Word: benefactors
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...little man. Bodyguards with their Tommy guns at the ready followed him to his customary concrete bench against the sea wall. There, opposite the statue of himself and within sight of the monument reared in his honor, His Excellency, Generalissimo Dr. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, Honorable Chief of State, Benefactor of the Nation, President and Dictator of the Dominican Republic, held his nightly court, with his favorites clustered around...
...election (as usual), Trujillo is backed by the Dominican Party, to which everybody in his Government, everybody in his monopolies, and nearly everybody who wants to do business, has to belong. Last time (May 1942), the Benefactor ran on the other party's ticket too. This time he waved his wand, and two phony opposition parties were created...
...deputies (Trujillo holds signed resignation letters from all Dominican deputies) were put forward as their candidates. One, Rafael Espaillat, has spent the campaign digging in the garden of his little farm outside Ciudad Trujillo. The other, Francisco Plats Ramirez, recently signed a routine resolution of praise for the Benefactor. ("A typist's error," he explains.) Neither man has made a campaign speech...
...Meat. In 17 masterful years of the Benefactor's rule, island businesses have been organized into monopolies and the profits are reaped by Trujillo and his numerous relations...
...from his salt monopoly. The national lottery, nominally run by his brother-in-law Ramon Savinon, nets $15,000 a month. Brother Anibal makes the mahogany concession worth $400,000 a year. But the slickest parlay is in cattle. The biggest cattle raiser in the Republic, the Benefactor operates the most modern slaughterhouse, and sets his own price on all cattle sold in the country. The slaughterhouse, built with an Export-Import Bank loan, nominally belongs to the state; so do the ships that carry Trujillo's beef to their Puerto Rican markets. Dominican soldiers load the ships...