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

Robert and Kat conclude the story, and the life, of Rafael Trujillo.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Oh I am recording.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Thank you lady.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Oh hey stay yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
What was the thing you were doing where you morphed
the fawns and an Ellie songs? I really enjoyed that.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
What I don't know, I don't know. So good now, No,
I don't feel now you've got me feeling ill self conscious.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Liked it genuinely.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
No, Sophie, you've you've you've mocked my accents too much
in the past and now nobody gets to hear it.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Wow, but it was so good listeners, it was really
it was so no, see it doesn't work anymore, but
it was so good.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
No, you've taken my power. Maybe I speaking of it.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
It was terrible.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Do it? Don't do it? Fine? Introducer introduced my my
podcast are podcast. This is Behind the Bastards, a show
about bad people. Kataboo not a bad person, Uh, kat,
you spend way too much time monitoring Fox News and

(01:13):
the gaggle of maniacs and would be authoritarian rulers who
spend all of their time on that fucking hell channel.
People can find you on the tiktoks and on the youtubes.
What how are you feeling? As we come into part
two talking about Raphael Truhio.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
I'm really interested to see where this is going, uh,
because it feels kind of like a typical rise to power,
especially in the twentieth century, especially US. Basically everything we've
seen in so many other countries.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
More but most of these stories involved but like not
a lot, more like one standard deviation of additional that.
But yeah, yeah, otherwise pretty normal dictator story. And when
true here takes power, he has kind of the standard
priorities that any new dictator has, Right, He's gonna sit
uneasily upon a new one throne. You know, he's going

(02:08):
to launch his traditional bloody reign of terror, kill his
political opponents, murder newspaper editors, anybody who might be resistance
to the rain. And Trujillo understood he's got to move
fast in doing this because things are not great in
the Dominican Republic. You know. Once the US leaves, they
kind of set shit up in a way that makes
a guarantee that the economy is going to collapse, and

(02:31):
sure enough, sugar prices fall through the floor it right
after Truheo takes office. This is partly due to the
fact that, like the Great Depression, is happening. So in
addition to the shit that the Dominican Republic was already
dealing with as a result of the US occupation and
the economic regime they set up, now you've got this depression.
And so the thing that had kind of kept them

(02:52):
limping along as a country previously was that the US
would send them loans right while sucking a bunch of
money out of the country. But now that the depression
is happening, suddenly we're not as willing to handle them loans.
So this is a lot for any government to deal with.
But it's particularly a lot because about three weeks after

(03:12):
Truhio takes office, a hurricane strikes the capital and it
just absolutely devastates. It destroys most of the slums. So
like obviously the slums, the buildings there are less able
to withstand a hurricane, so it's just incredibly devastating. There's
about eighty thousand people a little less than that living
in the capital when the hurricane hits, and more than

(03:34):
twenty five hundred of them die, plus another eight thousand
are injured and several thousand more are unaccounted for. So
like about ten percent of the city is like gone
or badly injured after this hits, which you can imagine,
like imagining that happening to like wherever you live right now,
Like it's catastrophic. It's a real problem. So Santa Domingo,

(03:58):
the capitol had been built in the fifteen hundreds, and
it had been built as kind of almost a medieval city,
right because the fifteen hundreds, you're kind of right at
this sort of like crossroads, you know, heading into modernity.
And so it was still divided into different neighborhoods based
on like job and social class. You have a neighborhood
for the people who do this gig, you have a

(04:19):
neighborhood for like this guild or whatever. And the whole
thing had been surrounded by a defensive wall. Like for
an example of how slowly shit moved in Santo Domingo
up until nineteen hundred, the gate was closed every night
like they would people would like blow horns and like
lock the gate at night for the city.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
We need to do that today.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Honestly, I agree.

Speaker 4 (04:41):
I like the pomp and circumstance of being like time
to go to bed.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Now, where do we put that gate? In Los Angeles? Though,
like if you're walling off LA. What part of it?
Do we are we doing the whole? Like, are we
are we looping the fuck around San Berndino or are
we just doing like the actual city of Los Angeles
is West LA part of it? Sophie. Yes, we have
two different sets of walls so that they can fight.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Can you do like on the highway, like put gates
so that way of someone's speeding and they're not paying attention,
they just hit it?

Speaker 4 (05:08):
You know that could work?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Like the east side west side division makes sense and
San Bernino is not Los Angeles. Thank you so much
has been.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
I think we do. I would like to do like
a big minace teerif style curtain wall around Culver City.
You know that's that's uh, that was my old neighborhood.
We can defend it from from those Santa Monica savages.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, don't even get me started on you.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Beverly Hills.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
No, it would be really great for all the people
here that are from or been to California.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
We need to unite the Cordillos to to take out
Beverly Hills. You know, I think with a with a
strong enough military force, we can occupy it and pacify
the region, but only.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Up until uh sunset and Dvini. Because we must keep
us Hollywood, we must keep us all.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, yeah, no that that this is all. This is
all great content for our listeners, Chess Robert, Yeah, yeah
it will. If we do have to send the Marines
in to Beverly Hills, it'll be pretty easy because most
of them are just down in a San Diego, so
you know, just to have him sail right up the coast. Yeah. Now,

(06:20):
much of the colonial quarritor of the capitol where the
elites tended to reside, was intact, because again, these are
like the nicest buildings. They're able to kind of handle
the hurricane, but the slums were flattened. Now, trueO responds
effectively to this disaster, by which I mean he just
doesn't shit the bed, and in not shitting the bed,
he kind of lays the foundation for a myth that

(06:42):
he single handedly rescues Santa Domingo and it's hour of need.
This is not really accurate, Like he's not he doesn't
do anything that like a moderately competent government didn't do,
but he does handle it in a moderately competent way
and then immediately set his propaganda apparatus to like, wow,
he didn't let everyone die after the disaster, look at

(07:04):
our hero, which is both like, it's sad where the
bar is, but also just like it, this is the
easiest way to win, like political points when you've just
taken over the government is not.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
It's like having a million people die and then being like, wow,
we handled that, yeh way better than we expected.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
Could be worse, Yeah, could have been worse.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
One of the first things he does as he is,
you know, handing out emergency aid supplies and shit, is
he has the National Congress pass an emergency loss of
spending the constitution and giving the president the power to
take any steps necessary in order to deal with the
relief effort. These You could compare this to like the
emergency powers Hitler gets after the Reichstag fire. It is
kind of interesting to me that, like a lot of

(07:48):
dictators will do the thing where oh, we'll do a
false flag or there will be an actual like uprising
or something, and we'll use that as an excuse to
pass this law giving me total power. Trueheo use is
the hurricane for that which I haven't actually run into.
In a dictator and is like an actual emergency. Yeah yeah,
that is an interesting little spin on the standard story.

(08:08):
Yeah and yeah, So these he starts. Basically, he makes
himself the center of the relief effort. So like all
of the money and donations that are coming in, all
of the international aid, it goes through true HEO, and
he is the one handing out Red Cross supplies and
having it handed out and stuff. So he makes sure
that even when other people are providing the raw materials,

(08:31):
he gets seen as like the person who is doling
them out, so that he gets the credit for like
all of this shit, he imposes controls over necessities which
are being like and he basically puts members of his
family and army officers he wants support from in charge
of You can hand out the food, you know, you
can hand out and make sure everyone knows that you're
doing it for me. But you can also like skim

(08:53):
some shit off the top and sell it on the
black market and make some money for yourself while you're
doing this.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
It is a really interesting to be like, hey, it's
not the typical thing of I'm killing the people that
you hate, or I'm killing this threat that's going to
bring us down. Yeah, it's like I am giving the community.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
What it needs.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah, And a lot of that is like Red Cross funds, Right,
it's like money that comes from overseas, and Trueho as
the president, is like, I get to determine how that
gets handed out, and so he is a lot of
this stuff does get two people who need it. He's
not completely shitting the bed on the relief effort, but
a lot of it also winds up in the black market,
which lets him bribe and start building loyalty from a

(09:35):
lot of like what are going to be the new
elites under his system because he gives them, you know,
cushy jobs handing out this shit, and they're able to
make good for themselves from it. A lot of the
aid supplies that come in are donations, particularly by Americans.
We don't know exactly how much gets sent to the
Dominican Republic because all of that stuff goes into Trueio's pocket.

(09:57):
The amount of aid scent was enough though, to both
line in his pockets and ensure that there's not like
mass starvation or death from disease. So he does accomplish that,
and in short order, Trujillo has both made himself very
wealthy and earned the support of the devastated urban poor,
and so no one with any say in the matter
looked too closely when he used the aftermath of the

(10:20):
hurricane for another purpose, which was doing the standard bloody
dictatorship of shit of cleaning up the last of his opposition.
One of his first moves in power prior to the
hurricane had been to establish a paramilitary organization, La forty two,
which operated with legal impunity as a secret police force.
The aftermath of the hurricane would be their first chance

(10:41):
to shine. And I'm going to quote from German Ornez here.
Since Congress had legalized dictatorship, it was easy for Trujillo
to take advantage of the situation to wipe out the
already decimated ranks of the opposition. Thus, many of his opponents,
done away with by strong armed squads, were reported victims
of the hurricane. The day after the hurricane, Truhiel ordered
in Paulino, the head of LA forty two, to secure

(11:03):
large quantities of gasoline, and that evening, the dead bodies
of the victims of the hurricane, as well as a
few killed by La forty two, were drinched with the
fluid and burned. This method of corps disposal was hailed
as an ingenious device of the president to save time
and prevent epidemics.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
True.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Hello, as a matter of fact, takes great pride in
his original health measure. Without this drastic step, he asserted,
we should have suffered an epidemic that would have destroyed
the capital itself. So he's a pretty smart guy, right
where You're like, look, we got to get rid of
all these dead bodies because that's bad for the disease.
And also, if we're going to be burning corpses, I
might as well have my secret police murder some of

(11:38):
these dudes I've got issue with, and we'll just throw
them on the fucking pile and then I'll get credit
for it.

Speaker 5 (11:44):
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Then it's not true HEEO did a terror. It's true.
HEO stopped an epidemic. Not bad.

