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

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Robert sits down with Kat Abu to talk about Rafael Trujillo, the genocidal dictator and most prolific godfather in world history. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up y'all, this is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. your podcasts. a punch to my nose. What's looming my sword of damacles? This is behind the bastards, a podcast about the doom looming over each of us that could sweep down and just, just shatter our worlds at any second. My guest today to talk about the feeling of having doom looming directly over her head.

It's cat a boop. Cat, you talk, you write a, sorry. We were just talking about your apartment and the looming death art that's over your head right now. Yeah, it's great. It's terrifying, I hate it. Yeah, like I'm nervous, but I've also promised that if this thing hanging over your head falls on you, that I will promise to vindicate you

and post it wherever you, your heart desires. Thank you, I appreciate having Sophie as an Avenger for me. Yes, as well as you. I can do. You are a researcher who studies and also professionally makes photo, Fox News on the TikToks, TikTok and other platforms. Kat, where can people find you first off before we get in here because they should in fact

find you? Track you down. You can find me on TikTok and YouTube. I do long form and short form content. And then I'm also signing up for like the billion other sites that are popping up and all that. You're gonna get on threads. Oh God, I'm on threads. And it's just, I forget that it exists

and then I had to post a TikTok there. I'm just like, I'm making so many thumbnails. I'm just so dumbly got on threads. And then I was like, I don't wanna be here. And then I, and then, so I think there's an account. I've never used it. Yeah. Do you know any?

Kat, you are, you are in the, in the business of professionally surveilling, you might say, a whole bunch of people who would really like to be either dictators or the direct employees of dictators. Absolutely. It's a perfect way to describe them. So today I thought we would talk about one of the OG right wing dictators. Absolutely, that's a perfect way to describe them. So today, I thought we would talk about one of the OG right wing dictators. We are talking

about like a classic, like one of one of the all timers. This guy is like, he's not the Jordan of right wing dictators because that's gotta be our boy Hitler. But he's like, he's like the Scotty Pippin of right wing dictators for sure. Yeah. Yeah. We are talking about Rafael Trujillo. I'm not really proud of you for knowing two basketball players names for a while. I feel like, I feel like I've trained you and you've done well. It's only taken six years. Look, I know other basketball players like a magic, magic, magic magic Jimmy something like that. Right. I think that's right. That's right.

Are we good? Yeah. We're most deaf. So he says we're right. We're most deaf. Magic Jimmy. Scotty Pippin. The big bopper.

That sounds right. What do you know about Rafael Trujillo? I know nothing about Rafael Trujillo. Okay. Do you know much about the Dominican Republic, which was the country that he dictated? Very basics of like geography and vibes. That is perfect. That is basically what I knew about the Dominican Republic

before, I mean, we did some episodes on Haiti, on Papadoc and Babydoc a year or so ago, which is where I really did my first deep dive into the history of the island that both of those countries are on, Hispaniola. But it's interesting because the Dominican Republic was very nearly a state. It came within a hair's breath of being part of the United States. Probably would have been one of more like Puerto Rico is in terms of like its legal status. And yeah.

We are absolutely central to everything that has happened in the history of the Dominican Republic. And most of us are like, you and like I was, before I started reading on this topic, like it's just not a, like Americans barely hear about it, right? When you do, it's like, oh, someone had a wedding in the Dominican, right? Like that do, it's like, oh, someone had a wedding in the Dominican, right?

Like that's, I think the normal amount of knowledge most Americans have, which is fucked up because we, we've caused a lot of problems over there. Um, yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the case with a lot of these types of places where you don't hear anything and then you're like, oh, we are completely responsible for their demise. Yeah, and with the Dominican Republic and with Haiti, a big part of it is that they are so close to us, right?

Like it is close enough that it could have realistically been part of the United States from a like, like in the, from a political standpoint. Like it's not further away than a number of like other island possessions that our country has taken over the years. And we do take possession of the Dominican Republic for a period of time. So we have the fun time. Was it us or was it England? Now, no, in this case, it's us in Spain and France, who are like the ones really, and

Haiti actually, Haiti gets some fucking around in the Dominican Republic too. So we're going to have a fun time talking about this because before we, before we discuss Rafael Trujillo, who is true, he's, he's interesting because he's both like in some ways a kind of traditional strong man dictator, but in some ways, he might be like one of the smartest dictators that I've come across in terms of how he builds and uses power and how he manipulated his population and exercise control over them. He's really unique in a lot of ways. There's some very interesting aspects of how he kind of wields power that are unique

to him. So I'm, this is exciting. We're going to have a good time talking about this horrible, horrible man who did a genocide. Can I ask you ahead of time how long did he rule or is that like a spoiler? Almost 30 years. Oh, okay. Goddamn. When you go, when you're into dictators and Sophie and I are big dictators, Stan, love

them. There's like, I would say broadly speaking, three kinds of dictators. You've got your flash in the pan, dictators, right? You're guys who like take over and they're there for a couple of years and then they get cued or assassinated, right? And they're out pretty quick. You know, even Hitler kind of is a short-termer, right? Like he's only in there about 12 years.

And then you've got what I would say is like, you know, the dictator equivalent of like living to like 80 or so, which is around 30 years. That's Stalin, that's Mao, that's where Trujillo is. And then every now and then, it's very rare for one of these guys to last more than 30 years. And that's when you're when you're in like the 30, the 35 year range reigning as a dictator, that's like absolute goat tier in terms of, you know, holding power. You know, those guys are guys are tough sons of bitches. But Trujillo was right at 29 years.

So that's a pretty good run as dictators go. He's not bad. Probably shouldn't be talking about these guys like they're your buddies. I don't know how else to do it at this point. You know, it's... You called him Scotty Pippin, which is really fun. Yeah, he's a Pippin-esque character.

So let's talk some history and geography. Both, as I said, the Dominican Republican Haiti are on the island of Hispaniola, which is famous for being the first place that Columbus discovered. Today, Haiti is about a third or so of the island, and the Dominican Republic lays over the bulk of the island. Now, initially, all of his banola was claimed by Spain, right? But you know Spain.

They lost interest pretty quickly because people started, they started quote unquote, discovering the rest of South America. And like, his banola didn't have a lot of silver. And that's kind of was their whole thing for a while. It was like, how much silver can we get to wreck our own economy via a terrible inflation? Let's really fuck ourselves over for the rest of time by importing way too much fucking silver. Hispanola kind of comes a backwater after this initial burst of excitement because Spain, they got their Peru, they got Mexico, they're all up in all those places, right?

