Part One: Rafael Trujillo: The Most Brutal Dictator of the Americas

Robert sits down with Kat Abu to talk about Rafael Trujillo, the genocidal dictator and most prolific godfather in world history.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Whats looming my sword of damacles. This is Behind the Bastards,
a podcast about the doom looming over each of us
that could get could sweep down and just just shatter
our worlds at any second. My guest today to talk
about the feeling of having doom looming directly over her
head is Kataboo. Kat you talk you right up. Sorry,

(00:27):
we were just talking about your apartment and the looming
death art that's over your head right now.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah, it's great, it's terrifying.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I hate it.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Yeah, like I'm nervous. But I've also promised that if
this thing hanging over your head falls on you, that
I will promise to vindicate you and post it wherever
your heart desires.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Thank you. I appreciate having Sophie as an avenger for me.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yes, Cat do you are a researcher who studies and
also professionally makes fun of Fox News on the tiktoks,
TikTok and other platforms. Kat, where can people find you? First? Off,
before we get in here, because they should in fact
find you, track you down?

Speaker 2 (01:09):
You foind me on TikTok and YouTube. I do long
form and short form content and then I'm also signing
up for like the billion other sites that are popping up, and.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
You're gonna, you're gonna get on threads.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Got him on threads, and it's just I forget that
it exists, and then I have to post a TikTok
there and just like I'm making so many.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Things, got on threads, and then I was like, I
don't want to be here, and then I and then
so I think there's an account I've never used it. Yeah,
do you know any kat.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
You are you are in the in the business of
professionally surveilling. You might say a whole bunch of people
who would really like to be either dictators or the
direct employees of dictators.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Absolutely, that's a perfect way to describe them.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
So today I thought we would talk about one of
the og right wing dictators. We are talking at about
like a classic, like one of one of the all timers.
This guy is like, he's not the Jordan of right
wing dictators, because that's got to be that's got to
be our boy Hitler. But he's like he's like the
Scottie Pippen of right wing dictators for sure. Yeah, yeah,

(02:16):
we are talking about Rafael trueheo.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
I'm not really proud of you for knowing two basketball
players names. First of all, Yeah, I feel like I
feel like I've trained you and you've done well. It's
only taken six years.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Look, I know other basketball players like Magic, Magic, Magic Jimmy,
something like that.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Right, I think that's.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Are we good? Yeah? Yeah, so he says we're right, Yeah,
Magic Jimmy, Scottie Pippin, the Big Bopper. That sounds right.
What do you know about Rafael Truo?

Speaker 2 (02:51):
I know nothing about Raphael trueO.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Okay, do you know much about the Dominican Republic, which
is the country that he he dictated.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Very basics of like geography and.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Vibes that is that is perfect. That is basically what
I knew about the Dominican Republic before. I mean, we
did some episodes on Haiti on Papa Doc and Baby
Doc a year or so ago, which is where I
really did my first deep dive into the history of
the island. That both of those countries are on Hispaniola.
But you know, it's interesting because like the Dominican Republic

(03:24):
was very nearly a state, like it came within a
hair's breadth of being part of the United States, probably
would have been wound up more like Puerto Rico is
in terms of like its legal status. We are absolutely
central to everything that has happened in the history of
the Dominican Republic, and most of us are like you
know you and like I was, you know before I

(03:47):
started reading on this topic, like it's just not a
we like Americans barely hear about it. Right when you do,
it's like, oh, someone had a wedding in the Dominican right,
Like that's that's I think the normal amount of knowledge
most Americans have, which is fucked up because we we've
caused a lot of problems over there.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, I mean I feel like that's the case with
a lot of these types of places where you don't
hear anything, and then you're like, oh, we are completely
responsible for their demise.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, and it with the Dominican Republic and with Haiti.
A big part of it is that they are so
close to us, right like it is, it is close
enough that it could have realistically been part of the
United States from a like like in the from a
political standpoint, like it's not further away than a number
of like other island possessions that our country has taken

(04:35):
over the years. And we do take possession of the
Dominican Republic for a period.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, so we have the fun game was it us
or was it now?

Speaker 1 (04:44):
No, in this case, it's it's us in Spain and
France who are like the ones really and Haiti. Actually
Haiti gets some fucking around in the Dominican Republic too.
So we're gonna have a fun time talking about this
because before we before we discuss Rafaeltrahio, who is true.
He's interesting because he's both like, in some ways a
kind of traditional strong man dictator, but in some ways

(05:07):
he might be like one of the smartest dictators that
I've come across in terms of how he builds and
uses power and how he manipulated his population and exercised
control over them. He's really unique in a lot of ways.
There's some very interesting aspects of how he kind of
wields power that are unique to him. So this is exciting.

(05:29):
We're going to have a good time talking about this horrible,
horrible man who did a genocide.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Can I ask ahead of time, how long did he
rule or is that like a spoiler?

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Almost thirty years? Okay, so damn when you go when
you're into dictators, and Sophie and I are big dictator stance.
Love them. There's, like I would say, broadly speaking, three
kinds of dictators. You've got your flash in the pan dictators, right,
your guys who like takeover and they're there for a
couple of years and then they get cooed or assassinated, right,

(05:58):
and they're out pretty quick.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
You know.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Even Hitler kind of is a short termer, right, Like
he's only in there about twelve years. And then you've
got what I would say is like, you know, the
the the dictator equivalent of like living to like eighty
or so, which is around thirty years. That's Stalin, that's Maw,
That's where true hello is. And then every now and then,
it's very rare for one of these guys to last
more than thirty years. And that's when when you're when

(06:23):
you're in like the thirty to thirty five year range
reigning is a dictator that's like absolute goat tier in
terms of you know, holding power. You know, those guys
are are are tough sons of bitches. But Trujillo was like,
right at twenty nine years, so that's a pretty good
run as dictators go. He's not he's not bad. Probably
shouldn't be talking about these guys like they're like they're

(06:46):
like they're your buddies. I don't know how else to
do it at this point.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
You know, you you called him Scottie Pippen, which is.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Really yeah, yeah, he's he's a Pippinesque character. So let's
talk some history and geography both. As I said, the
Dominican Republican Haiti are on the island of Hispaniola, which
is famous for being the first place that Columbus discovered. Today,
Haiti is about a third or so of the island,

(07:14):
and the Dominican Republic lays over the bulk of the island. Now,
initially all of Hispaniola was claimed by Spain, right, but
you know, Spain, they lost interest pretty quickly because people started,
they started quote unquote discovering the rest of South America,
and like, Hispaniola didn't have a lot of silver, and
that's kind of was their whole thing for a while.
It was like how much silver can we get to

(07:36):
wreck our own economy via terrible inflation, Like let's really
fuck ourselves over for the rest of time by importing
way too much fucking silver. So Hispaniola kind of comes
a backwater after this initial burst of excitement because you know, Spain,
they got their Peru, they got Mexico, They're all all
up in all those blazes, right. So the first slaves

