Speaker 1: Oh I am recording.
Speaker 2: Thank you lady.
Speaker 1: Oh hey stay yeah.
Speaker 2: What was the thing you were doing where you morphed
Speaker 2: the fawns and an Ellie songs? I really enjoyed that.
Speaker 1: What I don't know, I don't know. So good now, No,
Speaker 1: I don't feel now you've got me feeling ill self conscious.
Speaker 2: Liked it genuinely.
Speaker 1: No, Sophie, you've you've you've mocked my accents too much
Speaker 1: in the past and now nobody gets to hear it.
Speaker 2: Wow, but it was so good listeners, it was really
Speaker 2: it was so no, see it doesn't work anymore, but
Speaker 2: it was so good.
Speaker 1: No, you've taken my power. Maybe I speaking of it.
Speaker 2: It was terrible.
Speaker 1: Do it? Don't do it? Fine? Introducer introduced my my
Speaker 1: podcast are podcast. This is Behind the Bastards, a show
Speaker 1: about bad people. Kataboo not a bad person, Uh, kat,
Speaker 1: you spend way too much time monitoring Fox News and
Speaker 1: the gaggle of maniacs and would be authoritarian rulers who
Speaker 1: spend all of their time on that fucking hell channel.
Speaker 1: People can find you on the tiktoks and on the youtubes.
Speaker 1: What how are you feeling? As we come into part
Speaker 1: two talking about Raphael Truhio.
Speaker 3: I'm really interested to see where this is going, uh,
Speaker 3: because it feels kind of like a typical rise to power,
Speaker 3: especially in the twentieth century, especially US. Basically everything we've
Speaker 3: seen in so many other countries.
Speaker 1: More but most of these stories involved but like not
Speaker 1: a lot, more like one standard deviation of additional that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, otherwise pretty normal dictator story. And when
Speaker 1: true here takes power, he has kind of the standard
Speaker 1: priorities that any new dictator has, Right, He's gonna sit
Speaker 1: uneasily upon a new one throne. You know, he's going
Speaker 1: to launch his traditional bloody reign of terror, kill his
Speaker 1: political opponents, murder newspaper editors, anybody who might be resistance
Speaker 1: to the rain. And Trujillo understood he's got to move
Speaker 1: fast in doing this because things are not great in
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic. You know. Once the US leaves, they
Speaker 1: kind of set shit up in a way that makes
Speaker 1: a guarantee that the economy is going to collapse, and
Speaker 1: sure enough, sugar prices fall through the floor it right
Speaker 1: after Truheo takes office. This is partly due to the
Speaker 1: fact that, like the Great Depression, is happening. So in
Speaker 1: addition to the shit that the Dominican Republic was already
Speaker 1: dealing with as a result of the US occupation and
Speaker 1: the economic regime they set up, now you've got this depression.
Speaker 1: And so the thing that had kind of kept them
Speaker 1: limping along as a country previously was that the US
Speaker 1: would send them loans right while sucking a bunch of
Speaker 1: money out of the country. But now that the depression
Speaker 1: is happening, suddenly we're not as willing to handle them loans.
Speaker 1: So this is a lot for any government to deal with.
Speaker 1: But it's particularly a lot because about three weeks after
Speaker 1: Truhio takes office, a hurricane strikes the capital and it
Speaker 1: just absolutely devastates. It destroys most of the slums. So
Speaker 1: like obviously the slums, the buildings there are less able
Speaker 1: to withstand a hurricane, so it's just incredibly devastating. There's
Speaker 1: about eighty thousand people a little less than that living
Speaker 1: in the capital when the hurricane hits, and more than
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred of them die, plus another eight thousand
Speaker 1: are injured and several thousand more are unaccounted for. So
Speaker 1: like about ten percent of the city is like gone
Speaker 1: or badly injured after this hits, which you can imagine,
Speaker 1: like imagining that happening to like wherever you live right now,
Speaker 1: Like it's catastrophic. It's a real problem. So Santa Domingo,
Speaker 1: the capitol had been built in the fifteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: it had been built as kind of almost a medieval city,
Speaker 1: right because the fifteen hundreds, you're kind of right at
Speaker 1: this sort of like crossroads, you know, heading into modernity.
Speaker 1: And so it was still divided into different neighborhoods based
Speaker 1: on like job and social class. You have a neighborhood
Speaker 1: for the people who do this gig, you have a
Speaker 1: neighborhood for like this guild or whatever. And the whole
Speaker 1: thing had been surrounded by a defensive wall. Like for
Speaker 1: an example of how slowly shit moved in Santo Domingo
Speaker 1: up until nineteen hundred, the gate was closed every night
Speaker 1: like they would people would like blow horns and like
Speaker 1: lock the gate at night for the city.
Speaker 4: We need to do that today.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I agree.
Speaker 4: I like the pomp and circumstance of being like time
Speaker 4: to go to bed.
Speaker 1: Now, where do we put that gate? In Los Angeles? Though,
Speaker 1: like if you're walling off LA. What part of it?
Speaker 1: Do we are we doing the whole? Like, are we
Speaker 1: are we looping the fuck around San Berndino or are
Speaker 1: we just doing like the actual city of Los Angeles
Speaker 1: is West LA part of it? Sophie. Yes, we have
Speaker 1: two different sets of walls so that they can fight.
Speaker 3: Can you do like on the highway, like put gates
Speaker 3: so that way of someone's speeding and they're not paying attention,
Speaker 3: they just hit it?
Speaker 4: You know that could work?
Speaker 2: Like the east side west side division makes sense and
Speaker 2: San Bernino is not Los Angeles. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: has been.
Speaker 1: I think we do. I would like to do like
Speaker 1: a big minace teerif style curtain wall around Culver City.
Speaker 1: You know that's that's uh, that was my old neighborhood.
Speaker 1: We can defend it from from those Santa Monica savages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't even get me started on you.
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills.
Speaker 3: No, it would be really great for all the people
Speaker 3: here that are from or been to California.
Speaker 1: We need to unite the Cordillos to to take out
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills. You know, I think with a with a
Speaker 1: strong enough military force, we can occupy it and pacify
Speaker 1: the region, but only.
