic dictator shit. Changing a mountain, classic dictator shit. But really where it gets good is like this geographer is scared to give the actual height of the mountains, so he's got to just like just jink it by a little bit. Like that's not even a big lie, it's such a it.

dictator ship. Yeah. True Hello also commissioned songs to be composed in his honor, with titles like faith and Tru Heo Tru Hello is Great and Immortal and True Hello the Great Architect, none of which have the uh the panache of like Fox Trot Uniform, Charlie Kilo or uh, you know, some of the other great Bloodhound Gang songs.

the US. Truhio considers himself a marine, but the US is not the government in thirty seven that he feels the closest to, or that he wants to be the closest to, because he's kind of become a Hitler. Stand by this point right now, Adolph's been in power less time by a couple of years. Than Truio, but he's really done something with it. And Raphael is a big fan of this, This go getter young German. Right, he's a hitler. Yeah, yeah, he's a hitler. Stan, He's got all the albums.

oh yeah, he's got a signed one. The Nazi delegation is met with crowds and positive articles in tru Heillo controlled newspapers, all with titles like long live our illustrious leaders, the Honorable President, Doctor Trujillo, and the furor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler.

could not afford to feed foreigners too. Truio cracked down in migration from Haiti, but powerful American sugarcane plantation owners who brought in Haitians to cut caine because unlike Dominicans, they worked for practically nothing, forced him to make hu exceptions. He resorted to deporting Haitians and tightening border patrols, but the Haitians kept coming because obviously Haiti is doing badly in this period, as is generally the case. So they've

got poor refugees flooding over the border. Americans need them to work plantations for cheap But Truhello also is he's doing very much what conservatives do in our country, creating this panic over the border. Like, ah, it's not my mismanagement, and like the US having fucked us over for so long, that is why you're poor and starving. It's the Haitians. They're taking your jobs, they're taking your wealth, they're filling

our cut. We can't afford to feed them. All right, Well, isn't there like a I.

They work in communities. Even the ones that are going across have often been part of and working in these communities for generations. But Trujillo sees them as a and in fact, Trujillo is part Haitian, right, Like he has Haitian ancestors, which is very common. Right, It's one island. It's not all that bit, you know, like I don't.

much sense when you drill down into it. Other than that it makes sense when you talk about the politicians, when you talk about guys like Druhillo, for whom it's not about his deeply held beliefs as much as it is like I need a fucking scapegoat, and I can get people angry at the Haitians, you know, right, Like.

which he does throughout the mid thirties. In July of nineteen thirty seven, this process culminates in a new law which forces foreigners to register with migration officials and leads to a crackdown on immigration that allows him to deport eight thousand Haitians. And again, a bunch of those people had lived in the area for forever, right, Like they're just being forced out because someone decides in the government,

decides that they're Haitians and anyway, it's ugly. Trhillo goes on a grand tour of the border in August and he is furious to see that there are still way more Haitians than he wants to see, and he doesn't. He's angry that there's not as much livestock as he'd expected to see in this part of the countryside. So he starts talking to peasants as he's doing this like tour of these villages and they're like, oh, it's Haitian

bandits who stole our animals. Now it's unclear if this actually happened or if this is the justification that Raphael's propagandists give for his focus on the border. But there start being massacres. There's massacres of Dominicans by Haitian partisans. There's reprisal strikes Dominicans. Yeah, he stole it's a normal thing, like, but there there starts being more violence. That's a lot of it's you know, ginned up by his sort of like the propaganda that starts coming out. But like Yeah,

Dominicans kill Haitians. There's reprisal strikes and reprisal strikes and reprisal strikes. In early October, Truehio visits a banquet near the border and he starts to get drunk and at the point at which he gets really hammered, because he's this is not an unknown thing to him. He is and dictators often do this. He'll get hammered and then announce new policies.

The solution must continue. And for emphasis, he starts hammering his fist on the table as he's giving this speech about how, like, you know, we killed three hundred Haitians today and we're going to kill more and more and more of them soon, and like he basically starts promising, We're going to do a fucking massacre. And it is I think unclear if he'd had anyone killed at this point.

