Word: dominicans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Model Strongman. In the 31st year of the Era of Trujillo, Generalissimo Doctor Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. 69, Benefactor of the Fatherland, Rebuilder of the Financial Independence of the Republic, Father of the New Fatherland, Chief Protector of the Dominican Working Class, Genius of Peace, was gone, his body, grotesquely disfigured by 27 bullet wounds, stuffed in the trunk of the soon-to-be-abandoned car belonging to a disgruntled general named Juan Tomás Diaz. Outlived among the world's strongmen by Portugal's milder Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Trujillo had been the model for every...
...informer and procurer of obliging ladies. Trujillo's idol was a trigger-happy captain named C. F. Merkle, whose idea of order was shooting "troublemakers." Merkle was finally arrested, and committed suicide before he could be tried. But Trujillo went on to become boss of the Dominican armed forces, a position he used to make himself President in 1930. "God & Trujillo." No absolute ruler-not even France's Sun King-was more foppishly vain. Applying his own version of droit du seigneur, Trujillo took three wives, countless mistresses. Scattered about his peanut-sized fief were twelve palaces...
Busts of Trujillo adorned every park; plaques proclaiming that "in this house, Trujillo is boss" dangled from the wall of every shop. Along the roadside, signs proclaimed "Thank You, Trujillo," and neon beacons flashed the message "God and Trujillo." No Dominican dared oppose, or even snicker...
...General Homer Cummings and F.D.R. Jr. himself), and won such influential champions as U.S. Democratic Senators James O. Eastland and Allen Ellender, who once said, "I wish there were a Trujillo in every country of South and Central America." Other apologists, ignoring Trujillo's terror, pointed to the Dominican Republic's sharply improved per-capita yearly income ($225, about average for Latin America). But the average did not reflect the disproportionate share of the wealth acquired by the ubiquitous Trujillo family through The Benefactor's standard 10% cut on all public-works contracts, his heavy interests...
Beneath the façade of order, the Dominican Republic left by Trujillo is a political vacuum, and its economy is near collapse. As he grew older, Trujillo embarked on grandiose projects of no merit, lost $35 million on an international fair that flopped in 1956, drained away another $50 million for arms in the space of two years. Trujillo compounded his growing troubles by a foolish and abortive plot to assassinate Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt in Caracas last June. As a result, Trujillo was ostracized by all the other nations of the hemisphere...