Speaker 2: Up until uh sunset and Dvini. Because we must keep
Speaker 2: us Hollywood, we must keep us all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no that that this is all. This is
Speaker 1: all great content for our listeners, Chess Robert, Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: it will. If we do have to send the Marines
Speaker 1: in to Beverly Hills, it'll be pretty easy because most
Speaker 1: of them are just down in a San Diego, so
Speaker 1: you know, just to have him sail right up the coast. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: much of the colonial quarritor of the capitol where the
Speaker 1: elites tended to reside, was intact, because again, these are
Speaker 1: like the nicest buildings. They're able to kind of handle
Speaker 1: the hurricane, but the slums were flattened. Now, trueO responds
Speaker 1: effectively to this disaster, by which I mean he just
Speaker 1: doesn't shit the bed, and in not shitting the bed,
Speaker 1: he kind of lays the foundation for a myth that
Speaker 1: he single handedly rescues Santa Domingo and it's hour of need.
Speaker 1: This is not really accurate, Like he's not he doesn't
Speaker 1: do anything that like a moderately competent government didn't do,
Speaker 1: but he does handle it in a moderately competent way
Speaker 1: and then immediately set his propaganda apparatus to like, wow,
Speaker 1: he didn't let everyone die after the disaster, look at
Speaker 1: our hero, which is both like, it's sad where the
Speaker 1: bar is, but also just like it, this is the
Speaker 1: easiest way to win, like political points when you've just
Speaker 1: taken over the government is not.
Speaker 3: It's like having a million people die and then being like, wow,
Speaker 3: we handled that, yeh way better than we expected.
Speaker 4: Could be worse, Yeah, could have been worse.
Speaker 1: One of the first things he does as he is,
Speaker 1: you know, handing out emergency aid supplies and shit, is
Speaker 1: he has the National Congress pass an emergency loss of
Speaker 1: spending the constitution and giving the president the power to
Speaker 1: take any steps necessary in order to deal with the
Speaker 1: relief effort. These You could compare this to like the
Speaker 1: emergency powers Hitler gets after the Reichstag fire. It is
Speaker 1: kind of interesting to me that, like a lot of
Speaker 1: dictators will do the thing where oh, we'll do a
Speaker 1: false flag or there will be an actual like uprising
Speaker 1: or something, and we'll use that as an excuse to
Speaker 1: pass this law giving me total power. Trueheo use is
Speaker 1: the hurricane for that which I haven't actually run into.
Speaker 1: In a dictator and is like an actual emergency. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: that is an interesting little spin on the standard story.
Speaker 1: Yeah and yeah, So these he starts. Basically, he makes
Speaker 1: himself the center of the relief effort. So like all
Speaker 1: of the money and donations that are coming in, all
Speaker 1: of the international aid, it goes through true HEO, and
Speaker 1: he is the one handing out Red Cross supplies and
Speaker 1: having it handed out and stuff. So he makes sure
Speaker 1: that even when other people are providing the raw materials,
Speaker 1: he gets seen as like the person who is doling
Speaker 1: them out, so that he gets the credit for like
Speaker 1: all of this shit, he imposes controls over necessities which
Speaker 1: are being like and he basically puts members of his
Speaker 1: family and army officers he wants support from in charge
Speaker 1: of You can hand out the food, you know, you
Speaker 1: can hand out and make sure everyone knows that you're
Speaker 1: doing it for me. But you can also like skim
Speaker 1: some shit off the top and sell it on the
Speaker 1: black market and make some money for yourself while you're
Speaker 1: doing this.
Speaker 3: It is a really interesting to be like, hey, it's
Speaker 3: not the typical thing of I'm killing the people that
Speaker 3: you hate, or I'm killing this threat that's going to
Speaker 3: bring us down. Yeah, it's like I am giving the community.
Speaker 4: What it needs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And a lot of that is like Red Cross funds, Right,
Speaker 1: it's like money that comes from overseas, and Trueho as
Speaker 1: the president, is like, I get to determine how that
Speaker 1: gets handed out, and so he is a lot of
Speaker 1: this stuff does get two people who need it. He's
Speaker 1: not completely shitting the bed on the relief effort, but
Speaker 1: a lot of it also winds up in the black market,
Speaker 1: which lets him bribe and start building loyalty from a
Speaker 1: lot of like what are going to be the new
Speaker 1: elites under his system because he gives them, you know,
Speaker 1: cushy jobs handing out this shit, and they're able to
Speaker 1: make good for themselves from it. A lot of the
Speaker 1: aid supplies that come in are donations, particularly by Americans.
Speaker 1: We don't know exactly how much gets sent to the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic because all of that stuff goes into Trueio's pocket.
Speaker 1: The amount of aid scent was enough though, to both
Speaker 1: line in his pockets and ensure that there's not like
Speaker 1: mass starvation or death from disease. So he does accomplish that,
Speaker 1: and in short order, Trujillo has both made himself very
Speaker 1: wealthy and earned the support of the devastated urban poor,
Speaker 1: and so no one with any say in the matter
Speaker 1: looked too closely when he used the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: hurricane for another purpose, which was doing the standard bloody
Speaker 1: dictatorship of shit of cleaning up the last of his opposition.
Speaker 1: One of his first moves in power prior to the
Speaker 1: hurricane had been to establish a paramilitary organization, La forty two,
Speaker 1: which operated with legal impunity as a secret police force.
Speaker 1: The aftermath of the hurricane would be their first chance
Speaker 1: to shine. And I'm going to quote from German Ornez here.
Speaker 1: Since Congress had legalized dictatorship, it was easy for Trujillo
Speaker 1: to take advantage of the situation to wipe out the
Speaker 1: already decimated ranks of the opposition. Thus, many of his opponents,
Speaker 1: done away with by strong armed squads, were reported victims
Speaker 1: of the hurricane. The day after the hurricane, Truhiel ordered
Speaker 1: in Paulino, the head of LA forty two, to secure
Speaker 1: large quantities of gasoline, and that evening, the dead bodies
Speaker 1: of the victims of the hurricane, as well as a
Speaker 1: few killed by La forty two, were drinched with the
Speaker 1: fluid and burned. This method of corps disposal was hailed
Speaker 1: as an ingenious device of the president to save time
Speaker 1: and prevent epidemics.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 1: Hello, as a matter of fact, takes great pride in
Speaker 1: his original health measure. Without this drastic step, he asserted,
Speaker 1: we should have suffered an epidemic that would have destroyed
Speaker 1: the capital itself. So he's a pretty smart guy, right
Speaker 1: where You're like, look, we got to get rid of
Speaker 1: all these dead bodies because that's bad for the disease.