Speaker 4 (11:51):
That's that's smart.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, I'll give him that. I mean, he's pretty good
at this in terms of corpse.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
Disposal, especially as like beginning dictators.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as corpse disposal murders go pretty
good one, you know, pretty good one. So Trujillo's first
major struggle outside of just disaster recovery was cementing his
control over the quarrelsome rural highlands and their caciques. With
the new road infrastructure the US had left behind and

(12:21):
the modernized military Raphael had helped the Americans build, he
had the ability to project power in a way that
had never been possible for the central government of the Republic.
Arturo Espala, who participated in some of this campaign, later
recalled moving his marine trained troops over marine built roads.
The General Lisimo struck again and again. Casiques who wouldn't

(12:41):
surrender unconditionally were gunned down. The survivors saw the light.
The era of regional warlords was ended. The era of
trujillo had begun. In any dictator, you're gonna have to
deal with the fact that once you take over, there's
the people who were elites prior to your rights to power, right,
and you got kind of two broad options. One is
you co opt them, right, you make them your elites,

(13:03):
you know, and the other is you marginalize them.

Speaker 5 (13:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Either you take away their wealth and power, you massacre them,
or you just kind of do you try to slowly
edge them out. Raphael chooses a policy of military annihilation
right that's what he does to a lot of the
old elites, which engenders the everlasting hatred of the survivors,
but it brings them the loyalty of the peasantry. And
this makes a lot of sense when you consider the

(13:27):
people who had been running things in the Dominican Republic
prior to trueO. It had been pretty chaotic and most
of these people, most of the peasants were not happy
with these casiques, and we're not happy with like the
old leadership of the country because they'd been bad at it.
The dr had no meaningful middle class prior to True Heo,
because it turns out that it's hard to have a
middle class when like banditry is the biggest industry and

(13:49):
the central government doesn't work past the street lamps, you know.
So Rafael followed military action, and this is where it
gets really interesting, with a letter writing campaign. So as
soon as he's beaten, you know, his primary rivals militarily,
he sends out letters all over the countryside. He's posting
up like posts and towns and stuff, and announcements. He's

(14:10):
sending like all of these announcement out to people, telling them,
telling the peasants, hey I am in charge. Now you
are under my protection. If anybody fucks with your property,
come to true. Hero, is your landlord abusing you? Does
your village need a schoolhouse? Right, here's how you contact me,
tell me what you need. I got you. It's a
very kind of like mob thing, but it's he's not

(14:32):
starting with the threats to the peasants, right. He's doing
that to a lot of these old elites, to these
you know, he's very violent to them. But to the peasantry,
he's like, what do you guys need? What don't you have?

Speaker 6 (14:43):
Like?

Speaker 4 (14:43):
And also it's not just like a vague promise.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, and this he understood was the wait for him
to get long term security. Right. A powerful military is
good for fighting warlords, but also a powerful military is
how you get warlords. Right. Yea, you can never be
too secure in your military as a dictator, because it's
also where your rivals are going to come from. Right.

(15:07):
If you have a general who's really good at shit,
that's a rival to your power, But you also need
the like it's tough and the only thing if you're
going to have this powerful military, you're always going to
have some people who might be able to overthrow you.
The only way to make that impossible or at least
less likely is grassroots support, right, because these generals, who
if you're just a dictator to a normal dictators shit

(15:30):
and like cracking down on the peasants, and you're feared
more than you're loved, Well, what if I just take
out this guy? You know, I got a shot I
can make you know, But if the peasantry has your
back as the dictator, then suddenly it's a lot scarier
as some general to try to take over, you know.
And Truheil understood that most of his personal security in

(15:51):
the stability of his regime was going to rest entirely
on what amounted to bribing the peasantry and spla rights quote.
One of the techniques he used was baptism. Baptism and
one hundred dollar bills. Trujillo became godfather to tens of
thousands of children, and the parents of each child received
one hundred dollars. Truhil also reaped a dividend. It is
considered poor form in Latin America to conspire against your

(16:13):
compadre the godfather of your child. These baptisms had to
be seen to be believed. Shabbily dressed women of the
lower classes holding squalling infants would stream through the heavily
guarded gate of the National Palace and lineup outside the
palace chapel. The old man would handle the proceedings on
a production line basis. He would beam briefly at each
mother and child, mumble a few words, then pass on
to the next. The din was terrific, and the atmosphere

(16:35):
inside the chapel was stifling, but it went on for hours,
day after day. Let no one say that Truillo didn't
work hard at being a dictator. So he makes himself
a godfather to all of the poor people's kids, and
he pays them to become like make the godf and
then like, I mean, why wouldn't you be the.

Speaker 4 (16:51):
Guy that's going to give you a hundred bucks? Yeah, yeah,
that's strandfather.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
I've never heard of a dictatory that really, I've never.

Speaker 4 (16:59):
Heard that same, And I think it's really smart.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, I'm trying to think of like any equivalent.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
I don't think i've ever ye heard of someone like this.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
I mean, it's almost like marrying your child to consolidate
power in Europe.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
But like, also, hundreds of people and they're all the people.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, like poor people.

Speaker 4 (17:19):
That's really smart. Yeah, I'm just processing that.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, it's pretty smart because I've heard there's variants of this,
like the Nazis had like weird breeding programs where you'd
get money if you had enough kids and like like
makes it bride to people to have kids. But like
that's so different from like, yeah, I'll be your kid's godfather, right, yeah,
that's Is it just like a.

Speaker 4 (17:38):
One time thing or can you be like, hey, you're
my kid's godfather, what's up to you?

Speaker 1 (17:43):
I'm sure it probably works per kid. Uh yeah, it's yeah.
I mean I think there is this idea because he
is trying to set up this idea that like, if
you are like the peasants, you come to me when
you need something, right, Yeah, true, here's got your back,
and obviously as a result, you back me no matter
what I do, right, Like right, because I'm your godfather.

(18:06):
Remember when I built that school, Remember when I did this?
You know, like you owe me.

Speaker 4 (18:10):
And even if he didn't get like assassinated, like the
other person's going to have a.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Bad time, you have adequately uh anticipated where this story ends.
So yes, it is not hard to see why Truhiel
was initially very popular with the poor, right, And he
does a good job at building stability, right. And with stability,
people are able, Like, for one thing, merchants hadn't really

(18:35):
been able to keep like stock in stores in a
lot of the country because of how bad the banditry was.
Now they're able to do that. People are able to
start and run businesses. People are able to build a
degree of wealth. Right. Peasants are not constantly being drafted
to fight wars, no, nor are they living solely. They're
looking at the mercy of a strong man, true he o,

(18:56):
but not at a bunch of warring local strongmen. Right,
So you're not having to deal with this like, Okay,
I'm under this guy right now, but this dude is
more powerful and like if I like back him in
this and I got out, Like, you're not worrying about
that kind of shit all the time. Right, As long
as you're good with Trueio, you're generally pretty good. And
because he brings this form of peace to the country,

(19:16):
the economy starts doing a lot better and over the
coming years of his reign, over the time the Trio's
in power, the population of the Dominican Republic is going
to triple so he is obviously a dictator. He's extremely
strict on government employees, which is part of what makes
him popular because state employees previously, a lot of them

(19:37):
hadn't this is a really normal thing and a lot
of kind of failing states. State employees are like often
you bribe someone to get the job, and you give
them a cut of your salary, but you don't actually
have to do the job right, Like once you've gotten
yourself in there, you don't do shit, and so like
there's not services like shit that you need, Like I
need to be able to get a driver's license. I

(19:57):
need to be able to like fucking send letters and stuff,
and you can't do that because the government just doesn't
fucking do anything right. The state employees are not functional
under true heo, there is a functional state, and part
of it is because he treats every state employee like
a member of the military. Failure to show up is
punished the same way as it is of like a
soldier deserts, right, like he puts them under a military

(20:19):
justice system for government employees, and as a result, they're
services for citizens like people are able to do things.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
You know, does he actually care about services or is
he just doing it purely for he cares.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
He's not doing it to be a good guy, but
he's doing it because he understands that his ability to
stay in power is predicated on providing things for the people,
the mass of the country.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Right.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
I wasn't sure if it was like a double whammy
of the power and actually caring about the people, not
for power.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
I don't know the man, you know, I don't get
the feeling that he was terribly concerned with the comfort
of other people, But I get the feeling he understood
like I want the country to work because that's how
I stay in power, right, Right, And probably is a
degree of ego too, like I don't just want to govern,
I don't just want to be another warlord. I want
to be the guy who made this shit function. You know,

(21:12):
there's probably saying that.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
Like elected officials don't grasp this very basic concept.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Well, if someone else is responsible for the stability of
the state, then you can just grift. Right. That's what
he's kind of fighting against, is like all these guys
who had just grifted because they were like, well, it's
not my job to make the Dominican Republic work. But
I can pull some money out of this chunk of
the government or whatever that I've lucked my way into
being technically in charge of. It's not my job to
like make it function well. The buck does have to

(21:40):
stop with True Heo because he's the dictator. So he's like,
I am going to punish people they don't do their
fucking job because that'll make people angry. And if the
peasants are angry because shit still doesn't work, I'm less safe,
you know. Yeah. Uh Now, Obviously a massive concern for
him is the loyalty of the military, and it's this
problem you always have with a dictator's army, right where

(22:02):
you need competent officers to enforce what is a military dictatorship,
but you also have to be able to keep control
and officers who get too good or a danger to you.
And one of the ways that he manages this is
an idea I have not well, it's similar to some
things other people do. So there's this growing understanding of
fitness in this period of time in the thirties, right,

(22:23):
fitness culture is starting to become a thing, and Trueheo
has a conversation with a doctor who tells him that
the best thing to do for his health is go
on long walks, right, that that's really good for you.
So he becomes a devoted walker, and he makes it
be mandatory for military officers to come follow him on
his walks. But he's not like, he doesn't have a

(22:44):
super set schedule all the time, so you never know
when the walk is going to start. You just have
to show up outside of his palace and like the
late afternoon and wait around for hours until he's ready
to go on a walk, and it might take hours,
and then he might be out for hours. And as
a result, you're always you have this big thing that's
going to take a huge chunk of your day and
your energy, and it's kind of it's not entirely predictable

