Rafael Trujillo leveraged a 1930 hurricane to suspend the Constitution, establish La 42 secret police, and execute the 1937 Parsley Massacre, killing 20,000–30,000 Haitians via linguistic discrimination while offering Jewish refugees a Sosua colony as distraction. His regime collapsed after U.S. intervention: Kennedy authorized CIA arms but disavowed the May 30, 1961 assassination where assassins used American guns to kill Trujillo, leading to chaotic succession under Ramphus and Lyndon B. Johnson's deployment of 22,000 troops, illustrating how U.S. coups often end in disorder rather than stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Introducing The Girlfriend Podcast00:03:27
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
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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, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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 life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
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Oh, I am recording.
Thank you, Zoom Lady.
Ooh.
Hey.
Hey!
Hey, what was the thing you were doing where you morphed the fawns in an Ellie song?
Because I really enjoyed that.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It was so good.
No, I don't feel now.
You've got me feeling all self-conscious about my fawns.
I really liked it genuinely.
No, no, Sophie.
You've mocked my accents too much in the past, and now nobody gets to hear it.
Wow.
But it was so good.
Listeners.
It was really, it was so.
Hey.
No.
See?
It doesn't work anymore.
But it was so good.
No, you've taken my power.
Maybe if I insult you.
Speaking of which, it was terrible.
Do it.
Don't do it.
Fine.
Introduce your fucking podcast.
Yeah, introduce my podcast, our podcast.
Our fucking podcast.
This is Behind the Bastards, a show about bad people.
Cataboo, not a bad person.
Kat, you spend way too much time monitoring Fox News and 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.
How are you feeling as we come into part two, talking about Rafael Trujillo?
Rise To Power In Beverly Hills00:05:15
I'm really interested to see where this is going because it feels kind of like a typical rise to power, especially in the 20th century, especially U.S. basically everything we've seen in so many other countries.
More than that.
That's what most of these stories involve, but like not a lot more.
Like one standard deviation of additional that.
But yeah, yeah, otherwise, pretty normal dictator story.
And when Trujillo takes power, he has kind of the standard priorities that any new dictator has, right?
He's going to sit uneasily upon a new one throne.
He's going to launch his traditional bloody reign of terror, kill his political opponents, murder newspaper editors, anybody who might be resistance to the reign.
And Trujillo understood he's got to move fast in doing this because things are not great in the Dominican Republic.
Once the U.S. leaves, they kind of set shit up in a way that makes a guarantee that the economy is going to collapse.
And sure enough, sugar prices fall through the floor right after Trujillo takes office.
This is partly due to the fact that the Great Depression is happening.
So in addition to the shit that the Dominican Republic was already dealing with as a result of the U.S. occupation and the economic regime they set up, now you've got this depression.
And so the thing that had kind of kept them limping along as a country previously was that the U.S. 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 Trujillo 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 80,000 people, a little less than that, living in the Capitol when the hurricane hits.
And more than 2,500 of them die, plus another 8,000 are injured and several thousand more are unaccounted for.
So like about 10% 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 Santo Domingo, the capital, had been built in the 1500s and it had been built as kind of almost a medieval city, right?
Because the 1500s, 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 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 1900, the gate was closed every night.
Like they would, people would like blow horns and like lock the gate at night for the city.
We need to do that today, honestly.
I love that.
I agree.
I like the pomp and circumstance of being like, time to go to bed.
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 Bernardino 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.
Yeah.
Can you do like on the highway, like put gates so that way if someone's speeding and they're not paying attention, they just hit it, you know?
That could work.
Sure, that seems safer than that.
Like the east side, west side division makes sense.
And San Bernardino is not.
Los Angeles.
Thank you so much.
This has been.
I think we do.
I would like to do like a big minasterith style curtain wall around Culver City.
You know, that's, that's, uh, that was my old neighborhood.
We can defend it from those Santa Monica savages.
Yeah.
Don't even, don't even get me started on you, Beverly Hills.
No, Beverly Hills would be really great for all the people here that are from or been to California.
We need to unite the Cadillos to take out Beverly Hills.
You know, I think with a strong enough military force, we can occupy it and pacify the region.
But only up until Sunset and Dohini, because we must keep West Hollywood.
We must keep West Hollywood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, This is all great content for our listeners.
For just Robert.
Yeah.
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 San Diego.
So, you know, just to have them sail right up the coast.
Yeah.
Now, much of the colonial quarter of the capital 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, Trujillo 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 he single-handedly rescues Santo Domingo in its hour of need.
This is not really accurate.
Dictator Relief Efforts Go Wrong00:14:35
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 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 like having a million people die and then being like, wow, we handled that way better than we expected.
Could have been worse.
Yeah.
Could have been worse.
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 law suspending the Constitution and giving the president the power to take any steps necessary in order to deal with the relief effort.
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 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.
Trujillo uses the hurricane for that, which I haven't actually run into in a dictator.
Like an actual emergency.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is an interesting little spin on the standard story.
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 Trujillo 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, 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 some shit off the top and sell it on the black market and make some money for yourselves while you're doing this.
This is really interesting to be like, hey, you're, 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 what it needs.
Yeah.
And a lot of that is like Red Cross funds, right?
It's like money that comes from overseas.
And Trujillo 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 to 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 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 Trujillo's pocket.
The amount of aids sent was enough, though, to both lie 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 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 42, which operated with legal impunity as a secret police force.