Speaker 1: And also, if we're going to be burning corpses, I
Speaker 1: might as well have my secret police murder some of
Speaker 1: these dudes I've got issue with, and we'll just throw
Speaker 1: them on the fucking pile and then I'll get credit
Speaker 1: for it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Then it's not true HEEO did a terror. It's true.
Speaker 1: HEO stopped an epidemic. Not bad.
Speaker 4: That's that's smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll give him that. I mean, he's pretty good
Speaker 1: at this in terms of corpse.
Speaker 4: Disposal, especially as like beginning dictators.
Speaker 1: Yah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as corpse disposal murders go pretty
Speaker 1: good one, you know, pretty good one. So Trujillo's first
Speaker 1: major struggle outside of just disaster recovery was cementing his
Speaker 1: control over the quarrelsome rural highlands and their caciques. With
Speaker 1: the new road infrastructure the US had left behind and
Speaker 1: the modernized military Raphael had helped the Americans build, he
Speaker 1: had the ability to project power in a way that
Speaker 1: had never been possible for the central government of the Republic.
Speaker 1: Arturo Espala, who participated in some of this campaign, later
Speaker 1: recalled moving his marine trained troops over marine built roads.
Speaker 1: The General Lisimo struck again and again. Casiques who wouldn't
Speaker 1: surrender unconditionally were gunned down. The survivors saw the light.
Speaker 1: The era of regional warlords was ended. The era of
Speaker 1: trujillo had begun. In any dictator, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: deal with the fact that once you take over, there's
Speaker 1: the people who were elites prior to your rights to power, right,
Speaker 1: and you got kind of two broad options. One is
Speaker 1: you co opt them, right, you make them your elites,
Speaker 1: you know, and the other is you marginalize them.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Either you take away their wealth and power, you massacre them,
Speaker 1: or you just kind of do you try to slowly
Speaker 1: edge them out. Raphael chooses a policy of military annihilation
Speaker 1: right that's what he does to a lot of the
Speaker 1: old elites, which engenders the everlasting hatred of the survivors,
Speaker 1: but it brings them the loyalty of the peasantry. And
Speaker 1: this makes a lot of sense when you consider the
Speaker 1: people who had been running things in the Dominican Republic
Speaker 1: prior to trueO. It had been pretty chaotic and most
Speaker 1: of these people, most of the peasants were not happy
Speaker 1: with these casiques, and we're not happy with like the
Speaker 1: old leadership of the country because they'd been bad at it.
Speaker 1: The dr had no meaningful middle class prior to True Heo,
Speaker 1: because it turns out that it's hard to have a
Speaker 1: middle class when like banditry is the biggest industry and
Speaker 1: the central government doesn't work past the street lamps, you know.
Speaker 1: So Rafael followed military action, and this is where it
Speaker 1: gets really interesting, with a letter writing campaign. So as
Speaker 1: soon as he's beaten, you know, his primary rivals militarily,
Speaker 1: he sends out letters all over the countryside. He's posting
Speaker 1: up like posts and towns and stuff, and announcements. He's
Speaker 1: sending like all of these announcement out to people, telling them,
Speaker 1: telling the peasants, hey I am in charge. Now you
Speaker 1: are under my protection. If anybody fucks with your property,
Speaker 1: come to true. Hero, is your landlord abusing you? Does
Speaker 1: your village need a schoolhouse? Right, here's how you contact me,
Speaker 1: tell me what you need. I got you. It's a
Speaker 1: very kind of like mob thing, but it's he's not
Speaker 1: starting with the threats to the peasants, right. He's doing
Speaker 1: that to a lot of these old elites, to these
Speaker 1: you know, he's very violent to them. But to the peasantry,
Speaker 1: he's like, what do you guys need? What don't you have?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 4: And also it's not just like a vague promise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this he understood was the wait for him
Speaker 1: to get long term security. Right. A powerful military is
Speaker 1: good for fighting warlords, but also a powerful military is
Speaker 1: how you get warlords. Right. Yea, you can never be
Speaker 1: too secure in your military as a dictator, because it's
Speaker 1: also where your rivals are going to come from. Right.
Speaker 1: If you have a general who's really good at shit,
Speaker 1: that's a rival to your power, But you also need
Speaker 1: the like it's tough and the only thing if you're
Speaker 1: going to have this powerful military, you're always going to
Speaker 1: have some people who might be able to overthrow you.
Speaker 1: The only way to make that impossible or at least
Speaker 1: less likely is grassroots support, right, because these generals, who
Speaker 1: if you're just a dictator to a normal dictators shit
Speaker 1: and like cracking down on the peasants, and you're feared
Speaker 1: more than you're loved, Well, what if I just take
Speaker 1: out this guy? You know, I got a shot I
Speaker 1: can make you know, But if the peasantry has your
Speaker 1: back as the dictator, then suddenly it's a lot scarier
Speaker 1: as some general to try to take over, you know.
Speaker 1: And Truheil understood that most of his personal security in
Speaker 1: the stability of his regime was going to rest entirely
Speaker 1: on what amounted to bribing the peasantry and spla rights quote.
Speaker 1: One of the techniques he used was baptism. Baptism and
Speaker 1: one hundred dollar bills. Trujillo became godfather to tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of children, and the parents of each child received
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars. Truhil also reaped a dividend. It is
Speaker 1: considered poor form in Latin America to conspire against your
Speaker 1: compadre the godfather of your child. These baptisms had to
Speaker 1: be seen to be believed. Shabbily dressed women of the
Speaker 1: lower classes holding squalling infants would stream through the heavily
Speaker 1: guarded gate of the National Palace and lineup outside the
Speaker 1: palace chapel. The old man would handle the proceedings on
Speaker 1: a production line basis. He would beam briefly at each
Speaker 1: mother and child, mumble a few words, then pass on
Speaker 1: to the next. The din was terrific, and the atmosphere
Speaker 1: inside the chapel was stifling, but it went on for hours,
Speaker 1: day after day. Let no one say that Truillo didn't
Speaker 1: work hard at being a dictator. So he makes himself
Speaker 1: a godfather to all of the poor people's kids, and
Speaker 1: he pays them to become like make the godf and
Speaker 1: then like, I mean, why wouldn't you be the.
