Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's brutal dictator, rose from a violent childhood collecting bottle caps to leading a coup in 1930 with U.S. backing. Leveraging his role in the American-created Constabulary, he orchestrated fraudulently won elections and suppressed labor unions, mirroring the atrocities of Captain Merkley during the 1916 occupation. Ultimately, Trujillo's thirty-year reign exemplifies how foreign intervention enabled local strongmen to consolidate power through terror, destabilizing the nation for decades. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Doom Looming Over Her Head00:03:45
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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What's looming my sword of Damocles?
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the doom looming over each of us that could sweep down and just shatter our worlds at any second.
My guest today to talk about the feeling of having doom looming directly over her head is Kat Abu.
Kat, you talk, you write a, sorry.
We were just talking about your apartment and the looming death art that's over your head right now.
Yeah, it's great.
It's terrifying.
I hate it.
Yeah, like I'm nervous, but I've also promised that if this thing hanging over your head falls on you, that I will promise to vindicate you and post it wherever your heart desires.
Thank you.
I appreciate having Sophie as an Avenger for me.
Yes, I do.
You are a researcher who studies and also professionally makes fun of Fox News on the TikToks, TikTok, and other platforms.
Kat, where can people find you first off before we get in here?
Because they should, in fact, find you.
Track you down.
You can find me on TikTok and YouTube.
I do long form and short form content.
And then I'm also signing up for like the billion other sites that are popping up.
And all of these.
You're going to get on threads.
Oh, God.
I'm on threads and it's just, I forget that it exists.
And then I had to post a TikTok there.
I'm just like, I'm making so many thumbs up.
I'm really got on threads.
And then I was like, I don't want to be here.
And then I, and then, so I think there's an account.
I've never used it.
Yeah.
Do any cat, you are, you are in the, in the business of professionally surveilling, you might say, a whole bunch of people who would really like to be either dictators or the direct employees of dictators.
Haiti's Powerful Military Run00:14:09
Absolutely.
That's the perfect way to describe them.
So today I thought we would talk about one of the OG right-wing dictators.
We are talking about like a classic, like one of the all-timers.
Guy is like he's not the Jordan of right-wing dictators, because that's got to be, that's got to be our boy Hitler um, but he's like, he's like the Scotty Pippin of right-wing dictators for sure.
Yeah yeah, we are talking about Rafael Trujillo.
I'm like really proud of you for knowing two basketball players names first.
Oh yeah, I feel like.
I feel like uh, i've trained you and you've done well, it's only taken six years.
Look, I know other basketball players like uh magic magic magic Jimmy, something like that, right?
Uh-huh, I think that's right.
That sounds right.
Are we good?
Yeah, we're most definitely.
Sophie says we're right.
Yeah, Magic Jimmy, Scotty Pippin uh um um, the Big Bopper uh, that sounds right.
What do you know about Rafael Trujillo?
I know nothing about Rafael Trujillo okay uh, do you know much about the Dominican Republic, which was the country that he he dictated very basics of like geography and vibes that is.
That is perfect.
That is basically what I knew about the Dominican Republic before.
I mean we, we did some episodes on Haiti, on Papadoc and Baby Dock, a year or so ago, which is where I I really did my first deep dive into the history of the island that both of those countries are on Hispaniola.
Um, but you know, it's interesting because, like the Dominican Republic was very nearly a state, like it came within a hair's breadth of being part of the United States, probably would have been wound up more like Puerto Rico is in terms of like, its legal status, I have no idea.
We are absolutely central to everything that has happened in the history of the Dominican Republic and most of us are like you know you, and like I was you know, before I I started reading on this topic, like it's just not a we, like Americans, barely hear about it.
Right, when you do, it's like oh, someone had a wedding in the Dominican Right like that's that's, I think, the normal amount of knowledge most Americans have, which is up because we um, we've caused a lot of problems over there.
Um yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the case with a lot of these types of places where you don't hear anything and then you're like oh, we are completely responsible for their demise.
Yeah, and it with the Dominican Republic and with Haiti, a big part of it is that they are so close to us right, like it is, it is close enough that it could have realistically been part of the United States from a like, like in the, from a political standpoint, like it's not uh, further away than a number of like, other island possessions that our country has taken over the years, and we do take possession of the Dominican Republic for a period, so we have the funding.
Was it us or was it now?
No, in this case, it's it's us and Spain and France who are like the ones really, and Haiti actually.
Haiti gets some around in the Dominican Republic too.
So we're gonna have a fun time talking about this, because before we, before we, discuss Rafael Trujillo who, is true, he's.
He's interesting because he's both like, in some ways, a kind of traditional strongman dictator, but in some ways, he might be like one of the smartest dictators that i've come across in terms of how he builds and uses power and how he like manipulated, Manipulated his population and exercised control over them.
He's really unique in a lot of ways.
There's some very interesting aspects of how he kind of wields power that are unique to him.
So this is exciting.
We're going to have a good time talking about this horrible, horrible man who did a genocide.
Can I ask ahead of time, how long did he rule?
Or is that like a spoiler?
Almost 30 years.
Okay, goddamn.
When you go, when you're into dictators, and Sophie and I are big dictator stance, love them.
There's like, I would say, broadly speaking, three kinds of dictators.
You've got your flash in the pan dictators, right?
Your guys who like take over and they're there for a couple of years and then they get cooed or assassinated, right?
And they're out pretty quick.
You know, even Hitler kind of is a short-termer, right?
Like he's only in there about 12 years.
And then you've got what I would say is like, you know, the dictator equivalent of like living to like 80 or so, which is around 30 years.
That's Stalin.
That's Mao.
That's where Trujillo is.
And then every now and then, it's very rare for one of these guys to last more than 30 years.
And that's when you're when you're in like the 30 to 35 year range reigning as a dictator, that's like absolute goat tier in terms of, you know, holding power.
You know, those guys are tough sons of bitches.
But Trujillo was like right at 29 years.
So that's a pretty good run as dictators go.
He's not, he's not bad.
Probably shouldn't be talking about these guys like they're like they're like they're your buddies.
I don't know how else to do it at this point.
You know, you, you, you, it's.
You called him Scotty Pippin, which is really a Pippin-esque character.
So let's talk some history and geography.
Both, as I said, the Dominican Republic and Haiti are on the island of Hispaniola, which is famous for being the first place that Columbus discovered.
Today, Haiti is about a third or so of the island, and the Dominican Republic lays over the bulk of the island.
Now, initially, all of Hispaniola was claimed by Spain, right?
But you know, Spain.
They lost interest pretty quickly because people started, they started quote unquote discovering the rest of South America.
And like, Hispaniola didn't have a lot of silver.
And that's kind of was their whole thing for a while was like, how much silver can we get to wreck our own economy via terrible inflation?
Like, let's really fuck ourselves over for the rest of time by importing way too much fucking silver.
