San Cristóbal, 1891 – Santo Domingo (República Dominicana), 1961
By Wilfredo Lozano y Quisqueya Lora
Dictator for three decades, Rafael Trujillo was a legacy of the American intervention of 1916. Son of José Trujillo Valdez and Altagracia Julia Molina, he completed only primary education. At sixteen, he found work as a telegrapher. From a very young age, there are reports of his connections to criminal activities. Still very young, he joined the National Party led by Horacio Vásquez. During the intervention, he worked in the sugar mills as a weighman and later as a field guard.
In 1918, he became part of the National Guard and pursued armed resistance groups to the intervention, known as gavilleros. From that moment on, he had an uninterrupted rise in his career, eventually becoming a brigadier general and commander-in-chief of the Army in 1928. Along with the increase in his authority and influence, his personal fortune grew as a result of the corrupt practices he developed. By 1930, Trujillo was already one of the richest men in the country.
At this point, the government of Horacio Vásquez was in a state of deep political weariness. The chief of the Army conspired to overthrow him, supported by an apparently civic movement led by Rafael Estrella Ureña. The fall of Vásquez allowed Trujillo to run in the March 1930 elections, winning as the only candidate. This marked the beginning of a long period of terror. Trujillo formed a paramilitary gang known as the 42, dedicated to assassinating opponents.
A characteristic feature of the regime was the adulation of the dictator and his family. Roads, provinces, schools, and bridges bore their names; even Santo Domingo, the oldest city in the Americas, founded by Christopher Columbus’s brother in 1496, changed its name to Ciudad Trujillo. Prominent intellectuals justified the dictatorship, arguing that Trujillo was a historical necessity, as only he could overcome the obstacles facing the Dominican Republic. The ideological pillars of the dictatorship included not only the exaltation of tyranny but also anti-communism, Hispanic nationalism, and the persecution of Africans, especially Haitians. This persecution was most notably expressed in the massacre of Haitians ordered by Trujillo in 1937.
His absolute control over the national economy allowed him to carry out an important urban development plan, along with the payment of the foreign debt, the creation of the national currency, and the maintenance of its parity with the dollar. Trujillo monopolized the main productive lines and services. From the beginning, the dictator made efforts to maintain good relations with the United States. For much of his tyranny, Trujillo had the support of the Americans. However, by the late 1950s, international circumstances led the United States to adopt a democratic discourse incompatible with the reality faced by the Dominican Republic. Additionally, Washington feared a situation similar to that which had occurred with Batista’s dictatorship in Cuba following the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Finally, on May 30, 1961, after thirty years of iron-fisted dictatorship, Trujillo was assassinated in Santo Domingo while traveling in a vehicle to his farm.
