Background

Ethnicity: Rafael Trujillo was of Spanish, Haitian, French, and Dominican descent.

Rafael Trujillo was born Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina on October 24, 1891, in San Cristobal, Dominican Republic to a middle-class family of José Trujillo Valdez and Altagracia Julia Molina Chevalier. He and his 10 siblings were raised in a small rural town by parents of Spanish, Haitian, French, and Dominican descent. Because Trujillo hired someone to rewrite his family history once he came into power, the true facts of his background remain uncertain.

Education

As a child, Trujillo attended informal schools held in various villagers' homes. His education took place in fits and starts and was rudimentary at best. In 1897, at the age of six, he was registered in the school of Juan Hilario Meriño. One year later, he joined the school of Broughton, where his teacher was Eugenio María de Hostos. Trujillo remained there for the rest of his primary schooling. After starting his military career Trujillo attended the Haina Military Academy in 1921 and graduated with the first class in 1925.

Career

When Trujillo was 16 years old, he took a job as a telegraph operator. After joining a gang and committing a string of crimes, Trujillo was arrested for forging a check and subsequently lost his job. In 1916, Trujillo married his first wife, Aminta Ledesima, who would give him two daughters. In light of becoming a family man, Trujillo traded in his life of crime for a steady day job. At the end of 1916, he took a weigher position on a sugar plantation. Displaying leadership qualities, Trujillo was later promoted to a private policeman on the plantation.

Trujillo began his military career during the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) and was trained by United States Marines in the newly formed Dominican National Guard (eventually renamed the Dominican National Police).

Trujillo eventually rose to Chief of the Dominican National Police, all the while engaging in shady business deals related to the purchase of military food, clothes, and equipment, from which he began to amass wealth. Trujillo demonstrated a ruthless tendency to remove enemies from the army, place allies in key positions, and consolidate power, which is how he became the commander-in-chief of the army by 1927. When President Horacio Vázquez fell ill in 1929, Trujillo and his allies saw an opening to prevent Vice President Alfonseca, who they considered to be an enemy, from assuming the presidency.

Trujillo began to work with another politician, Rafael Estrella Ureña, to seize power from Vázquez. On February 23, 1930, Trujillo and Estrella Ureña engineered a coup that eventually resulted in both Vázquez and Alfonseca resigning and ceding power to Estrella Ureña. However, Trujillo had designs on the presidency himself and after months of intimidation and threats of violence toward other political parties, he assumed the presidency with Estrella Ureña as vice president on August 16, 1930.

Trujillo proceeded to murder and jail his opponents after the election. He also established a paramilitary force, La 42, designed to persecute his opponents and generally instill fear in the population. He exerted full control over the island's economy, establishing monopolies over salt, meat, and rice production. He engaged in blatant corruption and conflicts of interest, forcing Dominicans to buy staple food products distributed by his own companies. By rapidly acquiring wealth, Trujillo was eventually able to push out owners across various sectors, such as insurance and tobacco production, forcing them to sell to him. He also issued propaganda proclaiming himself as the savior of a previously backward country. In 1936 he changed the name of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City) and began to erect monuments and dedicate street names to himself.

Sugar was one of Trujillo's largest ventures, particularly in the post-war era. Most of the sugar mills were owned by foreign investors, so he set about buying them up with state and personal funds. He used nationalist rhetoric to back up his agenda of taking over foreign-owned sugar mills.

At the end of his reign, Trujillo's economic empire was unprecedented: he controlled nearly 80% of the country's industrial production, and his firms employed 45% of the active labor force. With 15% of the labor force employed by the state, this meant that 60% of the population depended on him directly for work.

Although Trujillo ceded the presidency to his brother in 1952 and 1957 and installed Joaquín Balaguer in 1960, he maintained de facto control over the island until 1961, using his secret police to infiltrate the population and rout out dissent using intimidation, torture, imprisonment, kidnapping and rape of women, and assassination.

Dominican exiles opposed to the Trujillo regime carried out two failed invasions, one in 1949 and one in 1959. However, things shifted in the region once Fidel Castro succeeded in overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. In order to help the Dominicans overthrow Trujillo, Castro armed a military expedition in 1959 composed mostly of exiles but also some Cuban military commanders. The uprising failed, but the Cuban government continued urging Dominicans to revolt against Trujillo and this inspired more conspiracies. One widely publicized case was that of the three Mirabal sisters, whose husbands had been jailed for conspiring to overthrow Trujillo. The sisters were assassinated on November 25, 1960, provoking outrage.