So Hispaniola kind of becomes a backwater after this initial burst of excitement because, you know, Spain, they got their Peru, they got Mexico.
They're all up in all those places, right?
So the first slaves start being brought to Hispaniola as a result of the fact that like the initial folks that they are working, because like since there's not a huge, you know, they do have some silver mines.
They have, you know, they're mining some other stuff and they've got some agricultural plantations set up.
And initially the people that they're using to work these plantations are the indigenous Taino and Carib peoples.
But they kill a huge number of those people, right?
Like the majority of the folks who had lived there pre-contact.
So this importation of slaves to Hispaniola starts because they're like, well, we need more laborers, right?
By the start of the 1600s, freedmen on the island outnumbered enslaved people.
So it's not initially what it's going to become, this kind of like massive slave plantation system.
That actually takes a little while to really get going.
Most slave ownership on Hispaniola was more intimate and smaller in scale than the vast plantations that would come to dominate Haiti or the American South, right?
Masters rarely had much more than one or two enslaved people who engaged in small-scale wage labor alongside them and their families.
Since cash was in short supply, most slaves on the island in this early period were taken through piracy.
They were also often stolen, French colonial slaves.
So like literally like French boats full of slaves would come by and people would, you know, raid them and take people off of them.
In 1697, there's a big kerfuffle and Spain and France have a treaty over Hispaniola.
And this is where France gets what's going to become Haiti.
And the chunk of Hispaniola that becomes Haiti is the colony of San Domain, right?
That's the name of like the French colony that's going to wind up rebelling and becoming Haiti.
And the French treated their possessions on Hispaniola just like they treated their possessions on all of the other Caribbean islands where they were involved.
So they would just started importing huge numbers of enslaved people, primarily to man sugar plantations, right?
That's the big fucking business in this period of time.
And it's a pretty shitty thing to farm.
You don't want to be a sugar farmer.
It's not a long life.
Now, the Spanish colony that is going to become, you know, kind of the center of what becomes the Dominican Republic is called Santo Domingo.
So you've got the French San Domain and you've got the Spanish Santo Domingo, which is a little bit confusing, which is why we're going to start calling them the Dominican Republic in Haiti very soon here.
And the economy in Santo Domingo is very different from Haiti.
Haiti is turning into this like slave plantation economy.
In Santo Domingo, there is still slavery, but it's again, it's on a much smaller scale.
Much of the economy, rather than being based around like sugar plantations, is cattle ranching, some tobacco growing and kind of small scale export of wood and animal hides.
And Spain is not thrilled with this state of affairs because it's a lot less profitable than San Domingue, right?
Like this kind of like all this small scale stuff is not making the sort of money that San Domain is making France.
But Spain is kind of, it's very difficult to actually govern beyond like the city of San Domain.
So you've got this city that is effectively the colony.
And then anytime you're outside of the walls of the city in the hinterland and these hills and mountains and stuff, it's basically ungovernable, right?
And this kind of population of what's going to become the Dominican Republic fills up very quickly with a mix of you've got some freed slaves, some escaped slaves from what's going to become Haiti.
They intermarry with indigenous peoples and with poor whites, and they create this kind of Creole subculture of ungovernable cowboy bandit types, right?
That's like the majority, that's not the majority of the population because the city is always going to have more people in it, but that's the majority of the landmass is kind of these very small numbers of these sort of like, yeah, cowboy bandit type folks.
Historian Lauren Derby writes that they quote, hunted wild cattle in the interior and sold smoked meat and tobacco to contrabandists based on neighboring La Tortuga Island.
Locally termed Monteros, these proto-peasants were the Dominican equivalent of the Hibaro, the Puerto Rican backlands highlander.
This contraband economy of black masterless men was so successful that Spanish authorities had to resort to draconian measures to contain it.
In 1606, for example, Governor Osorio torched northern settlements to the ground in a failed effort to curb contraband by forcing rural inhabitants to move closer to Santo Domingo.
The fact that many of the wealthiest pirates in this pan-Antillean maritime community were mulatto, such as the highly successful Domingo Sanchez Moreno, probably doubly galled the crown.
So this is a, like, number one, sounds kind of dope.
Like these people have built like a pretty interesting culture for themselves.
And the only way that Spain can keep a lit on it is like by periodically massacring huge numbers of them, right?
Like that's all you can do is you march your army into the interior and kill and burn whatever you can.
But they can kind of just sort of bounce when they see the army coming.
And it's not easy to march an army into the interior of Hispaniola and have them not die of all sorts of wild ass diseases.
So it's kind of like, again, a little bit like of an anarchy in most of these.
It sounds like an ideal society to be good.
It sounds perfect.
Sounds awesome.
Fucking cowboys, fucking making beef jerky, presumably.
Yeah, it sounds great.
Smoking a shit and hella tobacco.
Yeah, it sounds dope.
So while San Domingue exists under this pretty horrifying racial caste system, like slavery as awful as it's going to exist basically anywhere during like the period of the African slave trade, Santo Domingo is a lot less controlled and as a result, kind of a lot less awful.
And so it doesn't develop, which is not to say that it's, you know, there aren't, there isn't slavery.
There aren't a lot of like abusive social structures that exist, but it doesn't develop the same preconditions for revolution that you get in San Domingue, right?
And as we all know, in San Domingue, enslaved people have themselves a revolution starting at the tail end of the 1700s.
And in one of history's great upsets, they win their freedom from France.
Now, this is how we get Haiti, and the rest of the world has never stopped punishing Haiti for this, right?
We talk about this again in our episodes on Papa Doc and Baby Doc, but basically Haiti's history from this point is being continually fucked over by everyone else on the planet.
Close to it, not far from it, up to the present day.
So in Haiti, you know, they're dealing with after this period of revolution, pretty continuous incursions from the French until they finally force Napoleon to get the fuck out of there.
And the process of getting Napoleon out and of, you know, ensuring their liberty means that they build up a pretty good army.
Like Haiti has by kind of the late period of fighting off the French repeatedly, they have a pretty like powerful military.
And they are also by sort of the point they're done fighting the French for the most part, they're kind of, they're deeply traumatized, right?
They've had all of these horrific wars.
They are basically constantly aware of the fact that all of Europe and all of the Western world wants them back in fucking chains.
And so they're pretty paranoid.
And the thing that they start to focus on once France is less of a threat is the fact that they've got this neighbor, right?
They've got Santo Domingo sitting on most of their island and it's a possession of Spain.
And Spain, if you're not up on your Napoleonic history, for one thing, Spain is kind of briefly a part of Napoleon's empire, at least chunks of Spain are.
So the Haitians are like, well, I don't really like that they're just sitting there, a possession of Europe, right?
It feels like this could be really bad for us.
So why don't we, why don't we take them over, right?
Why don't we deal with Santa Domingo?
And to make a long story short, Haiti invades and they occupy Santo Domingo for about 22 years from the early to the mid-1800s.