The aftermath of the hurricane would be their first chance 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, Trujillo ordered Captain Paulino, the head of La 42, to secure large quantities of gasoline.
And that evening, the dead bodies of the victims of the hurricane, as well as a few killed by La 42, were drenched with the fluid and burned.
This method of corpse disposal was hailed as an ingenious device of the president to save time and prevent epidemics.
Trujillo, 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 disease.
And also, if we're going to be burning corpses, I might as well have my secret police murder some of 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, you know?
Then it's not Trujillo did a terror.
It's Trujillo stopped an epidemic.
Not bad.
That's smart.
Yeah.
I'll give him that.
I mean, he's pretty good at this.
In terms of corpse disposal, especially his beginning dictator steps.
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 U.S. had left behind and the modernized military Rafael 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 Espole, who participated in some of this campaign, later recalled, moving his marine-trained troops over marine-built roads, the Generalissimo struck again and again.
Caciques who wouldn't surrender unconditionally were gunned down.
The survivors saw the light.
The era of regional warlords was ended.
The era of Trujillo had begun.
And any dictator, you're going to have to deal with the fact that once you take over, there's the people who were elites prior to your rise to power, right?
And you got kind of two broad options.
One is you co-opt them, right?
You make them your elites, you know?
And the other is you marginalize them, right?
Either you take away their wealth and power, you massacre them, or you just kind of do, you try to slowly edge them out.
Rafael 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 him the loyalty of the peasantry.
And this makes a lot of sense when you consider the people who had been running things in the Dominican Republic prior to Trujillo, it had been pretty chaotic.
And most of these people, most of the peasants, were not happy with these caciques and were 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 Trujillo because it turns out that it's hard to have a middle class when like banditry is the biggest industry and the central government doesn't work past the street lamps, you know?
So Raphael 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 in towns and stuff and announcements.
He's sending like all of these announcements 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 Trujillo.
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 he's not 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?
And also it's immediately actionable.
It's not just like a vague promise.
Yeah.
And this, he understood, was the weight 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?
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?
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, 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 doing normal dictator shit 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 Trujillo understood that most of his personal security and the stability of his regime was going to rest entirely on what amounted to bribing the peasantry.
And Espale writes, quote, one of the techniques he used was baptism, baptism in $100 bills.
Trujillo became godfather to tens of thousands of children, and the parents of each child received $100.
Trujillo also reaped a dividend.
It is considered poor form in Latin America to conspire against your 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 line up 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 inside the chapel was stifling, but it went on for hours, day after day.
Let no one say that Trujillo 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 them their godfather.
And then like, I mean, why wouldn't you be take the guy that's going to give you 100 bucks?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's smart.
I've never heard of a dictator doing that, right?
I've never heard that scheme, and I think it's really smart.
Yeah.
I'm trying to think of like any equivalent.
I don't think I've ever heard of someone like this.
I mean, it's almost like marrying your child to consolidate power in Europe, but like also hundreds of people and they're all the people poor people.
That's really I'm just processing that.
Yeah, it's pretty smart.
Cause 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 described people to have kids.
But like that's so different from like, yeah, I'll be your kid's godfather, right?
Yeah, that's it just like a one-time thing or can you be like, hey, you're my kid's godfather.
What's up, Trujillo?
I'm sure it probably works per kid.
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?
Like Trujillo's got your back.
And obviously, as a result, you back me no matter what I do, right?
Like, because I'm your godfather.
Remember when I built that school?
Remember when I did this, you know, like you owe me.
And even if he did get like assassinated, like that other person's going to have a bad time.
You have adequately anticipated where this story ends.
So it is not hard to see why Trujillo 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 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, nor are they living solely.
They're living at the mercy of a strong man, Trujillo, 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, have I gotta like, you're not worrying about that kind of shit all the time, right?
As long as you're good with Trujillo, you're generally pretty good.
And because he brings this form of peace to the country, the economy starts doing a lot better.
And over the coming years of his reign, over the time that Trujillo'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 hadn't, this is a really normal thing in 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 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 Trujillo, 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 if like a soldier deserts, right?
Like he puts them under a military justice system for government employees.
And as a result, there's services for citizens.
Like people are able to do things, you know?
Does he actually care about services or is he just doing this purely for it?
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.
I wasn't sure if it was like a double whammy of the power and actually caring about the people, not for power.
I don't know the man.
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 there's 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, there's probably.
He's saying that like elected officials don't grasp this very basic concept.
Well, if someone else is responsible for the stability of the state, then you can just grift.
Energy And Ego Of A Leader00:06:16
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 stop with Trujillo 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.
Yeah.
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 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 are 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 30s, right?
Fitness culture is starting to become a thing.
And Trujillo 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 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, like 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 how long it's going to take.
And so that just takes up a lot of time that you might spend plotting, right?
Like this is a thing other dictators do.
Again, it's weird.
He's like, he, 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 and disrupt your life and stop you from being able to plot against me.
Trujillo's version is we're all going to like go on long walks with like shake weights in our hands so that we stay fit.
It's like instead of being like, I'm going to keep you all drugged up.
It's like, we're going to go on a gluten-free diet.
Yeah.
You have to think about it all the time.
You better enter your calories.
He's like your weight walkers.
You are out of here.
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.
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 rebellion against Trujillo's rule pretty early on.
And when he's finally killed, Trujillo 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 Trujillo's like, I think you got the point.