Speaker 4: Guy that's going to give you a hundred bucks? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's strandfather.
Speaker 1: I've never heard of a dictatory that really, I've never.
Speaker 4: Heard that same, And I think it's really smart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm trying to think of like any equivalent.
Speaker 1: I don't think i've ever ye heard of someone like this.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's almost like marrying your child to consolidate
Speaker 3: power in Europe.
Speaker 4: But like, also, hundreds of people and they're all the people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like poor people.
Speaker 4: That's really smart. Yeah, I'm just processing that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty smart because I've heard there's variants of this,
Speaker 1: like the Nazis had like weird breeding programs where you'd
Speaker 1: get money if you had enough kids and like like
Speaker 1: makes it bride to people to have kids. But like
Speaker 1: that's so different from like, yeah, I'll be your kid's godfather, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Is it just like a.
Speaker 4: One time thing or can you be like, hey, you're
Speaker 4: my kid's godfather, what's up to you?
Speaker 1: I'm sure it probably works per kid. Uh yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I think there is this idea because he
Speaker 1: is trying to set up this idea that like, if
Speaker 1: you are like the peasants, you come to me when
Speaker 1: you need something, right, Yeah, true, here's got your back,
Speaker 1: and obviously as a result, you back me no matter
Speaker 1: what I do, right, Like right, because I'm your godfather.
Speaker 1: Remember when I built that school, Remember when I did this?
Speaker 1: You know, like you owe me.
Speaker 4: And even if he didn't get like assassinated, like the
Speaker 4: other person's going to have a.
Speaker 1: Bad time, you have adequately uh anticipated where this story ends.
Speaker 1: So yes, it is not hard to see why Truhiel
Speaker 1: was initially very popular with the poor, right, And he
Speaker 1: does a good job at building stability, right. And with stability,
Speaker 1: people are able, Like, for one thing, merchants hadn't really
Speaker 1: been able to keep like stock in stores in a
Speaker 1: lot of the country because of how bad the banditry was.
Speaker 1: Now they're able to do that. People are able to
Speaker 1: start and run businesses. People are able to build a
Speaker 1: degree of wealth. Right. Peasants are not constantly being drafted
Speaker 1: to fight wars, no, nor are they living solely. They're
Speaker 1: looking at the mercy of a strong man, true he o,
Speaker 1: but not at a bunch of warring local strongmen. Right,
Speaker 1: So you're not having to deal with this like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm under this guy right now, but this dude is
Speaker 1: more powerful and like if I like back him in
Speaker 1: this and I got out, Like, you're not worrying about
Speaker 1: that kind of shit all the time. Right, As long
Speaker 1: as you're good with Trueio, you're generally pretty good. And
Speaker 1: because he brings this form of peace to the country,
Speaker 1: the economy starts doing a lot better and over the
Speaker 1: coming years of his reign, over the time the Trio's
Speaker 1: in power, the population of the Dominican Republic is going
Speaker 1: to triple so he is obviously a dictator. He's extremely
Speaker 1: strict on government employees, which is part of what makes
Speaker 1: him popular because state employees previously, a lot of them
Speaker 1: hadn't this is a really normal thing and a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of failing states. State employees are like often
Speaker 1: you bribe someone to get the job, and you give
Speaker 1: them a cut of your salary, but you don't actually
Speaker 1: have to do the job right, Like once you've gotten
Speaker 1: yourself in there, you don't do shit, and so like
Speaker 1: there's not services like shit that you need, Like I
Speaker 1: need to be able to get a driver's license. I
Speaker 1: need to be able to like fucking send letters and stuff,
Speaker 1: and you can't do that because the government just doesn't
Speaker 1: fucking do anything right. The state employees are not functional
Speaker 1: under true heo, there is a functional state, and part
Speaker 1: of it is because he treats every state employee like
Speaker 1: a member of the military. Failure to show up is
Speaker 1: punished the same way as it is of like a
Speaker 1: soldier deserts, right, like he puts them under a military
Speaker 1: justice system for government employees, and as a result, they're
Speaker 1: services for citizens like people are able to do things.
Speaker 3: You know, does he actually care about services or is
Speaker 3: he just doing it purely for he cares.
Speaker 1: He's not doing it to be a good guy, but
Speaker 1: he's doing it because he understands that his ability to
Speaker 1: stay in power is predicated on providing things for the people,
Speaker 1: the mass of the country.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I wasn't sure if it was like a double whammy
Speaker 3: of the power and actually caring about the people, not
Speaker 3: for power.
Speaker 1: I don't know the man, you know, I don't get
Speaker 1: the feeling that he was terribly concerned with the comfort
Speaker 1: of other people, But I get the feeling he understood
Speaker 1: like I want the country to work because that's how
Speaker 1: I stay in power, right, Right, And probably is a
Speaker 1: degree of ego too, like I don't just want to govern,
Speaker 1: I don't just want to be another warlord. I want
Speaker 1: to be the guy who made this shit function. You know,
Speaker 1: there's probably saying that.
Speaker 3: Like elected officials don't grasp this very basic concept.
Speaker 1: Well, if someone else is responsible for the stability of
Speaker 1: the state, then you can just grift. Right. That's what
Speaker 1: he's kind of fighting against, is like all these guys
Speaker 1: who had just grifted because they were like, well, it's
Speaker 1: not my job to make the Dominican Republic work. But
Speaker 1: I can pull some money out of this chunk of
Speaker 1: the government or whatever that I've lucked my way into
Speaker 1: being technically in charge of. It's not my job to
Speaker 1: like make it function well. The buck does have to
Speaker 1: stop with True Heo because he's the dictator. So he's like,
Speaker 1: I am going to punish people they don't do their
Speaker 1: fucking job because that'll make people angry. And if the
Speaker 1: peasants are angry because shit still doesn't work, I'm less safe,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. Uh Now, Obviously a massive concern for
Speaker 1: him is the loyalty of the military, and it's this
Speaker 1: problem you always have with a dictator's army, right where
Speaker 1: you need competent officers to enforce what is a military dictatorship,
Speaker 1: but you also have to be able to keep control
Speaker 1: and officers who get too good or a danger to you.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways that he manages this is
Speaker 1: an idea I have not well, it's similar to some
Speaker 1: things other people do. So there's this growing understanding of
Speaker 1: fitness in this period of time in the thirties, right,
Speaker 1: fitness culture is starting to become a thing, and Trueheo
Speaker 1: has a conversation with a doctor who tells him that
Speaker 1: the best thing to do for his health is go
Speaker 1: on long walks, right, that that's really good for you.