So the first slaves start being brought to Hispaniola as a result of the fact that like, the initial folks that they are working because like since there's not a huge, that they do have some silver mines, they have, they're mining some other stuff and they've got some agricultural plantations set up. And initially, the people that they're using

to work these plantations are the indigenous Tino and Kerib peoples. But they kill a huge number of those people, right? Like the majority of the folks who had lived their pre-contact. So this importation of slaves to Haspenola starts because they're like, well, we need more laborers, right? By the start of the 1600s,

Friedman on the island outnumbered enslaved people. So it's not initially what it's going to become, this kind of like massive slave plantation system. That actually takes a little while to really get going. Most slave ownership on his Spaniola was more intimate and smaller in scale than the vast plantations that would come to dominate Haiti or the American South, right? Masters rarely had much more than one or two enslaved people who were engaged in small-scale wage labor alongside them and their families. Since cash was in short supply, most slaves on the island in this early period were taken

through piracy. They were also often stolen French colonial slaves, so like literally like French boats, full of slaves would come by and people would, you know, raid them and take people off of them. In 1697, there's a big kerfuffle and Spain and France have a treaty over hispaniola, and this is where France gets what's going to become Haiti. And the chunk of hispaniola that becomes Haiti is the colony of Sandomane, right? That's the name of like the French colony that's going to wind up rebelling and becoming Haiti. And the French treated their possessions on hispaniola just like they treated their

possessions on all of the other Caribbean islands where they were involved. So they would just started importing huge numbers of enslaved people, primarily to man sugar plantations, right? That's the big fucking business in this period of time and it's a pretty shitty thing to farm You don't want to be a sugar farmer. It's it's a not a long life now The Spanish colony that is going to become you know kind of the center of what becomes the Dominican Republic is called Santa Domingo So you've got the French Sandomain and you've got the Spanish Santa Domingo, which is a little bit confusing, which is why we're going to start calling the Dominican Republic

in Haiti very soon here. And the economy in Santa Domingo is very different from Haiti. Haiti is turning into this slave plantation economy. In Santa Domingo, there is still slavery, but it's, again, it's on a much smaller scale, much of the economy rather than being based around like sugar plantations is cattle ranching, some tobacco growing, and kind of small scale export of wood in animal hides. And Spain is not thrilled with the state of affairs because it's a lot less profitable than than sand domain, right? Like this kind of like all this small scale stuff is not making the sort of money that Sando Man is making France.

But Spain is kind of, it's very difficult to actually govern beyond the city of Sando Man. So you've got this city that is effectively the colony. And then anytime you're outside of the walls of the city in the hinterland and these hills and mountains and stuff It's basically ungovernable, right? And this kind of population of what's kind of become the Dominican Republic fills up very quickly with a mix of You've got some freed slaves some escaped slaves from what's going to become Haiti They intermarry with indigenous peoples and with poor whites and they create this kind of

Creole subculture of ungovernable cowboy bandit types, right? That's like the majority of the population because the city's always gonna have more people in it. But that's the majority of the landmass is kind of these very small numbers of these sort of like, yeah, cowboy bandit type folks. Historian Lauren Derby writes that they quote,

hunted wild cattle in the interior and sold smoked meat and tobacco to contrabandists based on neighboring La Tortuga Island. Locally termed Monteros, these proto-pessents were the Dominican equivalent of the Hibaro, the Puerto Rican backlands highlander. This contraband economy of black masterless men was so successful that Spanish authorities had to resort to draconian measures to contain it. In 1606, for example, Governor Asorio torched northern settlements to the ground in a failed effort to curb contraband by forcing rural inhabitants to move closer to Santa Domingo.

The fact that many of the wealthiest pirates in this pan-Antilian maritime community were malado, such as the highly successful Domingo Sanchez-Morano, probably double-egulled the crown. So this is a, like, number one, sounds kind of dope. Like these people have built, like, a pretty interesting culture for themselves. And the only way that Spain can keep a lid on it is, like, by periodically massacring huge numbers of them, right? Like, that's all you can do is you march your army into the interior and kill and burn

whatever you can. But they can kind of just sort of bounce when they see the army coming. And it's not easy to march an army into the interior of his panola and have them not die of all sorts of wild ass diseases. So it's kind of like again, a little bit like of an anarchy in most of the. It sounds like an ideal society to be. It sounds perfect. Yes. That's awesome. Fucking cowboys, you fucking make and beef jerky presumably. Yeah, it sounds great. Smoking a shit.

Sonnet tobacco. Hell a tobacco. Yeah, it sounds dope. So while Sando Mang exists under this pretty horrifying racial caste system like slavery as awful as it's going to exist basically anywhere during the period of the African slave trade. Santa Domingo is a lot less controlled and as a result, kind of a lot less awful. And so it doesn't develop, which is not to say that there isn't slavery.

There aren't a lot of abusive social structures that exist, but it doesn't develop the same preconditions for revolution that you get in Sandomang, right? And as we all know, in Sandomang enslaved people have themselves a revolution starting at the tail end of the 1700s, and in one of history's great upsets, they win their freedom from France. Now this is how we get Haiti, and the rest of the world has never stopped punishing Haiti for this, right? We talk about this again in our episodes on pop-a-dock and baby-dock, but basically Haiti's history is how we get Haiti and the rest of the world has never stopped punishing Haiti for this, right?

We talk about this again in our episodes on pop-a-doc and baby-doc, but basically, Haiti's history from this point is being continually fucked over by everyone else on the planet. Close to it, not far from it, up to the present day. So in Haiti, you know, they're dealing with, after this period of revolution, pretty continuous incursions from the French until they finally forced Napoleon to get the fuck out of there. And the process of getting Napoleon out and of, you know, ensuring their liberty means that they build up a pretty good army. Like Haiti has by kind of the late period of fighting off the French repeatedly.

They have a pretty, like, powerful military. And they are also by sort of the point they're done fighting the French for the most part. They're kind of, they're deeply traumatized, right? They've had all of these horrific wars. They are basically constantly aware of the fact that all of Europe and all of the Western world wants them back in fucking chains.

And so they're pretty paranoid. And the thing that they start to focus on once France is less of a threat is the fact that they've got this neighbor, right? They've got San Tadomingo sitting on most of their island and it's a possession of Spain. And Spain, if you're not up on your Napoleonic history, for one thing, Spain is kind of briefly a part of Napoleon's empire, at least chunks of Spain are. So the Haitians are like, well, I don't really like that they're just sitting there, a possession of Europe, right?

