Word: trujillos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Object Lesson. For Trujillo understood the power of terror. Thousands of opponents perished quietly in SIM secret-police dungeons, in spectacular "auto accidents" and incredible "suicides." Trujillo's avenging arm reached even to the U.S. in the famed 1956 kidnap-murder of Columbia University Lecturer Jesus de Galindez, a bitter Trujillo critic and onetime tutor of the dictator's children. The peak of his terror was reached one October night in 1937, when Trujillo issued instructions to eliminate Haitian squatters along the northwest border. Working nonstop for 36 hours, Trujillo's highly efficient army butchered a reported...
Looking the Other Way. Trujillo horrified many people in the U.S. and Latin America. But he did not rule by terror alone. He had a natural talent for autocratic management. Starting with the 1930 hurricane that destroyed 70% of the capital, Trujillo imposed a rigidly controlled economy that rebuilt the city in short order. When he took power, the republic was burdened by a $20 million unpaid-and unpayable-debt. Trujillo decreed such heavy taxes that the debt was paid off in 17 years...
...treasury began to fill, Trujillo built schools and boasted that he had raised the literacy rate from 30% to 96% during his regime. Efficient hospitals were built; good roads (with military check points every few miles) crisscrossed the island to carry a rich sugar and coffee harvest to market. Trujillo spent millions on self-glorifying publicity (hiring such U.S. agents as F.D.R.'s Attorney 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...
...Trujillo Jr., 32, one of Trujillo's four acknowledged offspring. A polo-loving playboy, his main claim to fame until now was flunking out of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth while AWOL in pursuit (despite a wife and six children) of Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor (to whom he gave a $5,500 Mercedes-Benz, a $17,000 chinchilla coat). Commissioned by Daddy as an army colonel at the age of three and promoted to brigadier general at nine, Ramfis has little in his record to suggest the tenacity and talent needed...
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...