(23:08):
how long it's going to take, and so that just
takes up a lot of time that you might spend plotting, right,
like you, that's all This is a thing other dictators do. Again,
it's weird. He's like a lot of what he does
is like the slightly healthier version of normal dictator stuff.
Stalin's version of this was every getting everyone drunk. Yeah,
we're all going to get drunk and watch cowboy movies

(23:30):
and the middle disrupt your life and stop you from
being able to plot against me. Truio's version is, We're
all gonna like go on long walks with like shake
weights in our hands so that we stay fit.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
It's like instead of being like I'm going to keep
you all drugged up, it's like we're gonna go.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
On a gluten free diet. Yeah, and you guys to
think about it all the time. You better enter your calories.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
He's like the general your weight, wife, you are out,
how many points you got? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that's
kind of funny. He is a guy who has a
lot of energy. He does do the drinking thing too,
and he does keep his staff with him late at
night at social events. He doesn't really seem to get hungover,

(24:12):
so like a lot of times he'd stay out late
with them drinking and then get up early in the
next morning and like they'd have to come in like
an hour after they went to sleep, all like fucked up.
And you know, this is part of how he ensures loyalty.
And when this stuff doesn't work, there was always rampant brutality.
One of the last Codillos was Sergeant Enrique Blanco, who
like rebelled from the military and led this like regional

(24:35):
rebellion against Trujillo's rule pretty early on. And when he's
finally killed, Trujio takes his corpse and he parades it
through the towns where this guy had been popular, and
he makes local peasants dance with this guy's rotting corpse
until Truhio's like, I think you got the point. So again,
not a verse to brutal shit, right, Like he does

(24:58):
that too?

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Creative though, Yeah, it is really creative though.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, a little bit of a corpse dance. I don't know,
that'll probably make someone less likely to rebel. We should
try that, Sophie with our with our staff.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
I don't.

Speaker 4 (25:15):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
I don't think Carson Trivia.

Speaker 4 (25:16):
I think that's a great idea. Who are you gonna
kill first?

Speaker 1 (25:19):
I don't know. You know, I feel like if you
lock yourself into murdering a specific person and then making
people dance with their corpse, then you're just kinda like
that's like stymying, right, you gotta you gotta be let
the world kind of you know.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
I know who Robert would pick who's that, Sophie. I'm
not gonna say it on Mike, but I know who
you would be.

Speaker 7 (25:38):
Okay, Okay, I just think that, uh, that's really creative.

Speaker 4 (25:48):
That's like a really creative.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Way to.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Yeah, terrorize an entire population.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Also really heavy, Yeah, very are not light, and to
dance with one that's another workout.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Exactly exactly again health King, yeah exactly, very very concerned
with everyone's fitness levels. So he makes a priority to
of inculcating a sense of nationalism. Right because the Dominican
Republic had been a country, but not really just because
of how badly it worked, right, And a lot of
people in the hills are like, I don't fucking that's

(26:23):
not my government, Like what are you talking about? Like
my government is this angry dude, right? Or I am
the government? You know, it had been theoretical outside of era,
So he understood one of the things he has to
do is build a sense of nationalism. Part of how
he did this was in the capitol every day he
would raise the flag and order the national anthem played,
and then he would like sit out in his palace

(26:44):
with a telescope and watch how people responded to like
see if they were paying enough attention to the national anthem,
and when he noticed people weren't, he took action. As
this passage from Espala's book describes, one morning, soldiers clad
and civilian clothes swarmed into the square. They claborate everyone
who didn't stand up for the anthem and flag. This
went on for several days. Then people began drifting out

(27:06):
of the square just before each ceremony. Truhia responded by
throwing a cordin of troops around the area. People eventually
got the message. Dominicans were soon leaping frantically to their
feet at the sound of the first notes of the anthem.

Speaker 4 (27:18):
God.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
This dude would be frantically checking his Instagram comments just
to be like, all right.

Speaker 4 (27:22):
Who liked it? Who comments?

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Looking at his close friends story to see who reacted.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Would he would be a big fan of those like
really problematic uh interminent fasting ads people keep getting on Twitter?

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Why didn't you like the bad we come on? You
gotta stay fit? Yeah, have soldiers beat up dudes who
don't like sign up for the internet and fasting program.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
That would be so him would be intolerable, intolerable, speaking, intolerable,
it's time for ads. Robert.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Well, first I gotta ask Kat if you're a dictator, right, yes, yes,
you've got to. You've decided you're going to make everyone
stand up for an anthem, otherwise they get the shit
beaten out of them. What's the song? What are you picking?

Speaker 4 (28:08):
Oh god, that's a really good one.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
As an arcleptic, I'm going to go with wake me
Up before you go go.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Oh oh boy, that's a nightmare. That's like a literal
waking hell.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
Yeah, wow yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:21):
If you didn't know, you can do the Cotton Eye
Joe to wake me up before you go go and it.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
Wow, it matches up perfectly. So I'm going to make
them do that instead of.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
Standing for the skyrocket. See, I would be I would
be like a good dictator, So I would make everybody
listen to the Bloodhound Gangs, the Bad Touch and stand
up in salute. Yeah that's that's that's fair.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
But to be there, I get my rocks off en
forcing like Tucker Carlston on everyone around me.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
That's right, that's right, yeah so does yeah. Well, speaking
of dictators or guys who would like to be here's
some ads. Ah, we're back and and.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
We didn't hear what Sophie's song would be.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, Sophie, what's your song?

Speaker 4 (29:13):
Hmmm?

Speaker 1 (29:15):
I think I think it also the Bloodound Gang, Definitely,
They've got so many hits, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
I think I gotta go want to be by the
Spice Girls.

Speaker 3 (29:24):
Okay, Oh, that's a really good one. You got to
make sure everyone knows the rap though.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
Yeah, that's like the best part of the song, and
not enough people actually know the words.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Send in soldiers if they don't get the lyrics to
the rap right exactly.

Speaker 4 (29:35):
That's basically working at like a nightclub.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
Is like, every time I hear any song like that,
my eye twitches and I just automatically sing it.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
There you go. That would be a real wabb.

Speaker 4 (29:45):
I think that's a great choice.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
I think you.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, so a lot of his rules.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
We didn't ask Anderson what Anderson's choice would be, and
it would be it would be who Let the Dogs Out?

Speaker 1 (29:55):
That's creative, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Sorry, it's her favorite song. It's her only song. Listen
to to it on loop every night for four hours.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
See, my cats are intellectuals, so they like listening to
the entirety of the Who's Tommy, which is what I
would make everyone say, is so Saddami day very Saddam. Yeah.
So much of his ruling strategy was focused on simultaneously
humiliating old elites and turning himself into ass like a

(30:25):
figure of kind of almost like deified respect among the peasantry.
And I'm going to quote again from a write up
on Thought Company by Rebecca Bodenheimer. Quote. In nineteen thirty six,
he rechristened the capital Siadad Trujillo. He also changed the
name of Duarte Peak to Trujillo Peak. At ten twenty
eight feet, this Apex and the Dominican Cordillera is Central

(30:48):
is the Caribbean's highest mountain. It is about a third
the height of Mount Everest and surpasses the measurement of
any North American mountain east of the Mississippi. Legend has
it that a geographer laboring under Trujillo feared that even
the peaks impressive height would not be enough to police
the president, so he recorded the height at three thousand,
one hundred and seventy five meters ten thousand, four hundred
and seventeen feet instead just actually one hundred twenty eight

(31:13):
It's not even that big a lie, right, he's just
adding like three hundred feet like, h yeah, because meters. Yeah,
but it's interesting, yeah, changing them. I mean, first off,
changing the name of the capital city to be your name.
Classic dictator shit. Changing a mountain, classic dictator shit. But
really where it gets good is like this geographer is

(31:37):
scared to give the actual height of the mountains, so
he's got to just like just jink it by a
little bit. Like that's not even a big lie, it's
such a it.

Speaker 4 (31:46):
Really another mountain by being just that much taller.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
I think it's normally the highest, it's always it's just
the highest mountain in the Caribbean. Like, I don't think
he had to lie to make it that. He just
put a couple of hundred feet on because he was
so scared. Like that's a good dictator, you know. When
you've got that, you.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
Don't even threaten him. He probably wouldn't have even been
mad if he has told the truth. No, you wouldn't know.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
Is tall enough? Right? Yeah, but that guy still does it?
You you love to see it? Uh yeah, so obviously
he gets He gets described often as a womanizer. He's
often seen like dancing with high society women. He is
of course a rapist and becomes one on a massive
scale now that he is the president. But it is

(32:33):
sort of the kind of thing where like it just
becomes known that if Trueheo wants to see you, you
go to him. Right.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
Does he have like a specific type like is he
praying on women that work for him?

Speaker 1 (32:45):
Or I think it is generally women in high society,
but not exclusively. And it's it's just sort of like
he's got people and they'll come say, like here's a
gift or whatever, you know, the President would like to
see you, and is just generally known like it's it's
not a good thing to not give the president what

(33:05):
he wants, right, It's that kind of that's the kind
of coercion and violence that you're able to exert when
you're the president, as opposed to very yeah, very classic
dictator ship. Yeah. True Hello also commissioned songs to be
composed in his honor, with titles like faith and Tru
Heo Tru Hello is Great and Immortal and True Hello

(33:25):
the Great Architect, none of which have the uh the
panache of like Fox Trot Uniform, Charlie Kilo or uh,
you know, some of the other great Bloodhound Gang songs.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
Like was great and Immortal and it's like he's also
sexy and can throw a ball really far.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, yeah, real good picture.

Speaker 4 (33:48):
True he is such a good picture.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, pretty good jump shot.

