EP81: Rafael Trujillo

Rafael Trujillo was Generalissimo of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The violence deployed by his regime was extraordinary, with Trujillo’s men murdering an estimated 30,000 Haitians in a matter of weeks in 1937, not to mention thousands of Dominicans across three decades, in what my guest today describes as the violence of the Trujillo plantation. Trujillo’s story, and indeed the story of the Dominican Republic, can be read as a story of domination, perhaps ...