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

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Robert and Kat conclude the story, and the life, of Rafael Trujillo.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. punch to my nose. Listen to bombing with Aircon Drayon, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh I am recording. Thank you, Jim Whity. Oh hey! Hi! Hi! Hi, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, 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, you can go with it. It was terrible. Do it. Don't do it. it. It was terrible. Do it. Don't do it. Um, find introducing a fucking podcast. Yeah, I'm introduced my my podcast are podcasts. This is behind the bastards a show about bad people. Kataboo, not a bad person. Uh, Kat, you spend way too much time monitoring Fox news and the 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 YouTube's.

How you feel as we come into part two talking about Rafael Trujillo. 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 US. Basically everything we've seen in so many other countries. More, but I'm guessing it's going to be a lot more. 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. You know,

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 gotta move fast in doing this because things are not great in the Dominican Republic. Once the US leaves, they kind of set shit up in a way that makes a guarantee that the economy's going to collapse. And sure enough, sugar prices fall through the floor. It right after Trujillo takes office, this is partly due to the fact that like the Great

Depression is happening. So in addition to the shit that the Dominican Republic was already dealing with as a result of the US occupation and the economic regime, they set up. Now you've got this depression. And so the thing that had kind of kept them limping along as a country previously was that the US would send them loans, right, while sucking a bunch of money out of the country. But now that the depression is happening, suddenly we're not as willing to handle them loans. So this is a lot for any government to deal with, but it's particularly a lot because

about three weeks after 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 capital 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 Santerdomingo, the capital had been built in the 1500s and it had been built as kind of a 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 San Tudemengo. 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 it. I agree. I like the pomp and circumstance and 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 they can fight Yeah, can you do like on the highway like put gates? So that way of someone speeding and not paying attention. They just hit it, you know That could work right I feel 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, menace, tier-ith style curtain wall around Culver City. You know, that's, that's a, that was my old neighborhood. We can defend it from that. From those Santa Monica savages. Yeah. Don't eat it. Don't get me started on you Beverly Hills. No,

it's really great for all the people here that are from our band to California. We need to unite the Codillos 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 in Doreen because we must keep West Hollywood. We must keep West Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is all great content for our listeners. For Justin Robert.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 a San Diego. So, you know, just to have them sail right up the coast. Yeah.

Now, much of the colonial quarter of the Capitol where the elites tended to reside was intact because, again, these are like the nicest buildings they're able to kind of handle the hurricane, but the slums were flattened. Now, 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 Santa Domingo and its hour of need. This is not really accurate. He doesn't do anything that 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. So one of the first things he does as he is, you know, handing out emergency aid supplies and shit is he has the National Congress pass an emergency loss as spending 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 the emergency powers

Hitler gets after the Reichstag fire. It is kind of interesting to me that a lot of dictators will do the thing where, oh, we'll do a false flag or there will be an actual uprising or something and we'll use that as an excuse to pass this log giving me total power. Trujillo uses the hurricane for that,

which I haven't actually run into in a dictator and his state. Like an actual emergency. Yeah, yeah, that is an interesting little spin on the standard story, yeah. And yeah, so he starts, basically, he makes himself the center of the relief efforts.

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 yourself while you're doing this. And it is really interesting to be like, hey, it's not the typical thing of, I'm killing the people that you hate

or I'm killing this threat that's gonna bring us down. 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 bet 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

lion 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 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, law 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 or Nez 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 Polino, 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 gotta get rid of all these dead bodies because that's bad for the Zs. 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 in epidemic. Not bad. That's, that's smart. Yeah, I'll give him that. And he's pretty good at this in terms of corpse disposal especially is like beginning dictator's saps. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah as corpse disposal

Murders go pretty good one, you know pretty good one So Trujillo's first major struggle outside of just disaster recovery was cementing his control over the Coral Some Rural Highlands and their Cassex. With the new road infrastructure, the US 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 Espelé, who participated in some of this campaign, later recalled,

moving his marine train troops over marine goat roads, the generally some of us struck again and again, casheaks 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 older leads, 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 casheaks. And we're not happy with like the old leadership of the country because they'd been bad at it. The DR had no meaningful middle class prior to 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 streetlands, you know? So Rafael followed military action. And this is where it gets really interesting with a letter writing campaign. So as soon as he's beaten, you know, his primary rivals militarily, he sends out letters all over the countryside.