So again, not averse to brutal shit, right?
Like he does that too.
Creative, though.
Yeah, it is really creative though.
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.
I don't think Garrison would enjoy.
Sophie, I think that's a great idea.
Who are you going to kill first?
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 going to like, that's like stymieing, right?
You got to, you got to be, let the world kind of, you know, I know who Robert would pick.
Who's that, Sophie?
Oh, I'm not going to say it on Mike, but I know who you would pick.
Okay.
Okay.
Speaking of mics, my mic is back.
Good.
I just think that that's really creative.
That's like a really creative way to terrorize an entire population.
Also, really heavy.
Yeah, very heavy.
Corpses are not light.
And to dance with one, that's another workout.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Again, Health King.
Yeah, exactly.
Very, very concerned with everyone's fitness levels.
So he makes a priority too 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 not my government.
Like, what are you talking about?
Like, my government is this angry dude, right?
Or I'm 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 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 Espolay's book describes.
One morning, soldiers clad in civilian clothes swarmed into the square.
They clobbered everyone who didn't stand up for the anthem and flag.
This went on for several days.
Then people began drifting out of the square just before each ceremony.
Trujillo responded by throwing a coordinate 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.
God, this dude would be frantically checking his Instagram comments just to be like, all right, who liked it?
Who comments?
Really?
Looking at his close friend story to see who reacted.
He would be a big fan of those really problematic intermittent fasting ads people keep getting on Twitter.
Why didn't you like the van?
Come on, you got to stay fit.
Dancing For The National Anthem00:04:59
Yeah.
Have soldiers beat up dudes who don't like sign up for the intermittent fasting program?
That would be so him.
His pincher story would be intolerable.
Intolerable.
Speaking of intolerable, it's time for ads, Robert.
Well, first, I got to 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?
Oh, God, that's a really good one.
As an arcoleptic, I'm going to go with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.
Oh, oh, boy, that's a nightmare.
That's like a literal waking hell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Bump back.
If you didn't know, you can do the Cotton Eye Joe to Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.
And it matches up perfectly.
So I'm going to make them do that instead of standing for the night.
Suicide rate would 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 and salute.
Yeah, that's that's that's fair, but to be fair, I get my rocks off on forcing like Tucker Carlson on everyone around me.
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.
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Ah, we're back.
And we didn't hear what Sophie's song would be.
Yeah, Sophie, what's your song?
Hmm.
I think, I think the Bloodhound Gang, definitely.
They've got so many hits, Sophie.
I think I gotta go wanna be by the Spice Girls.
Scapegoating Haitians At The Border00:15:54
Okay.
Ooh, that's a really good one.
You gotta make sure everyone knows the rap, though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's like the best part of the song, and not enough people actually know the words.
Send in soldiers if they don't get the lyrics to the rap right.
Exactly.
That's basically working at like a nightclub is like every time I hear any song like that, my eye twitches and I just automatically sing it.
There you go.
That would be a real win.
I think that's a great choice.
Oh my God, thank you so much.
Yeah.
So a lot of his rules.
You didn't ask Anderson what Anderson's choice would be and it would be Who Let the Dogs Out by the song.
Very creative, Sophie.
Sorry, it's her favorite song.
It's her only song.
Wow.
We listen to it on the side.
I'm going to sensitize to it on loop every night for four hours.
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.
That is so Saddam.
Very, very Saddam.
Yeah.
So much of his ruling strategy was focused on simultaneously humiliating old elites and turning himself into as like a 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 1936, he rechristened the capital Ciedad Trujillo.
He also changed the name of Duarte Peak to Trujillo Peak at 10,128 feet.
This apex in the Dominican Cordillera Central 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 peak's impressive height would not be enough to please the president.
So he recorded the height at 3,175 meters, 10,417 feet instead.
Just what's the actual height?
10,128.
It's not even that big a lie, right?
He's just adding like 300 feet.
Or yeah, because meters.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Yeah.
Changing the, I mean, first off, changing the name of the capital city to be your name, classic dictatorship.
Changing a mountain, classic dictatorship.
But really where it gets good is like this geographer is scared to give the actual height of the mountain.
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 really says a lot.
Doesn't he beat out another mountain by being just that much taller?
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 kind of fear.
You don't even have to threaten him.
He probably wouldn't have even been mad if he was told the truth.
No, he wouldn't know.
How the fuck is he?
He's tall enough, right?
Yeah.
But that guy still does it.
You love to see it.
Yeah.
So obviously 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 sort of the kind of thing where like it just becomes known that if Trujillo wants to see you, you go to him, right?
Does he have like a specific type?
Like is he preying on women that work for him or I think it is generally women in high society, but not exclusively.
And 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 it's just generally known like it's not a good thing to not give the president what 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 just like a gangster.
Very, yeah, very classic dictator shit.
Yeah.
Trujillo also commissioned songs to be composed in his honor with titles like Faith and Trujillo, Trujillo is great and immortal, and Trujillo, the great architect.
None of which have the panache of like foxtrot uniform Charlie Kilo or, you know, some of the other great Bloodhound gang songs.
I like Trujillo is great and immortal.
It's like he's also sexy and can throw a ball really far.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Real good pitcher, Trujillo.
He's such a good pitcher.
Yeah.
Pretty good jump shot.
He can dunk.
I know you don't think he can dunk, but he can dunk.
And that's his own song.
That's like, that's the whole song.