(07:57):
start being brought to Hispaniola as a of the fact
that like the initial folks that they are working because like,
since there's not a huge that you know, they do
have some silver mines they have, you know, they're mining
some other stuff and they've got some agricultural plantations set up.
And initially the people that they're using to work these
plantations are the indigenous Tino and Carib peoples. But they

(08:19):
kill a huge number of those people, right, like the
majority of the folks who had lived their pre contact.
So this importation of slaves two Hespaniola starts because they're like, well,
we need more laborers. Right by the start of the
sixteen hundreds, friedman on the island outnumbered enslaved people. So
it's not initially what it's going to become, this kind

(08:41):
of like massive slave plantation system that actually takes a
little while to really get going. Most slave ownership on
Hispaniola was more intimate and smaller in scale than the
vast plantations that would come to dominate Haiti or the
American South. Right masters rarely had much more than one
or two enslaved people who engaged in small scale wage

(09:02):
labor alongside them and their families. Since cash was in
short supply. Most slaves on the island in this early
period were taken through piracy. They were also often stolen
French colonial slaves, so like literally like French boats full
of slaves would come by and people would you know,
raid them and take people off of them. In sixteen

(09:22):
ninety seven, there's a big kerfuffle and Spain and France
have a treaty over Hispaniola, and this is where France
gets what's going to become Haiti. And the chunk of
Hispaniola that becomes Haiti is the colony of San Domain, Right,
that's the name of the French colony that's going to
wind up rebelling and becoming Haiti. And the French treated

(09:44):
their possessions on Hispaniola just like they treated their possessions
on all of the other Caribbean islands where they were involved,
So they would just started importing huge numbers of enslaved people,
primarily demand sugar plantations, right, that's the big fucking business
in this period of time, and it's a pretty shitty
thing to farm. You don't want to be a sugar farmer.
It's a not a long life. Now, the Spanish colony

(10:08):
that is going to become, you know, kind of the
center of what becomes the Dominican Republic, is called Santo Domingo.
So you've got the French San Domain and you've got
the Spanish Santa Domingo, which is a little bit confusing,
which is why we're going to start calling the Dominican
Republican Haiti very soon here. And the economy in Santa
Domingo is very different from Haiti. Haiti is turning into

(10:29):
this like slave plantation economy. In Santa Domingo. There is
still slavery, but it's again it's on a much smaller scale.
Much of the economy, rather than being based around like
sugar plantations, is cattle ranching, some tobacco growing, and kind
of small scale export of wood in animal hides. And
Spain is not thrilled with this state of affairs because

(10:50):
it's a lot less profitable than San domin Right, Like
this kind of like all this small scale stuff is
not making the sort of money that San Domain is
making France, but Spain is kind of it's very difficult
to actually govern beyond like the city of San Domain.
So you've got this this city that is effectively the colony,

(11:10):
and then anytime you're outside of the walls of the
city and the hinterland and these hills and mountains and stuff,
it's basically ungovernable, right. And this kind of population of
what's going to become the Dominican Republic fills up very
quickly with a mix of you've got some freed slaves,
some escaped slaves from what's going to become Haiti. They
intermarry with indigenous peoples and with poor whites, and they

(11:32):
create this kind of creole subculture of ungovernable cowboy bandit types. Right.
That's like the majority of the population, because the city
is always going to have more people in it, but
that's the majority of the land mass is kind of
these the very small numbers of these sort of like yeah,
cowboy bandit type folks. Historian Lauren Derby writes that they

(11:53):
quote hunted wild cattle in the interior and sold smoked
meat and tobacco to contrabandists based on neighboring Latortu Island,
locally termed Montero's. These proto peasants were the Dominican equivalent
of the hibbarro, the Puerto Rican backlands highlander. This contraband
economy of black masterless men was so successful that Spanish
authorities had to resort to draconian measures to contain it.

(12:14):
In sixteen oh six, for example, Governor Assorio torched northern
settlements to the ground in a failed effort to curb
contraband by forcing rural inhabitants to move closer to Santa Domingo.
The fact that many of the wealthiest pirates in this
pan Antillean maritime community, warmerlados, such as the highly successful
Domingo Sanchez Moreno, probably double e galled the crown. So
this is a like number one sounds kind of dope.

(12:38):
Like these people have built like a pretty interesting culture
for themselves, and the only way that Spain can keep
a lid on it is like by periodically massacring huge
numbers of them, right, Like that's all you can do
is you march your army into the interior and kill
and burn whatever you can. But they can kind of
just sort of bounce when they see the army coming.
And it's not easy to march an army into the

(12:59):
antia rear of Hispaniola and have them not die of
all sorts of wild ass diseases. So it's kind of
like again a little bit like of an anarchy in
most of these.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
Sounds like an ideal society to be good. It sounds perfect, Yes,
that's awesome.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Fucking cowboys fucking making beef jerky presumably, Yeah, it sounds great.
Hella tobacco, Yeah, it sounds dope. So while sand Do
mag exists under this pretty horrifying racial caste system like
slavery as awful as it's going to exist basically anywhere

(13:35):
during like the period of the African slave trade, Santa
Domingo is a lot less controlled and as a result
kind of a lot less awful, and so it doesn't develop,
which is not to say that it's you know, there
aren't there isn't slavery. There aren't a lot of like
abusive social structures that exist, but it doesn't develop the
same preconditions for revolution that you get in Sandomang, right,

(13:56):
And as we all know, in Sandomang enslaved people have
themselves a revolution starting at the tail end of the
seventeen hundreds, and in one of history's great upsets, they
win their freedom from France. Now, this is how we
get Haiti, and the rest of the world has never
stopped punishing Haiti for this, right We talk about this
again in our episodes on Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

(14:17):
But basically Haiti's history from this point is being continually
fucked over by everyone else on the planet close to it,
not far from it, up to the present day. So
in Haiti, you know, they're dealing with, after this period
of revolution, pretty continuous incursions from the French until they
finally forced Napoleon to get the fuck out of there,

(14:39):
and the process of getting Napoleon out and of you know,
ensuring their liberty means that they build up a pretty
good army, like Haiti has by kind of the late
period of fighting off the French repeatedly, they have a
pretty like powerful military. And they are also by the

(15:00):
point they're done fighting the French for the most part,
they're kind of they're deeply traumatized, right, They've had all
of these horrific wars. They are basically constantly aware of
the fact that all of Europe and all of the
Western world wants them back in fucking chains, and so
they're pretty paranoid. And the thing that they start to
focus on once France is less of a threat is

(15:21):
the fact that they've got this neighbor, right, They've got
Santa Domingo sitting on most of their island, and it's
a possession of Spain and Spain if you're not up
on your Napoleonic history, for one thing, Spain is kind
of briefly a part of Napoleon's empire, at least chunks
of Spain are. So the Haitians are like, well, I
don't really like that they're just sitting there a possession

(15:42):
of Europe, right, it feels like this they could this
could be really bad for us. So why don't we
Why don't we take them over? Right? Why don't we
deal with Santa Domingo. And to make a long story short,
Haiti invades and they occupy Santa Domingo for about twenty
two years from the early to the mid eighteen hundreds,
and like all occupations, it's not pleasant, right, Like very

