Word: trujillos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Russian-born Hearst Society Gossipist Igor Cassini (Cholly Knickerbocker to his readers), charged with "willfully" failing to register as an agent for Rafael Trujillo's Dominican Republic, cut a rueful figure in court as he pleaded nolo contendere and awaited the judge's sentencing. Short on money for a defense and hopeful of avoiding adverse publicity for his designer-brother Oleg, whom he now works for and lives with, the onetime jet-set traffic dispatcher seemed to have lost his soaring spirits. Says a friend: "His whole life has collapsed. He lost his column. He lost his business...
...Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch had this expreience. A social reformer working within a constitutional framework, Bosch suddenly found himself caught between two extremes: those who insisted that the Dominican revolution ended with the assassination of Trujillo, and those who cried that revolution would begin only with widespread land reform...
...Dominican elite had assassinated Trujillo in an effort to seize for themselves the enormous economic power he retained for his personal pleasures. But releasing economic control from the Trujillo dictatorship was in no way an effort to redistribute wealth. Social responsibility among the elite is non-existent...
Most important, Bosch proposed legislation to confiscate the property of ex-Trujillo scpporters. Under the new plan, old Trujillo landlords would have been forbidden to plead their cases in court. Although Bosch advisors privately considered the new laws unconstitutional, practical politics offered no alternative: the land holding elite controlled the courts and the courts were stalling land reform. Property owners immediately envisioned a rash of confiscations...
With the assassination of Trujillo, Dominican society found itself cut loose from the only foundation it had ever known, the feudal supports of personal power and privilege. Present turmoil in the Dominican Republic is at bottom a struggle to define a system of values and law. The only hope for stability rests with the elite; they must shed the remnants of a feudal mentality and develop some sense of social responsibility. If not, stability can only come after violent revolution...