Speaker 1: So he becomes a devoted walker, and he makes it
Speaker 1: be mandatory for military officers to come follow him on
Speaker 1: his walks. But he's not like, he doesn't have a
Speaker 1: super set schedule all the time, so you never know
Speaker 1: when the walk is going to start. You just have
Speaker 1: to show up outside of his palace and like the
Speaker 1: late afternoon and wait around for hours until he's ready
Speaker 1: to go on a walk, and it might take hours,
Speaker 1: and then he might be out for hours. And as
Speaker 1: a result, you're always you have this big thing that's
Speaker 1: going to take a huge chunk of your day and
Speaker 1: your energy, and it's kind of it's not entirely predictable
Speaker 1: how long it's going to take, and so that just
Speaker 1: takes up a lot of time that you might spend plotting, right,
Speaker 1: like you, that's all This is a thing other dictators do. Again,
Speaker 1: it's weird. He's like a lot of what he does
Speaker 1: is like the slightly healthier version of normal dictator stuff.
Speaker 1: Stalin's version of this was every getting everyone drunk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're all going to get drunk and watch cowboy movies
Speaker 1: and the middle disrupt your life and stop you from
Speaker 1: being able to plot against me. Truio's version is, We're
Speaker 1: all gonna like go on long walks with like shake
Speaker 1: weights in our hands so that we stay fit.
Speaker 3: It's like instead of being like I'm going to keep
Speaker 3: you all drugged up, it's like we're gonna go.
Speaker 4: On a gluten free diet. Yeah, and you guys to
Speaker 4: think about it all the time. You better enter your calories.
Speaker 1: He's like the general your weight, wife, you are out,
Speaker 1: how many points you got? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: kind of funny. He is a guy who has a
Speaker 1: lot of energy. He does do the drinking thing too,
Speaker 1: and he does keep his staff with him late at
Speaker 1: night at social events. He doesn't really seem to get hungover,
Speaker 1: so like a lot of times he'd stay out late
Speaker 1: with them drinking and then get up early in the
Speaker 1: next morning and like they'd have to come in like
Speaker 1: an hour after they went to sleep, all like fucked up.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is part of how he ensures loyalty.
Speaker 1: And when this stuff doesn't work, there was always rampant brutality.
Speaker 1: One of the last Codillos was Sergeant Enrique Blanco, who
Speaker 1: like rebelled from the military and led this like regional
Speaker 1: rebellion against Trujillo's rule pretty early on. And when he's
Speaker 1: finally killed, Trujio takes his corpse and he parades it
Speaker 1: through the towns where this guy had been popular, and
Speaker 1: he makes local peasants dance with this guy's rotting corpse
Speaker 1: until Truhio's like, I think you got the point. So again,
Speaker 1: not a verse to brutal shit, right, Like he does
Speaker 1: that too?
Speaker 4: Creative though, Yeah, it is really creative though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of a corpse dance. I don't know,
Speaker 1: that'll probably make someone less likely to rebel. We should
Speaker 1: try that, Sophie with our with our staff.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think Carson Trivia.
Speaker 4: I think that's a great idea. Who are you gonna
Speaker 4: kill first?
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, I feel like if you
Speaker 1: lock yourself into murdering a specific person and then making
Speaker 1: people dance with their corpse, then you're just kinda like
Speaker 1: that's like stymying, right, you gotta you gotta be let
Speaker 1: the world kind of you know.
Speaker 2: I know who Robert would pick who's that, Sophie. I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna say it on Mike, but I know who
Speaker 2: you would be.
Speaker 7: Okay, Okay, I just think that, uh, that's really creative.
Speaker 4: That's like a really creative.
Speaker 1: Way to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, terrorize an entire population.
Speaker 3: Also really heavy, Yeah, very are not light, and to
Speaker 3: dance with one that's another workout.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly again health King, yeah exactly, very very concerned
Speaker 1: with everyone's fitness levels. So he makes a priority to
Speaker 1: of inculcating a sense of nationalism. Right because the Dominican
Speaker 1: Republic had been a country, but not really just because
Speaker 1: of how badly it worked, right, And a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the hills are like, I don't fucking that's
Speaker 1: not my government, Like what are you talking about? Like
Speaker 1: my government is this angry dude, right? Or I am
Speaker 1: the government? You know, it had been theoretical outside of era,
Speaker 1: So he understood one of the things he has to
Speaker 1: do is build a sense of nationalism. Part of how
Speaker 1: he did this was in the capitol every day he
Speaker 1: would raise the flag and order the national anthem played,
Speaker 1: and then he would like sit out in his palace
Speaker 1: with a telescope and watch how people responded to like
Speaker 1: see if they were paying enough attention to the national anthem,
Speaker 1: and when he noticed people weren't, he took action. As
Speaker 1: this passage from Espala's book describes, one morning, soldiers clad
Speaker 1: and civilian clothes swarmed into the square. They claborate everyone
Speaker 1: who didn't stand up for the anthem and flag. This
Speaker 1: went on for several days. Then people began drifting out
Speaker 1: of the square just before each ceremony. Truhia responded by
Speaker 1: throwing a cordin of troops around the area. People eventually
Speaker 1: got the message. Dominicans were soon leaping frantically to their
Speaker 1: feet at the sound of the first notes of the anthem.
Speaker 4: God.
Speaker 3: This dude would be frantically checking his Instagram comments just
Speaker 3: to be like, all right.
Speaker 4: Who liked it? Who comments?
Speaker 3: Looking at his close friends story to see who reacted.