I know you don't think he can dunk, but he can dunk.
Trujillo, I mean.
Dope.
Someone please compose that.
Yeah.
In person, Trujillo was all oily saturant confidence, but he was less stable than he liked to pretend.
By 1937, the Dominican Republic was nearly insolvent.
International assistance then had become absolutely necessary.
Now, this is 1937, and traditionally the Dominican Republic gets money from the U.S. Trujillo considers himself a Marine, but the U.S. is not the government in 37 that he feels the closest to or that he wants to be the closest to, because he's kind of become a Hitler Stan by this point, right?
Now, Adolf's been in power less time by a couple of years than Trujillo, but he's really done something with it.
And Raphael is a big fan of this go-getter young German, right?
He's a Hitler Stan.
Yeah, yeah, he's a Hitler Stan.
He's got all the albums.
Yeah.
Dad, have you seen Adolf's new single?
He's great.
Visionary.
Yeah, his new single, The Anschluss.
Yeah.
So in September of 1937, a bunch of Nazi government representatives come to visit him, and Trujillo accepts a signed copy of Mein Kampf from the German representative.
The Nazi delegate.
Yeah, oh, yeah, he's got a signed one.
The Nazi delegation is met with crowds and positive articles in Trujillo controlled newspapers, all with titles like, long live our illustrious leaders, the honorable president, Dr. Trujillo, and the Führer of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler.
Wait, when did Trujillo become a doctor?
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?
Yeah, it's like the only title I've got.
Well, because he gives it a little twist.
Yeah.
Right.
Dr. Trujillo.
Yeah.
What is this fucking game of thrones?
Long live our illustrious leader, the honorable president, Dr. Trujillo, and the Fuhrer of Germany, Reich, Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler.
Hitler here being basically the prince of dictators, where he's like, you can just call me Adolf.
Like, we all know who I am.
So yeah, just like Prince.
So in an article written by Michelle Wuker, Wuku describes how Trujillo was particularly inspired by Nazi racial theories, as well as the model of strongman leadership that Hitler represented.
Quote, Hitler's ideas gave Trujillo a racist and nationalist plan to distract Dominicans from their empty stomachs.
Reminding Dominicans that they could not afford to feed foreigners too, Trujillo cracked down on migration from Haiti.
But powerful American sugarcane plantation owners who brought in Haitians to cut cane because unlike Dominicans, they worked for practically nothing forced him to make huge 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 got poor refugees flooding over the border.
Americans need them to work plantations for cheap.
But Trujillo 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 U.S. having fucked us over for so long that is why you're poor and starving.
It's the Haitians.
They're taking your jobs.
They're taking your wealth.
They're filling our cut.
We can't afford to feed them all, right?
Isn't there like a, I mean, we went through this earlier, but like a pretty similar background.
Yep.
In a lot of ways, they're not far from Mietcha.
And in fact, it's the only two places on this island.
A good number of the Haitians that he is turning into like the enemy have just been living in what is the Dominican Republic for forever, right?
Because at the border area, it's not like everyone has always had, like, the Dominican-Haitian border only gets settled in 1929, the year that he comes to power.
So like there's just communities of Haitians in the Dominican Republic who have been living there for, you know, a long time.
Is it settled by him?
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.
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 37, from 1929 to 37, nothing has changed about the situation with Haitians, right?
There's Haitians who live in the Dominican side of the border.
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 big.
You know, like, I don't want to be, because I know they're like two separate states, but it's, it's one island that I've voted in and people have moved.
Like colonial power.
Yeah.
And he's also.
Yeah.
I mean, trying to trying to make bigotry make sense here, Kath.
Yeah, I don't know what I expected here.
Like, yeah, it's the same with like the U.S.-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 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, when you talk about guys like Trujillo, 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 I mean, in my work a lot, I'm like, you know, I know logically that this logically makes no sense.
Like it's inherently illogical, but it's still just so frustrating.
And yeah.
Oh my God.
Okay.
It's about to get a lot more frustrating, but it is, and often scholars do compare what Trujillo does to a lot of like politics of the U.S. border.
These are, these are, in fact, similar situations in a lot of ways.
Now, there's a difference in that the Haitians had occupied the Dominican Republic not all that long ago.
So there is that aspect 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.
I mean, except your Texas history class in fourth grade, you wouldn't know otherwise.
You would not know otherwise.
Right.
Yes.
So, but yeah, this is like a very similar in a lot of ways situation.
So Trujillo starts using these people as like a huge scapegoat.
And there is a belief among many Dominicans that Haitians are taking jobs and driving down the price of wages.
And so as a result, Trujillo gets a lot of support when he pushes through punitive laws against them, which he does throughout the mid-30s.
In July of 1937, 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 8,000 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 and the government decides that they're Haitians.
And anyway, it's ugly.
Trujillo 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, he's angry that there's not as much livestock as he's 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 Rafael's propagandists give for his focus on the border, but there start being massacres.
There's massacres of Dominicans by Haitian partisans.
There's reprisal strikes by Dominican forces.
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 reprisal strikes.
In early October, Trujillo 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, right?
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 ketamine or whatever.
Trump was like on Prednisone or whatever.
Oh, those were good days.
Those were good days.
That week was like the best week on that enforcement sort of landscaping.
Yeah, we had some, we had some fun times.
Don't forget January 6th, too.
Okay.
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 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 already begun.
Around 300 Haitians were killed in Banica.
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 300 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.