He's posting up like posts and towns and stuff and announcements. He's 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 it's he's not starting with the threats to the peasants, right? He's doing that to a lot of these old elites to 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, he's very violent to them,

but to the peasantry, he's like, what do you guys need? What don't you have? Like, through you, for you. And also, it's a really actionable, it's not just like a fake promise. Yeah, and this, he understood, was the wait for him to get long-term security, right?

A powerful military is good for fighting warlords, but also a powerful military is how you get warlords, right? 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, like, it's tough. And the only thing if you're gonna have this powerful military, you're always gonna 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, do a 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, I do. 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 Espelier writes, quote, one of the techniques he used was baptism, baptism and a hundred dollar bills. Trujillo became Godfather to tens of thousands of children and the parents of each child received a hundred dollars. 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 a godfather. And then like, I mean, why wouldn't you be the guy that's gonna give you a hundred bucks?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my father. I've never heard of a dictated doing that, right? No, probably. I've never heard that Steven. I think it's really smart. Yeah. I'm trying to think of any equivalent. I don't think I've ever seen. Yeah, I heard of someone like this.

I mean, it's almost like marrying your child to consolidate power in Europe, but also hundreds of people and they're all the people, like the poor people. I, that's really, yeah. I'm just processing that. Yeah, it's pretty smart because I've heard there's variants of this, like the Nazis had like weird breeding programs

where you'd get money if you had enough kids and like, like, but this makes it personal. This is right people to have kids, but like that's so different from like, yeah, I'll be your kid's godfather, right? Yeah, that's such a thing. Is it just like a one-time thing, or can you be like, hey, you're my kid's godfather, what's up to you?

I'm sure it probably works per kid. 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 your heels got your back. And obviously as a result, you back me, no matter what I do, right? Like, right.

Because I, I mean, 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 gonna have a bad time. You have adequately anticipated where the 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. No, nor are they living solely, they're living at the mercy of a strong man through heo, 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, if I got it 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 and a lot of kind of

failing states. State employees are like, often you bribe someone to get the job and you give them a cut of your salary, but you don't actually have to do the job, right? Like once you've gotten yourself in there, you don't do shit. And so like, there's not services, like shit that you need, like, I need to be able to get a driver's license. I 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 of like a soldier desserts, right? Like he puts them under a military justice system for government employees. And as a result, their services for citizens, like people

are able to do things, you know? Because he actually care about services or is he just hearing this purely for care? 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, right? 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, you know, I don't get the feeling that he was terribly concerned with the comfort of other people, but I get the feeling he understood like, I want the country to work because that's how I stay in power, right? And probably as it grieve ego too,

like I don't just wanna govern, I don't just wanna be another warlord, I wanna be the guy who made this shit function, you know? There's probably a problem. It's the same 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, right? That's what he's kind of fighting against is like all these guys who had just grifted

because they're 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 looked 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. Right.

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 or are 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 superset 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? That's awesome. That's awesome. That's Like, that's awesome. That's awesome. 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 dictators stuff. Stalin's version of this was every, getting everyone drunk. Yeah, we're all gonna get drunk and watch cowboy movies and just rubbed your life and stop you from being able to plot against me.

Druhio's version is we're all gonna 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 gonna keep you all dragged up. It's like we're gonna go on a gluten free diet. Yeah exactly. You gotta think about it all the time. You better enter your calories. He's like the see you, you'll wait for others. 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 hung over. So like a lot of times he'd stay out late with them drinking and then 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 Kadeos 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 a verse 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. Would you try that, Sophie, with our staff? No, I don't think he's't think I said we're an intro. 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 stymying, 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? I'm not going to say it on Mike, but I know who you would pick. Okay, okay. Thinking of Mike's, but Mike is back. Good times. I just think that that's really creative. That's like a really creative way to creative way to terrorize an entire population. Also really heavy.