Speaker 4 (33:54):
He can dunk. You don't think he can dunk, but
he can dunk. And not his own song. That's like,
that's a song.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
I know you don't think he can dunk, but he
can drug dunk, Truio, I mean dope, so please compose that.
Yeah in person, Truello was all oily sachurin confidence, but
he was less stable than he liked to pretend. By
nineteen thirty seven, the Dominican Republic was nearly insolvent. International

(34:23):
assistance then had become absolutely necessary. Now this is nineteen
thirty seven, and traditionally the Dominican Republic gets money from
the US. Truhio considers himself a marine, but the US
is not the government in thirty seven that he feels
the closest to, or that he wants to be the
closest to, because he's kind of become a Hitler. Stand

(34:44):
by this point right now, Adolph's been in power less
time by a couple of years. Than Truio, but he's
really done something with it. And Raphael is a big
fan of this, This go getter young German. Right, he's
a hitler. Yeah, yeah, he's a hitler. Stan, He's got
all the albums.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah, you see Adolf single great visionary.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, his new single the Anschluss. Yeah. So in September
of nineteen thirty seven, a bunch of Nazi government representatives
come to visit him, and tru Heil accepts a signed
copy of mind Camp from the German representative, the Nazi delegation. Yeah,
oh yeah, he's got a signed one. The Nazi delegation

(35:31):
is met with crowds and positive articles in tru Heillo
controlled newspapers, all with titles like long live our illustrious leaders,
the Honorable President, Doctor Trujillo, and the furor of the
German Reich, Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
Wait, why didn't you here become a doctor?

Speaker 1 (35:44):
At no point? Never did he become a doctor, Like
he just did. That's just what you do. If I
get to be a dictator, I've always wanted to be
a colonel, right.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, because twist yeah right, doctor Truio.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, what is this game of thrones?

Speaker 4 (36:04):
Long?

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Live, our illustrious leader, the Honorable President, Doctor Trueu and
the fure of Germany Reich Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Adolf Hitler Hitler here being basically the Prince of dictators,
where he's like, can you just call me Adolf? Like, like,
we all know who I am, so Prince yeah, just
like Prince.

Speaker 4 (36:28):
So.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
In an article written by Michelle Wouker, Wuka describes how
Trujillo was particularly inspired by Nazi racial theories as well
as the model of strong main leadership that Hitler represented. Quote.
Hitler's ideas gave Truheo a racist and nationalist plan to
distract Dominicans from their empty stomachs, reminding Dominicans that they
could not afford to feed foreigners too. Truio cracked down

(36:50):
in migration from Haiti, but powerful American sugarcane plantation owners
who brought in Haitians to cut caine because unlike Dominicans,
they worked for practically nothing, forced him to make hu exceptions.
He resorted to deporting Haitians and tightening border patrols, but
the Haitians kept coming because obviously Haiti is doing badly
in this period, as is generally the case. So they've

(37:11):
got poor refugees flooding over the border. Americans need them
to work plantations for cheap But Truhello also is he's
doing very much what conservatives do in our country, creating
this panic over the border. Like, ah, it's not my mismanagement,
and like the US having fucked us over for so long,
that is why you're poor and starving. It's the Haitians.

(37:32):
They're taking your jobs, they're taking your wealth, they're filling
our cut. We can't afford to feed them. All right, Well,
isn't there like a I.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
Mean, we went through this earlier, but like a pretty
similar background.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yep. In a lot of ways, they're not far from
Mitcha And in fact it's.

Speaker 4 (37:48):
Still only two places on this island.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
A good number of the Haitians that he is turning into,
like the have just been living in what is the
Dominican Republic for forever, right because right at the border area,
it's not like everyone has always had like the Dominican
Haitian border only gets settled in nineteen twenty nine, the
year that he comes to power, So like there's just
communities of Haitians and the Dominican Republic who have been

(38:12):
living there for you know, a long time.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
Is it settled by him?

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Well, yeah, I mean it's no, it's settled right before
he comes to power. So this is I think Vasquez
is his name is, So like right before he takes over,
this gets settled. I'm sure he had a hand in it,
because he's a powerful guy in government. Still at that point,
now rationally in thirty seven, from nineteen twenty nine to
thirty seven, nothing has changed about the situation with Haitians. Right,
there's Haitians who live in the Dominican side of the border.

(38:40):
They work in communities. Even the ones that are going
across have often been part of and working in these
communities for generations. But Trujillo sees them as a and
in fact, Trujillo is part Haitian, right, Like he has
Haitian ancestors, which is very common. Right, It's one island.
It's not all that bit, you know, like I don't.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Want to be because I know there are like two
separate states, but it's it's one island that I voted
in and people have moved colonial parallel.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, And he's also.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, I mean, but you're trying trying to make bigotry
makes sense here.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
Can't Yeah, I don't know what I expected here.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Like, Yeah, it's the same with like the US Mexico border,
right in a lot of ways. Right, you could look
at especially a lot of these like border communities where
the guys in Ice are often like like Hispanic dudes, right, Like,
it's like that's a big thing in the border. It's
this aspect of like like it never makes all that
much sense when you drill down into it. Other than
that it makes sense when you talk about the politicians,

(39:38):
when you talk about guys like Druhillo, for whom it's
not about his deeply held beliefs as much as it
is like I need a fucking scapegoat, and I can
get people angry at the Haitians, you know, right, Like.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
I mean, yeah, in my work a lot, I'm like,
you know, I know logically that this logically.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
Makes no sense, like it's inherently illogical, but it's still
just so fun frustrating and.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, oh my god, it's about to get a lot
more frustrating, but it is. And often scholars do compare
what true Heio does to a lot of like politics
of the US border. These are these are in fact
similar situations in a lot of ways. Now, there's a
difference in that that Haitians had occupied the Dominican Republic
not all that long ago, So there is that aspect

(40:23):
of it which like Mexico never like conquered a chunk
of the United States, right, like we went to war
with them and took a bunch of shit.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
I mean except your Texas history class in fourth grade.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yes, yes, no other you would not know otherwise, right, yes,
so but yeah, this is like a very similar in
a lot of wate situation. So true Heillo starts using
these people as like a a a huge scapegoat, and
there is a belief among many Dominicans that Haitians are

(40:53):
taking jobs and driving down the price of wages, and
so as a result, True Hello gets a lot of
support when he pushes through punit of laws against them,
which he does throughout the mid thirties. In July of
nineteen thirty seven, this process culminates in a new law
which forces foreigners to register with migration officials and leads
to a crackdown on immigration that allows him to deport

(41:14):
eight thousand Haitians. And again, a bunch of those people
had lived in the area for forever, right, Like they're
just being forced out because someone decides in the government,
decides that they're Haitians and anyway, it's ugly. Trhillo goes
on a grand tour of the border in August and
he is furious to see that there are still way
more Haitians than he wants to see, and he doesn't.

(41:34):
He's angry that there's not as much livestock as he'd
expected to see in this part of the countryside. So
he starts talking to peasants as he's doing this like
tour of these villages and they're like, oh, it's Haitian
bandits who stole our animals. Now it's unclear if this
actually happened or if this is the justification that Raphael's
propagandists give for his focus on the border. But there

(41:54):
start being massacres. There's massacres of Dominicans by Haitian partisans.
There's reprisal strikes Dominicans. Yeah, he stole it's a normal thing, like,
but there there starts being more violence. That's a lot
of it's you know, ginned up by his sort of
like the propaganda that starts coming out. But like Yeah,
Dominicans kill Haitians. There's reprisal strikes and reprisal strikes and

(42:17):
reprisal strikes. In early October, Truehio visits a banquet near
the border and he starts to get drunk and at
the point at which he gets really hammered, because he's
this is not an unknown thing to him. He is
and dictators often do this. He'll get hammered and then
announce new policies.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
It's sort of the equivalent of like Trump getting on
Twitter and getting angry and like or Elon or whatever,
like all these guys do this sort of thing. It's
when you have absolute power, you get to you get
to let your whims carry you when you're on Kennemy
or whatever or whatever. Those were good days. Those were
good days. Yeah, we had some We had some fun times.

Speaker 4 (42:58):
I forget January too.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
This is this is not going to be a fun time.
Because he gets drunk and he starts to get into
like an anger spiral and he suddenly he just kind
of at off the cuff gives a speech. I have
learned here that the Haitians have been robbing food and
cattle from the ranchers. To you Dominicans who have complained
of this pillaging committed by the Haitians who live among you.
I answer, I will solve the problem. Indeed, we have

(43:22):
already begun. Around three hundred Haitians were killed in Banika.
The solution must continue. And for emphasis, he starts hammering
his fist on the table as he's giving this speech
about how, like, you know, we killed three hundred Haitians
today and we're going to kill more and more and
more of them soon, and like he basically starts promising,
We're going to do a fucking massacre. And it is
I think unclear if he'd had anyone killed at this point.

(43:44):
There had been clashes prior to this, and it's kind
of unclear how much of this was like locked down
and set in stone before he started drinking, and how
much of this is influenced by the fact that he
starts drinking. But after he gives this kind of drunken announcement,
he orders his forces to move on the border region
and start massacring Haitians. Michelle Wooker writes, quote, Trujillo's soldiers

(44:06):
use their guns to intimidate, but not to kill. For that,
they used machetes, knives, picks, and shovels so as not
to leave bullets in the corpses. Bullet riddled bodies would
have made it obvious that the murderers were government soldiers, who,
unlike most Dominicans, had guns. But death by machete can
be blamed on peasants, on simple men of the countryside
rising up to defend their cattle in lands. Even a

(44:27):
bayonet leaves wounds like those of a simple knife that
the true authors of the crime can be masked. This
elaborate facade left out one crucial detail. If the massacre
was indeed a result of the Dominican peasant uprising against
the Haitians, why were there no casualties on the Dominican side,
and why did a number of Dominicans add a great
risk to their own lives and livelihoods hide Haitians and
efforts to protect them from Truhio's murderers. Trujillo's men searched

(44:50):
the houses in estates of the region one by one,
rounded up Haitians, and initiated deportation proceedings against them. Once
the paperwork was done, the Dominican government had proof that
the Haitians had been sent back to Haiti. The Haitians
were then transported like cattle to isolated killing grounds, where
soldiers slaughtered them at night, carried the corpses to the
Atlantic port at Monte Christi, and threw the bodies to

(45:10):
the sharks for days. The waves carried uneaten body parts
back onto Hispaniola's beaches. So we are past the fun
part of the true Heo story.