It feels like this, they could, this could be really bad for us. So why don't we, why don't we take them over, right? Or why don't we deal with, uh, with Santa Domingo? And to make a long story short, Haiti invades and they occupy Santa Domingo for about 22 years from the early to the mid 1800s. And like all occupations, it's not pleasant, right? Like very rarely do you occupy a country with soldiers and everyone is like, we really like being occupied

by your soldiers, this is a good time for everyone, right? And it's Santa Domingo being occupied by your soldiers. This is a good time for everyone, right? And it's said to be being occupied by a Spanish at the same time, or they just... No, no. The Haitians kick the Spanish out for about 20 years or so. Okay, so it's just occupation, occupation. Mm-hmm. Cool, super fun. Everyone has that.

Yeah, so it's colony, which is an occupation to a military occupation. And then in 1844, the Dominican Republic becomes a thing because they fight a war with Haiti and they kick the Haitians out and declare their independence. And they manage to keep their independence for about 15 years until the Spanish come back and take them over again for like four or five years.

So not a super stable history here, right? Pretty messy. Like, I already feel tired just thinking Not a super stable history here, right? Pretty messy. Like, I already feel tired just thinking about it. You can imagine how exhausted someone who was born in 1800 and the Dominican Republic would be by like 1850, right? You've just, it's just this carousel of assholes taking your place over, right? I think about like being a kid

like right at the beginning of that. it's like like today kids or people that remember like pre 9-11 you know and then you just get to see everything change. I feel like that's so much more exhausting and you have like five occupations that sounds super fun like a really fun 50 years. Yeah that's exactly how everyone in the Dominican Republic feels. I'm sure. So the US Civil War is over. And Washington is like, they're not thrilled with everything that's been happening in the Dominican Republic because it's pretty, you can get it from DC to the Dominican real fast, right? It is not far away from the continental United States.

And if you know much about America in like the late 1800s, we've got this kind of big attitude that like we don't want Europe fucking around and what we consider to be our backyard. And all of Latin America and the Caribbean is basically our backyard in our eyes, right? In this period of time. I'm not saying this is right. This is just how DC is thinking about things. And so a lot of American politicians are like, well, we don't, like the Europeans are not, clearly not doing a good job keeping things stable in the Dominican Republic. And this place is in our sphere of influence. So in 1865, we have us a vote on whether or not to annex the Dominican Republic. And it fails by a single vote. So US influence will remain kind of indirect after

this point for a while, but it's not going to stay indirect forever. But you can see just how close it came to like presumably probably being like a possession like Puerto Rico is in a legal sense, you know, like that's kind of I think a realistic way to look at how it might have gone down. Who knows. But the constant warring between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and they have, there are regular conflicts between the two countries, kind of in the, through the 1800s, means that politics in the Dominican Republic early on is just kind of a succession of strong man generals, right?

Because when you're dealing with all of this sort of governmental turnover, all that really matters is like, can you keep other people out, right? Can you actually effectively defend the country? And within Dominican politics, there's a vicious split between these kind of liberal and conservative parties, all of which are headed by these sort of strong man military types. And when we say liberal and conservative, I'm not talking in like the modern US sense, the conservatives broadly speaking, a big thing that they are advocates for is being annexed

by the United States, right? Because they're looking at number one how powerful the US is, particularly after the Civil War and going like, well, shit, they can probably stop this constant turnover, right? Like things would probably be a lot more stable. We would probably be in better economic shape if they were to come over. Whereas liberals are like, we don't want to be governed by yet another foreign power. We would like to be something that approximates a modern state. And they, these liberals will usually give the US constitution as kind of the ideal example of the structure of a government that they want.

But there's pretty universal agreement among these political elites that even though they like the idea of how the US government is supposed to be set up, they don't believe that Dominican peasants can be democratic citizens, right? And these kind of rich educated people who are a very small fraction of the population are like, well, these are uneducated wild cowboys. You can't have them, you can't give them any rights. Like they don't, they wouldn't know what to do with them. That is very much the attitude that these people have. They're not like nice folks, right? This attitude is well represented by the words of America, Lugo, a Dominican writer and one of these kind of intellectuals.

He argued that the state needed to lead from the top down until the citizenry could be educated to a higher degree of responsibility. He called the peasants, quote, degenerate due to racial mixture, a tropical environment and a poor diet. Thus he said, the working class of the Dominican Republic can never be governing, but rather governed classes. So pretty rough stuff. Yeah.

They wouldn't know what to do with autonomy. You wouldn't know what to do with the idea of doing things to yourself. Best these guys just let us run things. We've been doing so well prior to this point. Obviously, I'm the one that can fix this. Just me, no one else. Now there is, when we talk about white supremacy, which a lot of these attitudes are influencing things, but it's not the same as you're going to get in like the American southeers, you're going to get in Europe, not all that far after this point. There is this kind of attitude

among a lot of elites that like you can whiten the population in some ways and that's going to become more of a thing later on, right? So just keep that in your head because we will be talking about that once the thirties come around here. Outside the urban parts of the Dominican Republic, politics revolve very heavily around little strong men who are like in a lot of ways, kind of many dictators over a few towns at chunk of the countryside. And the best of them were able to keep areas of the interior relatively stable and protect their peasants from banditry and unrest.

Depending on the book, you'll hear these guys kind of referred to as either cadillos the book, you'll hear these guys kind of referred to as either Cadeos or Casex, which is, and Casex is an older word taken from the social order on the island in the days kind of before Columbus arrived, right? And it kind of gets applied to these more modern figures who are, they are in every sense the word, they're warlords, right? You know, small scale ones, but not, that's an accurate way to look at them. Now I found a lot of interesting sources for this episode, but the strangest and most entertaining is a biography of Trujillo written by one of his generals, the guy who wound up running his intelligence division for a while.

This dude's name is Arturo Espiot and Arturo was the son of one of the two or three wealthiest countries, or families in the Dominican Republic. And so his family are some of these warlord types, right? In this sort of pre-Trujillo era. And he is an untrustworthy piece of shit, which you can tell because he opens his book by repeatedly denying he tortured anybody. And I want to read you a quote from this because it's really good. I remain neither a shame, nor regretful of my ears as an intelligence officer. I earned my nom de gare, Navajita, the blade, not because I was guilty of any atrocities. The name

stymmed for my tendency to plunge straight to the heart of any problem or situation. I believed in direct simple action. However, there is not a single Dominican who has ever or can come forward to prove that I caused him to be tortured nor Kennedy Dominican family charged that one of its members died at my hands or my orders. I don't know, bro. I feel like people who don't torture anyone never need to say that. My not guilty of any atrocity is raising a lot of questions. I also love they called me. I was the head of intelligence. They called me the blade, not because of any cutting I did. They called me the head.

