Word: trujillos
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...months since the last of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's family departed, thousands of Dominicans previously silenced by terror have come forward to describe the crimes of the dead dictator's secret police, his army and personal goon squads. Last week Dominican Attorney General Eduardo Antonio Garcia Vasquez, who investigated the stories, reported a preliminary toll: known murders plus those missing and presumed dead come to 5,700 in the past five years. The total for the Trujillo regime's full 31 years may run to the tens of thousands...
Justice has been slow in coming to the Dominican Republic. Of the several thousand members of Trujillo's dread S.I.M. (Military Intelligence Service), only a handful are under arrest; not one has been tried. The rest have either been permitted to slip into exile or are openly walking the streets; some are still on active duty...
...reason is not hard to find. Though President Rafael Donnelly's seven-man Council of State has been installed to guide the country toward democracy, it operates under a shaky truce with the still powerful military that remains from Trujillo's time. In plain language the council is afraid to anger the trigger-happy officers by searching out the killers in their ranks. Says an official of the council: "Lots of military men are implicated. You know where we would end up if we pressed too hard...
Survivors know it was slow because the P.A. system blared the victims' screams throughout the cell blocks. A variant was the Pulpo (Octopus), a many-armed electrical device attached by means of small screws inserted into the skull. Trujillo's men also employed a rubber "collar" that could be tightened enough to sever a man's head, an 18-in. electrified rod ("the Cane") for shocking the genitals, nail extractors, leather-thonged whips, small rubber hammers, scissors for castration...
...Burned Alive." Sometimes the dictator himself took a hand in the proceedings. Carlos M. Nolasco, a former sergeant implicated in a 1959 air force conspiracy, tells of Trujillo's arriving one night at Nine to deal with eight officers arrested after the plot was broken. Says Nolasco: "The tyrant ordered the compromised officers burned alive." Other survivors tell of a ferocious murder binge immediately after Trujillo's assassination by a band of gunmen last May. Literally scores of people were horribly tortured and killed. Among the victims: General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in-law of Trujillo and secretary...