Speaker 4 (45:21):
Yeah, that was so much less fun than January sixth
on Twitter. Yes, yeah, once again throwing shit into the sea.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, and it's you know, you can see here too,
there's this echoing of the path, right, the Americans come
in because things are too unstable, there's too much fighting.
We take everybody's weapons so that only the government has guns,
and then the government uses their guns to get people together,
to threaten them together. But the killing itself, and this

(45:49):
is going to be thirty thousand people beaten to death
with clubs, with shovels, with knives, with picks, like this
is one of the most physically brutal acts of mass
killing that I've ever read about.

Speaker 4 (46:03):
Yeah, Jesus, Yeah, that's like raven Nan king shit. Just
like the brutality of the brute force.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Yeah, because the guns can let you collect people, but
if you shoot them then it's like obviously, right, you
lose your.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
You know, because all the other guns are sick.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yes. Haitian author Jack Alexis later wrote about the massacre
that day, such horrors took place under the torrential rain,
that your mouth tasted of ashes, that the air was
bitter to breathe, that shame weighed down on your heart,
and the flavor of all life indeed was repugnant. Jesus
pretty good writer. Yeah. After the first few days, Dominican

(46:42):
soldiers gave up the charade of avoiding the use of
their firearms. They started going door to door massacring Haitian
families anywhere they weren't actively employed and protected by a
foreign company. Many of the people they were killing were
lifelong residents of these areas, which means that number one,
it wasn't a lot of times and to the this
is a massacre executed by the government. There are certainly

(47:05):
some civilians, some Dominican civilians, who support the massacre. A
lot of Dominican civilians hide and try to protect because
these are their neighbors, These are family in some cases, right,
I mean, the fucking dictator is part Haitian, right.

Speaker 4 (47:17):
The people who hide them get killed.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Too sometimes, yes, yeah, I mean yeah, it's a genocide.
So one of the things that is a problem for
the government is that because everyone's just kind of lived
in this area for forever, they don't always look like
you can't always just tell who's a Haitian who's a
Dominican by looking at him right, right, because they live

(47:39):
like three minutes from each other for forever. Right, So
in order to figure out who the Haitians are, what
you do have is Haitians speak French right like or
at least a French creole, and like Dominicans speak like
kind of a Spanish creole, right, And so Haitians pronounce
the term for parsley differently than Dominicans. They can't roll

(48:02):
their rs in the right way. And it's just sort
of like a thing, right, Like you get this in
like polyglot community, where it'll be like, ah, they pronounce
it this way, we call it this way, you know,
it's like a we even have that with like the British, right,
like you, my roommate is ethnically British, and like he
calls it a bath room and like all this shit,
like you know, this is the less fun that just wrong. Yeah,

(48:23):
it is wrong. Soldiers will go door to door or
when they're doing checkpoints, they'll hold up a piece of
parsley and they'll ask the people to to what is
this called? And if they pronounce it the way Haitians
pronounce it, they'll kill them. They'll beat them to death,
they'll shoot them. It becomes called the par Parsley massacre
by a lot of people as a result of this. Yeah,

(48:45):
now it's kind of unclear how often that's the way
that they do it, but this apparently does happen to
some extent to some of the victims, so that's kind
of how it becomes known. The main phase of the
killing lasts roughly a week, so somewhere between twenty and
thirty thousand people massacred, and most of them in a week.
There's some mop up killings the second week. But like

(49:07):
after about a week of this, the international community finds out, right,
like this story for one thing, there's like body parts
washing up in Haiti, right, Like there's survivors who get
out and stuff, and people don't like it when you
do this. Generally like it's bad press, and particularly like
a lot of Americans are like, well, hey, we we're

(49:29):
backing this guy. What the fuck? We don't like this.
You know, we're pretty racist, but like, we don't like
it when this happens, or at least when we're informed
about it, you know, Yeah, don't like, don't let us
hear about it if you're gonna do it. Yeah. And
so Rafael orders an official stop to the massacre on
October eighth, after about a week, but his forces keep

(49:51):
mopping up. They kill a few hundred more families over
the next week or so. By the time the killing
stopped again, the lone estimate is about fifteen thousand. The
high estimate is thirty thous or so twenty twenty five thousands,
probably a pretty realistic death toll. The butchery is severe
enough that international attention lingers, and Raphael he tries to

(50:11):
stop the international press from coming in. You know, he's
got a pretty good lockdown in the cities. But one
American journalist, a fucking hero, really cool guy, Quentin Reynolds,
makes his way through like these cordons and shit and
gets into the countryside near the border of the Dominican
Republican Haiti, and he goes to hospitals, these little field

(50:33):
hospitals and jungle hospitals and shit just in the middle
of nowhere, and he starts talking to victims. He meets
hundreds of survivors, and because of how brutal, he's like
transfixed by the wounds, people who have like gouges in
their skulls. A lot of small children whose hands had
been hacked off, like hundreds of them. And he talks
to these people. He takes down their stories, he hears

(50:55):
what happened. He does his work diligently, and then, showing
more courage than might exist in the American media today,
he flies to the Capital to talk directly to Truthio,
to confront him about what he's heard and seen. And
I should note here that in addition to writing for
Colliers magazine, Quentin was a former NFL linebacker. So he

(51:15):
is he is like, yeah, he's pretty cool guy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
I'm hoping that he like mailed, like mailed his ship
ahead of time before going to the Capitol.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
That is unclear to me. He may just have had,
you know, this is the thirties. He may have just
had this kind of like they will not let and
they're not going to kill me. I am an American
and like in this period of time, we would have
sent the fucking Marines back if he murdered it, right,
Like that's just the way you know it was, we
take you out. Yeah, he may have just had kind
of faith that the dictator, but anyway, still a ballsy

(51:47):
moved to go directly to this guy and Truehillo like
Winds and dines this journalist, he sits him down for Yeah.
He gives Reynolds what Reynolds describes as the best champagne
he ever tasted. And while they're talking, because Reynolds is like,
here's what people they're saying happened to them. They're saying
your soldiers did all this horrible shit, and tru Heil's

(52:08):
like they're exaggerating, Like that can't be what happened. You know,
there was just an uprising of Dominican farmers against Haitians
and like they were just he says, it was a
truly lamentable incident and nobody feels worse about it than
I do. Fucking yeah, real piece of shit. So Quentin
points out, like I have seen a lot of evidence

(52:30):
that directly counters your claims, I don't believe you, and
Truio says, hey, look, it couldn't have been done by
my guys. They were all killed by machetes, not rifles.
My guys would have used rifles. You know, if I
was gonna do he does like an if I did
it sort of thing, or if it was gonna be
my guys. So now I also should note here after
like Quentin come like, it is because of him that

(52:52):
a lot of this story gets out. He's not the
only person who gets it out, but he like writes
a big article about it. He creates a lot of
international attends around this. Quentin Reynolds will go on to
be a war correspondent during World War Two. Pretty cool guy, imo.
So the River Massacre, as it's also sometimes called, was

(53:12):
inspired partly by a Nazi racial theories. Truhio was open
and this is again, as we talked about earlier, kind
of a long trend in Dominican rulers. He wants to
whiten his country, right, he wants to make it whiter,
and he sees the Haitians as darker than the Dominicans, right,
so he wants That's part of what's going on with
him here? And he follows up this massacre with a

(53:35):
dominicanization propaganda campaign that describes his terrible crime as an
act of protection to save Dominicans from the pollution of
Haitian blood.

Speaker 4 (53:44):
Is terrible crime. I thought it was the farmer's terrible crime.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
Oh yeah, right, yeah, like a little bit, a little
bit inconsistent here it is then somewhat ironic. And this
is where it gets real weird. International outcry, especially after
Quentin's article becomes a big problem for him, and so
in order to distract from all the people he's killed,
he offers to take in victims of the Nazi racial policies.

(54:10):
So the year after the River massacre, in nineteen thirty eight,
FDR had convened a thirty two nation conference in France
to discuss resettling Jewish refugees from Nazi territory. The war
had not started yet. Again, this is thirty eight, and
the Nazis were willing to allow immigration, were willing to
allow Jews to leave Nazi Germany as long as they

(54:31):
didn't take their money or property with them. But the
problem was that everyone's real fucking racist. Right. There are
caps on how many Jewish refugees on how many Jewish
people are allowed to enter the United States are allowed
to enter basically every Western country, right, because real fucking
racist and fdr. This is a thing that is going
to be repeatedly an issue for him. Is personally empathetic

(54:55):
but doesn't want to be seen as like soft on
the Jews, right, that is bad for you politically. This
is very racist everyone, like, that's why the Holocaust happens.
Is everybody's fucking terrible, but so the US and basically
no one is willing to This is not just the
United States. He has thirty two countries together, and none

(55:15):
of them are willing to extend their cap on refugees
to raise the number of Jews that they're willing to
take in. They come to this like toothless agreement where
everyone agrees, yeah, we should resettle Jewish people out of
Nazi areas, but no country should be expected to take
in more than their current laws allow. Only one world
leader stands up and offers to take additional Jewish refugees.

(55:38):
That's thirty two. Yeah, Raphaeltruhio because again he's a stan
of Hitler, but he doesn't really believe he has a
different belief set about racial policies. They are inspired by
the Nazis, but in his view, Jews are white. So
if I take Jews in and they start marrying, it'll
whiten this up, you know. Like that is the attitude
that he's coming into this with. Right, So he says

(56:01):
the Dominican Republic can host between fifty thousand and one
hundred thousand Jews. That's a big deal, right.

Speaker 4 (56:07):
Yeah, how many people live in the country at that point?

Speaker 1 (56:10):
I think a little like a million and a half
something like that at this point.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
Maybe that's a huge amount of immigration.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
And that's a lot of potentially a lot of lives
to say, right, yeah, that's that's significant. Does he actually
do it to a degree? We'll talk about that in
a little bit obviously, Like I don't give him moral
credit for this. For one thing he is it's weird
because like he is the only world leader who offers
to do this and as a result of it, a
lot of people's lives are saved. He does it for

(56:38):
the most racist and shitty reasons possible, right, right, Like
he is he is saving Holocaust victims in order to
cover up a genocide that he did. There's no lessons
sometimes from history. Just it's a thing that happened.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
Though, you know, it's a thing that happened.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
And obviously, like you, yeah, if you're one of these,
you you get out of Nazi Germany, however the fuck
you can, Like I'll go to Like I don't care
if this dictator is shitty, like I like, I have
no other options, Like it's nineteen thirty eight, and I'm
a Jewish guy in Germany, Like I'm gonna do whatever,
Go hang.