(16:05):
rarely do you like occupy a country with soldiers, and
everyone is like, we really like being occupied by your soldiers.
This is a good time for everyone, right, instant of.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Deming being is like being occupied by the Spanish at
the same time.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
Or are they just no, No, the Haitians kicked the
Spanish out for about twenty years, okay.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
So it's just occupation, occupation, cool, super fun everyone.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, so it's colony, which is an occupation to a
military occupation. And then in eighteen forty four the Dominican
Republic becomes a thing because they fight a war with
Haiti and they kick the Haitians out and declare their independence.
And they managed to keep their independence for about fifteen
years until the Spanish come back and take them over
again for like four or five years. So it's not

(16:50):
a not a super stable history here, right, pretty messy,
Like could you I already feel tired just thinking about it.
You can imagine how exhausted someone who was like born
in eighteen hundred in the Dominican Republic would be by
like eighteen fifty. Right, It's just this carousel of assholes
taking your place over, right.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
I think about like being a kid like right at
the beginning of that, and it's like today kids for
people that remember like pre nine to eleven, you know,
and then you just get to see everything change. I
feel like that's so much more exhausting. And you have
like five occupations. That sounds super fun, like a really
fun fifty years.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah, that's exactly how everyone in the Dominican Republic feels.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
I'm sure.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
So the US Civil War is over and Washington is
like they're not thrilled with everything that's been happening in
the Dominican Republic because it's pretty you can get from
DC to the Dominican real fast, right, it is not
far away from the continental United States. And if you
know much about America in like the late eighteen hundreds,

(17:54):
we've got this kind of big attitude that like, we
don't want Europe fucking around and what we consider to
be our backyard and all of Latin America and the
Caribbean is basically our backyard in our eyes, right in
this period of time. I'm not saying this is right,
this is just how DC is thinking about things. And
so a lot of American politicians are like, well, we

(18:15):
don't like the Europeans are not doing clearly not doing
a good job keeping things stable in the Dominican Republic,
and this place is in our sphere of influence. So
in eighteen sixty five we have US a vote on
whether or not to annex the Dominican Republic, and it
fails by a single vote. So US influence will remain
kind of indirect after this point for a while, but

(18:37):
it's not going to stay indirect forever. But you can
see just how close it came to like presumably probably
being like a possession like Puerto Rico is in a
legal sense, you know, like that's kind of I think
a realistic way to look at how it might have
gone down. Who knows, but the constant warring between the
Dominican republican Haiti and they have there are regular conflicts

(18:59):
between the two countries kind of in the through the
eighteen hundreds, means that politics in the Dominican Republic early
on is just kind of a succession of strongman generals, right,
because when you're dealing with all of this sort of
governmental turnover, all that really matters is like can you
keep other people out right? Can you actually effectively defend

(19:19):
the country. And within Dominican politics, there's a vicious split
between these kind of liberal and conservative parties, all of
which are headed by these sort of strong man military types.
And when we say liberal and conservative, and I'm not
talking in like the modern US, since the Conservatives, broadly speaking,
a big thing that they are advocates for is being
annexed by the United States, right, because they're looking at

(19:42):
number one, how powerful the US is, particularly after the
Civil War, and going like, well, shit, they can probably
stop this constant turnover, right, Like, things would probably be
a lot more stable, we would probably be in better
economic shape if they were to come over. Whereas liberals
are like, we don't want to be governed by yet
another foreign power. We would like to be something that

(20:04):
approximates a modern state. And these liberals will usually give
the US Constitution as kind of the ideal example of
the structure of a government that they want. But there's
pretty universal agreement among these political elites that even though
they like the idea of how the US government is
supposed to be set up, they don't believe that Dominican

(20:24):
peasants can be democratic citizens. Right. And these kind of rich,
educated people who are a very small fraction of the
population are like, well, these like these are uneducated, wild cowboys.
You can't have them, you can't give them any rights, like,
they wouldn't know what to do with them. That is
very much the attitude that these people have. They're not
like nice folks, right. This attitude is well represented by

(20:48):
the words of Americolgo, a Dominican writer. In one of
these kind of intellectuals, he argued that the state needed
to lead from the top down until the citizenry could
be educated to a higher degree responsibility. He called the
peasants quote degenerate due to racial mixture, a tropical environment,
and a poor diet. Thus, he said, the working class
of the Dominican Republic can never be governing but rather

(21:11):
governed classes. So pretty rough stuff.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
Hill, Yeah, they wouldn't know what to do with autonomy,
Like you want to know what to do with the
idea of doing things to yourself?

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Like best these guys. Best, these guys, just let us,
you know, run things. We've been doing so well prior
to this point.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, obviously I'm the one that can fix this.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Just just me, no one else. Now, there is when
we talk about sort of white supremacy, which a lot
of these attitudes are influencing things, but it's not the
same as you're going to get in like the American South,
or as you're going to get in Europe not all
that far after this point. There is this kind of
attitude among a lot of elites that like, you can
whiten the population in some ways, and that's going to

(21:57):
become more of a thing later on, Right, So just
keep that in your head because we will be talking
about that once the thirties come around. Here. Outside the
urban parts of the Dominican Republic, politics revolved very heavily
around little strongmen who are like, in a lot of ways,
kind of many dictators over you know, a few towns,
a chunk of the countryside, and you know, the best

(22:20):
of them were kind of able to keep areas of
the interior relatively stable and protect their peasants from banditry
and unrest. Depending on the book, you'll hear these guys
kind of referred to as either cadillos or caciques, which
is a casique is an older word taken from the
social order on the island in the days kind of

(22:40):
before Columbus arrived, right, And it's kind of it kind
of gets applied to these more modern figures. Who are
they are in every sense of the word. Their warlords, right,
you know, small scale ones, but not that's an accurate
way to look at them. Now. I found a lot
of interesting sources for this episode, but the strangest and
most entertaining is a biography of Trujio written by one

(23:02):
of his generals, the guy who wound up running his
intelligence division for a while. This dude's name is Arturo Espiat,
and Arturo was the son of one of the two
or three wealthiest countries or families in the Dominican Republic,
and so his family are some of these warlord types
right in this sort of pre Trujio era. And he

(23:23):
is an untrustworthy piece of shit, which you can tell
because he opens his book by repeatedly denying he tortured anybody.
And I want to reach you a quote from this
because it's really good. I remained neither a shame nor
regretful of my years as an intelligence officer. I earned
my nom de guerre Navahita, the Blade, not because I
was guilty of any atrocities. The name stemmed from my

(23:45):
tendency to plunge straight to the heart of any problem
or situation. I believed in direct simple action. However, there
is not a single Dominican who has ever or can
come forward to prove that I caused him to be tortured,
Nor can any Dominican family charge that one of its
members died at my hands or my I don't know, bro,
I feel like people who don't torture anyone never need
to say.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
That I'm not guilty of any atrocity. Sure is raising
a lot of questions.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
I also love they called me I was the head
of intelligence. They called me the Blade, not because of
any cutting I did. I was just so cool and
smart and strong.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah. They called me the dick kicker. No, no, no,
not for any violent reason, totally unrelated like okay, the Blade.
So with the caveat that Arto is very untrustworthy source.
He is a local and a local who gives us
an attitude of how the upper crust the kind of
like these these sort of like high up in kind