Elites Trying to Whiten Population00:09:30
And like all occupations, it's not pleasant, right?
Like very rarely do you like occupy a country with soldiers and everyone is like, we really like being occupied by your soldiers.
This is a good time for everyone, right?
Is Santo Domingo being is like being occupied by the Spanish at the same time or are they just no, no, the Haitians kicked the Spanish out for about 20 years or so.
Okay, so it's just occupation to occupation.
Cool, super fun.
Everyone's colony, which is an occupation to a military occupation.
And then in 1844, the Dominican Republic becomes a thing because they fight a war with Haiti and they kick the Haitians out and declare their independence.
And they manage to keep their independence for about 15 years until the Spanish come back and take them over again for like four or five years.
So not a not a super stable history here, right?
Pretty messy.
Like you could, you, I already feel tired just thinking about it.
You can imagine how exhausted someone who was like born in 1800 in the Dominican Republic would be by like 1850, right?
You've just, it's just this carousel of assholes taking your place over, right?
I think about like being a kid, like right at the beginning of that.
And it's like, like today, kids are people that remember like pre-9-11, you know, and then you just get to see everything change.
I feel like that's so much more exhausting.
And you have like five occupations.
That sounds super fun, like a really fun 50 years.
Yeah, that's exactly how everyone in the Dominican Republic feels.
I'm sure.
So the U.S. Civil War is over.
And Washington is like, they're not thrilled with everything that's been happening in the Dominican Republic because It's pretty, you can get from DC to the Dominican real fast, right?
It is not far away from the continental United States.
And if you know much about America in like the late 1800s, we've got this kind of big attitude that like, we don't want Europe fucking around in what we consider to be our backyard.
And all of Latin America and the Caribbean is basically our backyard in our eyes, right?
In this period of time.
I'm not saying this is right.
This is just how DC is thinking about things.
And so a lot of American politicians are like, well, we don't like the Europeans are not clearly not doing a good job keeping things stable in the Dominican Republic.
And this place is in our sphere of influence.
So in 1865, we have us a vote on whether or not to annex the Dominican Republic.
And it fails by a single vote.
So U.S. influence will remain kind of indirect after this point for a while, but it's not going to stay indirect forever.
But you can see just how close it came to like presumably probably being like a possession like Puerto Rico is in a legal sense, you know?
Like that's kind of, I think, a realistic way to look at how it might have gone down.
Who knows?
But the constant warring between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and they have, there are regular conflicts between the two countries kind of in the, through the 1800s, means that politics in the Dominican Republic early on is just kind of a succession of strongman generals, right?
Because when you're dealing with all of this sort of governmental turnover, all that really matters is like, can you keep other people out, right?
Can you actually effectively defend the country?
And within Dominican politics, there's a vicious split between these kind of liberal and conservative parties, all of which are headed by these sort of strongman military types.
And when we say liberal and conservative, and I'm not talking in like the modern U.S. sense, the conservatives, broadly speaking, a big thing that they are advocates for is being annexed by the United States, right?
Because they're looking at, number one, how powerful the U.S. is, particularly after the Civil War, and going like, well, shit, they can probably stop this constant turnover, right?
Like things would probably be a lot more stable.
We would probably be in better economic shape if they were to come over.
Whereas liberals are like, we don't want to be governed by yet another foreign power.
We would like to be something that approximates a modern state.
And these liberals will usually give the U.S. Constitution as kind of the ideal example of the structure of a government that they want.
But there's pretty universal agreement among these political elites that even though they like the idea of how the U.S. government is supposed to be set up, they don't believe that Dominican peasants can be democratic citizens, right?
And these kind of rich educated people who are a very small fraction of the population are like, well, these like, these are uneducated wild cowboys.
You can't have them, you can't give them any rights.
Like they don't, they wouldn't know what to do with them.
That is very much the attitude that these people have.
They're not like nice folks, right?
This attitude is well represented by the words of Americo Lugo, a Dominican writer and one of these kind of intellectuals.
He argued that the state needed to lead from the top down until the citizenry could be educated to a higher degree of responsibility.
He called the peasants, quote, degenerate due to racial mixture, a tropical environment and a poor diet.
Thus he said, the working class of the Dominican Republic can never be governing, but rather governed classes.
So pretty rough stuff.
No.
Yeah.
They wouldn't know what to do with autonomy.
Like you wouldn't know what to do with the idea of doing things to yourself.
Best these guys, best these guys just let us, you know, run things.
We've been doing so well prior to this point.
Yeah, obviously I'm the one that can fix this.
Just me.
No one else.
Now, there is, when we talk about sort of white supremacy, which a lot of these attitudes are influencing things, but it's not the same as you're going to get in like the American South or as you're going to get in Europe, not all that far after this point.
There is this kind of attitude among a lot of elites that like you can whiten the population in some ways.
And that's going to become more of a thing later on, right?
So just keep that in your head because we will be talking about that once the 30s come around here.
Outside the urban parts of the Dominican Republic, politics revolved very heavily around little strongmen who were like in a lot of ways kind of mini dictators over, you know, a few towns, a chunk of the countryside.
And, you know, the best of them were kind of able to keep areas of the interior relatively stable and protect their peasants from banditry and unrest.
Depending on the book, you'll hear these guys kind of referred to as either cadillos or caciques, which is a cacique is an older word taken from the social order on the island in the days kind of before Columbus arrived, right?
And it's kind of, it kind of gets applied to these more modern figures who are, they are in every sense the word, they're warlords, right?
You know, small scale ones, but not, that's an accurate way to look at them.
Now, I found a lot of interesting sources for this episode, but the strangest and most entertaining is a biography of Trujillo written by one of his generals, the guy who wound up running his intelligence division for a while.
This dude's name is Arturo Espeat.
And Arturo was the son of one of the two or three wealthiest countries or families in the Dominican Republic.
And so his family are some of these warlord types, right?
In this sort of pre-Trujillo era.
And he is an untrustworthy piece of shit, which you can tell because he opens his book by repeatedly denying he tortured anybody.
And I want to read you a quote from this because it's really good.
I remain neither ashamed nor regretful of my years as an intelligence officer.
I earned my nom de guerre, navajita, the blade, not because I was guilty of any atrocities.
The name stemmed from my tendency to plunge straight to the heart of any problem or situation.
I believed in direct, simple action.
However, there is not a single Dominican who has ever or can come forward to prove that I caused him to be tortured, nor can any Dominican family charge that one of its members died at my hands or my orders.
I don't know, bro.
I feel like people who don't torture anyone never need to say that.
Am I not guilty of any atrocities is raising a lot of questions?
I also love, they called me, I was the head of intelligence.
They called me the blade, not because of any cutting I did.
I was just so direct.
So cool and smart and strong.
Yeah, they called me the dick kicker.
No, no, no.
Not for any violent reason.