There had been clashes prior to this, and it's kind of unclear how much of this was like locked down and set in stone before he started drinking, and how much of this is influenced by the fact that he starts drinking. But after he gives this kind of drunken announcement, he orders his forces to move on the border region and start massacring Haitians. Michelle Wooker writes, quote, Trujillo's soldiers

use their guns to intimidate, but not to kill. For that, they used machetes, knives, picks, and shovels so as not to leave bullets in the corpses. Bullet riddled bodies would have made it obvious that the murderers were government soldiers, who, unlike most Dominicans, had guns. But death by machete can be blamed on peasants, on simple men of the countryside rising up to defend their cattle in lands. Even a bayonet leaves wounds like those of a simple knife that

the true authors of the crime can be masked. This elaborate facade left out one crucial detail. If the massacre was indeed a result of the Dominican peasant uprising against the Haitians, why were there no casualties on the Dominican side, and why did a number of Dominicans add a great risk to their own lives and livelihoods hide Haitians and efforts to protect them from Truhio's murderers. Trujillo's men searched the houses in estates of the region one by one,

rounded up Haitians, and initiated deportation proceedings against them. Once the paperwork was done, the Dominican government had proof that the Haitians had been sent back to Haiti. The Haitians were then transported like cattle to isolated killing grounds, where soldiers slaughtered them at night, carried the corpses to the Atlantic port at Monte Christi, and threw the bodies to the sharks for days. The waves carried uneaten body parts

back onto Hispaniola's beaches. So we are past the fun part of the true Heo story.

to threaten them together. But the killing itself, and this is going to be thirty thousand people beaten to death with clubs, with shovels, with knives, with picks, like this is one of the most physically brutal acts of mass killing that I've ever read about.

their firearms. They started going door to door massacring Haitian families anywhere they weren't actively employed and protected by a foreign company. Many of the people they were killing were lifelong residents of these areas, which means that number one, it wasn't a lot of times and to the this is a massacre executed by the government. There are certainly

some civilians, some Dominican civilians, who support the massacre. A lot of Dominican civilians hide and try to protect because these are their neighbors, These are family in some cases, right, I mean, the fucking dictator is part Haitian, right.

like three minutes from each other for forever. Right, So in order to figure out who the Haitians are, what you do have is Haitians speak French right like or at least a French creole, and like Dominicans speak like kind of a Spanish creole, right, And so Haitians pronounce the term for parsley differently than Dominicans. They can't roll

their rs in the right way. And it's just sort of like a thing, right, Like you get this in like polyglot community, where it'll be like, ah, they pronounce it this way, we call it this way, you know, it's like a we even have that with like the British, right, like you, my roommate is ethnically British, and like he calls it a bath room and like all this shit, like you know, this is the less fun that just wrong. Yeah,

it is wrong. Soldiers will go door to door or when they're doing checkpoints, they'll hold up a piece of parsley and they'll ask the people to to what is this called? And if they pronounce it the way Haitians pronounce it, they'll kill them. They'll beat them to death, they'll shoot them. It becomes called the par Parsley massacre

by a lot of people as a result of this. Yeah, now it's kind of unclear how often that's the way that they do it, but this apparently does happen to some extent to some of the victims, so that's kind of how it becomes known. The main phase of the killing lasts roughly a week, so somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand people massacred, and most of them in a week.

There's some mop up killings the second week. But like after about a week of this, the international community finds out, right, like this story for one thing, there's like body parts washing up in Haiti, right, Like there's survivors who get out and stuff, and people don't like it when you do this. Generally like it's bad press, and particularly like a lot of Americans are like, well, hey, we we're backing this guy. What the fuck? We don't like this.

You know, we're pretty racist, but like, we don't like it when this happens, or at least when we're informed about it, you know, Yeah, don't like, don't let us hear about it if you're gonna do it. Yeah. And so Rafael orders an official stop to the massacre on October eighth, after about a week, but his forces keep mopping up. They kill a few hundred more families over the next week or so. By the time the killing

stopped again, the lone estimate is about fifteen thousand. The high estimate is thirty thous or so twenty twenty five thousands, probably a pretty realistic death toll. The butchery is severe enough that international attention lingers, and Raphael he tries to stop the international press from coming in. You know, he's

got a pretty good lockdown in the cities. But one American journalist, a fucking hero, really cool guy, Quentin Reynolds, makes his way through like these cordons and shit and gets into the countryside near the border of the Dominican Republican Haiti, and he goes to hospitals, these little field hospitals and jungle hospitals and shit just in the middle

of nowhere, and he starts talking to victims. He meets hundreds of survivors, and because of how brutal, he's like transfixed by the wounds, people who have like gouges in their skulls. A lot of small children whose hands had been hacked off, like hundreds of them. And he talks to these people. He takes down their stories, he hears

what happened. He does his work diligently, and then, showing more courage than might exist in the American media today, he flies to the Capital to talk directly to Truthio, to confront him about what he's heard and seen. And I should note here that in addition to writing for Colliers magazine, Quentin was a former NFL linebacker. So he is he is like, yeah, he's pretty cool guy. Yeah.