(24:44):
of like warlord types wanted to see themselves and talk
about themselves right. So he gives us an idea of
how elites and Dominican society in this period wanted to
pretend that things worked right, and the way that he
frames this period of Dominican history is that these regional
strongmen were kind of ungovernable by the central government and
would periodically overthrow it to put their own guy in charge.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
The Dominican government was never strong enough to resist the caciques.
The army was merely a handful of ill trained conscripts.
Recruitment was simple. From time to time, the government would
call on loyal casiques for volunteers. The local chiefs would
then round up a batch of unhappy youths and send
them to the capitol. Sometimes it was necessary to use
force when Casique handcuffed his volunteers to a huge rope
and send them to the army with this message, here

(25:29):
are your volunteers. Please return the rope. Man, I got
plenty of boys, but ropes cost money, homie, Like, bro, I.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Only got so much fucking rope over here, Like you
got it. It's like giving tupperware, you know, Like I
want you to enjoy the thing I made, but it
got please return it, like don't keep it.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, he is treating like sending them conscripts like a
covered dish, Like no, no, enjoy that, man, it's really good.
The good conscripts but could you could you send me
back the bowl? Ye?

Speaker 2 (26:01):
Next day, I see you, just like make sure you
don't forget it, and I need a last time. But
like I need that fucking rope man.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, very funny. Now you know who always sends back
the bowl? Cat good?

Speaker 2 (26:15):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Please tell me the sponsors of our podcast. Uh if
they send you boys, which you can order, you can
have boys sent to you, you know, you know, conscripts
or whatever. Uh, just send back the role, That's all
they ask Sophie.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Sophie is that the aggressive head shacking or was doing
would not translate on this audio medium.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
But no, see what I have to deal with here,
Cat unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Respectfully, you're welcome.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Ads, we're back, and we're talking about falling in love
with a magician, which I hope to do one day. Sure,
yeah yeah, how could what could be better than loving

(27:03):
a magician? You know, getting to live in Las Vegas? Uh,
probably getting sowt in half.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
You're talking about dating a really successful magician. Though I
feel like most magicians don't work in Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
I feel like both the least and the most successful
magicians work in Las Vegas. There's a big. There's a
lot of parts of Vegas you could work.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
You don't want to date magician. You want to do
either the worst out there at the best.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, I want to date the shittiest magician because that'll
always feel good about myself.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Is there better?

Speaker 1 (27:33):
No? No, No, I want I want my magician partner
to come home at the end of a long day
and I'll be like, yeah, I made some podcasts. People
like them, and they'll be like, yeah, I got stabbed
on Fremont Street, you know, trying to trying to busk.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
And then they're like and then they look at you
and they go pick a card, should I guess something
in your ear? And it's their entire earnings of the day.
It's just like eighty two cents.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, yeah, which which they got from? Ah, I forgot
all the names of the casinos on Fremont Street. Anyway, Yeah, kat,
you ready to get back into this little history lesson.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
I don't even know how ready I am.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Okay, okay. So, the upside of the state of affairs
that exists in the Dominican Republic in the late eighteen
hundreds is that the caciques have a lot of power
and there are generally options for Dominicans outside of the
urban areas if they don't like who they're living under. Right,
So there's mobility, but there's poverty. You know, you can
kind of just be like this guy sucks. I'm going
to like hike for two days, and then you know

(28:33):
there'll be a different strong man or no one at all,
and you know, I can try to figure out my shit.
But it's basically impossible for the government to set up
large scale agriculture or to trade or do anything that
would allow them to function the way that like a
nation functions, because everything outside of the capital is just
like a mix of banditry and like small scale peasant

(28:53):
farmers and stuff. It's very unstable. From an early age,
the Dominican economy, such as it is, relied heavily on
the United States, and this was a calculated choice by
several of the more liberal general types who wound up
running the country in the late eighteen hundreds. In eighteen
ninety one, they signed a reciprocity treaty that made the
United States officially the main trading partner of the country.

(29:16):
We leased one of their ports so that our navy
would be able to do boat stuff there, and we
started handing out loans to them right because the government
is trying to get into a more stable position so
that they can govern the Dominican Republic. And we're like, oh,
we got money. We'll give you guys money to do that.
Don't worry. The terms are not ruinous. We are absolutely

(29:36):
not working on a way to fuck you over, just
like we did Deahiti. Next door promises, Pinky swears, sounds
of it. This is never going to happen again, Kat,
But all of the money we give them winds up
in the hands of local strongmen, and none of it
goes towards like helping regular people or making the country

(29:56):
function better. I know it won't happen again. Not so weird,
Yeah it would be. It would be crazy if after
this we just flew a palette of billions of dollars
in cash to a country let's call it smarrak and
then lost it all. Like that would be wild if
we'd done that. All good stuff, good stuff. So in

(30:18):
a yeah, the US is like, ah, you got to
pay us back for all these loans that just got
robbed by your you know, the assholes running the country.
You know what We're going to do for you guys,
because you're such good clients. We're going to appoint a
private company to handle getting you to pay back your
foreign debt, and we do that in eighteen ninety two. This,

(30:40):
you know, leads to a series of events that in
nineteen oh four culminates in the United States creating the
Santo Domingo Improvement Company. Now, the job of this country
is to take control of their entire custom system, to
regulate customs for the Dominican Republic at all of their ports,
skimming money off of the top through these like in
export taxes and shit to repay debts to American Like

(31:04):
at this point, a lot of it's privately owned American
companies that can't be met by the Dominican government. By
nineteen oh five, the United States controls all custom houses
in the country. So we're just like running you know,
all of that stuff for the Dominican Republic, not for them.
We're running it so that we can skim off the
top money that would otherwise theoretically go into like taxes

(31:26):
and shit.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
You know, I can't be right that bring this sound like.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
Us, Yeah, that doesn't sound like the thing. We'll keep
doing forever now because this and let's be fair here, we're,
as we often are, just copying the British right, because
they are the goats at this sort of thing. No
one's ever been better at it.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Did we have a revolution because we hated how they
did this?

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Well, we thought that we could do a better job
of doing it. Eventually it was the long con, and
by god, did it work out, you know. So all
of this stuff ends up being basically a big con
to suck the wealth of the Dominican Republic out of
its neck like you know, vampires, and no amount of

(32:07):
throttling the customs houses was enough to actually pay down
their debt, which by nineteen sixteen had ballooned to more
than thirty million dollars, which was a lot of money
in those days. Economic collapse brings about political unrest. The
President of the Dominican Republic is assassinated in nineteen eleven,
and in nineteen sixteen President Yemenez has a little civil

(32:28):
war with the former Minister of War. The US government
looks at all this unrest in the Dominican Republic, which
we absolutely had not helped to cause, and are like, boy,
they might not be able to repay all of this
additional money that they now owe us in excess of
the money that they ever borrowed from us. You know
what we should do. You know, also nineteen sixteen, we're

(32:48):
kind of worried if things get any more unstable, Germans
could come in, right, the Germans could take over the
Dominican Republic, and that'll be bad for everybody, mainly US.
So we do a thing that we're going to do
repeatedly from this point forward.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
Cant we yeah, uh, Pavid guy and back him.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Not quite yet. First we send in the Marines.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, I'm going to read a quote from a write
up by Thought Company summarizing US intervention here in the
Dominican The US soldiers moved quickly to secure their hold
on the Dominican Republic. In May, Rear Admiral William B.
Caperton arrived in Santo Domingo and took over the operation.
General Arius decided to oppose the occupation, ordering his men
to contest the American landing at Puerto Plata on June first.