Speaker 4 (57:13):
Out in the Dominican Republic.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Hell of a lot better than staying in fucking Germany. Yeah, right,
no shade on those people. So we will talk about
what happens with this very strange offer. But first, you
know who else wants to go to the Dominican Republic?
Tell me sponsors of our podcasts.

Speaker 4 (57:32):
Wow, yeah, the racist reasons are not racist.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
It's a roll of the dice. Cat, that's a roll
of the dice, flip of the old coin right there. Anyway,
here's ads. Oh, we're back, and we are talking about
Raphael Truhio's very odd offer to take a bunch of

(57:57):
Jewish refugees in. Now he is still pretty racist, among
other things. He's willing to take these immigrants in as
long as they don't take jobs in certain fields that
he sees as like Jewish fields, like finance. Right, Like, basically,
I will let you come here if you work as
farmers and if you ideally marry and have kids with Dominicans.

Speaker 4 (58:19):
Right, He's like, you can come here, I just don't
want you to be like too.

Speaker 1 (58:21):
Jewy, you know, that is basically what he says, right.
But obviously the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, who are
like some of the people trying to get Jewish people
out of Europe, are like, well, this is the literally
the only offer on the tape. Of course we're going
to take it. Like what else are we going to
fucking do? So they take the offer, and again a

(58:42):
big part of what Truhillo is trying to do here
is distract from the fact that he has just carried
out a genocide. But you know, you can't be picky
if you're the JCS in this situation. So they create
a special organization. The acronym for it is DORSA. I
don't remember what it stands for. It doesn't really matter.
And the purpose of this organization is to take money
generally from diaspora Jews who are trying to get people

(59:03):
out of Europe and buy up land twenty six thousand
acres I think in the Democratic or in the Dominican Republic,
and then settle Jewish people on that land as farmers.
Upon arrival, each new settler is supposed to be given
eighty acres of land ten kyat cows, a mule and
a horse, which compared to Auschwitz is pretty good deal, right, Yeah,

(59:24):
not bad. It's not a great plan. I don't think true.
HEO knows a lot about farming. The specific area that
these folks are able to are given to, like allowed
to buy acre g In is not fertile farmland for
what they want to grow because their initial plan is tomatoes.
I don't exactly know why, but it's a bad place
to grow tomatoes, and there are other problems. For one thing,

(59:48):
most of the younger Jewish people who could get out
of Germany already have, so most of the people who
are coming into the Dominican Republic are fifty year older,
which makes sense when you look at the dim graphics
that remained in the German Jewish and Austrian Jewish communities
in this period of time. But TRUEEO, a lot of
this is like he wants to breed them, right, so

(01:00:09):
like the fact that they're old, he's not thrilled with.
There's other issues with the colony. For one thing, most
of the people who come there, their goal is not
to actually stay in the dr right. Their goal is
to get there to save their lives and then get
a visa to enter the US, which totally reasonable. Like
I'm not criticizing them for this, but it doesn't it's

(01:00:31):
part of why the plan doesn't entirely work the way
that Truhio wants it to. But also the colony doesn't collapse,
and this is really fascinating. So they're having this issue.
The first crops that they tried to work to grow
doesn't work. So Dorset inputs or imports a bunch of

(01:00:51):
Jewish Palestinians who have been living on kibbutzes and brings
them over and has them like helps set up like
farms and meat processing plants and like dairies and stuff
to make cheese. And this actually takes off. Like with
these like kibbutzam in they build a thriving community. I

(01:01:14):
think there's never more than about five hundred people who
live in it at a time, but something like ten
thousand something like that, like fifteen hundred, mite, Like there's
there's a few thousand people the numbers are kind of unclear,
who move through the colony on their way to the US.
So this does save a lot of lives. And there
is still a Jewish population in this area, in this

(01:01:35):
colony called Sosua to this day. And in fact, most
of the butter and cheese made in the Democratic or
made in the Dominican Republic is made by businesses run
by these Jewish families, so to this day still around.
So that's that will be the only nice thing we
talk about today. But that's nice. Yeah, that's good. Again,

(01:01:57):
I don't give Truheo credit for this. I give these
people credit for like surviving and making something actually kind
of rad out of a very.

Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
Bad hands up for racism.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Yeah, yeah, this is this is the one time racism
saved lives in the Holocaust.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
We're solving one genocide with another gener Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Again, there's not always lessons to take out.

Speaker 4 (01:02:19):
Of fiery fire. I guess, or cancel each other out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
I don't know math it doesn't can't. No, it certainly
does not cancel it out.

Speaker 6 (01:02:26):
It's just a thing that's just for the sake of
everyone that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:30):
Loves to hate me. I'm totally kidding. Genocide is bad.
I've always been consistent about that, anti.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Genesis, anti genocide. Yeah, for example, a nice man would
have tried to save people from the Holocaust, not to
cover up his genocide. Totally agree, Yeah, much better.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
Sophie is suspiciously quiet about being anti genocide.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Oh yeah, no, Sophie's I don't actually know how to
make that into a joke. So as you all might
have picked up about the fact that you know he's
he's talking about wanting to whiten up the Dominican Republic
and all that stuff that that's a big factor in
like what he's doing here, I should start talking about
how he conceived of his own race, because obviously Raphael

(01:03:15):
has some Haitian ancestry and has some weird hang ups
with this, which brings me to the matter of his face.
One of Truheillo's great shames is again that he is
darker than he wants to look like he is. He
considers that to be to having he considers having darker
skin to be something shameful, and as a result, he
is known to wear thick it's described as pancake makeup

(01:03:37):
at all time. He always has whitening makeup on his face,
and he's bad at applying it, like it is like noticing. Yeah,
he looks like a mannequin, like he's just got it
slathered on all the time. Yeah, yeah, come on, man,
Like Bare Minerals has some good stuff, like yeah, anyway, whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
He knows that, but not a third basketball player happening?

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
What is happening?

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
Why do you know what Bare Minerals is?

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
I don't know because I I have your I've had,
you know, dated people and stuff. You go buy gifts
and ship and the sport. I'm I'm good at getting gifts.
You know you are.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
No, no, no, no, I I can't even I can't even
deny Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Sarcastic, thoughtful as ass.

Speaker 4 (01:04:23):
Yeah, so he knows Minerals. That's very sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
That's yeah, so one of again.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
So no the basketball player's name by end of day
or we're gonna have our problem.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
Uher, that's my favorite player.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Yeah, there you go. So he's wearing this pancake makeup
and this is kind of This is very much in
line with It's not just about like skin color, it's
about He's very insecure about his origins, right, including the
fact that he comes from poverty. And this insecurity extends
to like he when once he One of the reasons
why we don't have as much to hail about his

(01:05:00):
childhood as we'd like is that he goes too great
links to cover up everything about his early life once
he is in power, including he kind of goes to
war against his old nickname chippeda or bottle cap. And
this is a fun little anecdote from The Little Caesar
of the Caribbean, which is a biography of truthio quote. Somehow,

(01:05:20):
the nickname was eventually eliminated as a result of one
of Trujillo's earliest biographical rewrites. To accomplish this, however, he
had to banish the word from the language. Many people
who stubbornly disregarded the prohibition paid dearly for their daring.
Though successful in suppressing the word, the General Lissimo has
failed to abolish its meaning. The natural and probably innocent
boyhood passion for collecting meaningless trifles remains with him to

(01:05:43):
this day. Although considerably changed in scope in his maturity.
Trujillo collects medals and decorations, of which he possesses more
than fifty.

Speaker 4 (01:05:51):
So God, I loved her dictators, which is like a
shit on a.

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
Fake Yeah that why wouldn't so.

Speaker 4 (01:05:57):
The heavish jacket in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:05:58):
Yeah, it is funny. It's also very funny to me.
I mean it's horrible, but like he has people killed
and tortured for using the word bottle cap.

Speaker 4 (01:06:07):
That is insane. That is an insane thing to do.
Then will literally.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
Torture people instead of just collecting bottle caps and going
to therapy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
It is. It's also this weird pattern with Truhio where
there's so many aspects of him that are like related
to things every dictator does, but just twisted in a
weird direction. Like Joseph Stalin has like people air brushed
out of pictures and shit, you know, once he has
them killed in order to hide that they ever existed.
Raphael does the same thing with the colloquial term for

(01:06:40):
bottle cap. Like that's such a weird anyway, and like
so unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. Also, like it's like it's pretty
normal in this in the Dominican Republic, and I think
elsewhere for kids to collect bottle caps, like it's not
a great shame, but it makes this it's a thing
that a poor kid does. Rich kids are not collecting
bottle cap you know. And he doesn't want people to

(01:07:02):
think that about him.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
I think it's cute. I think it's cute that he
was collecting bottle caps. That he was beating up people
and getting his brothers to hurt people to get bottle
caps well charming.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
You know what, kat, When I sacrifice a ram tonight
in order to commune with the deceased soul of Raphael Trueel,
I will let him know that you thought that was cute,
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
And then he's in a torture me until eternity.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
No, he's dead now. All he can do is like
knockover trinkets on your wall.

Speaker 4 (01:07:31):
I don't have any bottle caps from knockover. Reason to
be disappointed.

Speaker 1 (01:07:34):
He's gonna be pissed. So as as the forties become
the fitties, true Heo grew increasingly comfortable in his role
as dictator. He built a rigid schedule for himself, one
that assured he was awake every day at five am
and followed the exact same route every day in his routine.
This would eventually be the death of him, but for
a while it works pretty well. After his early evening walk,

(01:07:57):
he often had a driver take him around in a
small car through the streets of the capitol, always without escort,
usually without bodyguards. Some of this is that, like he
just has that much faith in the system he's built
to protect him, and it works for like thirty years,
Like he has legitimately built, like done such a good
job of kind of cracking down on resistance that for

(01:08:19):
the most part this works for him.