take you out. Yeah, he may have just had kind of faith that the dictator, but anyway, still a ballsy moved to go directly to this guy and Truehillo like Winds and dines this journalist, he sits him down for Yeah. He gives Reynolds what Reynolds describes as the best champagne he ever tasted. And while they're talking, because Reynolds is like, here's what people they're saying happened to them. They're saying your soldiers did all this horrible shit, and tru Heil's

like they're exaggerating, Like that can't be what happened. You know, there was just an uprising of Dominican farmers against Haitians and like they were just he says, it was a truly lamentable incident and nobody feels worse about it than I do. Fucking yeah, real piece of shit. So Quentin points out, like I have seen a lot of evidence that directly counters your claims, I don't believe you, and Truio says, hey, look, it couldn't have been done by

my guys. They were all killed by machetes, not rifles. My guys would have used rifles. You know, if I was gonna do he does like an if I did it sort of thing, or if it was gonna be my guys. So now I also should note here after like Quentin come like, it is because of him that a lot of this story gets out. He's not the only person who gets it out, but he like writes a big article about it. He creates a lot of international attends around this. Quentin Reynolds will go on to

be a war correspondent during World War Two. Pretty cool guy, imo. So the River Massacre, as it's also sometimes called, was inspired partly by a Nazi racial theories. Truhio was open and this is again, as we talked about earlier, kind of a long trend in Dominican rulers. He wants to whiten his country, right, he wants to make it whiter, and he sees the Haitians as darker than the Dominicans, right, so he wants That's part of what's going on with

him here? And he follows up this massacre with a dominicanization propaganda campaign that describes his terrible crime as an act of protection to save Dominicans from the pollution of Haitian blood.

to discuss resettling Jewish refugees from Nazi territory. The war had not started yet. Again, this is thirty eight, and the Nazis were willing to allow immigration, were willing to allow Jews to leave Nazi Germany as long as they didn't take their money or property with them. But the

problem was that everyone's real fucking racist. Right. There are caps on how many Jewish refugees on how many Jewish people are allowed to enter the United States are allowed to enter basically every Western country, right, because real fucking racist and fdr. This is a thing that is going to be repeatedly an issue for him. Is personally empathetic but doesn't want to be seen as like soft on

the Jews, right, that is bad for you politically. This is very racist everyone, like, that's why the Holocaust happens. Is everybody's fucking terrible, but so the US and basically no one is willing to This is not just the United States. He has thirty two countries together, and none of them are willing to extend their cap on refugees to raise the number of Jews that they're willing to

take in. They come to this like toothless agreement where everyone agrees, yeah, we should resettle Jewish people out of Nazi areas, but no country should be expected to take in more than their current laws allow. Only one world leader stands up and offers to take additional Jewish refugees. That's thirty two. Yeah, Raphaeltruhio because again he's a stan of Hitler, but he doesn't really believe he has a different belief set about racial policies. They are inspired by

the Nazis, but in his view, Jews are white. So if I take Jews in and they start marrying, it'll whiten this up, you know. Like that is the attitude that he's coming into this with. Right, So he says the Dominican Republic can host between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand Jews. That's a big deal, right.

lot of people's lives are saved. He does it for the most racist and shitty reasons possible, right, right, Like he is he is saving Holocaust victims in order to cover up a genocide that he did. There's no lessons sometimes from history. Just it's a thing that happened.

he sees as like Jewish fields, like finance. Right, Like, basically, I will let you come here if you work as farmers and if you ideally marry and have kids with Dominicans.

out a genocide. But you know, you can't be picky if you're the JCS in this situation. So they create a special organization. The acronym for it is DORSA. I don't remember what it stands for. It doesn't really matter. And the purpose of this organization is to take money generally from diaspora Jews who are trying to get people out of Europe and buy up land twenty six thousand acres I think in the Democratic or in the Dominican Republic, and then settle Jewish people on that land as farmers.