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 used 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 and lands.
Even a 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, at a great risk to their own lives and livelihoods, hide Haitians in efforts to protect them from Trujillo's murderers?
Trujillo's men searched the houses and 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 Cristi, and threw the bodies to the sharks.
For days, the waves carried uneaten body parts back onto Hispaniola's beaches.
Genocide Inspired By The Nazis00:12:13
So we are past the fun part of the Trujillo story.
Yeah, that was so much less fun than January 6th on Twitter.
Yes.
Yeah.
Once again, throwing shit into the sea.
And it's, you know, you can see here, too, there's this echoing of the past, 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 is going to be 30,000 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.
Yeah, Jesus.
Yeah.
That's like Rehun Nan King shit, just in terms of like the brutality of just like brute force.
Yeah, because the guns can let you collect people, but if you shoot them, then it's like obvious you did it, right?
You lose your political, you know, because all the other guns are in sick.
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 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 their credit, this is a massacre executed by the government.
There are certainly 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?
Do the people who hide them get killed 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?
Like because they live 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 their R's in the right way.
And it's just sort of like a thing, right?
Like you get this in like polyglot communities 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, I, my roommate is, is ethnically British and like he calls it a bathroom and you're like all this shit.
Like, you know, this is the less fun version of this.
It's wrong, FYI.
Yeah, 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, 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 parsley massacre by a lot of people as a result of this.
Yeah.
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 20 and 30,000 people massacred and most of them in a week.
There's some mop-up killings the second week, but like after about a week of this, the international community finds out, right?
Like this story gets, 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're 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, just shoot him like the rest of them.
Yeah, don't like, don't let us hear about it if you're going to do it.
Yeah.
And so Raphael orders an official stop to the massacre on October 8th after about a week, but his forces keep 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 15,000.
The high estimate is 30,000 or so.
20, 25,000 is probably a pretty realistic death toll.
The butchery is severe enough that international attention lingers.
And Raphael, he tries to 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 Republic in Haiti.
And he goes to hospitals, these little field 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.
Just, and he talks to these people.
He takes down their stories.
He hears what happened.
He does his work diligently.
And then showing more courage than might exist in the American media today, he flies to the Capitol to talk directly to Trujillo, to confront him about what he's heard and seen.
And I should note here that in addition to writing for Collier's magazine, Quinton was a former NFL linebacker.
So he is, he is like, yeah, he's pretty cool guy.
Yeah.
I'm hoping that he like mailed, like mailed his shit ahead of time before going to the Capitol.
That is unclear to me.
He may just have had, you know, this is the 30s.
He may have just had this kind of like, they will not let an, 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 can take you out.
Yeah, he may have just had kind of faith that the dictator, but anyway, still a ballsy move to go directly to this guy.
And Trujillo wines and dines this journalist.
He sits him down for Godfather.
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 are saying happened to them.
They're saying your soldiers did all this horrible shit.
And Trujillo's 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, 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 that directly counters your claims.
I don't believe you.
And Trujillo 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 going to do, he does like an if I did it sort of thing, or if it was going to be my guys.
So now I also should note here, after like Quentin, like it is because of him that 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 attention around this.
Quentin Reynolds will go on to be a war correspondent during World War II.
Pretty cool guy, IMO.
So the river massacre, as it's also sometimes called, was inspired partly by Nazi racial theories.
Trujillo 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 Dominicanization propaganda campaign that describes his terrible crime as an act of protection to save Dominicans from the pollution of Haitian blood.
His terrible crime.
I thought it was the farmer's terrible crime.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
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 Nazi racial policies.
So, the year after the River Massacre in 1938, FDR had convened a 32-nation conference in France to discuss resettling Jewish refugees from Nazi territory.
The war had not started yet again.
This is 38, and the Nazis were willing to allow immigration, were willing to allow Jews to leave Nazi Germany as long as they 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 or 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, 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 U.S. and basically no one is willing to, this is not just the United States.
He has 32 countries together, and none 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.
Yeah, Rafael Trujillo.
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 us up.
You know, like that is the attitude that he's coming into this with, right?
So he says the Dominican Republic can host between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews.
That's a big deal, right?
Yeah.
How many people live in the country at that point?
I think a little, like a million and a half, something like that at this point, maybe.
That's a huge amount of immigration.
And that's a lot of, potentially a lot of lives to save, 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, 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 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.
Right.
There's no lessons sometimes from history.
Just it's a thing that happened, though.
You know, it's a thing that happened.
Yeah.
And obviously, like, yeah, if you're one of these Jews, 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, right.
It's 1938 and I'm a Jewish guy in Germany.
Like, I'm going to do whatever I want to do to get out.
I'm going to hang out in the Dominican Republic.
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.
Escaping Germany For The DR00:03:04
Wow.
Yeah.
For racist reasons or not racist reasons.
It's a roll of the dice, cat.
That's a roll of the dice.
Flip of the old coin right there.
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Racism Saves Lives In Holocaust00:05:06
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Oh, we are back.
And we are talking about Rafael Trujillo's very odd offer to take a bunch of 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, right?
He's like, you can come here.
I just don't want you to be like too Jewy, you know?
That is, 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 literally the only offer on the table.
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 big part of what Trujillo 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 out of Europe and buy up land, 26,000 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 80 acres of land, 10 cows, a mule, and a horse, which compared to Auschwitz is pretty good deal, right?
Like, yeah, not bad.