Speaker 4 (01:08:22):
So do the peasants still like him?

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
A lot of them do. I don't, like, there's no
pole data, right, but he does seem to be pretty
popular for most of his reign with the peasantry. And
when he has resistance and shit, when he's finally killed,
it's not the peasants that do it, right, it's the
kind of like upper middle class to rich families and stuff,
these families who had maybe more power before he got in.

(01:08:45):
That's it's like the elites were. Resistance to his regime
primarily comes from so yeah esplay and his early biographers
often describe him as having a lot of dates with girls.
This like that's also a major part of his his
day to day schedule. Obviously, women are being induced to

(01:09:06):
sleep with him through direct threat, but it's it's generally
enough to know that, like while the old man wants
your company, and you can either have this be a
violent process or you'll get something out of it at
the end, right, like normal dictator stuff, not to you know,
wash over it. There's just not a lot of direct detail.
But this thing that's happening, I think he I believe

(01:09:29):
he has a number.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Of kids, like a wife or like an air parent.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, well that the air thing is
more complicated. He kind of goes back and forth somewhat,
but like, yes, to an extent, he attempts to do that.
So yeah. A good example of the stakes here, you know,
of being one of the women that he is pursuing
is the case of Maria Mercedes Merabal. She was an

(01:09:53):
upper class woman who married into a family that was
anti true heel and was committed to the underground resistance
efforts to his regime. Right, So these are elites, These
are wealthy people who are trying to fund and carry
out resistance to eventually force Trueio out of power, and
she marries into a family doing this. So, because she
is in the upper crack class, she's rich. She's still

(01:10:14):
attending social events where Trujillo is present, right, and at
one of these dances, he makes sexual advances towards her, and,
fully aware of how dangerous this is, she slaps him.
Now that's pretty baller. But also there are going to
be consequences for slapping the dictator, right, yeah, because he's

(01:10:34):
the dictator in this case, she spends a little bit
of time in jail. He puts her father in prison
for two years, and because he's an old man, he's
basically starved and tortured and then released and dies pretty
much immediately after getting out of prison. Now that makes
Maria angry. Probably don't need to belabor that point. So

(01:10:55):
she and her sisters Patria and Minerva start to organize
together and they create the nexus of an underground movement
aimed at ousting Trujio from power. They came to be
known as the Butterflies or Las Matoposas, and they were
a major part, like a nexus of the underground resistance
to the regime until in nineteen fifty nine, a group

(01:11:16):
of Dominican exiles try to overthrow the government. This had
happened a decade earlier, right, a bunch of like Dominicans
who'd been forced out by Trujeo came in with guns
to try to overthrow the government. But when this cracked out,
or when this insurgency in nineteen fifty nine gets defeated,

(01:11:36):
there's a crackdown and it's so brutal that it convinces
the mariposas they have to accelerate their plans to force
Truio out, so they start planning to assassinate the president. Unfortunately,
they get caught. Trueo's secret services are competent, they're good
at what they do. They uncover evidence that this is
being planned, and you know, sexism being what it is.

(01:11:58):
trueO arrests their husbands and throws them in prison. Right,
so the Marabelle sisters are stay out of jail for
a while. They actually travel up to visit their husbands
who are in jail as they're kind of like waiting
to be sentenced, and then on their way back into
town from this visit. On November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty

(01:12:19):
Trueo's men ambush them on a rural mountain road, forced
them out of their car, and beat all of them
to death. This is a very famous moment. It's kind
of it catalyzes a lot of the resistance Hero's regime.
Their Mariposas are still celebrated today for their role in
the resistance. This is like one of the really searing
moments of Trueheo regime. For obvious reasons.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
Was it in like the Dominican press at all? No?
Or was that suppressed?

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
Yeah? I mean, I think this is the kind of
thing that spreads primarily through the conversations in the underground,
I believe, if I'm not mistaken. Truhio's regime tries to
claim that it's like bandits or something. You know who
doesn't so there is some news about it. But Trujillo's
regime has its secret police, which initially is a military unit,

(01:13:07):
but in nineteen fifty seven he creates a civilian led
intelligence directorate loyal to the dictator, specifically to watch the military.
This is normal shit. You know. He's got like his
famous prison where he tortures people, right, He's got his
secret police who do normal secret police shit. That is
all what every dictator is. I think we have talked
enough about that that I'm not glossing it over. What

(01:13:30):
I think is interesting because it's very different from a
lot of dictators I've read about, is what actually keeps
him in power is not just terror. At the same
time as he is building this very traditional repression apparatus,
he is also systematically extending himself into every major industry
in the country. He is nationalizing a number of foreign businesses,

(01:13:50):
and he makes himself and his family the center of
the entire economy. By the nineteen fifties, most Dominican peasants
are in some way employed by the Trujillos, and so
that's how they make their living. Right, It's directly connected
to this family, how because they control every industry. If
you have a job in the dr it's probably through
a company that they own, one way or the other. Right,

(01:14:12):
in addition to handing out jobs in the government through patronage,
he's a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:14:16):
Slicker than like a lot of other dictators. I feel
like they get sloppy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
Around your ten He's very smart, and he does get sloppy.

Speaker 4 (01:14:23):
He gets sloppy with like the genocide inconsistent, but like
it's smart. He's still doing moves to keep peasants on
the side.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
Yeah, and he's very Yeah, he is a very he's
a methodical thinker. Yeah, in a way that a lot
of dictators they're like like possibly, you know, carrying out
that genocide. There are these moments where his kind of
passions carry him, but he thinks through what he's doing
to a significant extent. And I'm going to quote again
from Lauren Derby's book The Dictator's Seduction, which I really

(01:14:53):
do recommend. It's a great book about Truheo. He then
fashioned all public works, policy, formation and patronage is personal
gifts from the dictator to the pueblo or people. With
his family and a few close friends, Trujillo used the
state to develop a system of highly profitable economic monopolies.
As he gradually took over all core national industries such
as meat, milk, sugar, rice, oil, cement, and beer. He

(01:15:16):
then used the law to guarantee their profitability and allocated
state contracts to his family and cronies. For example, he
prohibited the production of sea salt, so the public would
have to purchase salt from the Baharuna Mines, which he controlled.
His wife, Maria Martinez, was allotted a government bank for
casing state paychecks. Trujillo's sister's husband was given the military

(01:15:36):
pharmaceutical contract, a highly lucrative enterprise given the massive expansion
of the armed forces. In this extreme example of prebndalism,
the appropriation of the state for private ends, the state
became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo
and his circle. Trhi eventually became one of the wealthiest
men in Latin America. Under his regime, there was no
effective distinction between the national treasury and the dictator's own purse.

(01:16:00):
He also used the state as a legal screen which
shielded the public from the regime's extraordinarily lawlessness and corruption.
He enabled his own divorce, for example, by altering divorced legislation,
and this is very effective. This is a big part
of what allows him to maintain power. It is also
going to be part of his downfall because where this

(01:16:24):
leads is the nationalization by trueO of foreign owned businesses,
including businesses owned by Americans. Right, so he is kind
of taken. He is reducing our ability to profit. Now
we had been on his side and had helped fund him,
had given him more loans, had given him weapons through
the early stages of the Cold War. Because he's an
anti communist. Right now, our support of Truhio, to be fair,

(01:16:45):
is not rooted in anti communism because of how long
this guy is in power. It goes back further than that,
right But once the Cold War really gets going, he
re fashions himself as an anti communist. Some of this
came naturally to him. He and Castro hate each other.
So in nineteen fifty six, when Castro is planning his
revolt against Batista, Trujillo had offered the Batista regime military

(01:17:10):
supplies that didn't wind up working out for Batista. Castro
overthrows Batista. And in nineteen fifty nine, when that Dominican
exile force had attempted to overthrow the Trujillo regime, a
lot of the guys who go in with that are Cubans.
Like the Cuban government is arming, like it's a little

(01:17:32):
bit their bay of pigs, right, is trying to overthrow
Trujillo's government. Obviously not a bad thing to want to
overthrow the Trujillo regime. I'm not really being critical here,
but it is a big part of why Castro supports
this is because Trujillo had tried to stop him, right like,
so these guys have a little bit of like a
thing going on. Trujillo responds to this by plotting his

(01:17:55):
own invasion of Cuba, which would not have worked and
never winds up panning out. So he constant compensated by
having his men loot the Cuban embassy in Trujillo the city,
which is what he's renamed the Capitol right. Raphael also
had a long standing rivalry with Romulo Bettencourt, the president
of Venezuela. In nineteen fifty one, one of his men

(01:18:17):
had tried to kill Bettencourt when he visited Havana by
stabbing him with a poisoned syringe. This led to some
understandable anger by Bettencourt against Trujillo, and so Bettencourt started
publicly accusing the Dominican dictator of being a crooke and
a gangster, which is not wrong here. So Trujillo, now
that he's been insulted, tries to blow up Bettencourt with

(01:18:38):
a car bomb, and Bettencourt survives with severe burns. Now,
all of this is fine, dictator on dictator violence, no
problem either way here. Really it's just fun to read about.
But by nineteen sixty the United States is starting to
get pissed off. Eisenhower considered the attacks on Bettencourt to
be the last straw and was somewhat confusingly convinced. Like

(01:19:02):
Eisenhower's worry and why he's like allows the CIA to
try to overthrow Trujillo is he's he's convinced that Trujillo's
going to turn the Dominican Republic into a fortress for communism,
which is completely illogical. I think it might have been that,
like he thinks that Trujillo is so out of pocket
that he's going to create a revolution and then the

(01:19:23):
communists will get in power. Oh okay, yeah, because he's
like he's so bad at being like He's like, I
think this guy is out of control now, and I
don't want him to be replaced by communists. He is.
I don't see much evidence that the Communists were ever
likely to take over. I don't think they could have

(01:19:44):
done worse than Truio, but I just don't think that
that was really likely but that Eisenhower is convinced of
that in any case, so he tells the CIA to
help the anti Trujillo underground do a coup. Now, I
will say, of all of the coup is that the
US has backed. I don't really have a problem with
trying to kill Raphael Trujillo, right, Like I'm not don't

(01:20:06):
have a super big issue with it. But we're bad
at this, like we usually are when we try to
do cus right, Like, we're pretty dog shit at this
stuff for the most part. And it is a messy process. Now,
part of why it's messy is just the fact that
Eisenhower kind of approves trying to do this, but he
does it right at the end of his administration, and

(01:20:27):
then the Kennedy administration, and so it's just chaotic, right,
We're changing administrations and this kind of get lost in
the mix. And then right when we start, so Kennedy's
people do send a bunch of guns, like a bunch
of rifles over to some Dominican dissidence to assassinate tru Heio.
But like a week after we give them guns, the

(01:20:48):
Bey of Pigs happens. And again there's just not a
lot of focus on follow up. We kind of hand
them some guns. We fuck up overthrowing the Cuban government. No,
we're terrible at that. It's just no one's priority, you know.
It's it's one of those kinds of things.