(33:33):
General Arius went to Santiago, which he vowed to defend.
The Americans sent a concerted force and took the city
that wasn't the end of the resistance. In November, Governor
Juan Perez of the city of San Francisco di Maceroy
refused to recognize the occupation government hold up in an
old fort. He was eventually driven out by the Marines.
And so you know, we take over. And if you're

(33:54):
anywhere kind of from your late twenties on, you and
most of us have watched the US and vaden Ocaia
by a couple of countries, and what happens in the
Dominican Republic is more similar to like what we do
in Iraq than what goes on in Afghanistan. Right, we
set up a military government and we have the Marines
start training and equipping a local military so that we
can leave and have a country that will be, in

(34:17):
our eyes kind of a pliant client state. Right, that's
the goal here, right, so that we can get some
fucking money out of them again, right, Like that's what
we're doing in this case. Now, this concludes the historical
background portion of the story. So as we've left off
the historical background, the US Marines are occupying the country
and we are trying to get it into a stable

(34:38):
enough position that we can continue sucking on it like
the vampires we are. So let's move back over to
our bastard for the week. Finally, Raphael Truhio, because he
is going to be one of the young Dominican men
that the US Marines pick out of poverty and obscurity
and are like, here's a gun we.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Need you to keep.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Thinks, don't do anything bad with it.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Pick a random guy and be like, hey, don't fuck
over the entire don't be a megalomaniac that takes over
an entire country.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
Here's a bunch of dudes with guns.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Be cool, be cool, be chill, do the right thing,
just like us.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah, just like us, like we always do with our guns. So.
Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was born in San Cristobal, Dominican Republic,
on October twenty fourth, eighteen ninety one. He was the
fourth of eleven children, most of whom survived to adulthood.
So his parents were doing something right. You know, that's
not bad in this period of time for somebody coming

(35:39):
out of poverty. Now, despite an impressive name, he did
not come from impressive surroundings. His hometown was a small
village on the Southern Coast, and his father, Pepito, is
generally described like one biographer literally just calls him a
non entity. He is not a big deal, you might say,
and he's not really around a lot. You get the idea, now.

(36:01):
Trujillo would later commission court biographers to tell a very
different version of his upbringing, one that is more rarefied
and that paints his family is coming from the upper
middle class. This is not accurate, right, this is him.
He's kind of insecure about his origins and he will
he will exaggerate them as a as a you know,
an adult in power. Most there's not a lot of

(36:23):
great context as to his early life, his childhood, but
all of the credible biographers that I've read tend to say, like, yeah,
they were pretty poor, right, Like, they were not unusually poor.
They were not like, you know, the worst off, but
they were not They did not come from the upper
middle class. The Truiello children went shoeless because there was
no money in the family for shoes. His dad was

(36:46):
a minor postal clerk and often went without income because
he had sold his salary for a short term loan,
which is a thing that a lot of men who
work for the government do right, You'll basically be like,
I need money, now, I will give you, you know,
interest basically, and so you get my salary for a
period of time. It's a really it winds up being
a pretty abusive situation. I probably don't need to explain how,

(37:07):
but like a lot of guys get trapped in this
in this period of time.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Why do you think he didn't like, not even you
just describe, but like, why why didn't he exaggerate like
how poor he was or talk about how poor he was?
Because I feel like that's a typical right wing tactic
of like, you know, I came from nothing and now
I'm this guy.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
It is in our culture, right, he has a it's
really important for him to feel like and to seem
like like it's going to be important to him to
act as if he is coming like a gentleman, right,
that he is coming from kind of this more upper class,
not like super rich, but that he's coming from something.
You know, he he will always be kind of insecure
about his surroundings. It is worth noting that's very much

(37:49):
a thing in American right wing politics. It's not always
the case, right, and in this in the Dominican culture,
Like that's just not a thing trueho feels would benefit him.
Or it's unclear to me because I'm not obviously I'm
not an expert. It's unclear to me if it's more
that he didn't think it would benefit him, or that
he just legitimately had hang ups right, Like he's just

(38:11):
actually kind of ashamed of his humble circumstances and didn't
want to be honest about them.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Does it mean it's a dom story, like he grew
up from nothing?

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Ye?

Speaker 2 (38:20):
I think yeah, like is a big part of like
this legend built around him.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, it's interesting. It is interesting that Truillo's not going
to really take that tactic. But the the like true
hel biography that I read that was like done by
like basically was telling the version of his story that
he wanted told. Talk like makes a big deal about
how they were like you know, middle class to upper
middle class. His family was doing well, whereas his more

(38:47):
credible biographers are like, no, they were as poor as
everyone around them was. So, yeah, they were poor enough
that like because his dad is regularly going without income
because he's sold his salary for a loan. His older
brothers have to do cattle wrestling to make ends meet,
which is also really common. A lot of people would
will do this because there's both wild cows and just

(39:10):
like farms outside of the city. So you bust in
one night, you cut down a fence, you steal a
cow or two. That's food, that's money. You know.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
I thought you met like wrestling cows.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
No, that would that would do They would not have
like it would be cool if you could do it.
I have known a lot of cows in my life
and none that I would want to wrestle with. It
would be pretty rad if you could do it. So
one of the few privileges he enjoyed as a little

(39:41):
kid was that his grandmother, Ersina, was very well educated,
and she ensured that Raphael and his siblings learned to read. Later,
he would attend grammar school, but his attendance was a
regular since he he very nearly died of diphtheria as
a little kid, so he doesn't get to do a
lot of school. And aside from these broad strokes, we
you don't know a lot about his childhood. It's pretty

(40:03):
likely that he's dropped out of school by the fourth grade,
so most of the education that he does get comes
from his grandma, who I think was pretty much self taught,
just like a very smart person, and who sees it
as important that he learned to read and that his
siblings learned to read. And one of Trujillo's better biographies,
Trujillo Little Caesar of the Caribbean, German Ornez writes quote,

(40:26):
but if the children did not learn much as school,
at school, the dusty street was separated. In those days,
the monotonous rows of San Cristobal shacks provided them with
an excellent schooling in lawlessness. To survive the rowdyism of
the neighborhood kids, a boy had to be tougher than
the others, or, at least, as in the Trujillo's case,
he had to belong to a large, clannish family. In
frequent street brawls, the solid front of the Trujillo boys