It's not a great plan.
I don't think Trujillo knows a lot about farming.
The specific area that these folks are able to are given to like allowed to buy acreage 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, 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 50 or older, which makes sense when you look at the demographics that remained in the German Jewish and Austrian Jewish communities in this period of time.
But Trujillo, a lot of this is like he wants to breed them, right?
So 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 U.S., which totally reasonable.
I'm not criticizing them for this, but it doesn't.
It's part of why the plan doesn't entirely work the way that Trujillo 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 try to work to grow doesn't work.
So Dorsa inputs or imports a bunch of Jewish Palestinians who have been living on kibbutzes and brings them over and has them like help 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 kibbutzim in, they build a thriving community.
I think there's never more than about 500 people who live in it at a time, but something like 10,000, something like that, like 1500 might 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 U.S.
So this does save a lot of lives.
And there is still a Jewish population in this area, in this colony called Sasua 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, I don't give Trujillo credit for this.
I give these people credit for like surviving and making something actually kind of rad out of a very bad.
Put your hands up for racism.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the one time racism saved lives in the Holocaust.
We're solving one genocide with another.
Yeah.
Again, there's not always lessons to take out of fire and fire, I guess.
Canceling each other out.
I don't know, math.
It doesn't can't.
No, it certainly does not cancel it out.
Trujillo Regime Claims Bandit Status00:15:41
It's just a thing.
I'm totally kidding for that.
For the sake of everyone that loves to hate me, I'm totally kidding.
Genocide is bad.
It's bad.
Always been consistent about that.
I'm anti-genocide.
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.
Sophie is suspiciously quiet about being anti-genocide.
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 has some Haitian ancestry and has some weird hang-ups with this, which brings me to the matter of his face.
One of Trujillo'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 at all time.
He always has whitening makeup on his face and he's bad at applying it.
Like it is like noted.
He looks like a mannequin.
Yeah, he looks like a mannequin.
Like he's just got it slathered on all the time.
Get a blender.
Yeah, yeah.
Come on, man.
Like bare minerals has some good stuff.
Like, yeah, anyway, whatever.
He knows that, but not a third basketball player.
What is happening?
Yeah.
What is happening?
Why do you know what bare minerals is?
I don't know because I've had, you know, dated people and stuff.
You go buy gifts and shit at the Sephora.
Allegedly.
I'm good at getting gifts, you know?
You are.
No, I can't even deny it.
Robert is a great guy.
I'm not even being sarcastic.
He's thoughtful as ass.
Yeah.
So.
I mean, he does bare minerals.
That's really sweet.
Yeah.
So one of, again, so know a third basketball player's name by end of day, or we're going to have a problem.
Bear mineral.
That's my favorite player.
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 detail about his childhood as we'd like is that he goes to great lengths to cover up everything about his early life once he is in power, including he kind of goes to war against his old nickname, Chipita or bottle cap.
And this is a fun little anecdote from The Little Caesar of the Caribbean, which is a biography of Trujillo.
Quote, somehow 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 Generalissimo has failed to abolish its meaning.
The natural and probably innocent boyhood passion for collecting meaningless trifles remains with him to this day, although considerably changed in scope.
In his maturity, Trujillo collects medals and decorations, of which he possesses more than 50.
So that I loved dictators, which is like a shit ton of fake bottles.
Why wouldn't he?
It's so fucking heavy, the heaviest jacket in the world.
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.
That is insane.
That is an insane thing to do.
It is.
Men will literally torture people instead of just collecting bottle caps and going to therapy.
It is.
It's also this weird pattern with Trujillo, 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 airbrushed 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 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 caps, you know?
And he doesn't want people to think that about him.
I think it's cute.
I think it's cute that he was collecting bottle caps, that he was beating at people and getting his brothers to hurt people to get bottle caps.
Well, you know what, Kat?
When I sacrifice a ram tonight in order to commune with the deceased soul of Raphael Trujillo, I will let him know that you thought that was cute.
Thank you.
And then he's going to torture me until eternity.
Nah, he's dead now.
All he can do is like knock over trinkets on your wall.
I don't have any bottle caps from knockover.
He's going to be disappointed.
He's going to be pissed.
So as the 40s become the 50s, Trujillo grew increasingly comfortable in his role as dictator.
He built a rigid schedule for himself, one that assured he was awake every day at 5 a.m. 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, he often had a driver take him around in a small car through the streets of the capital, 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 30 years.
Like he has legitimately built, like done such a good job of kind of cracking down on resistance that for the most part, this works for him.
So do the peasants still like him?
A lot of them do.
I don't like, there's no poll data, right?
Like, 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 had maybe more power before he got in.
That's, it's like the elites where resistance to his regime primarily comes from.
So yeah, Espela and his early biographers often describe him as having a lot of dates with girls during this.
Like that's also a major part of his day-to-day schedule.
Obviously, women are being induced to sleep with him through direct threat.
But it's generally enough to know that like, well, 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 is a thing that's happening.
Or why?
I believe he has a number of kids.
Did he ever have like a wife or like an air apparent?
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 Maribal.
She was an upper class woman who married into a family that was anti-Trujillo 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 Trujillo 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 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 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.
don't need to belabor that point.
So she and her sisters, Patria and Minerva, start to organize together and they create the nexus of an underground movement aimed at ousting Trujillo from power.
They came to be known as the butterflies or Las Maraposas.