Speaker 4 (01:21:04):
We can't let them go to the crime. Yes, so
it's just like you know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
Whatever, Yeah, well, whatever happens, you know, we're gonna go back.
Really this thing. Yeah, you got to remember here, everybody
in the JFK administration is on fuckloads of amphetamines right now.
So it's hard to focus, you know, or it's easy
to focus, but it's easy to lose track of stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:21:24):
Yeah, they talk about how they want to open a
bar together.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from
a write up by the Warfare History Network about what
happens next. In February fifteenth, nineteen sixty one, Secretary of
State Dean Rusk sent a letter to President Kennedy informing
him of the developments regarding the Rafael Trujillo assassination plots.
It read, our representatives in the Dominican Republic have at
considerable risk to those involved, established contacts with numerous leaders

(01:21:50):
of the underground opposition and the CIA has recently been
authorized to arrange for delivery to them outside the Dominican
Republic of small arms and sabotage equipment Now equipment sat
like bombs and ship you know.

Speaker 6 (01:22:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
Sorry. After the Bey of Pigs disaster, the Kennedy administration
tries to convince the dissidents not to kill tru Heio,
as the political climate was not conducive at that moment. However,
the machine guns were dispatched to the US consulate and
we're taken into possession. Two days before Truhio's murder, Kennedy
sent a cable to Dearborn informing him that the United
States did not condone political assassination in any form and

(01:22:27):
that the United States must not be associated with the
attempt on Truio's life. So I will say, we're this
is like the one time where we tried to assassinate
a guy and it was like, yeah, I probably should
have gotten got but we immediately try to get out
of it, like we do machine guns.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Please get get it.

Speaker 4 (01:22:51):
You could use it for something else, like use it
some art.

Speaker 6 (01:22:53):
Yeah, we don't like this. We're not part of the
throw the sea with the others again. Can I don't
know how much experience you have with dissidents, but historically,
when you give them a bunch of guns, they're gonna
use them. Right, It's kind of what everyone knows about dissidents. Bulletles,
that's right, that's right, all those dissidents you're arming. So

(01:23:13):
in the end, it was true Hello's iron rigid schedule
and his habit of driving around without guards that would
do him in. On May thirtieth, a group of assassins
armed with US guns waited by the route they knew
the dictator would take from his girlfriend's house to the Capitol.
When Trujillo's car approached, they opened fire. You know, they
wound him.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
His his his driver response returns fire, so does tru Heio.
He like gets out of the car with a gun,
but some of the assassins double back and they just
they gun him down and he dies on the spot.
They throw his corpse in the trunk of a car,
and they like park it outside the American Consulate because
they don't really know what to do after that point, right, Like,

(01:23:51):
uh shit, what do we do with this guy? Fuck?

Speaker 4 (01:23:57):
I guess this is logical. Just throw this see, man,
that's what we've been doing this whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:24:01):
You can't throw them in the sea. Now the assailants
like fleet at this point, and some of them do survive.
I actually read an we know who they are? Yeah, yeah,
their names are their heroes now, oh yeah, we actually
I read an interview with like one of these dudes
who was like alive pretty recently and was like, yeah,
I have I still have the shoes that I killed

(01:24:21):
him in, and every year on the anniversary of his murder,
I like put them on again just to like walk
around down in my killing the president's shoes.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
I was looking at pictures of true hero and there's
like this BBC article that I'm piking on now and
it says I shot the corolest dictator in the Americas,
And it's just like this really old dude.

Speaker 1 (01:24:41):
Yeah, and honestly, like what a flex being, Like, Yeah,
killing the president's shoes. I put them on when I'm
killing the president or just you know, having a walk about. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:53):
It's like people are like these are like my lucky boxers.
We're like, this is my assassination, this is.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
My shot president pants fucking dope, like really like like God,
tear flex right there.

Speaker 3 (01:25:07):
I'm not saying assassinate anyone, but if you do, make
sure your outfit is crush.

Speaker 1 (01:25:11):
You have a nice outfit and save the shoot well no,
don't actually bad idea, burn everything you're wearing. I mean
to assassination sense, right.

Speaker 3 (01:25:21):
Just make sure you get like hanged in like a
cool outfit. The moral of the story is dressed well
all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:25:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:29):
Also with Druhu, I do.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
I mean, I can't use the word respect, but I
like that he went out shooting, Like I appreciate that yours. Yeah,
I mean he's like, after all these years, he's driving
to his girlfriend's house and he gets shot, and he's like,
fuck it got a gun somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
Yeah, he does kind of scarface it a little bit,
tries to at.

Speaker 4 (01:25:50):
Least, yeah, tries to. It totally feels Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Now, the coup that these assassins had had like hope
that there would be a coup government and up they
would overthrow. That does not really happen. Trujillo's son, Ramphis
takes over their presidency and gets rounds up a lot
of these guys and a lot of their friends and family.
He kills a bunch of people. He feeds some of
them alive to sharks. Rampis sucks os so is not

(01:26:21):
in power long right, because Trujillo Raphael Trho, pretty smart dictator.
Ramphis again up for one thing, you just know by
that name, he's not right.

Speaker 4 (01:26:31):
There's never going to be another president and it's not
spelled the way you know.

Speaker 1 (01:26:37):
And so within a couple of months he's got this
power struggle with a jou Joaquin Bellagher, who is another
Dominican politician, and uh, it just doesn't work out. There's
a bunch of rioting in the streets, and Ramphis winds
up fleeing the country with a bunch of stolen money,
uh and and never comes back. Yeah, you know, there's

(01:27:00):
more riots and stuff in his wake. The American embassy
becomes convinced that the Communists are going to take over
the country, and so LBJ sends twenty two thousand American
troops to restore order. Yeah, there was no communist revolt,
This was never a real threat. But we wind up
there again.

Speaker 4 (01:27:18):
Or like no.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
Ramphis Also, I just looked at Ramphis on his Wikipedia page.
I don't know if you looked at this, but some
say that his dad made him a brigadier general at
the age of nine and also a colonel when he
was four.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
Yeah, that's classic dictator stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):
Yeah, with the equivalent pay and privileges of being a colonel.

Speaker 4 (01:27:37):
He was like, I'm a doctor, you're a colonel.

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
Yeah, yeah, yep. And he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't
live that long. He dies in sixty nine, thankfully.

Speaker 4 (01:27:48):
So that's how long are we in the Dominican Republic
after that?

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
Not that long, I don't think, but also, you know,
to an extent kind of forever too. Yeah, that's story
for another day though, what happens next. But you know,
I think the important thing to take out of this
is that when the US gets involved in your country,
it always ends well, and it always ends cleanly. We're

(01:28:13):
not just like back again and again over and over again,
like fucking shit up with guns and you know, backing dictators.
That never happens. Like we're we come in clean and
we come out clean.

Speaker 3 (01:28:27):
That's when you depose the dictator of the country, we'll
back you up. You don't just leave him in the
trunk of a card for the embassy.

Speaker 4 (01:28:34):
You know we're there.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
It's oh man, it is funny, good stuff. So that
was bad raphaeol truheo. Bad us involvement in his dictatorship.
Also bad us involvement after his dictatorship not great.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
Yeah, I mean, as far as dictators go, there were
like a bunch of little twists, like he did everything
just slightly.

Speaker 1 (01:28:59):
Differ interesting dictator.

Speaker 3 (01:29:01):
Interesting dictator for sure, Like he followed a lot of
the formula, but he was like, I gotta do it
my way.

Speaker 1 (01:29:07):
Yeah. Yeah, he's a little bit like, you know, like
the Bloodhound Gang, right, Sophie, come on, we all we're
all big fans of the Bloodhound Gang. He's a little
bit like.

Speaker 4 (01:29:19):
The third Property brother.

Speaker 3 (01:29:20):
You know, he looks like the other Property brothers, but
they just got a.

Speaker 4 (01:29:24):
Little something different.

Speaker 1 (01:29:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Yeah, came a third basketball player. Do it? Do it?

Speaker 4 (01:29:31):
Do it?

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):
Uh? Uh? The one?

Speaker 6 (01:29:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
A third one? I know you do? You claim you're Jackson,
You claim you're better at basketball, you say, Andrew Jackson. Well, Lebron, Lebron,
thank you. I feel better.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
Welcome.

Speaker 4 (01:29:47):
I just took like two and a half hours to
get there. That was healing for me.

Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
That's good. Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
Can't you have anything you want to plug.

Speaker 3 (01:29:55):
Uh yeah, I talk about right wing media and Fox
News and commedia, just like all those assholes doing stuff.
You can check me out on TikTok at Katamboo and
then same on YouTube.

Speaker 4 (01:30:07):
Whe I do long form content.

Speaker 1 (01:30:09):
Sweet excellent. Well you can find uh me listening to
the Bloodhound Gang, which I will be doing after this
episode of our show finished.

Speaker 5 (01:30:20):
Happy for you. You can find my book After the Revolution
wherever books are sold, and you can find Rafael true
heio dead because he's.

Speaker 1 (01:30:31):
Fucking got got oh yeah deadish ship. So yeah, you know,
and uh you know, for those of you listening, I'm not.
I would never encourage anyone to assassinate an elected leader.
But if you do, keep your shoes.

Speaker 4 (01:30:46):
Keep the shoes, Yeah, keep the shoes, shoes.

Speaker 1 (01:30:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:30:51):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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