I was just so nervous. They called me the head. It was so cool and smart and strong. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they called me the dick kicker. No, no, no, not for any violent reason, totally unrelated. Like, okay, the blade. So with the caveat that Arturo is very untrustworthy source, he is a local,

and a local who gives us an attitude of how the upper crust, the kind of like these sort of like high up and kind of like warlord types, wanted to see themselves and talk about themselves, right? So he gives us an idea of how elites in Dominican society in this period wanted to pretend that things worked, right? And the way that he frames this period of Dominican history is that these regional strongmen were kind of ungovernable by the central government and would periodically overthrow it to put their own guy in charge.

Quote, the Dominican government was never strong enough to resist the Cassecs. The army was merely a handful of ill-trained conscripts. Recruitment was simple. From time to time, the government would call on loyal Cassex for volunteers. The local chiefs would then round up a batch of unhappy youths and send them to the capital. Sometimes it was necessary to use force. One Cassee can cuffed his volunteers to a huge rope and sent them to the army with this message. Here are your volunteers. Please return the rope. Man, I got plenty of boys, but ropes cost money, homie. Like, bro, I only got so much fucking rope over here. Like, you got it.

It's like giving Tupperware, you know, like, I want you to enjoy the thing I made, but got, please return it. Like, don't do it. Yeah, he is, he is treating like sending them conscripts like a covered dish. Like, no, no, enjoy that, man. It. He is treating like sending them conscripts like a covered dish. Like, no, no, enjoy that man. It's really good.

They're good conscripts, but could you send me back the bowl? Yeah. Next time I see you just like make sure you bring it. Don't forget it. I know you did a lot of time, but like I need that fucking rope man. Yeah, very funny. Hmm. Now, you know who always sends back the bowl, Kat?

Thought I don't know. Please tell me. Hmm. Now, you know who always sends back the bowl cat. Thought I don't know, please tell me the sponsors of our podcast. If they send you boys, which you can order, you can have boys sent to you, you know, you know, conscripts or whatever, just send back the road. That's all they ask. Sophie. No. Sophie hates it. I realize that the aggressive head shaking I was doing would not translate on this audio medium, but no. See what I have to deal with here, Cat. Unbelievable.

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the murder and corruption. This is just a abuse, the murder, and corruption. This is just a business, and their product are people. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids?

And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. buried forever. But they made a podcast called Bombing about absolutely tanking on stage I'm talking about your most amazing little experiences of the farm I tell gnarly stories and I talked to friends about their worst moments of bombing and all sorts of ways Bombing on stage bombing and public bombing in life like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big

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Listen to bombing with Aircon Dre and Will Ferrell's big money players network on the I.R. Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about falling in love with a magician which I hope to do one day Yeah, yeah, who how could what could be better than loving a magician? You know getting to live in Las Vegas Probably getting sought-and-half You're talking about dating a really successful magician though. I feel like most magicians don't work in Las Vegas I feel like both the least and the most successful

magicians work in Las Vegas. There's a big, there's a lot of parts of Vegas you could work in. You don't want a day to dayed magician. You want a day either the worst out there or the best out there. Yeah, I want a dayed the shittiest magician because they'll always feel good about myself.

I don't think you deserve better. No, no, no. I want my magician partner to come home at the end of a long day and I'll be like, yeah, I made some podcasts, people like them and they'll be like, yeah, I got stabbed on Fremont Street, you know, trying to, trying to busk. And then they're like, and then they look at you and they go pick a card. You're like, you should have got something in your ear. It's their entire earnings of the day. It's just like 82 cents.

Yeah, which they got from, oh, I forgot all the names of the Casinos on Freemont Street anyway. So, today. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Kat, you ready to get back into this little history lesson? You don't even know how ready I am.

Okay, okay. So, the upside of the state of affairs that exists in the Dominican Republic in the late 1800s is that the Cisecs have a lot of power and there are generally options for Dominicans outside of the urban areas if they don't like who they're living under, right? So there's mobility, but there's poverty. You know, you can kind of just be like, this guy sucks, I'm going to like hike for two days. And then, you know, there will be a different strong man or no one at all. And, you know, I can try to figure out my shit, but it's basically impossible for the government to set up large-scale

agriculture or to trade or do anything that would allow them to function the way that like a nation functions because everything outside of the capital is just like a mix of banditry and like small-scale peasant farmers and stuff. It's very unstable. From an early age, the Dominican economy, such as it is, relied heavily on the United States. And this was a calculated choice by several of the more liberal general types who wound up running the country in the late 1800s. In 1891, they signed a reciprocity treaty that made the United States officially the main trading partner of the country. We leased one of their ports so that our Navy would be able to, you know, do boat stuff there.

And we started handing out loans to them, right? Because the government is trying to get into a more stable position so that they can like govern the Dominican Republic. And we're like, oh, we got money. We'll give you guys money to do that. Don't worry. The terms are not ruinous. We are absolutely not working on a way to fuck you over,

just like we did to Haiti next door. Promises, pinky swears. Now, this is never going to happen again, Kat, but all of the money we give them winds up in the hands of local strongmen. And none of it goes towards like helping regular people or making the country function better.

I know it won't happen again. That's so weird. That's not so weird. Yeah, it would be, it would be crazy if after this, we just flew a pallet of billions of dollars in cash to a country. Let's call it smerak and then lost it all. Like that would be wild if we'd done that. Good stuff. Good stuff. So in, in a, yeah, the US is like, ah,

you got to pay us back for all these loans that just got robbed by your, you know, the, the assholes running the country. You know, what we're going to do for you guys because you're such good clients, we're going to appoint a private company to handle getting you to pay back your foreign debt. And we do that in 1892. This leads to a series of events that in 1904 culminates in the United States creating the Santo Domingo Improvement Company. Now the job of this country is to take control of their entire custom system, to regulate customs for the Dominican Republic at all of their ports, skimming

money off of the top through these like import and export taxes and shit to repay debts to American, like at this point, a lot of its privately owned American companies that can't be met by the Dominican government. By 1905, the United States controls all custom houses in the country. So we're just like running, you know, all of that stuff for the Dominican Republic. Not for them, we're running it so that we can skim off the top money that would otherwise

theoretically go into like taxes and shit, you know. I can't be right there in this sound like us. Yeah, that doesn't sound like the thing we'll keep doing forever. Now, because this, and let's be fair here, we're, as we often are, just copying the British, right? Because they are the goats at this sort of thing. No one's ever been better at it. Didn't we have a revolution because we hated how they did this?