Yeah, very heavy. Horses are not light and to dance with one 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 am the government, you know? It had been theoretical outside of Arizona. 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 capital 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 Espelier'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 cordon of troops around the area. People eventually got the message. Dominicans were sued and 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? Looking at his close friend's story to see who reacted. Yeah. Now, he would be a big fan of those like really problematic intermittent fasting ads. People keep getting on Twitter. Um, why didn't you like the bad? We come on, you gotta stay fit.

Yeah, I have soldiers beat up dudes who don't like sign up for the intermittent fasting program. That would be so him. His Pinterest score 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 them, 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 arcolectic, 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, yeah. Yeah, if you didn't know, you can do the caught my Joe to wake me up before you go go and it matches up perfectly. So I'm gonna make them do that instead of standing for the night.

The 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 fair, but to be fair, I get my rocks off, I'm forcing like Tucker Carlson on everyone around me. That's right, that's right.

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They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I-Hard 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's 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. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart 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 bombing about absolutely tanking on stage.

I'm talking about your most man-assable experiences of the performer. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in 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 A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. It was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up.

Subscribe to my podcast, Bombing, with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. I'll have guests like Sam Jay, to say slow and Michelle Butteau, Max DeMarco, DJ Doug Pound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more! Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrellris big money players network on the iR radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts ah we're back and and we didn't hear what Sophie's song would be yeah Sophie what your song hmm I think I think it's also the Bloodhound gang.

Definitely. They've got so many hits, Sophie. I think I gotta go wanna be by the Spice Girls. Okay. Ooh, that's a really good one. You gotta make sure everyone knows the rap though. Yeah, that's like the best part of the song and not enough people actually know the word.

Send in soldiers if they don't get the lyrics to the rap, right? Exactly. That's basically what we're working at at like a nightclub is like, every time I hear a song like that, my eye twitches and I just automatically sing it. There you go. That would be a real wedding. I think that's a great choice.

Like I think you said that. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of his rulings did. You didn't ask Anderson what Anderson's choice would be and it would be Anderson's choice. It would be who let the dogs out. That's not very creative Sophie. Sorry, it's her favorite song. So her only song. We would have to do 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 sad. Very, very sad. 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 recristened the capital, Ciedade Trujillo. He also changed the name of Duarte Peak to Trujillo Peak. At 10,128 feet, this apex in the Dominican Cordelera 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 peaks impressive height would not be enough to police the president. So he recorded the height at 3,175 meters, 10,417 feet instead. Just had to actually... 10,128. It's not even that big a lie, right?

He's just adding like 300 feet. Like... Or yeah, because8. It's not even that big a lie, right? He's just adding 300 feet like. Or yeah, because meters. Yeah. What's it? It's interesting. Yeah. Change in the, I mean, first off, changing the name of the capital city to be your name, classic dictatorshit. Quite changing a mountain, classic dictatorshit. But really where it gets good is like, this geographer is scared to give the actual height of the mountain So he's got it just like just jink it by a little bit like that's not even a big lie

It's such a Like 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 hundred feet on because he was so scared Like that's a good dictator, you know when you've got that kind of You don't even have you don't even have a written No, you don't even have a mat if he was told the truth. No, you wouldn't know how it's all enough, right? Yeah But that guy still does it

You you you love still does it. You love to see it. Yeah. So obviously he gets, he gets described often as a womanizer. He's often seen like dancing with high society women. He is of course a rapist and becomes one on a massive scale now that he is the president. But it is 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 praying 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 like the game sir. Very, very classic dictatorship. post it like the Gator. Classic, the Gator. Very, yeah, very classic, get, get, get Gator shit. Um, yeah, uh, 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, uh, the panache of like Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo or, uh, you know, um, some of the other great bloodhound gang songs. I just, I like true. He was great in Immortal. He's also sexy and can throw a ball really far. Yeah, real good pitcher.