Totally unrelated.
Like, okay, the blade.
So with the caveat that Artero is a very untrustworthy source, he is a local and a local who gives us an attitude of how the upper crust, the kind of like, these, these sort of like high up and kind of like warlord types wanted to see themselves and talk about themselves, right?
So he gives us an idea of how elites in Dominican society in this period wanted to pretend that things worked, right?
And the way that he frames this period of Dominican history is that these regional strongmen were kind of ungovernable by the central government and would periodically overthrow it to put their own guy in charge.
Quote: The Dominican government was never strong enough to resist the caciques.
The army was merely a handful of ill-trained conscripts.
Recruitment was simple.
From time to time, the government would call on loyal caciques for volunteers.
The local chiefs would then round up a batch of unhappy youths and send them to the capital.
Sometimes it was necessary to use force.
When Kacique handcuffed his volunteers to a huge rope and sent them to the army with this message, Here are your volunteers.
Dating a Successful Magician00:05:23
Please return the rope.
Man, I got plenty of boys, but ropes cost money, homie.
Like, bro, I only got so much fucking rope over here.
Like, you gotta, it's like giving Tupperware, you know?
Like, I want you to enjoy the thing I made, but God, please return it.
Like, don't keep it.
Yeah, he is.
He is treating like sending them conscripts like a covered dish.
Like, no, no, enjoy that, man.
It's really good.
They're good, good conscripts.
But could you, could you send me back the bowl?
Please, like, next time I see you, just like, make sure you bring it.
Don't forget it.
I need it last time, but like, I need that fucking rope, man.
Yeah.
Very funny.
Now, do you know who always sends back the bowl, Kat?
God, I don't know.
Please tell me.
The sponsors of our podcast.
If they send you boys, which you can order, you can have boys sent to you, you know, you know, conscripts or whatever.
Just send back the rope.
That's all they ask.
Sophie?
No.
Sophie is.
I realized that the aggressive head shaking I was doing would not translate on this audio medium, but no.
See what I have to deal with here, Kat.
Unbelievable.
Respectfully, you're welcome.
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I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and we're talking about falling in love with a magician, which I hope to do one day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What could be better than loving a magician?
You know, getting to live in Las Vegas, probably getting sawed in half.
You're talking about dating a really successful magician, though.
I feel like most magicians don't work in Las Vegas.
I feel like both the least and the most successful magicians work in Las Vegas.
There's a lot of parts of Vegas you could work in.
You don't want to date a mid-magician.
You want to date either the worst out there or the best.
Yeah, I want to date the shittiest magician because then I'll always feel good about myself.
Skimming Money from Imports00:15:53
You deserve better.
No, no.
No, I want my magician partner to come home at the end of a long day and I'll be like, yeah, I made some podcasts.
People like them.
And they'll be like, yeah, I got stabbed on Fremont Street, you know, trying to trying to busk.
And then they're like, and then they look at you and they go, pick a card.
You're like, this should have been something in your ear.
And it's their entire earnings of the day.
It's just like 82 cents.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which, which they got from, oh, I forgot all the names of the casinos on Fremont Street.
Anyway.
Okay.
Yeah.
Kat, you ready to get back into this little history lesson?
You don't even know how ready I am.
Okay.
Okay.
So the upside of the state of affairs that exists in the Dominican Republic in the late 1800s is that the caciques have a lot of power and there are generally options for Dominicans outside of the urban areas if they don't like who they're living under, right?
So there's mobility, but there's poverty.
You know, you can kind of just be like, this guy sucks.
I'm going to like hike for two days.
And then, you know, there will be a different strongman or no one at all.
And, you know, I can try to figure out my shit.
But it's basically impossible for the government to set up large-scale agriculture or to trade or do anything that would allow them to function the way that like a nation functions because everything outside of the capital is just like a mix of banditry and like small-scale peasant farmers and stuff.
It's very unstable.
From an early age, the Dominican economy, such as it is, relied heavily on the United States.
And this was a calculated choice by several of the more liberal general types who wound up running the country in the late 1800s.
In 1891, they signed a reciprocity treaty that made the United States officially the main trading partner of the country.
We leased one of their ports so that our Navy would be able to, you know, do boat stuff there.
And we started handing out loans to them, right?
Because the government is trying to get into a more stable position so that they can like govern the Dominican Republic.
And we're like, oh, we got money.
We'll give you guys money to do that.
Don't worry.
The terms are not ruinous.
We are absolutely not working on a way to fuck you over, just like we did to Haiti next door.
Promises.
Pinky swears.
Sounds legit.
This is never going to happen again, Kat, but all of the money we give them winds up in the hands of local strongmen.
And none of it goes towards like helping regular people or making the country function better.
I know it won't happen again.
That's why it's so weird.
Yeah.
It would be crazy if after this, we just flew a pallet of billions of dollars in cash to a country.
Let's call it Smurak and then lost it all.
Like that would be wild if we'd done that.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
So in, yeah, the U.S. is like, ah, you got to pay us back for all these loans that just got robbed by your, you know, the assholes running the country.
You know what we're going to do for you guys?
Because you're such good clients.
We're going to appoint a private company to handle getting you to pay back your foreign debt.
And we do that in 1892.
This leads to a series of events that in 1904 culminates in the United States creating the Santo Domingo Improvement Company.
Now, the job of this country is to take control of their entire customs system, to regulate customs for the Dominican Republic at all of their ports, skimming money off of the top through these like import and export taxes and shit to repay debts to American, like at this point, a lot of it's privately owned American companies that can't be met by the Dominican government.
By 1905, the United States controls all custom houses in the country.
So we're just like running, you know, all of that stuff for the Dominican Republic.
Not for them.
We're running it so that we can skim off the top money that would otherwise theoretically go into like taxes and shit.
That can't be right.
That doesn't sound like us.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like the thing we'll keep doing forever.
Now, because this, and let's be fair here, we're, as we often are, just copying the British, right?
Because they are the goats at this sort of thing.
No one's ever been better at it.
Didn't we have a revolution because we hated how they did this?
Well, we thought that we could do a better job of doing it eventually.
It was the long con.
And by God, did it work out, you know?
So all of this stuff winds up being basically a big con to suck the wealth of the Dominican Republic out of its neck like, you know, vampires.
And no amount of throttling the customs houses was enough to actually pay down their debt, which by 1916 had ballooned to more than $30 million, which was a lot of money in those days.
Economic collapse brings about political unrest.
The president of the Dominican Republic is assassinated in 1911.
And in 1916, President Yimenez has a little civil war with the former minister of war.
The U.S. government looks at all this unrest in the Dominican Republic, which we absolutely had not helped to cause, and are like, boy, they might not be able to repay all of this additional money that they now owe us in excess of the money that they ever borrowed from us.
You know what we should do?
Also, 1916, we're kind of worried if things get any more unstable, the Germans could come in, right?