Speaker 2: Would he would be a big fan of those like
Speaker 2: really problematic uh interminent fasting ads people keep getting on Twitter?
Speaker 1: Why didn't you like the bad we come on? You
Speaker 1: gotta stay fit? Yeah, have soldiers beat up dudes who
Speaker 1: don't like sign up for the internet and fasting program.
Speaker 2: That would be so him would be intolerable, intolerable, speaking, intolerable,
Speaker 2: it's time for ads. Robert.
Speaker 1: Well, first I gotta ask Kat if you're a dictator, right, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: you've got to. You've decided you're going to make everyone
Speaker 1: stand up for an anthem, otherwise they get the shit
Speaker 1: beaten out of them. What's the song? What are you picking?
Speaker 4: Oh god, that's a really good one.
Speaker 3: As an arcleptic, I'm going to go with wake me
Speaker 3: Up before you go go.
Speaker 1: Oh oh boy, that's a nightmare. That's like a literal
Speaker 1: waking hell.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow yeah.
Speaker 3: If you didn't know, you can do the Cotton Eye
Speaker 3: Joe to wake me up before you go go and it.
Speaker 4: Wow, it matches up perfectly. So I'm going to make
Speaker 4: them do that instead of.
Speaker 1: Standing for the skyrocket. See, I would be I would
Speaker 1: be like a good dictator, So I would make everybody
Speaker 1: listen to the Bloodhound Gangs, the Bad Touch and stand
Speaker 1: up in salute. Yeah that's that's that's fair.
Speaker 3: But to be there, I get my rocks off en
Speaker 3: forcing like Tucker Carlston on everyone around me.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, yeah so does yeah. Well, speaking
Speaker 1: of dictators or guys who would like to be here's
Speaker 1: some ads. Ah, we're back and and.
Speaker 4: We didn't hear what Sophie's song would be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sophie, what's your song?
Speaker 4: Hmmm?
Speaker 1: I think I think it also the Bloodound Gang, Definitely,
Speaker 1: They've got so many hits, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I think I gotta go want to be by the
Speaker 2: Spice Girls.
Speaker 3: Okay, Oh, that's a really good one. You got to
Speaker 3: make sure everyone knows the rap though.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like the best part of the song, and
Speaker 4: not enough people actually know the words.
Speaker 1: Send in soldiers if they don't get the lyrics to
Speaker 1: the rap right exactly.
Speaker 4: That's basically working at like a nightclub.
Speaker 3: Is like, every time I hear any song like that,
Speaker 3: my eye twitches and I just automatically sing it.
Speaker 1: There you go. That would be a real wabb.
Speaker 4: I think that's a great choice.
Speaker 2: I think you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a lot of his rules.
Speaker 2: We didn't ask Anderson what Anderson's choice would be, and
Speaker 2: it would be it would be who Let the Dogs Out?
Speaker 1: That's creative, Sophie.
Speaker 2: Sorry, it's her favorite song. It's her only song. Listen
Speaker 2: to to it on loop every night for four hours.
Speaker 1: See, my cats are intellectuals, so they like listening to
Speaker 1: the entirety of the Who's Tommy, which is what I
Speaker 1: would make everyone say, is so Saddami day very Saddam. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So much of his ruling strategy was focused on simultaneously
Speaker 1: humiliating old elites and turning himself into ass like a
Speaker 1: figure of kind of almost like deified respect among the peasantry.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote again from a write up
Speaker 1: on Thought Company by Rebecca Bodenheimer. Quote. In nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: he rechristened the capital Siadad Trujillo. He also changed the
Speaker 1: name of Duarte Peak to Trujillo Peak. At ten twenty
Speaker 1: eight feet, this Apex and the Dominican Cordillera is Central
Speaker 1: is the Caribbean's highest mountain. It is about a third
Speaker 1: the height of Mount Everest and surpasses the measurement of
Speaker 1: any North American mountain east of the Mississippi. Legend has
Speaker 1: it that a geographer laboring under Trujillo feared that even
Speaker 1: the peaks impressive height would not be enough to police
Speaker 1: the president, so he recorded the height at three thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred and seventy five meters ten thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen feet instead just actually one hundred twenty eight
Speaker 1: It's not even that big a lie, right, he's just
Speaker 1: adding like three hundred feet like, h yeah, because meters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting, yeah, changing them. I mean, first off,
Speaker 1: changing the name of the capital city to be your name.
Speaker 1: Classic dictator shit. Changing a mountain, classic dictator shit. But
Speaker 1: really where it gets good is like this geographer is
Speaker 1: scared to give the actual height of the mountains, so
Speaker 1: he's got to just like just jink it by a
Speaker 1: little bit. Like that's not even a big lie, it's
Speaker 1: such a it.
Speaker 4: Really another mountain by being just that much taller.
Speaker 1: I think it's normally the highest, it's always it's just
Speaker 1: the highest mountain in the Caribbean. Like, I don't think
Speaker 1: he had to lie to make it that. He just
Speaker 1: put a couple of hundred feet on because he was
Speaker 1: so scared. Like that's a good dictator, you know. When
Speaker 1: you've got that, you.
Speaker 4: Don't even threaten him. He probably wouldn't have even been
Speaker 4: mad if he has told the truth. No, you wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: Is tall enough? Right? Yeah, but that guy still does it?
Speaker 1: You you love to see it? Uh yeah, so obviously
Speaker 1: he gets He gets described often as a womanizer. He's
Speaker 1: often seen like dancing with high society women. He is
Speaker 1: of course a rapist and becomes one on a massive
Speaker 1: scale now that he is the president. But it is
Speaker 1: sort of the kind of thing where like it just
Speaker 1: becomes known that if Trueheo wants to see you, you
Speaker 1: go to him. Right.
Speaker 3: Does he have like a specific type like is he
Speaker 3: praying on women that work for him?
Speaker 1: Or I think it is generally women in high society,
Speaker 1: but not exclusively. And it's it's just sort of like
Speaker 1: he's got people and they'll come say, like here's a
Speaker 1: gift or whatever, you know, the President would like to
Speaker 1: see you, and is just generally known like it's it's
Speaker 1: not a good thing to not give the president what
Speaker 1: he wants, right, It's that kind of that's the kind
Speaker 1: of coercion and violence that you're able to exert when
Speaker 1: you're the president, as opposed to very yeah, very classic
Speaker 1: dictator ship. Yeah. True Hello also commissioned songs to be
Speaker 1: composed in his honor, with titles like faith and Tru
Speaker 1: Heo Tru Hello is Great and Immortal and True Hello
Speaker 1: the Great Architect, none of which have the uh the
Speaker 1: panache of like Fox Trot Uniform, Charlie Kilo or uh,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the other great Bloodhound Gang songs.