True. He's such a good pitcher. Yeah, pretty good jump shot. He can dunk. I don't think he can dunk, but he can dunk. And that's his own song. And that's like, that's the whole song. I know he's your thing.

He can dunk, but he can draw it down. Trujillo, I mean, dope. Someone who's composed that. Yeah. In person, Trujillo was all oily, satirine 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 US 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, eight-off spin and power less time by a couple of years than Trujillo, but he's really done something with it. And Rafael is a big fan of this, this, 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. That he's seen Adolfstew single. It's great. Visionary. Yeah. His new single, The Ansheless. Yeah. Shluss, yeah. So in September of 1937, a bunch of Nazi government representatives come to visit him and Trujillo accepts a signed copy of mine camp 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, I was like saying,, why is it a Colonel? Well, because he's a little twist. Yeah. Right, that's sorry. Dr. Trujillo. Yeah.

What is this, like, of endgame of Thrones? Long live our illustrious leader, the honorable president, Dr. Trujillo, and the fjour of Germany, right? Adolf Hitler. Yeah, 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, in like prince.

Yeah, just like prince. So in an article written by Michelle Wooker, Wooker 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 US 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?

Well, 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 each other. 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 is always 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 and the Dominican Republic who have been living

there for a long time. Is it settled by him? Well, I mean, it's settled right before he comes to power. So this is, I think, Vazquez 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 and 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. They even the ones that are going across have often been part of and working in these communities for generations. But Trujillo sees them as an, 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?

But I don't want to be, because I know there are like two separate states, but it's one island that I've boasted in and people have moved across colonial power all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And he's also. Yeah. I mean, what you're trying to make bigotry make sense here, cat? Yeah, I don't know what I expected here. Yeah, it's the same with the US-Mexico border, right? In a lot of ways, right? You could look especially a lot of these border communities where the guys in ice are often like, like Hispanic dudes, right? Like it's like, that's a big thing in the border.

It's this aspect of like, like it never makes all that much sense when you drill down into it other than that. It makes sense when you talk about the politicians. 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. I mean, yeah.

In my work a lot, I'm like, you know, I know logically that this logically makes no sense. Like it's inherently a logical, 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 often scholars do compare what Trujillo does to a lot of like politics of the US border. 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 would not know otherwise. He would not know otherwise, right? So, but yeah, this is like a very similar in a lot of ways situation. So Trujillo fight 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, in 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 propaganda is 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 Dominicans forces. He stole all of them. He stole all of them. Yeah, he stole all of them. It's a normal thing, but 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 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 started 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. He'll even pump his like on prednisone or whatever. Oh, those were good days. Those were good days. That week was like the last week on that and forced him to settle landscape. Yeah, we had some, ever had some fun times. I don't forget January 6th too. This is not going to be a fun time because he gets drunk and he starts to get into like

an anger spiral. And he suddenly, he just kind of at off the cuff gives a speech. I have learned here that the Haitians have been robbing food and cattle from the ranchers. To you Dominicans, with complaint 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 Baneca. The solution must continue.

And for emphasis, he starts hammering his fist on the table. 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 Walker writes, quote, Trujillo soldiers use their guns to intimidate, but not to kill. For that, they used machetes, knives, picks, and shovels, so as not to leave bullets in the corpses. Bullet riddled bodies would have made it obvious that the murderers were government soldiers who, unlike most Dominicans, had guns. But death by machete can be blamed on peasants, on the 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 in a states of the region one by one, rounded up Haitians and initiated deportation proceedings against them. Once the paper was done, the Dominican government had proof that the Haitians had been sent back to Haiti. The Haitians were then transported like cattle to isolated killing grounds,

where soldiers slaughtered them at night, carried the corpses to the Atlantic Port at Monte Christi and threw the bodies to the sharks. For days, the waves carried un-eaten body parts back onto his spanielis beaches. So we are past the fun part of the Trujillo story. Yeah, that was so much less fun than January's that's on Twitter. Yes. Yeah. And once again, throwing shit into the sea. Yep.