The Germans could take over the Dominican Republic, and that'll be bad for everybody, mainly us.
So we do a thing that we're going to do repeatedly from this point forward.
Can I guess pick a guy and back him?
Not quite yet.
First, we send in the Marines.
Okay, sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah, I'm going to read a quote from a write-up by Thought Company summarizing U.S. intervention here in the Dominican.
U.S. soldiers moved quickly to secure their hold on the Dominican Republic.
In May, Rear Admiral William B. Caperton arrived in Santo Domingo and took over the operation.
General Arius decided to oppose the occupation, ordering his men to contest the American landing at Puerto Plata on June 1st.
General Arius went to Santiago, which he vowed to defend.
The Americans sent a concerted force and took the city.
That wasn't the end of the resistance.
In November, Governor Juan Perez of the city of San Francisco de Macaroy refused to recognize the occupation government.
Holed up in an old fort, he was eventually driven out by the Marines.
And so, you know, we take over.
And if you're anywhere kind of from your late 20s on, you and most of us have watched the U.S. invade and occupy a couple of countries.
And what happens in the Dominican Republic is more similar to like what we do in Iraq than what goes on in Afghanistan, right?
We set up a military government and we have the Marines start training and equipping a local military so that we can leave and have a country that will be, in our eyes, kind of a pliant client state, right?
That's the goal here, right?
So that we can get some fucking money out of them again, right?
Like that's what we're doing in this case.
Now, this concludes the historical background portion of the story.
So as we've left off the historical background, the U.S. Marines are occupying the country and we are trying to get it into a stable enough position that we can continue sucking on it like the vampires we are.
So let's move back over to our bastard for the week.
Finally, Rafael Trujillo, because he is going to be one of the young Dominican men that the U.S. Marines pick out of poverty and obscurity and are like, here's a gun.
We need you to keep it.
So don't do anything bad with it.
Pick a random guy and be like, hey, don't fuck over the entire country.
Don't be a megalomaniac that takes over an entire country.
Here's a bunch of dudes with guns.
Be cool.
Be cool.
Be chill.
Do the right thing.
Just like us.
Yeah, just like us.
Like we always do with our guns.
So Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was born in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic on October 24th, 1891.
He was the fourth of 11 children, most of whom survived to adulthood.
So his parents were doing something right.
You know, that's not bad in this period of time for somebody coming out of poverty.
Now, despite an impressive name, he did not come from impressive surroundings.
His hometown was a small village on the southern coast.
And his father, Pepito, is generally described, like one biographer literally just calls him a non-entity.
He is not a big deal, you might say.
And he's not really around a lot.
You get the idea.
Now, Trujillo would later commission court biographers to tell a very different version of his upbringing, one that is more rarefied and that paints his family as coming from the upper middle class.
This is not accurate, right?
This is him.
He's kind of insecure about his origins, and he will exaggerate them as an adult in power.
There's not a lot of great context as to his early life, his childhood, but all of the credible biographers that I've read tend to say, like, yeah, they were pretty poor, right?
Like they were not unusually poor.
They were not like, you know, the worst off, but they were not, they did not come from the upper middle class.
The Trujillo children went shoeless because there was no money in the family for shoes.
His dad was a minor postal clerk and often went without income because he had sold his salary for a short-term loan, which is a thing that a lot of men who work for the government do, right?
You'll basically be like, I need money now.
I will give you, you know, interest, basically.
And so you get my salary for a period of time.
It's a really, it winds up being a pretty abusive situation.
I probably don't need to explain how, but like a lot of guys get trapped in this in this period of time.
Why do you think he didn't like not even just describe it?
Like, why didn't he, why didn't he exaggerate like how poor he was or talk about how poor he was?
Because I feel like that's a typical right-wing tactic of like, you know, I came from nothing and now I'm this guy.
It is in our culture, right?
He has a, it's really important for him to feel like and to seem like, like it's going to be important to him to act as if he is coming like a gentleman, right?
That he is coming from kind of this more upper class, not like super rich, but that he's coming from something, you know?
He, he will always be kind of insecure as about his surroundings.
It is worth noting that's very much a thing in American right-wing politics.
It's not always the case, right?
And in this, in the Dominican culture, like that's just not a thing Trujillo feels would benefit him.
Or it's unclear to me because I'm not, obviously, I'm not an expert.
It's unclear to me if it's more that he didn't think it would benefit him or that he just legitimately had hangups, right?
Like he's just actually kind of ashamed of his humble circumstances and didn't want to be honest about them.
Because I mean, it's Saddam's story.
Like he grew up from nothing.
And I think that like is a big part of like this legend built around him.
Yeah.
It is interesting that Trujillo's not going to really take that tactic.
But the like Trujillo biography that I read that was like done by like basically was telling the version of his story that he wanted told talk like makes a big deal about how they were like, you know, middle class to upper middle class.
His family was doing well.
Whereas his more credible biographers are like, no, they were as poor as everyone around them was.
So yeah, they were poor enough that like because his dad is regularly going without income because he's sold his salary for a loan, his older brothers have to do cattle wrestling to make ends meet, which is also really common.
A lot of people will do this because there's both wild cows and just like farms outside of the city.
So you bust in one night, you cut down a fence, you steal a cow or two.
That's food, that's money, you know?
I thought you meant like wrestling cows.
No, that would that would be so.
They would not have like it would be cool if you could do it.
I have known a lot of cows in my life and none that I would want to wrestle with.
Yeah, that's why it needs to be a dope sport.
It would be pretty rad if you could do it.
So one of the few privileges he enjoyed as a little kid was that his grandmother, Ersina, was very well educated.
And she ensured that Raphael and his siblings learned to read.
Later, he would attend grammar school, but his attendance was irregular since he very nearly died of diphtheria as a little kid.
So he doesn't get to do a lot of school.
And aside from these broad strokes, we don't know a lot about his childhood.
It's pretty likely that he's dropped out of school by the fourth grade.
So most of the education that he does get comes from his grandma, who I think was pretty much self-taught, just like a very smart person and who sees it as important that he learned to read and that his siblings learned to read.
And one of Trujillo's better biographies, Trujillo, Little Caesar of the Caribbean, German Ornaz writes, quote, but if the children did not learn much at school, the dusty streets which separated in those days, the monotonous rows of San Cristóbal shacks provided them with an excellent schooling in lawlessness.
To survive the rowdyism of the neighborhood kids, a boy had to be tougher than the others, or at least, as in the Trujillo's case, he had to belong to a large clannish family.
In frequent street brawls, the solid front of the Trujillo boys proved good enough to lick all opposition, a fact they never forgot later in life.
From such an environment, Rafael emerged as a resourceful, headstrong character.
As a boy, Trujillo was always in trouble, recalls one of his neighbors, always trying to cheat someone, always bragging about how he would one day make big money without much effort.
I do think that's cool that like he had a lot of brothers, so they kind of worked as a gang together.