Speaker 3: Like was great and Immortal and it's like he's also
Speaker 3: sexy and can throw a ball really far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, real good picture.
Speaker 4: True he is such a good picture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty good jump shot.
Speaker 4: He can dunk. You don't think he can dunk, but
Speaker 4: he can dunk. And not his own song. That's like,
Speaker 4: that's a song.
Speaker 1: I know you don't think he can dunk, but he
Speaker 1: can drug dunk, Truio, I mean dope, so please compose that.
Speaker 1: Yeah in person, Truello was all oily sachurin confidence, but
Speaker 1: he was less stable than he liked to pretend. By
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven, the Dominican Republic was nearly insolvent. International
Speaker 1: assistance then had become absolutely necessary. Now this is nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven, and traditionally the Dominican Republic gets money from
Speaker 1: the US. Truhio considers himself a marine, but the US
Speaker 1: is not the government in thirty seven that he feels
Speaker 1: the closest to, or that he wants to be the
Speaker 1: closest to, because he's kind of become a Hitler. Stand
Speaker 1: by this point right now, Adolph's been in power less
Speaker 1: time by a couple of years. Than Truio, but he's
Speaker 1: really done something with it. And Raphael is a big
Speaker 1: fan of this, This go getter young German. Right, he's
Speaker 1: a hitler. Yeah, yeah, he's a hitler. Stan, He's got
Speaker 1: all the albums.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see Adolf single great visionary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his new single the Anschluss. Yeah. So in September
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty seven, a bunch of Nazi government representatives
Speaker 1: come to visit him, and tru Heil accepts a signed
Speaker 1: copy of mind Camp from the German representative, the Nazi delegation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he's got a signed one. The Nazi delegation
Speaker 1: is met with crowds and positive articles in tru Heillo
Speaker 1: controlled newspapers, all with titles like long live our illustrious leaders,
Speaker 1: the Honorable President, Doctor Trujillo, and the furor of the
Speaker 1: German Reich, Adolf Hitler.
Speaker 4: Wait, why didn't you here become a doctor?
Speaker 1: At no point? Never did he become a doctor, Like
Speaker 1: he just did. That's just what you do. If I
Speaker 1: get to be a dictator, I've always wanted to be
Speaker 1: a colonel, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because twist yeah right, doctor Truio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is this game of thrones?
Speaker 4: Long?
Speaker 2: Live, our illustrious leader, the Honorable President, Doctor Trueu and
Speaker 2: the fure of Germany Reich Adolf Hitler.
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler Hitler here being basically the Prince of dictators,
Speaker 1: where he's like, can you just call me Adolf? Like, like,
Speaker 1: we all know who I am, so Prince yeah, just
Speaker 1: like Prince.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: In an article written by Michelle Wouker, Wuka describes how
Speaker 1: Trujillo was particularly inspired by Nazi racial theories as well
Speaker 1: as the model of strong main leadership that Hitler represented. Quote.
Speaker 1: Hitler's ideas gave Truheo a racist and nationalist plan to
Speaker 1: distract Dominicans from their empty stomachs, reminding Dominicans that they
Speaker 1: could not afford to feed foreigners too. Truio cracked down
Speaker 1: in migration from Haiti, but powerful American sugarcane plantation owners
Speaker 1: who brought in Haitians to cut caine because unlike Dominicans,
Speaker 1: they worked for practically nothing, forced him to make hu exceptions.
Speaker 1: He resorted to deporting Haitians and tightening border patrols, but
Speaker 1: the Haitians kept coming because obviously Haiti is doing badly
Speaker 1: in this period, as is generally the case. So they've
Speaker 1: got poor refugees flooding over the border. Americans need them
Speaker 1: to work plantations for cheap But Truhello also is he's
Speaker 1: doing very much what conservatives do in our country, creating
Speaker 1: this panic over the border. Like, ah, it's not my mismanagement,
Speaker 1: and like the US having fucked us over for so long,
Speaker 1: that is why you're poor and starving. It's the Haitians.
Speaker 1: They're taking your jobs, they're taking your wealth, they're filling
Speaker 1: our cut. We can't afford to feed them. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: isn't there like a I.
Speaker 3: Mean, we went through this earlier, but like a pretty
Speaker 3: similar background.
Speaker 1: Yep. In a lot of ways, they're not far from
Speaker 1: Mitcha And in fact it's.
Speaker 4: Still only two places on this island.
Speaker 1: A good number of the Haitians that he is turning into,
Speaker 1: like the have just been living in what is the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic for forever, right because right at the border area,
Speaker 1: it's not like everyone has always had like the Dominican
Speaker 1: Haitian border only gets settled in nineteen twenty nine, the
Speaker 1: year that he comes to power, So like there's just
Speaker 1: communities of Haitians and the Dominican Republic who have been
Speaker 1: living there for you know, a long time.
Speaker 4: Is it settled by him?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean it's no, it's settled right before
Speaker 1: he comes to power. So this is I think Vasquez
Speaker 1: is his name is, So like right before he takes over,
Speaker 1: this gets settled. I'm sure he had a hand in it,
Speaker 1: because he's a powerful guy in government. Still at that point,
Speaker 1: now rationally in thirty seven, from nineteen twenty nine to
Speaker 1: thirty seven, nothing has changed about the situation with Haitians. Right,
Speaker 1: there's Haitians who live in the Dominican side of the border.
Speaker 1: They work in communities. Even the ones that are going
Speaker 1: across have often been part of and working in these
Speaker 1: communities for generations. But Trujillo sees them as a and
Speaker 1: in fact, Trujillo is part Haitian, right, Like he has
Speaker 1: Haitian ancestors, which is very common. Right, It's one island.
Speaker 1: It's not all that bit, you know, like I don't.