One of the decisive factors in Trujillo's downfall was his attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt in 1960 after discovering that the latter had participated years before in a conspiracy to oust him. When the assassination plot was revealed, the Organization of American States (OAS) severed diplomatic ties with Trujillo and imposed economic sanctions. Moreover, having learned its lesson with Batista in Cuba and recognizing that Trujillo's corruption and repression had gone too far, the United States government withdrew its longstanding support of the dictator it had helped train.

On May 30, 1961, Rafael Trujillo was ambushed while traveling in his car and gunned down by seven assassins, some of whom were members of his own armed forces. Following his assassination, the Trujillo family was unable to maintain control over the Dominican Republic, and the capital city of Santo Domingo soon regained its former name.

Achievements

• Despite the vast corruption of Trujillo's dictatorship, his fortunes were closely tied to the Dominican economy, and thus the population benefitted as his government went about modernizing the island and undertaking infrastructure and public works projects, such as improving sanitation and paving roads. He was particularly successful in pushing industrialization, creating industrial plants for the production of shoes, beer, tobacco, alcohol, vegetable oil, and other products. Industries enjoyed special treatment, like protection from labor unrest and foreign competition.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Reajuste de la deuda externa 1937

Religion

Trujillo was Roman Catholic himself and actively used the church for his political propaganda.

Politics

The Dominican Party was officially founded on March 11, 1932, with Rafael Leonidas Trujillo listed as its Director. Plans for the Party had been underway, however, almost from the time Trujillo assumed power in the Dominican Republic in August 1930. In a sense, by 1932 Trujillo was the environment in the Dominican Republic, as he dominated not only the political structure but the entire life of the nation. During Trujillo's reign, the Dominican Party was the only political party that was legally functioning in the country.

Views

One of Trujillo's most well-known legacies was his racist attitudes toward Haiti and the Haitian sugarcane laborers who lived near the border. He stoked the historic Dominican prejudice against black Haitians, advocating a "deafricanization" of the nation and restoration of "Catholic values." Despite his own mixed-race identity and the fact that he himself had a Haitian grandparent, he projected the image of the Dominican Republic as a white, Hispanic society, a myth that persists to this day with bigoted, anti-Haitian legislation being passed as recently as 2013.

Trujillo's anti-Haitian sentiment culminated in the murder of an estimated 20,000 Haitians in October 1937, when he traveled to the border and declared that the "Haitian occupation" of the border areas would no longer continue. He ordered all Haitians remaining in the area to be murdered on sight. This act provoked widespread condemnation across Latin America and the United States. After an investigation, the Dominican government paid Haiti $525,000 for damages and injuries occasioned by what officially was termed "frontier conflicts."

Personality

By 1933 the Dominican Congress raised his ranking to "Generalissimo" and later on Trujillo voted himself the title of "Benefactor of the Nation." In 1936 he named the oldest city in the new world (Santo Domingo) Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City). Trujillo was so self-centered and felt the need for power so badly that he even had a slogan that said "God and Trujillo."

Physical Characteristics: Trujillo was a dynamic and healthy person. Medically, he was in good general health, but suffered from chronic urinary tract infections and later prostate problems. In 1934, Dr. Georges Marion was called from Paris to perform three urological procedures on Trujillo.

Interests

• Music & Bands

  Giuseppe Verdi

Connections

Rafael Trujillo was officially married three times: first to Aminta Ledesma y Pérez, then to Bienvenida Ricardo y Martínez, and finally to María de los Ángeles Martínez y Alba. He also known to have numerous affairs with other women. He had 10 children not all of whoom lived to adulthood.

Father:

José Trujillo Valdez

Mother:

Altagracia Julia Molina Chevalier

ex-wife:

Aminta Ledesma y Pérez

ex-wife:

Bienvenida Ricardo y Martínez

Wife:

María de los Ángeles Martínez y Alba

Daughter:

Julia Genoveva Trujillo

Daughter:

Flor de Oro Trujillo Ledesma

Son:

Ramfis Trujillo

Daughter:

Odette Altagracia Trujillo

Daughter:

María de los Ángeles del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Trujillo

Son:

Leónidas Radhamés Trujillo

Daughter:

Yolanda Trujillo

Daughter:

Elsa Julia Trujillo

Son:

Bernadette Trujillo

ally:

Rafael Estrella Ureña

References

• Trujillo: The Death of a Dictator
  2017
• The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945
  1998
• President Trujillo: His work and the Dominican Republic
  1936
• The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo
  2009
• Trujillo: The life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator
  1966
• Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa
  2009
• Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean
  2011
• Trujillo mi Padre. En Mis Memorias
  2010