Upon arrival, each new settler is supposed to be given eighty acres of land ten kyat cows, a mule and a horse, which compared to Auschwitz is pretty good deal, right, Yeah, not bad. It's not a great plan. I don't think true. HEO knows a lot about farming. The specific area that these folks are able to are given to, like allowed to buy acre g In is not fertile farmland for what they want to grow because their initial plan is tomatoes. I don't exactly know why, but it's a bad place

to grow tomatoes, and there are other problems. For one thing, most of the younger Jewish people who could get out of Germany already have, so most of the people who are coming into the Dominican Republic are fifty year older, which makes sense when you look at the dim graphics that remained in the German Jewish and Austrian Jewish communities in this period of time. But TRUEEO, a lot of this is like he wants to breed them, right, so like the fact that they're old, he's not thrilled with.

There's other issues with the colony. For one thing, most of the people who come there, their goal is not to actually stay in the dr right. Their goal is to get there to save their lives and then get a visa to enter the US, which totally reasonable. Like I'm not criticizing them for this, but it doesn't it's part of why the plan doesn't entirely work the way that Truhio wants it to. But also the colony doesn't collapse, and this is really fascinating. So they're having this issue.

The first crops that they tried to work to grow doesn't work. So Dorset inputs or imports a bunch of Jewish Palestinians who have been living on kibbutzes and brings them over and has them like helps set up like farms and meat processing plants and like dairies and stuff to make cheese. And this actually takes off. Like with

these like kibbutzam in they build a thriving community. I think there's never more than about five hundred people who live in it at a time, but something like ten thousand something like that, like fifteen hundred, mite, Like there's there's a few thousand people the numbers are kind of unclear, who move through the colony on their way to the US. So this does save a lot of lives. And there is still a Jewish population in this area, in this

colony called Sosua to this day. And in fact, most of the butter and cheese made in the Democratic or made in the Dominican Republic is made by businesses run by these Jewish families, so to this day still around. So that's that will be the only nice thing we talk about today. But that's nice. Yeah, that's good. Again, I don't give Truheo credit for this. I give these people credit for like surviving and making something actually kind of rad out of a very.

One of Truheillo's great shames is again that he is darker than he wants to look like he is. He considers that to be to having he considers having darker skin to be something shameful, and as a result, he is known to wear thick it's described as pancake makeup at all time. He always has whitening makeup on his face, and he's bad at applying it, like it is like noticing. Yeah, he looks like a mannequin, like he's just got it

slathered on all the time. Yeah, yeah, come on, man, Like Bare Minerals has some good stuff, like yeah, anyway, whatever.

fact that he comes from poverty. And this insecurity extends to like he when once he One of the reasons why we don't have as much to hail about his childhood as we'd like is that he goes too great links to cover up everything about his early life once he is in power, including he kind of goes to war against his old nickname chippeda or bottle cap. And this is a fun little anecdote from The Little Caesar

of the Caribbean, which is a biography of truthio quote. Somehow, the nickname was eventually eliminated as a result of one of Trujillo's earliest biographical rewrites. To accomplish this, however, he had to banish the word from the language. Many people who stubbornly disregarded the prohibition paid dearly for their daring. Though successful in suppressing the word, the General Lissimo has

failed to abolish its meaning. The natural and probably innocent boyhood passion for collecting meaningless trifles remains with him to this day. Although considerably changed in scope in his maturity. Trujillo collects medals and decorations, of which he possesses more than fifty.

so unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. Also, like it's like it's pretty normal in this in the Dominican Republic, and I think elsewhere for kids to collect bottle caps, like it's not a great shame, but it makes this it's a thing that a poor kid does. Rich kids are not collecting bottle cap you know. And he doesn't want people to think that about him.

usually without bodyguards. Some of this is that, like he just has that much faith in the system he's built to protect him, and it works for like thirty years, Like he has legitimately built, like done such a good job of kind of cracking down on resistance that for the most part this works for him.

That's it's like the elites were. Resistance to his regime primarily comes from so yeah esplay and his early biographers often describe him as having a lot of dates with girls. This like that's also a major part of his his

day to day schedule. Obviously, women are being induced to sleep with him through direct threat, but it's it's generally enough to know that, like while the old man wants your company, and you can either have this be a violent process or you'll get something out of it at the end, right, like normal dictator stuff, not to you know, wash over it. There's just not a lot of direct detail. But this thing that's happening, I think he I believe he has a number.

efforts to his regime. Right, So these are elites, These are wealthy people who are trying to fund and carry out resistance to eventually force Trueio out of power, and she marries into a family doing this. So, because she is in the upper crack class, she's rich. She's still attending social events where Trujillo is present, right, and at one of these dances, he makes sexual advances towards her, and, fully aware of how dangerous this is, she slaps him.