They're like, well, if we're going to get into a fight, like at least I've got siblings I could call in.
I love that.
I mean, it's like when you're a girl with like brothers or like you have someone to back you up.
Or I guess what just having a bunch of brothers starting to gang, getting in trouble.
Yeah.
In this case, kind of a literal gang.
Although because they're poor, the thing that he becomes kind of a gangster about is very silly.
So his nickname around town is Chapita, which is kind of the colloquial term for bottle caps.
It doesn't mean that literally, but it's like what people call bottle caps.
And he gets that nickname because he collects bottle caps.
And for some unknown reason, he became like an obsessive hoarder of caps from sodas and beers.
He hated the nickname, but like he got the nickname because not only did he collect these, but he would like beat people up to take their bottle caps.
Like he would get his brothers together.
He was like running a bottle cap racket so that he could, yeah.
And he just like hoarded them.
Like he wasn't selling them or anything.
That part is unclear to me.
He probably, I assume he traded when he couldn't fight for them, but he's he's very into collecting bottle caps and he's willing to do violence in order to expand his collection, which is pretty funny.
I'm imagining him being like a Funko Pop, like beating people up for Funko Pops.
Yeah, it is a little bit like that.
It's less sad than a Funko Pop because bottle caps are objectively better than Funko Pops.
You can do something with a bottle cap.
Yeah.
All you can do with a Funko Pop is become aware of the fact that you've lost control of your life.
So at age 16, he started to work as a telegraph operator, a job he got thanks to his uncle.
Now, again, his father's kind of a non-entity.
So it's his two uncles, Teodulo and Plinio, who taught him how to be a man.
And these guys, each of these guys is like half of a good con man, right?
Plinio is like charming and intelligent.
Like he's, he's good at like talking to people.
He's got a lot of social intelligence.
And Teodulo is a drunk and a womanizer who like writes poetry in prose, but is all and is seen as like, so he's this like, he's too drunk to be like a really good con man.
He's kind of just like, it's like they're each half of a good con man.
Uncles Teaching Con Man Ways00:02:01
So as a young adult, he gets offered a job working security at one of the local sugar plantations.
Like all but one sugar company in the Republic, Raphael's employers were American.
It's likely that his charming, because we control all of the big business in the Dominican Republic, right?
Right.
Like we've taken over these sugar companies in part due is like a, well, you know, if you let American companies in to dominate this industry, you know, that's how we can take out some of this debt that somehow still keeps ballooning every year.
So like all but, yeah, so his, his employer is here.
He's working for the Americans.
And his, it's probably Teodulo, his uncle, who gets him this job because he's just like drinking with the dude who's doing the hiring, but we don't really know.
Most casual summaries of Raphael's past will describe him as working as a security guard for the sugar company.
This is inaccurate.
Trujillo was an informer for the sugar company.
His job was to make friends with labor organizers who were like getting ready to organize unions and like go on strike and then help take them out.
So that is his job.
He is a spy, like to crack down on the labor movement for these American companies.
And he loves this gig.
That is such an early reason to hate someone in this story.
It is a real piece of shit, Jeff.
Yeah.
Immediately.
Yeah.
Fuck that dude.
Yeah.
It's very funny because like he loves this because he's like, oh, I get to pick my own hours.
You know, I don't have a boss breathing down my neck.
All I got to do is fuck over these laborers.
Future state propaganda will note that his strength of character got him an award from mill management.
But the reality is that he helped catch and hang several men who were looking to start labor unions.
Like he is killing people for the sugar company.
And that's how Americans got cheap sugar in the early 1900s, everybody.
So good.
Good stuff.
So, uh, tragically, and this is sad, cat, his promising career murdering union organizers is cut short because he raped somebody.
Killing Laborers for Sugar00:03:41
Um, god damn it.
Come on.
Yeah, he's a real justice.
Yeah.
Justice for Raphael.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah, cancel culture has come for the murdering rapist.
Woke mind virus.
Yeah.
So, um, we don't exactly know.
Like, I hate to just like drop, he's a, he probably committed rape, but there's not a lot of detail because all of the criminal records from the period of time where he's probably getting in trouble burn down mysteriously after he takes power.
Um, so this is based primarily on other people's recollections, but it seems like he probably went to jail for this for a period of time.
Oh, that's right.
Um, yeah, it's a little unclear.
He is going to be a prolific rapist and sexual assaulter throughout his entire adult life.
And it's, it's interesting because if you, when you read these, there's a lot, a lot of the first biographies I read about this guy are written in like, you know, the 60s or whatever.
And they, they will describe him as like a ladies man with a wandering eye.
And they're critical biographies, but the men writing them like just don't see the fact that he's, don't see what he's doing is serial sexual assault.
And then when you get more modern coverage of Truejio, it becomes very clear, like, oh yeah, he was like a terrible, terrible rapist.
Like they're like, he was popular with the dames.
Yeah, you know, the dames really like this man.
No, they liked him.
You get that a lot with dictators from this period of time when you read early books about them.
But you know who isn't problematic, Kat.
The ads and sponsors that sell you boys with rope.
Yeah.
That's right.
Here's some ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Marines Training Trujillo as Made Man00:15:50
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
What did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of the flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're talking about Rafael Trujillo, who has probably gone to jail for rape at this period of time after murdering union organizers for a gig.
So he gets out of jail.
And at this point, he's kind of started to get confident in his own abilities.
One presumes spending some time in jail connects him to more criminals.
And he sort of, after this period, becomes kind of a gangster, right?
Definitely a gangster.
Kind of a low-level gangster.
He runs a forgery racket.
He does some cattle rustling.
And more than anything else, he becomes a pimp, right?
He is a very successful pimp.
I assume he's taking bottle caps.
I probably shouldn't say this, but like you get the feeling he treats the women that he is working with the way he used to treat bottle caps, including these stealing from them from other pimps using violence.
That's the feeling one gets.
Again, there's not terrible, tremendous detail about it, right?
But he is a very successful pimp.
And knowing what we know about him, that's probably an ugly story, right?
I think that's fair to say, given everything we know about this guy's background.
And this is where our two stories, the history of the Dominican Republic up to this point and the U.S. occupation and the life of Rafael Trujillo intertwine.
In 1916, when the U.S. comes in, Trujillo is about 24 years old.
And despite how his career as a spy for the sugar companies had ended, he left with some connections and a good recommendation.
The Marines have now invaded the Dominican Republic, and their mission is to maintain domestic tranquility.
And this is code for make the company stable enough for American investors to profit.
One local historian would later note, it was the landing of the American Marines, which brought Trujillo his opportunity to rise from obscurity.
And this is certainly true.
Prior to our involvement, Rafael was the organized crime equivalent of a minor cacique, right?
He probably first interacts with the Americans through getting arrested for forgery.
He might have also gotten arrested for cattle rustling.