And it's, you know, you can see here too. There's this echoing of the path, right? The Americans come in because things are too unstable. There's too much fighting. We take everybody's weapons so that only the government has guns. And then the government uses their guns to get people together, to threaten them together, but the killing itself, and this is going to be 30,000 people. Beat into 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. Um, yeah, Jesus. Yeah. That's like great for Nanking shit, just in just like the brutality of the state 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? And it's obvious. You lose your political, you know, because all the other let you collect people, but if you shoot them, then it's like obvious you didn't, right? You lose your bullet, you know.

There's all the other guns around the seat. 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, mass-occurring 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 and sciences, right? I mean, the fucking dictator is part Haitian, right? Does it, 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 it, right? Right. 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? Or at least a French Creole, and like Dominican speak like kind of a Spanish Creole, right? And so Haitians pronounce the term for parsley

differently than Dominicans. They can't rule their ars in the right way. And it's just sort of like a thing, right? Like you get this in like polygloc commuter where it'll be like, oh, they pronounce it this way, we call it this way. Yeah, it's like a, we even have that with like the British, right?

Like you, my roommate is ethnically British and like, he calls it a bathroom and you're like, all this shit. Like, you know, this is the less fun that you know, that's wrong. 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, to what is this called? And if they pronounce it the way Haitians pronounce it, they'll kill them. They'll beat him to death, they'll shoot him. It becomes called the Parsley Massacre

by a lot of people as a result of this. Beasin. 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 get 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 happens or at least when we're informed about it. I don't want to show him the rest of it. Don't let us hear about it if you're going to do it.

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.

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 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, then in addition to writing for Collier's magazine, Quentin was a former NFL linebacker.

So he is, he is like, 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, and they're not going to kill me. I am an American. And like, in this period of time, we would have sent the fucking Marines back if he murdered it, right? Like that's just the way, you know, it was. There 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, like, whines and dines this journalist, he sits him down for, 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 true he says, hey, look, it couldn't

have been done by my guys. They were all killed by machetes, not rifles. My guys would have used rifles, you know, if I was gonna do, he does like an if I did it, sort of thing, or if it was gonna be my guys. So now, I also should note here, after like Quentin, 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 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. He's terrible, man. I thought it was the farmer's terrible crime. Oh, 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 the 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, or 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,

does 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 US 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. The Hitler stand. Yeah, Rafael Trujillo. Because again, he's a stand-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 whiteness 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 say, right? Yeah. That's significant. Is he actually do it? Two degree. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Obviously, I don't get him moral credit for this. For one thing, it's weird, because 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? Like 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. And obviously, yeah, if you're one of these usually, you get out of Nazi Germany, however the fuck you can. Like I'll go to, like, I don't care if this dictator's shitty. Like I have no other options. Like it's 1938 and I'm a Jewish guy in Germany. Like I'm going to do whatever I need to get out.

I mean, I didn't 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.

Oh wow. Yeah. The racist reasons are not racist reasons. It's a roll of the dice, Cat. It's a roll of the dice, Cat. That's a roll of the dice. Flip of the old coin right there. Anyway, here's ads. Sacred Skando, one of best new podcasts of 2022,

is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to parade. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community, that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States

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You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. An Achiller 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. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey what's up y'all this is Eric Andre, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. I'm talking about your most amazing hands and roll experiences of the performer. I tell gnarly stories and I I'm talking about your most man-asserable experience as a performer. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways.

Bombing on stage, bombing in 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 A-maker punch to my nose. I want to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. It was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, Bombing, with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. I'll have guests like Sam Jay, to say slow and Michelle Butteau, Max DeMarco, DJ Doug Bound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more!

Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's big money players network on the IR radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're 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 to Jewie, 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 the literally the only offer on the tape. Of course, we're going to take it. Like, what else are we going to fucking do? So they take the offer.