Now that's pretty baller. But also there are going to be consequences for slapping the dictator, right, yeah, because he's the dictator in this case, she spends a little bit of time in jail. He puts her father in prison for two years, and because he's an old man, he's basically starved and tortured and then released and dies pretty much immediately after getting out of prison. Now that makes

Maria angry. Probably don't need to belabor that point. So she and her sisters Patria and Minerva start to organize together and they create the nexus of an underground movement aimed at ousting Trujio from power. They came to be known as the Butterflies or Las Matoposas, and they were a major part, like a nexus of the underground resistance to the regime until in nineteen fifty nine, a group

of Dominican exiles try to overthrow the government. This had happened a decade earlier, right, a bunch of like Dominicans who'd been forced out by Trujeo came in with guns to try to overthrow the government. But when this cracked out, or when this insurgency in nineteen fifty nine gets defeated, there's a crackdown and it's so brutal that it convinces the mariposas they have to accelerate their plans to force Truio out, so they start planning to assassinate the president. Unfortunately,

they get caught. Trueo's secret services are competent, they're good at what they do. They uncover evidence that this is being planned, and you know, sexism being what it is. trueO arrests their husbands and throws them in prison. Right, so the Marabelle sisters are stay out of jail for a while. They actually travel up to visit their husbands who are in jail as they're kind of like waiting to be sentenced, and then on their way back into

town from this visit. On November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty Trueo's men ambush them on a rural mountain road, forced them out of their car, and beat all of them to death. This is a very famous moment. It's kind of it catalyzes a lot of the resistance Hero's regime. Their Mariposas are still celebrated today for their role in the resistance. This is like one of the really searing moments of Trueheo regime. For obvious reasons.

This is normal shit. You know. He's got like his famous prison where he tortures people, right, He's got his secret police who do normal secret police shit. That is all what every dictator is. I think we have talked enough about that that I'm not glossing it over. What I think is interesting because it's very different from a lot of dictators I've read about, is what actually keeps

him in power is not just terror. At the same time as he is building this very traditional repression apparatus, he is also systematically extending himself into every major industry in the country. He is nationalizing a number of foreign businesses, and he makes himself and his family the center of the entire economy. By the nineteen fifties, most Dominican peasants are in some way employed by the Trujillos, and so that's how they make their living. Right, It's directly connected

to this family, how because they control every industry. If you have a job in the dr it's probably through a company that they own, one way or the other. Right, in addition to handing out jobs in the government through patronage, he's a lot.

do recommend. It's a great book about Truheo. He then fashioned all public works, policy, formation and patronage is personal gifts from the dictator to the pueblo or people. With his family and a few close friends, Trujillo used the state to develop a system of highly profitable economic monopolies. As he gradually took over all core national industries such as meat, milk, sugar, rice, oil, cement, and beer. He then used the law to guarantee their profitability and allocated

state contracts to his family and cronies. For example, he prohibited the production of sea salt, so the public would have to purchase salt from the Baharuna Mines, which he controlled. His wife, Maria Martinez, was allotted a government bank for casing state paychecks. Trujillo's sister's husband was given the military pharmaceutical contract, a highly lucrative enterprise given the massive expansion

of the armed forces. In this extreme example of prebndalism, the appropriation of the state for private ends, the state became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo and his circle. Trhi eventually became one of the wealthiest men in Latin America. Under his regime, there was no effective distinction between the national treasury and the dictator's own purse.

He also used the state as a legal screen which shielded the public from the regime's extraordinarily lawlessness and corruption. He enabled his own divorce, for example, by altering divorced legislation, and this is very effective. This is a big part of what allows him to maintain power. It is also going to be part of his downfall because where this leads is the nationalization by trueO of foreign owned businesses, including businesses owned by Americans. Right, so he is kind

of taken. He is reducing our ability to profit. Now we had been on his side and had helped fund him, had given him more loans, had given him weapons through the early stages of the Cold War. Because he's an anti communist. Right now, our support of Truhio, to be fair, is not rooted in anti communism because of how long this guy is in power. It goes back further than that, right But once the Cold War really gets going, he re fashions himself as an anti communist. Some of this

came naturally to him. He and Castro hate each other. So in nineteen fifty six, when Castro is planning his revolt against Batista, Trujillo had offered the Batista regime military supplies that didn't wind up working out for Batista. Castro overthrows Batista. And in nineteen fifty nine, when that Dominican exile force had attempted to overthrow the Trujillo regime, a lot of the guys who go in with that are Cubans.