(40:49):
proved good enough to lick all opposition, a fact they'd
never forgot later in life. From such an environment, Rafael
emerged as a resourceful, headstrong character. As a boy, Trujillo
was always in trouble. Recall one of his neighbors always
trying to cheat someone always bragging about how he would
one day make big money without much effort. I do
think that's cool that, Like he had a lot of brothers,
so they kind of worked as a gang together. They're like, well,

(41:11):
if we're gonna get into a fight, like, at least
I've got siblings, I could Collin. I love that.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, I mean it's like when you're a girl with
like brothers, like you have someone to bag you up.
Greguez would just having a bunch of brothers starting.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
To gang, yeah, getting in trouble. Yeah, in this case,
kind of a literal gang. Although because they're poor, the
thing that he becomes kind of a gangster about is
very silly. So his nickname around town is Chapeta, which
is kind of the colloquial term for bottle caps. It
doesn't mean that literally, but it's like what people call
bottle caps. And he gets that nickname because he collects

(41:46):
bottle caps and for some unknown reason he became like
an obsessive order of caps from sodas and beers. He
hated the nickname, but like he got the nickname because
not only did he collect these, but he would like
beat people up to take their bottle cap, Like he
would get his brothers to get back. He was like
running a bottle cap racket so that he could.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, and he just like hoarded them like he wasn't
selling them or anything.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
That part is unclear to me. He probably, I assume
he traded when he couldn't fight for them. But he's
he's very into collecting bottle caps and he's willing to
do violence in order to expand his collection, which is
pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
From imagining him being like a funko pop, like beating
people up for funko pops.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's less
sad than a funk o pop because bottle caps are
objectively better than funko pops.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
You can do something with a bottle cap.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah, yeah, all you can do with a funko pop.
Has become aware of the fact that you've lost control
of your life. So at age sixteen, he started to
work as a telegraph operator, a job he got thanks
to his uncle. And again, his father's kind of a
non entity. So it's his two uncles, Teodulo and Plinio,
who taught him how to be a man. And these guys,

(42:58):
each of these guys is like half of a good
con man. Right, Plinio is like charming and intelligent, like
he's he's good at like talking to people. He's got
a lot of social intelligence. And Teodulo is a drunken
a womanizer who like writes poetry in prose, but is
all as seen as like so he's this like he's
too drunk to be like a really good con man.

(43:19):
He's kind of just like like they're each half of
a good con man. So as a young adult, he
gets offered a job working security at one of the
local sugar plantations. Like all but one sugar company in
the Republic, Rafael's employers were American. It's likely that his
charming because we control all of the big business in
the American rehol right right, Like we've taken over these

(43:42):
sugar companies in part is like a well, you know,
if you let American companies in to dominate this this industry,
you know, that's how we can take out some of
this debt that somehow still keeps ballooning every year. So
like all but yeah, so his employers here, he's working
for the Americans, and his it's pro probably Teodulo, his
uncle who gets him this job because he's just like

(44:03):
drinking with the dude who's doing the hiring, but we
don't really know. Most casual summaries of Raphael's past will
describe him as working as a security guard for the
Sugar Company. This is inaccurate. Truhello was an informer for
the sugar company. His job was to make friends with
labor organizers who were like getting ready to organize unions

(44:23):
and like go on strike and then help take them out.
So that is his job. He is a spy, like
to crack down on the labor movement for these American companies,
and he loves this gig.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
That is such an early reason to hate someone in
this story.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
It is a real piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
Jes yeah, immediately, Yeah thought that ud.

Speaker 1 (44:45):
Yeah, It's very funny because like he loves this because
he's like, oh, I get to pick my own hours,
you know, I don't have a boss breathing down my neck.
All I gotta do is fuck over these laborers. Future
state propaganda will note that his strength of character got
him an award from Milli Management, but the reality is
that he helped catch and hang several men who are
looking to start labor unions. Like he is killing people

(45:07):
for the sugar company, and that's how Americans got cheap
sugar in the early nineteen hundreds. Everybody so good, good stuff.
So tragically, and this is sad cat. His promising career
murdering union organizers is cut short because he rapes somebody.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Damn.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, he's a real justice yeah, justice for Raphael Yeah yeah,
cancel culture has come for the murdering rapists. Yeah. So
we don't exactly know, like I hate to just like
drop he's a he probably committed rape, but there's not
a lot of detail because all of the criminal records

(45:48):
from the period of time where he's probably getting in
trouble burned down mysteriously after he takes power. So this
is based primarily on other people's recollections. But it seems
like he probably went to jail for this for a
period of time. Yeah, it's a little unclear. He is

(46:09):
going to be a prolific rapist and sexual assault throughout
his entire adult life. And it's it's interesting because if
you when you read these there's a lot a lot
of the first biographies I read about this guy are
written in like, you know, the the sixties or whatever,
and they they will describe it as like a ladies
man with a wandering eye, and their critical biographies, but

(46:29):
the men writing them like just don't see the fact
that he's don't see what he's doing as serial sexual assault.
And then when you get more modern coverage of true Heo,
it becomes very clear like, oh, yeah, he was like
a terrible, terrible rapist, like he was.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Popular with the names.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, you know the dames really like this man.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
No, they liked him.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
You get that a lot move on with dictators from
this period of time when you read early books about them.
But you know who isn't problematic kat.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
The ads and sponsors that sell you boys with rope.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, that's right, here's some ads. We're back. We're talking
about Raffaeultruheo, who has probably gone to jail for rape
at this period of time after murdering union organizers for
a gig. So he gets out of jail and at

(47:25):
this point he's kind of starting to get confident in
his own abilities. One presumes spending some time in jail
connects him to more criminals, and he sort of after
this period becomes kind of a gangster, right, definitely a gangster,
kind of a low level gangster. He runs a forgery racket,
he does some cattle rustling, and more than anything else,

(47:46):
he becomes a pimp. Right, he is a very successful
pimpsus his I probably shouldn't say this, but like you
get the feeling he treats the the women that he
is working with the way he used to treat bottle caps,
including these, stealing from them from other pimps using violence.

(48:09):
That's the feeling one gets. Again, there's not terrible tremendous
detail about it, right, but he is a very successful pimp,
and knowing what we know about him, that's probably an
ugly story, right, I think that's fair to say, given
everything we know about this guy's background. And this is
where are two stories, the history of the Dominican Republic
up to this point in the US occupation and the

(48:32):
life of Rafaeltruhio intertwine in nineteen sixteen, when the US
comes in, Trueheo is about twenty four years old, and
despite how his career as a spy for the sugar
companies had ended, he left with some connections and a
good recommendation. The Marines have now invaded the Dominican Republic
and their mission is to maintain domestic tranquility, and this

(48:54):
is code for make the company stable enough for American
investors to profit. One local historian would like it was
the landing of the American Marines which brought Truheo his
opportunity to rise from obscurity, and this is certainly true.
Prior to our involvement, Raphael was the organized crime equivalent
of a minor casiqu right. He probably first interacts with

(49:15):
the Americans through getting arrested for forgery. He might have
also gotten arrested for cattle wrestling. He probably goes to
jail again. We don't know, because in nineteen twenty seven,
a mysterious fire destroys the Supreme Court building with all
of the criminal records in it. What is likely true
is that he runs into a little bit of trouble
with the new regime because he's a criminal and his
uncle Tao Dulo is able to smooth it over. Tiodulo