He probably goes to jail again.
We don't know because in 1927, a mysterious fire destroys the Supreme Court building with all of the criminal records in it.
What is likely true is that he runs into a little bit of trouble with the new regime because he's a criminal, and his uncle Teodulo is able to smooth it over.
Teodulo has made friends with an American customs officer, a guy named James McLean.
And McLean is one of these Americans who's been in the country the longest.
He's like working in as one of these, you know, because we take over their customs like stations.
So he is there before the Marines arrive.
And when the Marines arrive, they're like, well, this guy knows the country and he's one of us.
So let's give him a job now that we're running things, right?
And Teodulo drinks with McLean.
The two of them are hardcore alcoholics and they are just getting wasted together all the time.
So when the military government comes in, they make McLean a colonel because they're like, well, this guy knows the country.
And Teodulo's like, hey, can you give a job to my nephew?
Like, he's a good kid.
You know, he only occasionally commits horrible crimes.
Albert Hicks, an American journalist working in the country at the time, describes McLean as a man who, quote, when sufficiently sober, found a profound satisfaction in the company of harlots, which is, you know, probably another reason why he likes Trujillo, because Trujillo is a pimp in this period of time.
So question the guy that wrote the general that wrote the biography of this guy, who said he didn't do any atrocities.
Does he mention any atrocities, even like in a positive way, of Trujillo?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Later on.
I mean, so he's like, I didn't commit anything like this, but this guy did.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a common, common story for guys in dictatorships.
So Hicks goes on to claim that Teodulo introduced his nephew, Trujillo, to McLean during a drinking session.
And quote, Raphael, immediately recognizing a job he could fill, played the pimp to the chief of the constabulary.
So McLean gets made like the head of the police, basically, just because he's an American who lives in the country.
And Trujillo's like, hey, you want some, you want some ladies?
Like, I'm a pimp.
I can satisfy your needs, you know?
And this gets him in good with the Americans.
And, you know, he moves on quickly from giving McLean prostitutes to supplying prostitutes to American Marines, which is a great way to get the Marines to like you historically.
Now, once McLean is kind of hooking Trujillo up with the occupation authorities, Trujillo starts finding other ways to please American officers.
He starts acting as an informer to basically he'll go into communities that are like resisting the American occupation, that are like harboring insurgents, and he'll make friends in there.
And then he'll go back to the Americans and be like, here's who you go massacre, right?
These are the people who like are, you know, harboring these folks who are who are resisting the regime.
And he soon, as a result of this, falls in with the absolute bloodiest of the Marines that are in the country, a guy named Captain Merklay.
So this is Merkley is an American who is running the pacification campaign in the east of the Dominican Republic.
And he makes Trujillo his right-hand man.
And together, the two of them cut a bloody swath across the countryside.
Merklay is so out of hand that the U.S. Senate eventually investigates him and finds that he has, quote, a policy of repression that has been carried out by the forces of the occupation and is inherently unwise, which reacted primarily upon peaceful civilians.
And as the result of which, many atrocities were undoubtedly committed.
So like this guy gets so out of pocket that the U.S. Senate in like 1917 is like, we can't have you occupying the Dominican Republic.
You're too fucking nuts.
Now, this passage from the biography, Trujillo, Little Caesar of the Caribbean, gives us more context as to what he was doing with Merklay.
Another competent observer, the historian and economist Melvin M. Knight, says in Americans in Santo Domingo, a number of Dominicans, we may be certain that nobody knows exactly how many, were put to death offhand by the Marines, and some were tortured without ever having their day in court at all.
In fairness, however, it must be said that Captain Merklay's end was appropriate to his corrupt practice.
The assassinations by Captain Merklay were repudiated by his superiors, and he committed suicide while awaiting for trial, asserts Knight.
Knight's version is supported by Sumner Wells in his aforementioned book.
Nevertheless, if Merkley himself paid dearly for his cruelty and sadism, his methods, unfortunately, did not disappear with him.
And young Trujillo, he left behind a keen, proficient disciple who has carried on the sadistic tradition long after his teacher's name is no longer remembered.
So he gets his boss Merkle, and they massacre and torture probably hundreds of people to try to pacify the eastern chunk of this of the Dominican Republic.
The Senate gets involved and is like, wow, you need to come back here and stand trial because what you have been doing is so out of hand.
And Merkley fucking kills himself, leaving Trujillo to be like, well, it's sad he's dead, but at least he taught me how to be a real piece of shit.
So yeah, a proud chapter in U.S. Marine Corps history right there.
He's like, time for me to take up this torch.
It's my time now.
Yeah, it is his time.
And he has been a freelancer for the U.S. Marines up to this point.
But once Merkley commits suicide, he decides, I need a more formal job.
And it just so happens that during this period, the U.S. occupation government has decided we need to set up a permanent military force, the Dominican Constabulary, geared at keeping the interior pacified once the Marines leave.
In December of 1918, Raphael is accepted into this program.
He gets commissioned as an officer and he rises very quickly through the ranks, due in part to the fact that Colonel McLean is running the constabulary.
So like he's basically bribing his boss with prostitutes in order to get promoted to the point where he's running the constabulary.
So he goes from second lieutenant.
Yeah.
And he, there are more allegations of rape and extortion against him during this period of time.
He gets court-martialed for rape, but like nothing happens to him.
He keeps getting promoted because he's providing prostitutes to the Marines.
So they don't want him out of there.
And he's kind of, he has this reputation of being because he's worked with Merkley and he knows how to like kill a shitload of people.
He's like the guy, if you're having trouble in an area, if like there's, you know, uprisings or whatever, he's this guy you can send in because you don't want to do it yourself.
You saw what happened to Merkley, right?
It's bad business for the Americans to go committing massacres directly, but you can send this guy in with some dudes, with some Dominicans, and he'll fucking kill people, right?
And then you can, you don't have to get in trouble yourself and commit suicide after a Senate investigation.
So prior to U.S. military or military involvement, most of the military power in the Dominican Republic had been in the hands of these kind of local warlords who'd maintained private militias and sometimes sent the scraps of their militias down to the central government when they had a war to fight with Haiti or whatever.
And officers, in as much as they existed, had always been members of a small, wealthy class in the country.
The Americans wanted to change this in part because the Cadillos were their enemies, right?
They didn't want to like these guys to continue to have all the military power.
So one of the first things we do is we disarm the countryside.
So we take weapons both from the militias that these guys have had and from peasants.
We wind up confiscating about 3 million firearms, which is enough to arm every man, woman, and child in the country three times over.
That gives you an idea of how hard it was to control this place.
They have three guns for every person in the country out in the just out in the sticks, you know?
Very heavily armed little land before we come there.
And we take all of their guns and we dump them into the sea.
And then we build roads so that this new constabulary that we're training can access all these isolated areas of the rural interior.
And like we dumped 3 million guns into the sea.