Like the Cuban government is arming, like it's a little bit their bay of pigs, right, is trying to overthrow Trujillo's government. Obviously not a bad thing to want to overthrow the Trujillo regime. I'm not really being critical here, but it is a big part of why Castro supports this is because Trujillo had tried to stop him, right like, so these guys have a little bit of like a thing going on. Trujillo responds to this by plotting his own invasion of Cuba, which would not have worked and

never winds up panning out. So he constant compensated by having his men loot the Cuban embassy in Trujillo the city, which is what he's renamed the Capitol right. Raphael also had a long standing rivalry with Romulo Bettencourt, the president of Venezuela. In nineteen fifty one, one of his men had tried to kill Bettencourt when he visited Havana by

stabbing him with a poisoned syringe. This led to some understandable anger by Bettencourt against Trujillo, and so Bettencourt started publicly accusing the Dominican dictator of being a crooke and a gangster, which is not wrong here. So Trujillo, now that he's been insulted, tries to blow up Bettencourt with a car bomb, and Bettencourt survives with severe burns. Now, all of this is fine, dictator on dictator violence, no problem either way here. Really it's just fun to read about.

But by nineteen sixty the United States is starting to get pissed off. Eisenhower considered the attacks on Bettencourt to be the last straw and was somewhat confusingly convinced. Like Eisenhower's worry and why he's like allows the CIA to try to overthrow Trujillo is he's he's convinced that Trujillo's going to turn the Dominican Republic into a fortress for communism,

which is completely illogical. I think it might have been that, like he thinks that Trujillo is so out of pocket that he's going to create a revolution and then the communists will get in power. Oh okay, yeah, because he's like he's so bad at being like He's like, I think this guy is out of control now, and I don't want him to be replaced by communists. He is. I don't see much evidence that the Communists were ever

likely to take over. I don't think they could have done worse than Truio, but I just don't think that that was really likely but that Eisenhower is convinced of that in any case, so he tells the CIA to help the anti Trujillo underground do a coup. Now, I will say, of all of the coup is that the US has backed. I don't really have a problem with trying to kill Raphael Trujillo, right, Like I'm not don't

have a super big issue with it. But we're bad at this, like we usually are when we try to do cus right, Like, we're pretty dog shit at this stuff for the most part. And it is a messy process. Now, part of why it's messy is just the fact that Eisenhower kind of approves trying to do this, but he does it right at the end of his administration, and then the Kennedy administration, and so it's just chaotic, right, We're changing administrations and this kind of get lost in

the mix. And then right when we start, so Kennedy's people do send a bunch of guns, like a bunch of rifles over to some Dominican dissidence to assassinate tru Heio. But like a week after we give them guns, the Bey of Pigs happens. And again there's just not a lot of focus on follow up. We kind of hand them some guns. We fuck up overthrowing the Cuban government. No, we're terrible at that. It's just no one's priority, you know. It's it's one of those kinds of things.

It read, our representatives in the Dominican Republic have at considerable risk to those involved, established contacts with numerous leaders of the underground opposition and the CIA has recently been authorized to arrange for delivery to them outside the Dominican Republic of small arms and sabotage equipment Now equipment sat like bombs and ship you know.

attempt on Truio's life. So I will say, we're this is like the one time where we tried to assassinate a guy and it was like, yeah, I probably should have gotten got but we immediately try to get out of it, like we do machine guns.

do him in. On May thirtieth, a group of assassins armed with US guns waited by the route they knew the dictator would take from his girlfriend's house to the Capitol. When Trujillo's car approached, they opened fire. You know, they wound him.

I actually read an we know who they are? Yeah, yeah, their names are their heroes now, oh yeah, we actually I read an interview with like one of these dudes who was like alive pretty recently and was like, yeah, I have I still have the shoes that I killed him in, and every year on the anniversary of his murder, I like put them on again just to like walk around down in my killing the president's shoes.

Ramphis again up for one thing, you just know by that name, he's not right.

more riots and stuff in his wake. The American embassy becomes convinced that the Communists are going to take over the country, and so LBJ sends twenty two thousand American troops to restore order. Yeah, there was no communist revolt, This was never a real threat. But we wind up there again.

That never happens. Like we're we come in clean and we come out clean.