And they were a major part, like a nexus of the underground resistance to the regime until in 1959, a group 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 Trujillo came in with guns to try to overthrow the government.
But when this crackdown or when this insurgency in 1959 gets defeated, there's a crackdown.
And it's so brutal that it convinces the Mariposas they have to accelerate their plans to force Trujillo out.
So they start planning to assassinate the president.
Unfortunately, they get caught.
Trujillo'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, Trujillo arrests their husbands and throws them in prison, right?
So the Maribel sisters 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 25th, 1960, Trujillo's men ambush them on a rural mountain road, force 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 to Trujillo's regime.
Their Mariposas are still celebrated today for their role in the resistance.
This is like one of the really searing moments of the Trujillo regime for obvious reasons.
Was it in like the Dominican press at all?
Or was that suppressed?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the kind of thing that spreads primarily through conversations in the underground.
I believe, if I'm not mistaken, Trujillo's regime tries to claim that it's like bandits or something, you know, who doesn't.
So there is some, I think, news about it.
But Trujillo's regime has its secret police, which initially is a military unit.
But in 1957, 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 has.
I think we have talked enough about that that I'm not glossing it over.
What 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 and he makes himself and his family the center of the entire economy.
By the 1950s, 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?
In addition to handing out jobs in the government through patronage.
He's a lot slicker than like a lot of other dictators.
I feel like they get sloppy around year 10.
He's very smart and he does get sloppy.
He gets slappy with like the genocide inconsistent, but like it's smart.
He's still doing moves to keep peasants outside.
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 do recommend.
It's a great book about Trujillo.
He then fashioned all public works, policy formation, and patronage as 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 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 Bajarona mines, which he controlled.
His wife, Maria Martinez, was allotted a government bank for cashing state paychecks.
Trujillo's sister's husband was given the military pharmaceutical contract, a highly lucrative enterprise given the massive expansion of the armed forces.
In this extreme example of pre-Bindalism, the appropriation of the state for private ends, the state became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo and his circle.
Trujillo 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.
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 divorce 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 leads is the nationalization by Trujillo of foreign-owned businesses, including businesses owned by Americans, right?
So he is kind of taking, 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 Trujillo, to be fair, 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 refreshions himself as an anti-communist.
Some of this came naturally to him.
He and Castro hate each other.
So in 1956, when Castro was planning his revolt against Batista, Trujillo had offered the Batista regime military supplies.
That didn't wind up working out for Batista.
Castro overthrows Batista.
And in 1959, when that Dominican exile force had like 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 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 own invasion of Cuba, which would not have worked and never winds up panning out.
So he compensated by having his men loot the Cuban embassy in Trujillo, the city, which is what he's renamed the capital, right?
Cuban Arms And Overthrow Plans00:12:30
Rafael also had a long-standing rivalry with Romulo Betancourt, the president of Venezuela.
In 1951, one of his men had tried to kill Betancourt when he visited Havana by stabbing him with a poisoned syringe.
This led to some understandable anger by Betancourt against Trujillo.
And so Betancourt started publicly accusing the Dominican dictator of being a crook and a gangster, which he's not wrong here.
So Trujillo, now that he's been insulted, tries to blow up Betancourt with a car bomb.
And Betancourt 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 1960, the United States is starting to get pissed off.
Eisenhower considered the attacks on Betancourt to be the last straw and was somewhat confusingly convinced.
Like Eisenhower's worry and why he allows the CIA to try to overthrow Trujillo is he's convinced that Trujillo is 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 communists will get in power.
Why would he need?
Oh, okay.
I got you.
I got you.
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 done worse than Trujillo, but I just don't think that that was really likely.
But 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 coups that the U.S. has backed, I don't really have a problem with trying to kill Rafael Trujillo, right?
Like, I'm not, don't have a super big issue with it, but we're bad at this, like we usually are when we try to do coups, right?
Like we're, 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 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 dissidents to assassinate Trujillo.
But like a week after we give them guns, the Bay 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 shit.
It's just no one's priority, you know?
It's one of those kinds of stuff.
They're like, we can't let them go to the communists.
They're also just like, you know, whatever.
Yeah, well, whatever happens, you know, we're going to go do really bad at 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.
Yeah, they talk about how they want to open a bar together.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Warfare History Network about what happens next.
In February 15th, 1961, 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 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, like bombs and shit, you know.
Come on, make it cooler.
Yeah.
Sorry.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Kennedy administration tries to convince the dissidents not to kill Trujillo, as the political climate was not conducive at that moment.
However, the machine guns were dispatched to the U.S. consulate and were taken into possession.
Two days before Trujillo's murder, Kennedy sent a cable to Dearborn informing him that the United States did not condone political assassination in any form and that the United States must not be associated with the attempt on Trujillo'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, this guy probably should have gotten got, but we immediately try to get out of it.
Like, we do not get machine guns.
Yeah.
Go get that dude.
And then we're like, oh, fuck.
Don't kill him.
No, right now.
Not right now.
We're not annoying enough.
Please.
Forget those guns we gave you.
Please get it.
Yeah.
You could use it for something else.
Like, use some art.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Carve it up.
We don't like this.
We're not part of this.
Throw it in the sea with the others.
Now, again, Kat, I don't know how much experience you have with dissidents, but historically, when you give them a bunch of guns, they're going to use them, right?
It's kind of what everyone knows about dissidents.
Why aren't riddled with bullet holes?
That's right.