Well, we thought that we could do a better job of doing it eventually. It was, it was the long con. And by God, did it work out, you know. So all of this stuff winds up being basically a big con to suck the wealth of the Dominican Republic out of its neck like vampires. And no amount of throttling the customs houses was enough to actually pay down their debt, which by 1916 had ballooned to more than $30 million, which was a lot of money in those days. Economic collapse brings about political unrest. The president of the Dominican Republic is assassinated in 1911,

and in 1916, President Yaminez has a little civil war with the former minister of war. The US government looks at all this unrest in the Dominican Republic, which we absolutely had not helped to cause. And are like, boy, they might not be able to repay all of this additional money that they now owe us and excess of the money that they ever borrowed from us. You know what we should do, you know? Also, it's 1916.

We're kind of worried if things get any more unstable, the Germans could come in, right? The Germans could take over the Dominican Republic, and that'll be bad for everybody, mainly us. So, we do a thing that we're going to do repeatedly from this point forward. And we, yeah. Uh, a pager guy and back him. Not quite yet. First, we send in the Marines. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. So yeah. I'm going to read a quote from a write up by thought company summarizing US intervention here in the Dominican.

US soldiers moved quickly to secure their hold on the Dominican Republic. In May, rear admiral William B. Caperton arrived in Santo Domingo and took over the operation. General Arias decided to oppose the occupation, ordering his men to contest the American landing at Puerto Plata on June 1st. General Arias went to Santiago, which he vowed to defend. The Americans sent a concerted force and took the city. That wasn't the end of the resistance. In November, Governor Juan Perez of the city of San Francisco, Di Macaroy refused to recognize the occupation government. Hold up in an old fort, he was eventually driven out by the Marines. And so, you know, we take over. And if you're anywhere kind of from your late 20s on,

you and most of us have watched the US invade and occupy a couple of countries. And what happens in the Dominican Republic is more similar to like what we do in Iraq than what goes on in Afghanistan, right? We set up a military government and we have the Marine Start training and equipping a local military so that we can leave

and have a country that will be in our eyes kind of a client, client state, right? That's the goal here, right? So that we can get some fucking money out of them again, right? Like that's the, that's what we're doing in this case. Now, this concludes the historical background portion of the story. So, so as we've left off the historical background, the US Marines are occupying the country, and we are trying to get it into a stable enough position that we can continue sucking on it like the vampires we are. So, let's move back over to our bastard for the week.

Finally, Rafael Trujillo, because he is going to be one of the young Dominican men that the US Marines pick out of poverty and obscurity, and they're like, here's a gun. We need you to keep things. Yeah. So don't do anything bad with it. Pick a random guy and be like, hey, don't fuck over the entire, don't be a megalomania that takes over an entire country. Here's a bunch of dudes with guns. Be cool. Be cool. Be chill. Do the right thing just like us yeah just like us like we always do with our guns um so Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was born in San Cristobal Dominican Republic on October 24th 1891 uh he was the fourth of 11 children most of whom survived to adulthood so his parents were doing

something right you you know? That's not bad in this period of time for somebody coming out of poverty. Now, despite an impressive name, he did not come from impressive surroundings. His hometown was a small village on the southern coast, and his father, Pepito, is generally described like one biographer literally just calls him a non-entity. He is not a not a big deal, you might say, and he's not really around a lot, you get the idea. Now, Trujillo would later commission court biographers

to tell a very different version of his upbringing, one that is more rarefied and that paints his family as coming from the upper middle class. This is not accurate, right? This is him, he's kind of insecure about his origins, and he will exaggerate them as a, you know, an adult in power. Most, there's not a lot of great context as to his early life as childhood, but all of the credible biographers that I've read tend to say,

like, yeah, they were pretty poor, right? Like, they were not unusually poor. They were not like, you know, the worst off, but they were not, they did not come from the upper middle class. The Trujillo children went shoeless because there was no money in the family for shoes. His dad was a minor postal clerk and often went without income because he had sold his salary for a short term loan, which is a thing that a lot of men who work for the government do, right? You'll basically be like, I need money now, I will give you interest basically and so you get my salary for a period of time.

It's a really, it winds up being a pretty abusive situation. I probably don't need to explain how, but a lot of guys get trapped in this period of time. Why do you think he didn't, like not even just describe it, like why didn't he exaggerate like how poor he was or talk about how poor he was because I feel like that's a typical right wing tactic of like, you know, I came from nothing and now I'm this guy. It is in our culture, right?

He has a, it's really important for him to feel like and to seem like, like it's going to be important to him to act as if he is coming like a gentleman, right, that he is coming from kind of this more upper glass, not like super rich, but that he's coming from something, you know. He will always be kind of insecure as bad as surrounding. So it is worth noting that's very much a thing in American right wing politics. It's not always the case, right? And in this, in the Dominican culture, like that's just not a thing Trujillo feels would benefit him.

Or it's unclear to me, because obviously I'm not an expert. It's unclear to me if it's more that he didn't think it would benefit him, or that he just legitimately had hang-ups, right? Like, he's just actually kind of ashamed of his humble circumstances and didn't want to be honest about them.

Like, he's a dumb story.? Like he grew up from nothing. Yes, yes. I think that like is a big part of like this legend built around him. Yeah, it's interesting. It is interesting that Trujillo's not going to really take that tactic. But the like Trujillo biography that I read that was like done by, like, basically was telling the version of his story that he wanted told, like makes a big deal about how they were like, you know, middle class to upper middle class, his family was doing well. Whereas there's more credible biographers are like, no, they were as poor as everyone

around them was. So yeah, they were poor enough that like because his dad is regularly going without income because he's sold his salary for alone, his older brothers have to do cattle wrestling to make ends meet, which is also really common. A lot of people would do this because there's both wild cows and just like farms outside of the city. So you bust in one night, you cut down a fence, you steal a cow or two, that's food, that's money, you know

I thought you meant like wrestling cows. No, that would that would be so they would not have like It would be cool if you could do it I have known a lot of cows in my life and none that I would want to wrestle with It would be pretty rad if you could do it. So one of the few privileges he enjoyed as a little kid was that his grandmother, Ersina, was very well educated. And she ensured that Raphael and his siblings learned to read. Later, he would attend grammar school, but his attendance was irregular since he very nearly died of diptheria as a little kid, so he doesn't get to do a lot of school.

