In his tragic and comedic novel _The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao,” author Junot Díaz has his narrator say the following about the dictator featured here, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina:.
“For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality . . . At first glance, he was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up”.
Trujillo used assassination, censorship, and military force to achieve his agendas, which included amassing a fortune that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world by the 1950s. His ego was such that he renamed Santo Domingo “Ciudad Trujillo” and the highest mountain La Pelona Grande “Pico Trujillo”. Trained by US Marines and supported by the US until 1960, Trujillo was responsible for creating massive Dominican animosity towards Haitians, and killing many thousands of both groups.
One horrific example is the Parsley Massacre of 1937, known as El Corte (“the cutting”) in the Dominican Republic. Between late September and early October, Trujillo ordered his men to slaughter upwards of 20,000 (total fatalities are unknown) Haitians on the Dominican border — many of the killings took place at Massacre River, pictured on the second slide. Trujillo’s soldiers were told to use machetes rather than guns to make it look like Dominicans were defending their properties against Haitian cattle thieves. The people along the border were often of mixed blood ancestry and skin color wasn’t enough to determine lineage, so the rumor was that the killers would identify Haitians by the way they pronounced the word for parsley — the “r” in the word “perejil” wasn’t voiced by the Haitians.
Trujillo was eventually assassinated, but the damage he did left a long legacy.
Source: Edward Paulino: Bearing witness to the 1937 Haitian Massacre: How a diplomatic letter, an activist’s letter, and the internet sparked amovement for reconciliation and equality, Thursday, February 18, 2016, 2:00-3:45 pm, Charles E Merrill Lounge — talk notice and description from Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas UCSC. Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies “Dominican Republic: bearing witness to a modern genocide,” Edward Paulino, Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Fall 2016, UC Berkeley. Images from “El Corte”: A forgotten genocide” May 12, 2001, LAS410, by Peter Everett