That's right.
All those dissidents you're arming.
So in the end, it was Trujillo's iron-rigid schedule and his habit of driving around without guards that would do him in.
On May 30th, a group of assassins armed with U.S. 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.
His, his, uh, his driver returns fire.
So does Trujillo.
He like gets out of the car with a gun.
Um, 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, ah, shit, what do we do with this guy?
Fuck.
So we're like, I guess this is the logical stuff.
Just throw it in the sea, man.
That's what we've been doing this whole time.
Yeah, throw him in the sea.
Now, the assailants like flee at this point.
And some of them do survive.
I actually read an interview.
Doesn't we know who they are?
Yeah, yeah.
Their names are 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 him in.
And every year on the anniversary of his murder, I like put them on again just to like walk around town in my killing the president shoes.
I was looking at pictures of Trujillo and there's like this BBC article that I'm thinking on now and it says, I shot the cruelest dictator in the Americas.
And it's just like this really old dude.
Yeah.
And honestly, like, what a flex being like, yeah, these are my killing the president shoes.
I put them on when I'm killing the president or just, you know, having a walkabout.
Yeah.
It's like when people are like, these are like my lucky boxers.
You're like, this is my assassination.
Yeah, this is my shop president pants.
Fucking dope.
Like, really, like, like, God-tier flex right there.
I'm not saying assassinate anyone, but if you do, make sure your outfit is fresh.
Yeah, have a nice outfit and save the shoe.
Well, no, don't actually.
Bad idea.
Burn everything you're wearing.
Um, I mean, if you don't mind going, assassination sense, right?
Just make sure you get like hanged in like a cool outfit.
The moral of the story is dressed well all the time.
Yeah.
Also, with Trujillo, I do.
I mean, I can't use the word respect, but I like that he went out shooting.
Like, I appreciate that here.
Um, he isn't this.
Yeah, I mean, he's like, Yeah, after all these years, he's you know, driving to his girlfriend's house and he gets shot and he's like, fuck it.
Got a gun somewhere.
Yeah, he does kind of scarface it a little bit.
Tries to at least, yeah, tries to, it totally fails.
Yeah.
Now, the coup that these assassins had had like hope that there would be a coup, government and stuff they would overthrow.
That does not really happen.
Um, Trujillo's son, Ramphus, uh, takes over the 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.
Uh, Ramphus, all my homies hate Rampus sucks.
Ooh.
So Ramfus is not in power long, right?
Because Trujillo, Rafael Trujillo, pretty smart dictator.
Ramphus, again, for one thing, you just know by that name.
He's not going to be.
There's never going to be another president Ramphus.
No, absolutely.
And it's not spelled the way you think.
And so within a couple of months, he's got this power struggle with Joaquin Belaguer, who is another Dominican politician.
And it just doesn't work out.
There's a bunch of rioting in the streets.
And Ramphus winds up fleeing the country with a bunch of stolen money and never comes back.
Yeah, there's 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 22,000 American troops to restore order.
There was no communist revolt.
This was never a real threat, but we wind up there again.
We're like, no, Ramphus.
Also, I just looked up Ramphus 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.
Yeah, that's classic dictator stuff.
Yeah, with the equivalent pay and privileges of being a colonel.
He was like, I'm a doctor.
You're a colonel.
Yeah.
Lol.
Yeah.
Yep.
And he doesn't live that long.
He dies in 69, thankfully.
So how long are we in the Dominican Republic after that?
Not that long, I don't think, but also, you know, to an extent, kind of forever, too.
Yeah, that's a 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 U.S. gets involved in your country, it always ends well.
And it always ends cleanly.
We're 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 come in clean and we come out clean.
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 car in front of the embassy.
You know, we're there.
Oh, man.
It is funny.
Good stuff.
So that was bad.
Rafael Trujillo, bad.
U.S. involvement in his dictatorship, also bad.
U.S. involvement after his dictatorship, not great.
Yeah.
I mean, as far as dictators go, though, there were like a bunch of little twists.
Like he did everything just slightly different.
Interesting dictator.
Interesting dictator for sure.
Like he followed a lot of the formula, but he was like, I got to do it my way.
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 here.
He's a little bit like the third property brother.
You know, he looks like the other property brothers, but he's just got a little something different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Name a third name a third basketball player.
Do it.
The one you know a third one.
I know you do.
You claim.
Andrew Jackson.
You claim you're better at basketball.
Did you say Andrew Jackson?
Oh, LeBron.
LeBron.
Thank you.
I feel better.
You're welcome.
It just took like two and a half hours to get there.
That was healing for me.
That's good.
Yeah.
That's good.
Kat, you have anything you want to plug?
Yeah, I talk about right-wing media and Fox News and right-wing community, just like all those assholes doing stuff.
You can check me out on TikTok at CatMboo.
And then same on YouTube where I do long-form content.
Sweet.
Excellent.
Well, you can find me listening to the Bloodhound Gang, which I will be doing after this episode of our show finishes.
I'm happy for you.
You can find my book After the Revolution, wherever books are sold.
And you can find Rafael Trujillo dead because he fucking got gotten the shit.
Hell yeah.
Dead as shit.
So yeah, you know?
And, you know, for those of you listening, I'm not...
Keep Your Shoes On00:02:17
I would never encourage anyone to assassinate an elected leader.
But if you do, keep your shoes.
Keep the shoes, yeah.
Keep the shoes.
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