And aside from these broad strokes, we don't know a lot about his childhood. We can, it's pretty likely that he's dropped out of school by the fourth grade. So most of the education that he does get comes from his grandma, who I think was pretty much self-taught, just like a very smart person and who sees it as important that he learned to read and

that his siblings learned to read. And one of Trujillo's better biographies, Trujillo, little Caesar of the Caribbean, German or Nez writes, quote, but if the children did not learn much of school, the at school, the dusty streets, what's separated in those days, the monotonous rows of San Cristobal Shaxx provided them with an excellent schooling in lawlessness. To survive the routism of the neighborhood kids, a boy had to be tougher than the others, or at least as in the Trujillo's case, he had to belong to a large, clannish family. In frequent street brawl, the solid front of the Trujillo boys proved good enough to hit lick all opposition, a fact they'd never forgot later in life. From such an environment,

Raphael emerged as a resourceful headstrong character. As a boy, Trujillo was always in trouble, recalls one of his neighbors, always trying to cheat someone, always bragging about how he would one day make big money without much effort. I do think that's cool that like he had a lot of brothers so they kind of worked as a gang together. Like, well, if we're getting into a fight, like at least I've got siblings I can call in. I love that. I mean, it's like when your girl with like brothers are like you have someone to back you up, or August what, just having a bunch of brothers start in a game, getting in trouble.

Yeah, in this case, kind of a literal gang, although because they're poor, the thing that he becomes kind of a gangster about is very silly. So his nickname around town is Chapita, which is kind of the colloquial term for bottle caps. It doesn't mean that literally, but it's like what people call bottle caps. And he gets that nickname because he collects bottle caps.

And for some unknown reason, he became like an obsessive hoarder of caps from sodas and beers. He hated the nickname, but like he got the nickname because not only did he collect these, but he would like beat people up to take their bottle caps. Like he would get it brothers to get, he was like running a bottle cap racket so that he could, yeah. And he just like hoarded them, like he wasn't selling them or anything.

That part is unclear to me. He probably, I assume he traded when he couldn't fight for them, but he's very into collecting bottle caps and he's willing to do violence in order to expand his collection, which is pretty funny. Um, imagining him being like a Funko pop, like beating people up for Funko pops. Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's less sad than a Funko pop because a bottle caps are objectively better than Funko pops. You can do something with a bottle cap. Yeah. Yeah'll, you can do with a Funko pop is become aware of the fact

that you've lost control of your life. So, at age 16, he started to work as a telegraph operator. A job he got thanks to his uncle. And again, his father's kind of a non-entity. So it's his two uncles, Teodulo and Plenio, who taught him how to be a man. And these guys, each of these guys has like half of a good con man, right? Plenio is like charming and intelligent, like he's good at like talking to people, he's got a

lot of social intelligence. And Teodulo is a drunk and a womanizer who like writes poetry and prose, but is all, and is seen as like, so he's this like, he's too drunk to be like a really good con man. He's kind of just like, they're each half of a good con man. So as a young adult, he's gets offered a job working security at one of the local sugar plantations. Like all but one sugar company in the Republic, Rafael's employers were American.

It's likely that his charming, because we control all of the big business in the Republic. Rafael's employers were American. It's likely that his charming, because we control all of the big business in the Dominican Republic, right? Like we've taken over these sugar companies in part is like a, well, you know, if you let American companies in to dominate this industry, you know, that's how we can take out some of this debt that somehow still keeps ballooning every year.

So like all but yeah, so his employers here, he's working for the Americans. And it's probably Teodulo, his uncle who gets him this job because he's just like drinking with the dude who's doing the hiring, but we don't really know. Most casual summaries of Rafael's past will describe him as working as a security guard for the sugar company.

This is inaccurate. Trujillo was an informer for the sugar company. His job was to make friends with labor organizers who were like getting ready to organize unions and like go on strike and then help take them out. So that is his job. He is a spy like to crack down on the labor movement for these American companies.

And he loves this gig. That is such an early reason to hate someone in this story. And it's a real piece of shit job. And he just, immediately, fuck that dude. Yeah, it's very funny, because like he loves this,

because he's like, oh, I get to pick my own hours, I don't have a boss breathing down my neck. All I gotta do is fuck over these laborers. Future state propaganda will note that his strength of character got him an award from Mill Management, but the reality is that he helped catch and hang several men who were looking

to start labor unions. Like he is killing people for the sugar company. And that's how Americans got cheap sugar in the early 1900s, everybody. So, good, good stuff. So tragically, and this is sad, Kat, his promising career murdering union organizers is cut short because he raped somebody.

I'm not going to cut them, come on. Yeah, he's a real justice. Yeah. Justice for Rafael. Yeah, yeah, cancel culture has come for the murdering rapists. I'm both mind, virus. Yeah.

So we don't exactly know, like, I hate to just like drop, he's a, he probably committed rape, but there's not a lot of detail because all of the criminal records from the period of time where he's probably getting in trouble, burn down mysteriously after he takes power. So, this is based primarily on other people's recollections, but it seems like he probably went to jail for this for a period of time. That's right. Yeah, it's a little unclear. He is going to be a prolific rapist and sexual assaulter throughout his entire adult life.

And it's interesting, because if you, when you read these, there's a lot of the first biographies I read about this guy are written in like, you know, the 60s or whatever, and they will describe it as like a ladies man with a wandering eye and their critical biographies, but the men writing them like just don't see the fact that he's, don't see what he's doing

as serial sexual assault. And then when you get more modern coverage of Trujillo, it becomes very clear like, oh, yeah, he was like a terrible, terrible rapist. Like, obviously. They're like, he was popular with the names. So, you know, the names really like this man. But no, they liked him. You get that a lot.

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connects him to more criminals and he sort of after this period becomes kind of a gangster, right? Definitely a gangster. Kind of a low level gangster. He runs a forgery racket. He does some cattle rustling. And more than anything else, he becomes a pimpe, right? He is a very successful pimpe. Is he successful in bottle caps?

I probably shouldn't say this, but like, you get the feeling he treats the the the the women that he is working with the way he used to treat bottle caps, including the stealing from them from other pimps using violence. That's that's the feeling one gets again. There's not terrible, tremendous detail about it, right? But he is a very successful pimping knowing what we know about him. That's probably an ugly story, right? I think that's fair to say. Given everything we know about this guy's background. And this is where our two stories, the history of the Dominican Republic

up to this point and the US occupation and the life of Rafael Trujillo intertwined. In 1916, when the US comes in, Trujillo is about 24 years old, and despite how his career as a spy for the sugar companies had ended, he left with some connections and a good recommendation. The Marines have now invaded the Dominican Republic and their mission is to maintain domestic tranquility. And this is code for make the companies stable enough for American investors to profit. One local historian would later note, it was the landing of the American Marines, which brought Trujillo his opportunity to rise from obscurity. And this is certainly true.

Prior to our involvement, Rafael was the organized crime equivalent of a minor casete, right? He probably first interacts with the Americans through getting arrested for forgery. He might have also gotten arrested for cattle rustling. He probably goes to jail again. We don't know because in 1927, a mysterious fire destroys the Supreme Court building with all of the criminal records in it. What is likely true is that he runs into a little bit

of trouble with the new regime because he's a criminal. And his uncle, Teodulo is able to smooth it over. Teodulo has made friends with an American customs officer, a guy named James McLean. And McLean is one of these Americans who's been in the country the longest. He's like working in as one of these, because we take over their customs, like stations.