And again, a 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 de-ass for a 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 in to the Dominican Republic are 50-year 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 true heo A lot of this is like he wants to breed them, right? So like the 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 There's other issues with the colony for one thing. Most of the people who come there, their goal is not to actually stay in the DR, right? Their goal is to get there, to save their lives, and then get a visa to enter the US, which

totally reasonable. 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 tried to work to grow doesn't work. So Dorset inputs or imports, a bunch of Jewish Palestinians who have been living on kibbutzes and and brings them over and has them help set up farms and meat processing plants and dairies and stuff to make cheese.

This actually takes off with these kibbutzes and 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 1,500 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 US. So this does save a lot of lives. And there is still a Jewish population in this area and this colony called Sosua to this day. And in fact, most of the butter and cheese

made in the Democratic, or made in the Dominican Republic is made by businesses run by these Jewish families. So to this day, still around. So that's, that will be the only nice thing we talk about today, but that's nice. Yeah. That's good. Again, 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 situation. But 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 genocide. Again, there's not always lessons to take out of history. Fire fire, I guess. Cancel each other out. I don't know, math. It doesn't can't know.

It certainly does not cancel it out. It's just a thing. I totally can't. For the sake of everyone that loves to hate me, I'm totally kidding. Genocide is bad. It's bad. I've 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. Yeah. So we agree. Yeah.

Much better than to do. So he is suspiciously quiet about being anti-genocide. Oh, yeah. No. So he'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 talking about wanting to whiten up the Dominican Republic and all that stuff, 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 Rafael has some Haitian ancestry and has some weird hangups 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 considers that to be to having to, he considers having darker skin to be something shameful. And as a result, he is known to where 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. Um, this is. I wonder. Yeah, yeah. Come on, man. Like bear minerals has some good stuff. Like yeah, anyway, whatever.

He knows that but not the third basketball player? What is happening? Yeah. What is happening? Why do you know what bear minerals is? I don't know because I have, I have, I've had, you know, dated people and stuff. You go buy gifts and shit at the Sephora. I'm a, I'm, I'm good at getting gifts, you know?

You are. No, no, no, no, I can't even, I can't even deny Robert is a great thing. I don't even think so. I'm sure he's thoughtful as ass. Yeah. Yeah. So, we know it's their minerals. That's feel sweet. Yeah. That's yeah. So one of again, so no a third basketball players named by end of day, or we're going to have a problem. Bear and Mineral. that's my beer 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, he, wins, once he, one of the reasons why we don't have as much to tail 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, Chappita, or bottle cap. And this is a fun little

lannic dote 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. Those 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 metals and decorations of which he possesses more than 50. So. I loved her dictators, which is like a shit ton of fake money on that. Oh, yeah.

Why wouldn't you? 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 in tortured for using the word bottle cap. That is insane. That is an insane thing to do.

It is 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, Rafael 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 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.

It was that he was beating up people and getting his brothers to hurt people to get bottle caps. Well, charming. You know what, Kat, when I sacrifice a ram tonight in order to commune with the deceased soul of Rafael Trujillo, I will let him know that you thought that was cute. Thank you. And then he's going to torture me until he turns. No, he's dead now.

All he can do is knock over trinkets on your wall. I don't know. He bottled that from knockover. He's going to be disappointed. He's going to be pissed. So as the 40s become the fitties, 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 Capitol, always without escort, usually without bodyguards. Some of this is that like he just has that much faith in the system he's built to protect him, and it works for like 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 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 were resistance to his regime primarily comes from. So yeah, Espoil 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, 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 happening.

I think he, I believe he has a number of kids. What was it, you have like a wife or like an arrow pair? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the, the, 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-true heal and was committed to the underground resistance efforts to his regime. These are elites, these are wealthy people who are trying to fund and carry out resistance to eventually force Trujillo out of power. She marries into a family doing this. Because she is in the upper class, she's rich, she's still attending social events where Trujillo is present.

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 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 tried 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 insurgency in 1959 gets defeated, there's a crackdown.