(49:38):
has made friends with an American customs officer, a guy
named James MacLean, and McLean is one of these Americans
who's been in the country the longest. He's like working
in as one of these you know, because we take
over their customs like stations, so he is there before
the Marines arrive, and when the Marines arrive, they're like, well,
this guy knows the country and he's one of us,
so let's give him a job now that we're running

(50:00):
things right. And Taodulo drinks with MacLean. The two of
them are hardcore alcoholics and they are just getting wasted
together all the time. So when the military government comes in,
they make McLean a colonel because they're like, well, this
guy knows the country, and Taodula's like, hey, can you
give a job to my nephew, Like he's a good kid,

(50:21):
you know, he only occasionally commits horrible crimes. Albert Hicks,
an American journalist working in the country at the time,
describes McLean as a man who, quote, when sufficiently sober,
found a profound satisfaction in the company of Harlot's, which is,
you know, probably another reason why he likes Trujio, because

(50:42):
Trujio is a pimp in this period of time.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
So question the guy that wrote the general the biography
of this guy who said he didn't do any atrocities,
does he mention any atrocities, even like in a positive way.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Of Truio, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, later on, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Commit anything like this, but I okay, yes, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
That's a common common story for guys and dictatorships. So
Hicks goes on to claim that Tiadulo introduced his nephew
Trujeo to MacLean during a drinking session and quote Raphael immediately,
recognizing a job he could fill, played the pimp to
the chief of the constabulary. So McLean gets made like
the head of the police basically just because he's an

(51:25):
American who lives in the country. And Truio's like, hey,
you want some you want some ladies, Like I'm a pimp.
I can satisfy your needs, you know, And this gets
him in good with the Americans, and you know, he
moves on quickly from giving McLean prostitutes to supplying prostitutes
to American Marines, which is a great way to get

(51:45):
the Marines to like you historically. Now, once MacLean is
kind of hooking Trujeo up with the occupation authorities, Truio
starts finding other ways to police American officers. He starts
acting as an informer to basically go into communities that
are like resisting the American occupation that are like harboring insurgents,

(52:06):
and he'll make friends in there, and then he'll go
back to the Americans and be like, here's who you
go massacre, right, these are the people who like, are
are you harboring these folks? W are who are resisting
the regime? And he soon as a result of this,
falls in with the absolute bloodiest of the Marines that
are in the country. A guy named Captain Murcley, So

(52:26):
this is Merclay, is an American who is running the
pacification campaign in the east of the Dominican Republic. And
he makes trueO his right hand man, and together the
two of them cut a bloody swath across the countryside.
Murclay is so out of hand that the US Senate
eventually investigates him and finds that he has quote a
policy of repression that has been carried out by the

(52:48):
forces of the occupation and is inherently unwise, which reacted
primarily upon peaceful civilians, and as the result of which
many atrocities were undoubtedly committed. So like, this guy gets
so out of pow that the US Senate in like
nineteen seventeen is like, we can't have you occupying the
Dominican Republic your two fucking nuts? Now, this passage from

(53:10):
the biography tru Heio, Little Caesar of the Caribbean, gives
us more context as to what he was doing with Mercley.
Another competent observer, the historian and economist Melvin M. Knight, says,
in Americans in Santo Domingo, a number of Dominicans. We
may be certain that nobody knows exactly how many were
put to death offhand by the Marines, and some were
tortured without ever having their day in court at all.

(53:32):
In fairness, however, it must be said that Captain Merkley's
end was appropriate to his corrupt practice. The assassinations by
Captain Merkley were repudiated by his superiors, and he committed
suicide while awaiting for trial, asserts Knight. Knight's version is
supported by Sumner Wells in his aforementioned book. Nevertheless, if
Merkley himself paid dearly for his cruelty and sadism, his
methods unfortunately did not disappear. With him and young Trujillo.

(53:55):
He left behind a keen, proficient disciple who was carried
on the sadistic tradition long after his teacher's name is
no longer remembered. So he gets his boss, Mercley, and
they massacre and torture probably hundreds of people to try
to pacify the eastern chunk of this of the Dominican Republic.
The Senate gets involved and is like, wow, you need

(54:16):
to come back here and stand trial because what you
have been doing is so out of hand. And Merkley
fucking kills himself leaving. Trueheo to be like, well, it's
sad he's dead, but at least he taught me how
to be a real piece of shit. So yeah, a
proud chapter in US Marine Corps history right there.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
He's like, time for me to take up this torch.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
It's my time now, Yeah, it is his time. And
he has been a freelancer for the US Marines up
to this point, but once Mercley commits suicide, he decides
I need a more formal job. And it just so
happens that during this period, the US occupation government has
decided we need to set up a permanent military force.

(54:57):
The Dominican Constabulary geared it keep the interior pacified. Once
the Marines leave in December of nineteen eighteen, Rafael is
accepted into this program. He gets commissioned as an officer,
and he rises very quickly through the ranks due in
part to the fact that Colonel MacLean is running the constabulary,
so like he's basically bribing his boss with prostitutes in

(55:19):
order to get promoted to the point where he's running
the constabulary. So he goes from second loot yeah, yeah, yeah.
Any there are more allegations of rape and extortion against
Hi during this period of time. He gets court martialed
for rape, but like nothing happens to him. He keeps
getting promoted because he's providing prostitutes to the Marines, so
they don't want him out of there. And he's kind

(55:42):
of he has this reputation of being because he's worked
with Mercley and he knows how to like kill a
shitload of people. He's like the guy if you're having
trouble in an area, if like there's you know, uprisings
or whatever, He's this guy you can send in because
you don't want to do it yourself. You saw what
happened to Merkley, right, It's bad business for the Americans
to go committing massacres directly. But you can send this

(56:03):
guy in with some dudes, with some Dominicans and he'll
fucking kill people, right, and then you can you don't
have to get in trouble yourself and commit suicide after
a senate investigation. So, prior to US or military involvement,
most of the military power in the Dominican Republic had
been in the hands of these kind of local warlords
who'd maintained private militias and sometimes sent the scraps of

(56:26):
their militias down to the central government when they had
a war to fight with Haiti or whatever. And officers,
inasmuch as they existed, had always been members of a
small wealthy class in the country. The Americans wanted to
change this, in part because the Kadillos were their enemies, right.
They didn't want to like these guys to continue to
have all the military power. So one of the first

(56:46):
things we do is we disarm the countryside. So we
take weapons both from the militias that these guys have
had and from peasants. We wind up confiscating about three
million firearms, which is enough to arm every man, woman
and child in the country three times over. And that
gives you an idea of how hard it was to
control this place. They have three guns for every person