So he is there before the Marines arrive. And when the Marines arrive, they're like, well, this guy knows the country and he's one of us. So let's give him a job now that we're running things, right? And Teodulo drinks with McLean. The two of them are hardcore alcoholics and they are just getting wasted together all the time. So when the military government comes in, they make McLean a kernel because they're like,

well, this guy knows the country. And Teodulo is like, hey, can you give a job to my nephew? Like he's a good kid, you know, he only occasionally commits horrible crimes. Albert Hicks, an American journalist working in the country at the time, describes McLean as a man who, quote, wins sufficiently sober, found a profound satisfaction in the company of Harlitz, which is, you know, probably another reason why he likes Trujillo because Trujillo is a pimpen this period of time. So question, the guy that wrote the general, the biography of this guy, who said he didn't

do any atrocities. Does he mention any atrocities, even like in a positive way of Trujillo? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, later on. I didn't commit anything like this, but this I did. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's a common story for guys and dictatorships. So Hicks goes on to claim that Tia Dulo introduced his nephew Trujillo to McLean during a drinking session and quote, Rafael, immediately recognizing a job he could fill, played the pimp to the chief of the constabulary. So, McLean gets made like the head of the police, basically, just because he's an American who lives in the country. And Trujillo's like,

hey, you want some, you want some ladies? Like, I'm a pimp. I can satisfy your needs, you know. And this gets him in good with the Americans. And, you know, he moves on quickly from giving McLean prostitutes to supplying prostitutes to American Marines, which is a great way to get the Marines to like you, historically. Now, once McLean is kind of hooking Trujillo up with the occupation authorities, Trujillo starts finding other ways to please American officers. He starts acting as an informer to basically he'll go into communities that are like resisting the American occupation, that are like harboring insurgents, and he'll make friends in there, and then he'll go back to the Americans and be like, here's who you go massacre, right?

These are the people who are harboring these folks who are resisting the regime. And he's soon as a result of this falls in with the absolute bloodiest of the Marines that are in the country, a guy named Captain Merklei. So this is Merklei as an American who is running the pacification campaign in the east of the Dominican Republic. And he makes Trujillo his right hand man, and together the two of them cut a bloody swath across the countryside. Merkle is so out of hand that the US Senate eventually investigates him and finds that

he has quote, a policy of repression that has been carried out by the forces of the occupation and is inherently unwise, which reacted primarily upon peaceful civilians. And as the result of which many atrocities were undoubtedly committed. So like this guy gets so out of pocket that the US Senate in like 1917 is like, we can't have you occupying the Dominican Republic. You're two fucking nuts. Now this passage from the biography Trujillo, little Caesar of the Caribbean, gives us more context as to what he was doing with Merkle. Another competent observer, the historian and economist Melvin Imnite,

says in Americans in Santo Domingo, a number of Dominicans, we may be certain that nobody knows exactly how many, were put to death offhand by the Marines, and some were tortured without ever having their day in court at all. In fairness, however, it must be said that Captain Merkle's end was appropriate to his corrupt practice. The assassinations by Captain Merkle were repudiated by his superiors, and he committed suicide while awaiting for trial, asserts night. Night's version is supported by Sumner Wells in his aforementioned book.

Nevertheless, if Merklei himself paid dearly for his cruelty in sadism, his methods, unfortunately, did not disappear with him. And young Trujillo, he left behind a keen, proficient disciple who was carried on the sadistic tradition long after his teacher's name is no longer remembered. So he gets his boss, Merkle, and they massacre and torture probably hundreds of people to try to pacify the Eastern chunk of the Dominican Republic.

The Senate gets involved and is like, wow, you need to come back here and stand trial because what you have been doing is so out of hand and Merckley fucking kills himself, leaving true heo to be like, well, it's sad he's dead, but at least he taught me how to be a real piece of shit. So yeah, a proud chapter in US Marine Corps history right there. He's like, time for me to take up this torch. It's my time now.

Yeah, it is his time. And he has been a freelancer for the US Marines up to this point. Um, but once Merclay commit suicide, he decides I need a more formal job. And it just so happens that during this period, the US occupation government has decided we need to set up a permanent military force. The Dominican Constabulary, geared at keeping the interior pacified once the Marines leave. In December of 1918, Raphael is accepted into this program.

He gets commissioned as an officer, and he rises very quickly through the ranks, doing part to the fact that Colonel McLean is running the constabulary. So like, he's basically bribing his boss with prostitutes in order to get promoted to the point where he's running the constabulary. So like he's basically bribing his boss with prostitutes in order to get promoted to the point where he's running the constabulary. So he goes from second. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any there are more allegations of rape and extortion against him during this period of time. He gets court martialed for rape, but like nothing happens to him. He keeps

getting promoted because he's providing prostitutes to the Marines. So, they don't want him out of there. And he's kind of, he has this reputation of being because he's worked with Merkley and he knows how to like kill a shitload of people. He's like the guy if you're having trouble in an area, if like there's, you know, uprisings or whatever. He's this guy you can send in because you don't want to do it yourself. You saw what happened to Merkley, right? It's bad business for the Americans to go committing massacres directly, but you can send

this guy in with some dudes, with some Dominicans and he'll fucking kill people, right? And then you don't have to get in trouble yourself and commit suicide after a Senate investigation. So prior to US military or military involvement, most of the military power in the Dominican Republic had been in the hands of these kind of local warlords who maintained private militias and sometimes sent the scraps of their militias down to the central government when they had a war to fight with Haiti or whatever. And officers in as much as they existed had always been members of a small wealthy class in the country.

The Americans wanted to change this in part because the Cadello's were their enemies, right? They didn't want to like these guys to continue to have all the military power. So one of the first things we do is we disarm the countryside. So we take weapons both from the militias that these guys have had and from peasants. We wind up confiscating about 3 million firearms, which is enough to arm every man, woman, and child in the country three times over. And that gives you an idea of how hard it was to control this place. They have three guns for every person in the country, just out in the sticks, you know?

Very heavily armed little land before we come there. And we take all of their guns and we dump them into the sea. And then we build roads so that this new, constabulary that we're training can access all these isolated areas of the rural interior and like policy. Wait, sorry, we dumped three million guns into the sea. Yep. Cool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's that's how we that's how we handle this. Now that number is probably exaggerated, right? Like, this is coming from that dude who winds up running the secret police.