Yep.
Cool.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
That's that's how we that's how we handle this.
Now, that number is probably exaggerated, right?
Like this is coming from that dude who winds up running the secret police.
I don't know that he's a credible source on how many guns the U.S. took, but we send in the Marines, we take all of the weapons in the countryside and we shove them into the ocean, right?
Honestly, it's not our worst plan.
It's not the worst thing we're going to do here, although we are doing it so that we can enforce a dictatorship that sends money to us.
So we disarm the countryside, we send in the Marines, they build all these roads so that we can, you know, stop any sort of resistance to this new regime we're trying to put in place.
And, you know, this military force we're building, we call it a constabulary because its goal is primarily policing.
And we don't want it to become like another militia, like all of the other ones that have run the country.
So we avoid hiring from the groups who had traditionally run the Dominican military, right?
And particularly who had provided officers for the Dominican military.
And instead, we start promoting as officers the absolute dregs of Dominican society, poor peasant type people.
Now, the Marines are always good at finding the absolute dregs of society.
That's what they do.
And one of the guys that they're going to pick is like, oh, this dude is like exactly who should be running this policing force is Rafael Trujillo.
And to talk about how that happened, I'm going to read a quote from the book, The Dictator's Seduction by Lauren Derby.
Widespread resistance to becoming part of the United States-led force meant that recruiters were forced to enlist what a witness described as the worst rascals, thieves, and assassins in the country.
If the military had previously been a means of social ascent for the respectable poor, it was now open to the anonymous crowd.
Trujillo and the other young officers pulled from the ranks of the obscure never forgot that the United States was their benefactor.
In his book, Arturo Espel describes how Trujillo and his fellow new soldiers pacified the interior with the Marines and the impact that it left on them.
It may be considered a left-handed compliment to the Corps, but Trujillo always thought of himself as basically a Marine Corps officer and damned proud of it.
It was typical, for instance, that of the 40 to 50 decorations conferred upon him during his long career, Trujillo was proudest of a faded threadbare medal attesting to his service with the Marines.
So that is interesting.
This guy who's going to become a dictator considers himself a United States Marine.
You know, we could talk a little bit about our buddy Smedley Butler, the Marine who would become one of the most decorated soldiers in U.S. history and later write that he had never been anything but a gangster for capitalism.
This is the period that that's going down in, right?
Like this is why Smedley feels that way.
Because one of the long-term results of U.S. occupation is that the Marines train Trujillo and make him basically a made man to enforce this regime that exists to send money to U.S. companies.
And he is going to be a pretty brutal dictator using the things that he's learned from the Americans.
The U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republicans in 1924 and policing authority is handed over to the constabulary.
At the same time as the Marines leave, the United States takes over as the largest foreign exchange producer in the country and they start flooding the Dominican Republic with duty-free U.S. goods.
Now, if your contact with the phrase duty-free is in an airport, that may sound great, right?
You get all the cheap cigars and liquor you could want.
But this is actually a real problem because when you are forcibly making it that like your country gets to sell duty-free products in another country, what that means is that U.S. products are able to undercut every single national industry.
So all of the Dominican people's money is flowing back to the United States, but local Dominican companies are not like the government is not drawing taxes on those transactions.
And local Dominican companies can't make money because they are never going to be as cheap as mass-produced U.S. products that are being sold duty-free in the Dominican Republic.
Staging Legitimate Rebellion Against Vasquez00:03:29
So it kind of inherently cripples the economy.
Like we leave and say, by the way, we're making it impossible for you guys to ever get on your own feet.
Fuck you.
You know, USA number.
Is there any reason they were here?
Yeah, yes.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
This is just, you know, this is an escalation from controlling like the customs ports.
So this all necessitates that the government take on more debt in order to survive.
And we all know historically how that goes for countries on the island of Hispaniola.
Now, the interim president of the Dominican Republic had been a guy named Horatio Vasquez, who adopted Rafael as a pupil and put him in charge of the constabulary.
And again, this is supposed to be a policing force.
But as soon as the Americans leave, Rafael spends his first few years running it, turning it from a policing force into a proper army.
He puts his own picked men in positions of command.
And in 1930, he's in a situation where he feels like he can carry out a coup d'état against the president.
Now, part of how he does this is he makes a deal with, like in many countries where the U.S. has set up a leadership, there are rebels, right?
And as soon as the U.S. leaves, these rebels start fighting the central government.
The rebels in the Dominican most powerful faction is under a guy named Rafael Urinha.
Now, in exchange for putting Urena in power, Trujillo agrees that, you know, basically Trujillo agrees, I will stop the military from fighting the rebels so that you guys can take over the government.
And then you have to carry out new elections.
And I have to be allowed to run for president in the new election.
So they work this out amongst themselves to make it seem like there's been a legitimate rebellion against Vasquez.
And now they're having a free election and that Trujillo is going to win it.
It's not going to be a free election, right?
This all works like gangbusters.
The rebels march on the Capitol.
Trujillo doesn't stop them.
Vasquez steps down as president.
And yeah, there's an election and Urina and Trujillo run on a joint ticket and Trujillo becomes the president.
So, you know, that's how that shit goes.
Sounds good stuff.
Worked well.
Yeah.
It does.
It does work more or less well.
So yeah, what followed is the kind of dictator fake presidential election stuff that we're used to on this podcast, right?
He is the president.
The military threatens to murder or at least allow the murder of anyone who runs against him.
So he gets 99% of the vote in this election.
He, in fact, gets more votes than there are voters in the Dominican Republic, which we as the United States, who are basically keeping an eye on everything to make sure that the money keeps flowing, like the U.S. ambassador is like, yeah, this is a scam election.
Like he absolutely has just made himself dictator.
And everyone in Washington is pretty much like, it's fine.
Like he's basically a Marine, right?
Like we can trust him to do to do the shit that we want him to do.
Support our veterans.
Yeah, right.
He's a vet, you know?
So while Rafael Trujillo's rise to power is more or less standard strongman coup stuff, how he actually performs while in office is pretty ingenious.
And in consolidating power and exercising it, Trujillo is going to kind of prove himself to be something of a visionary when it comes to being a dictator.
But that's all coming in part two, along with unfortunately a genocide.
Cat.
Washington Trusting the Dictator00:02:51
You got anything to plug before we roll out here?
Yeah, go follow me on TikTok at CatMBU and YouTube, where I do long-form content.
I have a very dumb video probably coming out the end of the month or next month.
So follow me there.
And then there are, once again, a billion other platforms.
Just look me up, I guess.
Yeah.
Find Cat Abu on Twitter or not Twitter.
Well, on Twitter, but on TikTok and the YouTubes.
Avoid Twitter.
It's a bad place now.
They're all bad places, I guess.
There's not any good places on the internet.
Except for this podcast, which you can get ad-free by subscribing to CoolerZone Media.
That's the episode.
Goodbye.
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