(57:07):
in the country out in the just out in the sticks,
you know, very heavily armed little land. Before we come
there and we take all of their guns and we
dump them into the sea, and then we build roads
so that this new constabulary that we're training can access
all these isolated areas of the rural interior.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
And like, we dump three million guns into the sea.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yep, cool, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's how
we that's how we handle this. Now that number is
probably exaggerated, right, Like this is coming from that dude
who winds up running the secret Police, So I don't
know that he's a credible source on how many guns
the US took. But we send in the Marines, We
take all of the weapons in the countryside, and we
shove them into the ocean.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Right, Honestly, it's not our worst plan.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
It's not the worst thing we're going to do here,
although we are doing it so that we can enforce
a dictatorship that sends money to us. So we disarm
the countryside, we send in the Marines, they build all
these roads so that we can, you know, stop any
sort of resistance to this new regime we're trying to
put in place. And you know, this this military force

(58:14):
we're building, we call it a constabulary because its goal
is primarily policing, and we don't want it to become
like another militia like all of the other ones that
have run the country. So we avoid hiring from the
groups who had traditionally run the Dominican military, right and
particularly who had provided officers for the Dominican military, and
instead we start promoting as officers the absolute dregs of

(58:38):
Dominican society, poor peasant type people. Now, the Marines are
always good at finding the absolute dregs of society, That's
what they do. And one of the guys that they're
going to pick is like, oh, this dude is like
exactly who should be running this policing force is Rafael Druhio.
And to talk about how that happened, I'm going to
read a quote from the book The Dictator's Seduction by

(58:58):
Lauren Derby. Widespread resistance to becoming part of the United
States led force meant that recruiters were forced to enlist
what a witness described as the worst rascals, thieves, and
assassins in the country. If the military had previously been
a millions of social assent for the respectable poor, it
was now open to the anonymous crowd. Trujillo and the
other young officers pulled from the ranks of the obscure

(59:21):
never forgot that the United States was their benefactor. In
his book, Arturo Espiallet describes how Trujillo and his fellow
News soldiers pacified the interior with the Marines and the
impact that it left on them. It may be considered
a left handed compliment to the Corps, but Trujillo always
thought of himself as basically a Marine Corps officer and
damned proud of it. It was typical, for instance, that

(59:43):
of the forty to fifty decorations conferred upon him during
his long career, Trujillo was proudest of a faded, threadbare
medal attesting to his service with the Marines. So that
is interesting. This guy who's going to become a dictator
considers himself a United States Marine.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Um.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
You know, we could talk a little bit about our
buddy Smedley Butler, the Marine who would become one of
the most decorated soldiers in US history and later write
that he had never been anything but a gangster for capitalism.
This is the period that that's going down in, right Like.
This is why Smedley feels that way because one of
the long term results of US occupation is that the

(01:00:19):
Marines trained true hero and make him basically a made
man to enforce this regime that exists to send money
to US companies, and he is going to be a
pretty brutal dictator using the things that he's learned from
the Americans. The US occupation of the Dominican Republicans in
nineteen twenty four and policing authority is handed over to

(01:00:42):
the constabulary as at the same time as the Marines leave,
the United States takes over as the largest foreign exchange
producer in the country, and they start flooding the Dominican
Republic with duty free US goods. Now, if you're contact
with the phrase duty free is in an airport, that
may sound great, right, you get all the cheap cigars
and liquor you could want, But this is actually a

(01:01:03):
real problem because when you are forcibly making it that
like your country gets to sell duty free products in
another country what that means is that US products are
able to undercut every single national industry. So all of
the Dominican people's money is flowing back to the United States,
but local Dominican companies are not, Like the government is

(01:01:24):
not drawing taxes on those transactions, and local Dominican companies
can't make money because they are never going to be
as cheap as mass produced US products that are being
sold duty free in the Dominican Republic. So it kind
of inherently cripples the economy. Like we leave and say,
by the way, we're making it impossible for you guys
to ever get on your own feet. Fuck you you

(01:01:44):
know USA number one and they were here, Yeah, yes, yes, exactly, Yes.
This is just you know, this is an this is
an escalation from controlling like the customs ports. So this
all necessity that the government take on more debt in
order to survive, and we all know historically how that

(01:02:04):
goes for countries on the island of Hispaniola. Now, the
interim president of the Dominican Republic had been a guy
named Horatio Vasquez who adopted Rafael as a pupil and
put him in charge of the constabulary. And again This
is supposed to be a policing force, but as soon
as the Americans leave, Rafael spends his first few years
running it, turning it from a policing force into a

(01:02:26):
proper army. He puts his own picked men in positions
of command, and in nineteen thirty he's in a situation
where he feels like he can carry out a coupdettas
against the president. Now, part of how he does this
is he makes a deal with Like in many countries
where the US is set up a leadership, there are rebels,
right and as soon as the US leaves, these rebels

(01:02:47):
start fighting the central government. The rebels in the Dominican
the most powerful faction is under a guy named Rafael Urina. Now,
in exchange for putting Urina in power, Truhillo agrees that
you know, basically true. He agrees, I will stop the
military from fighting the rebels so that you guys can
take over the government, and then you have to carry

(01:03:08):
out new elections, and I have to be allowed to
run for president in the new election. So they work
this out amongst themselves to make it seem like there's
been a legitimate rebellion against Vasquez and now they're having
a free election and that Trohillo is going to win it.
It's not going to be a free election. Right, This
all works like Gangbusters. The rebels march on the capitol,
Trujillo doesn't stop them. Vesquez steps down as president, and yeah,

(01:03:32):
there's an election and Urina and Trujillo run on a
joint ticket and Trujillo becomes the president. So you know
that's how that shit goes. Good? Stuff worked, well, yeah,
it does, It does work more or less. Well, so, yeah,

(01:03:52):
what followed is the kind of dictator, fake presidential election
stuff that we're used to on this podcast. Right, he
is the president, the military threatens to murder or at
least allow the murder of anyone who runs against him.
So he gets ninety nine percent of the vote in
this election. He in fact, gets more votes than there
are voters in the Dominican Republic, which we as the

(01:04:14):
United States, who are basically keeping an eye on everything
to make sure that the money keeps flowing. Like the
US ambassador is like, yeah, this is a scam election,
Like he absolutely has just made himself dictator, and everyone
in Washington is pretty much like it's fine, Like he's
basically a marine, right, like we can trust him to
do the shit that we want him to do.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
Support our veterans.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Yeah right, he's a vet, you know. So while Raphaeltruhio's
rise to power is more or less standard strong man
coup stuff, how he actually performs while in office is
pretty ingenious and in consolidating power and exercising it, TRUEHEO
is going to kind of prove himself to be something
of a visionary when it comes to being a dictator.

(01:04:59):
But that's all coming in part two, along with unfortunately
a genocide cat. You got anything to plug before we
roll out here?

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Go follow me on TikTok, at katamboo and YouTube where
I do wrong form content. I had a very dumb
video probably coming out the end of the month or
next month. So follow me there and then there are
once again a billion other platforms. Just hook me up,
I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Yeah, find Kataboo on Twitter or not Twitter, well on Twitter,
but on TikTok and the YouTube's avoid Twitter. It's a
bad place. Now, They're all bad places. I guess. There's
not any good places on the internet except for this podcast,
which you can get ad free by subscribing to cooler

(01:05:44):
Zone Media. That's the episode.

Speaker 3 (01:05:47):
Goodbye Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
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