So, I don't know that he's a credible source on how many guns the US took, but we send in the Marines, we take all of the weapons in the countryside and we shove them into the ocean, right? I think, honestly, it's not our worst plan. It's not the worst thing we're going to do here. Although we are doing it so that we can enforce a dictatorship

that sends money to us. So we disarm the countryside, we send in the Marines, they build all these roads so that we can stop any sort of resistance to this new regime we're trying to put in place. And this military force we're building, we call it a constabulary because its goal is primarily policing. And we don't want it to become like another militia, like all of the other ones that have run the country. So we avoid hiring from the groups who had traditionally run the Dominican military,

right? And particularly who had provided officers for the Dominican military. And instead, we start promoting as officers the absolute dregs of Dominican society, poor peasant type people. Now, the Marines are always good at finding the absolute dregs of society. That's what they do. And one of the guys that they're going to pick is like,

oh, this dude is like exactly who should be running this policing force is Rafael Trujillo. And to talk about how that happened, I'm gonna read a quote from the book, The Dictators Seduction by Lauren Derby. Wide spread resistance to becoming part of the United States-led force meant that recruiters were forced to enlist what a witness described as, the worst rascal thieves and assassins in

the country. If the military had previously been a million of socialist scent for the rest of the ectable poor, it was now open to the anonymous crowd. Trujillo and the other young officers pulled from the ranks of the obscure never forgot that the United States was their benefactor. In his book, Arturo Espelé describes how Trujillo and his fellow new soldiers pacified the interior

with the Marines and the impact that it left on them. It may be considered a left-handed compliment to the Corps, but Trujillo always thought of himself as basically a Marine Corps officer and damned proud of it. It was typical, for instance, that of the 40 to 50 decorations conferred upon him during his long career. Trujillo was proudest of a faded threadbare medal attesting to his service with the Marines. So that is interesting.

The guy who's going to become a dictator considers himself the United States Marine. We could talk a little bit about our buddy, Smetley Butler, the Marine who would become one of the most decorated soldiers in US history, and later write that he had never been anything but a gangster for capitalism. This is the period that that's going down in, right? This is why Smetley feels that way, because one of the long-term results of US occupation is that the Marines trained Trujillo and make him basically a made man to enforce this regime that exists to send money to US companies. And he is going to be a pretty brutal dictator using the things that he's learned from the Americans. The US occupation of the Dominican Republicans in 1924,

and policing authority is handed over to the Constabulary. As at the same time as the Marines leave, the United States takes over as the largest foreign exchange producer in the country, and they start flooding the Dominican Republic with duty-free US goods. Now, if you're contact with the phrase duty-free is in an airport, that may sound great, right? You get all the phrase duty free, is it an airport? That may sound great, right? You get all the cheap cigars and liquor you could want. But this is actually a real problem because when you are forcibly making it that like your country gets to sell

duty free products in another country, what that means is that US products are able to undercut every single national industry. So all of the Dominican people's money is flowing back to the United States, but local Dominican companies are not like the government is not drawing taxes on those transactions, and local Dominican companies can't make money because they are never going to be as cheap as mass-produced US products that are being sold duty-free in the Dominican Republic. So it kind of inherently cripples the economy. Like we leave and say, by the way, we're making it impossible for you guys to ever get on your own feet. Fuck you, you know, USA number one.

They were here. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yes. This is just, you know, this is an, this is an escalation from controlling like the customs ports. So this all necessitates that the government take on more debt in order to survive, and we all know historically how that goes for countries on the island of hispaniola. Now the interim president of the Dominican Republic had been a guy named Horatio Vazquez, who adopted Rafael as a pupil and put him in charge of the constabulary. And again, this is supposed to be a policing force,

but as soon as the Americans leave, Rafael spends his first few years running it, turning it from a policing force into a proper army. He puts his own picked men in positions of command. And in 1930, he's in a situation where he feels like he can carry out a coup d'état against the president. Now, part of how he does this is he makes a deal with, like in many countries where the US is set up a leadership, there are rebels, right? And as soon as the US leaves, these rebels start fighting the central government.

The rebels in the Dominican, those powerful faction is under a guy named Rafael Urena. Now, in exchange for putting Urena in power, Trujillo agrees that, you know, basically Trujillo agrees, I will stop the military from fighting the rebels so that you guys can take over the government. And then you have to carry out new elections. And I have to be allowed to run for president in the new election.

So they work this out amongst themselves to make it seem like there's been a legitimate rebellion against Vasquez. And now they're having a free election. And that Trujillo is going to make it seem like there's been a legitimate rebellion against Vazquez, and now they're having a free election, and that Trujillo is going to win it. It's not going to be a free election, right? This all works like gangbusters. The rebels march on the Capitol. Trujillo doesn't stop them. Vazquez steps down as president, and yeah, there's an election and Urina and Trujillo run

on a joint ticket, and Trujillo becomes the president. So you know, that's how that shit goes. It's hard to make. It worked well. Yeah, it does. It does work more or less well. So yeah, what followed is the kind of dictator-based presidential election stuff that we're used to on this podcast, right?

He is the president, the military threatens to murder or at least allow the murder of anyone who runs against him. So he gets 99% of the vote in this election. He, in fact, gets more votes than there are voters in the Dominican Republic, which we, as the United States, who are basically keeping an eye on everything to make sure that the money keeps flowing. Like the US ambassador is like, yeah, this is a scam election. Like he absolutely has just made himself dictator. And everyone in Washington is pretty much like, it's fine. Like he's basically a Marine, right?

Like we can trust him to do to do the shit that we want him to do. I'm a supporter of veterans. Yeah, he's a vet, you know? So while Raphael Trujillo's rise to power is more or less standard strongman coup stuff, how he actually performs well in office is pretty ingenious and in consolidating power and exercising it. Trujillo is going to kind of prove himself to be something of a visionary when it comes to being a dictator.

But that's all coming in part two, along with unfortunately a genocide. Cat! You got anything to plug before we roll out here? Uh, yeah, go follow me on TikTok at Cat and Boo and YouTube where I do wrong form content. I have a very dumb video probably coming out the end of the month or next month. Um, so follow me there. I had a very dumb video probably coming out the end of the month or next month. So follow me there. And then there, once again, a billion other platforms

just took me up, I guess. Yeah, find Kat Abu on Twitter or not Twitter, well on Twitter, but on TikTok and the YouTube's, avoid Twitter, it's a bad place now. They're all bad places, I guess. There's not any good places on the internet. Except for this podcast, which you can get ad-free by subscribing to Cooler Zone Media. That's the episode. Goodbye.

Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. From more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers and community members. We weren't safe anywhere.

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