And it's so brutal that it convinces the Mara Poses. 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 sexism being what it is, Trujillo arrests their husbands and throws them in prison.

So the Maradal sisters stay out of jail for a while. They actually travel up to visit their husbands who are in jail as they're waiting to be sentenced. And then on their way back into town from this visit, on November 25th, 1960, Trujillo's men ambushed them on a rural mountain road, forced them out of their car and beat all of them to death. This is a very famous moment. It kind of, it catalyzes a lot of the resistance to Trujillo's regime.

Their Mara poses 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 surprised? 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 Treyhose regime has its secret police, which initially is a military unit. But in 1957, he creates a civilian lead 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 Trujios,

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 a lot of other dictators. I really think it's sloppy around your time. He's very smart and he does get sloppy. He gets sloppy with the genocide and consistent, but it's smart. He's still doing moves to keep peasants outside.

Yeah, and he's a methodical thinker in a way that a lot of dictators, like possibly carrying out that genocide, He's a methodical thinker in a way that a lot of dictators there like like Possibly you know carrying out that genocide. There are these moments where his kind of passions carry him But he he thinks through what he's doing to a significant extent and I'm gonna quote again from Lauren Derby's book the dictators seduction which I really do recommend. It's a great book about your heal He then fashioned all public works policy, 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 Baharuna mines where he could, which he controlled. His wife Maria Martinez was allotted a government bank for caching 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-bendilism, the appropriation of the state for private ends, the state became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo in 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 for and 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 re-fascends 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 attempted to overthrow the Trujillo regime, a lot of the guys who go in with that are Cubans. Like the Cuban government is arming. It's a little bit their bay of pigs is trying to overthrow Trujillo's government. Obviously, not a bad thing to

one 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? 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 we constantly compensated by having his men loot the Cuban embassy in Trujillo, the city, which is what he's renamed the capital, right? 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 poisons 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, like Eisenhower's worry and why he's like allows the CIA

to try to overthrow Trujillo, is he's convinced that Trujillo is gonna 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 guess I guess. Yeah, because he's like, he's so bad at being like, he's like, I think this guy is out

of control now. Yeah. And I don't want him to be replaced by communists. He is, I don't see it much evidence that the 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 that Eisenhower is convinced of that in any case.

So he tells the CIA to help the anti-True Hill underground do a coup. Now, I will say of all of the coups that the US has backed, I don't really have a problem with trying to kill Raffaille, Truello, 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 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 doesn't write 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 over throwing the Cuban government. That is one. Focus. one thing at a time. No, we're terrible at that shit. It's just no one's priority, you know? It's one of those kinds of things. We can't let them go to the crime, yes, but all of a sudden it's like, you know, whatever.

Yeah, well, whatever happens, you know, we're going to go to do this. Well, that really bad, it's this thing. Yeah, you got to remember here, everybody in the JFK administration is on fuck loads 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. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from a write up by the warfare history network about what happens next. In February 15, 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, sat 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 US consulate and were taken into possession. Two days before Trujillo's murder, Kennedy sent a cable to deerborn 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 tried to get out of it. Like we do not act like. Like you have machine guns. Yeah.

Oh shit. Don't kill him. Don't kill him. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Please, please, please, we just want sex. Forget it. Yeah.

You could use it for something else. Like use it some art. 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 up or something. We don't like this. We're not part of this. Throw it in the sea with the others. 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 gonna use them, right? It's kind of what everyone knows about dissidents. And then riddle with bullies. 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. They wound him, his driver, response returns fire. So does Trujillo. He gets out of the car with a gun, but some of the assassins double back and they just, they gun him down and he dies on the spot.

They throw his corpse in the trunk of a car and they like park it outside the American consulate because they don't really know what to do after that point, right? Like, oh shit, what do we do with this guy? Fuck. Huh. Um.

