Rafael Trujillo
Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years, renamed its capital after himself, ordered the killing of perhaps twenty thousand Haitians in a week, and was shot on a coast road by men his own regime had made. He came out of the National Guard the Americans had trained during their occupation of 1916-24, rose to command it, and used it in 1930 to remove the president and win an election in which he received more votes than there were voters. From then until 1961 he held the state whether or not he held the presidency: he was president from 1930 to 1938 and 1942 to 1952 and governed through his brother and a series of placemen the rest of the time. He ran the country as a family business, owning by the end most of its sugar, salt, tobacco, cement, shipping and insurance, and taking a share of the rest. Santo Domingo became Ciudad Trujillo in 1936. The highest peak became Pico Trujillo. A neon sign in the capital read God and Trujillo. In October 1937 he ordered the army to kill the Haitians living along the border, and the soldiers, told to use machetes so that it would look like a peasant rising, identified their victims by asking them to say the Spanish word for parsley. The United States tolerated him as an anti-communist for two decades, and stopped in 1960, after his agents tried to kill the president of Venezuela with a car bomb and the OAS imposed sanctions. On 30 May 1961 a group of conspirators with weapons the CIA had supplied ambushed his car on the road to San Cristóbal and shot him dead. The Mirabal sisters, three women he had had murdered six months earlier, are remembered on the international day against violence against women. He is remembered in Vargas Llosa's novel and in the Dominican word for his era, the Trujillato, which nobody uses fondly.
- Lived: 1891 CE – 1961 CE
- Nationality: Dominican
- Roles: dictator, head_of_state, military