Sorry. I guess this is the log of the stuff. Just throw it in the sea man. That's what we've been doing this whole time. Yeah I guess this is the log. Just log it yourself. Just throw it in the sea, man. That's what we've been doing this whole time. Yeah, throw it in the sea. Now, the assailants like flee at this point. And some of them do survive.

I actually read an interview. Do we know who they are? Yeah, yeah. Their names are in their heroes now. Oh, yeah. We, uh, we actually, I read an interview with like one of these dudes, uh, 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 down 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 coolest dictator in the's and it's just like this really old dude. Yeah. And honestly like what deflects being like, yeah, you might kill in the president shoes. I put them on when I'm killing the president or just, you know, having a walk about, yeah. It's like, these are like my lucky boxers. You're like, this is my assassin agent. Yeah, this is my shot. The president pants.

Fucking dope. Like really like like God tier flex right there. I'm not saying assassin anyone, but if you do make sure you're out, it is fresh. Yeah, have a nice outfit and save the shoot. Well, no, don't actually bad idea. Burn all everything you're wearing. I mean, it's just good to sense.

That's a nation sense, right? Just make sure you get like hanged in like a cool outfit. The moral of the story is stressful 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 cheer on him.

He is a gangster. Yeah, I mean, he's like, after all these years, he's driving to his girlfriend's house and he gets shot and he's like, fuck it. That he's gun somewhere. He does kind of scar face it a little bit. Try to at least. Yeah, try 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. Trujillo's son, Ramfus, takes over their presidency and gets, rounds up a lot of these guys and a lot of their friends and family. He kills a bunch of people. He feeds some of them alive to sharks. Oh, Ramfus sucks. Oh, Ramfus sucks. So, Ramfus. All my homie, K-Ramfus sucks. Oh, Ramfus.

So, Ramfus is not in power long, right? Because Trujillo, Rafael Trujillo, pretty smart dictator, Ramfus, getting up for one thing, you just know by that name. He's not right. There's never gonna be another president, Ramfus. No, absolutely. And it's not spelled the way you speak. And so, within a couple of months, he's got this power struggle with a Joaquin Baliger,

who is another Dominican politician. And it just doesn't work out. There's a bunch of rioting in the streets. And Rampus winds up fleeing the country with a bunch of stolen money and never comes back. Yeah, you know, 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. Now, there was no communist revolt.

This was never a real threat, but we wind up there again. We're like, no ranfists. I just looked at ranfists on his Wikipedia page. This was never a real threat, but we wind up there again. We're like, no, I just looked at Ramfess 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. Yeah. Yep. And he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't live that long. He dies in 69, thankfully. So that's 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,, 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 backing dictators. That never happens. Like we come in clean and we come out clean. That's what everyone knows about us.

When you depose the dictator of the country, we'll back you up. You don't just leave him in the trunk of a cart for the embassy. Yeah, we're there. It is. Oh man, it is funny. Good stuff. So that was bad. Rafael Trujillo, bad US involvement in his dictatorship. Also bad US involvement after his dictatorship. Not great. Yeah, I mean, as far as dictators go,

though, there were like a bunch of little twists. Like, did everything just slightly different. Yeah, interesting dictator, yeah. Interesting dictator, for sure. Like, he followed a lot of the formula, but he was like, I gotta do it my way. Yeah, yeah, he's a little bit like, you know, like the Bloodhound gang, right 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 basketball player do it do it do it

I'm doing The one you know a third one. I know you do you claim you're Jackson you're you claim you're better at basketball. You say entry Jackson. Oh Lebron Lebron. Thank you. I feel welcome. I just took like two and a half hours to get there. Yeah, I was healing for me. That's good. Yeah, cat. 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 cat M

Boo 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 so happy for you. You can find my book after the revolution wherever books are sold.

And you can find Rafa El Trujillo dead, because he fucking got dead in the end. Dead is shit. Dead is shit. Dead is shit. So yeah, you know, and for those of you listening, I would never encourage anyone to assassinate an elected leader. But if you do, keep the shoes.

Keep the shoes, yeah. Keep the shoes. Keep the shoes. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined.

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