Speaker 3: Want to be because I know there are like two
Speaker 3: separate states, but it's it's one island that I voted
Speaker 3: in and people have moved colonial parallel.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, And he's also.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, but you're trying trying to make bigotry
Speaker 1: makes sense here.
Speaker 4: Can't Yeah, I don't know what I expected here.
Speaker 1: Like, Yeah, it's the same with like the US Mexico border,
Speaker 1: right in a lot of ways. Right, you could look
Speaker 1: at especially a lot of these like border communities where
Speaker 1: the guys in Ice are often like like Hispanic dudes, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's like that's a big thing in the border. It's
Speaker 1: this aspect of like like it never makes all that
Speaker 1: much sense when you drill down into it. Other than
Speaker 1: that it makes sense when you talk about the politicians,
Speaker 1: when you talk about guys like Druhillo, for whom it's
Speaker 1: not about his deeply held beliefs as much as it
Speaker 1: is like I need a fucking scapegoat, and I can
Speaker 1: get people angry at the Haitians, you know, right, Like.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, in my work a lot, I'm like,
Speaker 3: you know, I know logically that this logically.
Speaker 4: Makes no sense, like it's inherently illogical, but it's still
Speaker 4: just so fun frustrating and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh my god, it's about to get a lot
Speaker 1: more frustrating, but it is. And often scholars do compare
Speaker 1: what true Heio does to a lot of like politics
Speaker 1: of the US border. These are these are in fact
Speaker 1: similar situations in a lot of ways. Now, there's a
Speaker 1: difference in that that Haitians had occupied the Dominican Republic
Speaker 1: not all that long ago, So there is that aspect
Speaker 1: of it which like Mexico never like conquered a chunk
Speaker 1: of the United States, right, like we went to war
Speaker 1: with them and took a bunch of shit.
Speaker 4: I mean except your Texas history class in fourth grade.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, no other you would not know otherwise, right, yes,
Speaker 1: so but yeah, this is like a very similar in
Speaker 1: a lot of wate situation. So true Heillo starts using
Speaker 1: these people as like a a a huge scapegoat, and
Speaker 1: there is a belief among many Dominicans that Haitians are
Speaker 1: taking jobs and driving down the price of wages, and
Speaker 1: so as a result, True Hello gets a lot of
Speaker 1: support when he pushes through punit of laws against them,
Speaker 1: which he does throughout the mid thirties. In July of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven, this process culminates in a new law
Speaker 1: which forces foreigners to register with migration officials and leads
Speaker 1: to a crackdown on immigration that allows him to deport
Speaker 1: eight thousand Haitians. And again, a bunch of those people
Speaker 1: had lived in the area for forever, right, Like they're
Speaker 1: just being forced out because someone decides in the government,
Speaker 1: decides that they're Haitians and anyway, it's ugly. Trhillo goes
Speaker 1: on a grand tour of the border in August and
Speaker 1: he is furious to see that there are still way
Speaker 1: more Haitians than he wants to see, and he doesn't.
Speaker 1: He's angry that there's not as much livestock as he'd
Speaker 1: expected to see in this part of the countryside. So
Speaker 1: he starts talking to peasants as he's doing this like
Speaker 1: tour of these villages and they're like, oh, it's Haitian
Speaker 1: bandits who stole our animals. Now it's unclear if this
Speaker 1: actually happened or if this is the justification that Raphael's
Speaker 1: propagandists give for his focus on the border. But there
Speaker 1: start being massacres. There's massacres of Dominicans by Haitian partisans.
Speaker 1: There's reprisal strikes Dominicans. Yeah, he stole it's a normal thing, like,
Speaker 1: but there there starts being more violence. That's a lot
Speaker 1: of it's you know, ginned up by his sort of
Speaker 1: like the propaganda that starts coming out. But like Yeah,
Speaker 1: Dominicans kill Haitians. There's reprisal strikes and reprisal strikes and
Speaker 1: reprisal strikes. In early October, Truehio visits a banquet near
Speaker 1: the border and he starts to get drunk and at
Speaker 1: the point at which he gets really hammered, because he's
Speaker 1: this is not an unknown thing to him. He is
Speaker 1: and dictators often do this. He'll get hammered and then
Speaker 1: announce new policies.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's sort of the equivalent of like Trump getting on
Speaker 1: Twitter and getting angry and like or Elon or whatever,
Speaker 1: like all these guys do this sort of thing. It's
Speaker 1: when you have absolute power, you get to you get
Speaker 1: to let your whims carry you when you're on Kennemy
Speaker 1: or whatever or whatever. Those were good days. Those were
Speaker 1: good days. Yeah, we had some We had some fun times.
Speaker 4: I forget January too.
Speaker 1: This is this is not going to be a fun time.
Speaker 1: Because he gets drunk and he starts to get into
Speaker 1: like an anger spiral and he suddenly he just kind
Speaker 1: of at off the cuff gives a speech. I have
Speaker 1: learned here that the Haitians have been robbing food and
Speaker 1: cattle from the ranchers. To you Dominicans who have complained
Speaker 1: of this pillaging committed by the Haitians who live among you.
Speaker 1: I answer, I will solve the problem. Indeed, we have
Speaker 1: already begun. Around three hundred Haitians were killed in Banika.
Speaker 1: The solution must continue. And for emphasis, he starts hammering
Speaker 1: his fist on the table as he's giving this speech
Speaker 1: about how, like, you know, we killed three hundred Haitians
Speaker 1: today and we're going to kill more and more and
Speaker 1: more of them soon, and like he basically starts promising,
Speaker 1: We're going to do a fucking massacre. And it is
Speaker 1: I think unclear if he'd had anyone killed at this point.
Speaker 1: There had been clashes prior to this, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of unclear how much of this was like locked down
Speaker 1: and set in stone before he started drinking, and how
Speaker 1: much of this is influenced by the fact that he
Speaker 1: starts drinking. But after he gives this kind of drunken announcement,
Speaker 1: he orders his forces to move on the border region
Speaker 1: and start massacring Haitians. Michelle Wooker writes, quote, Trujillo's soldiers
Speaker 1: use their guns to intimidate, but not to kill. For that,
Speaker 1: they used machetes, knives, picks, and shovels so as not
Speaker 1: to leave bullets in the corpses. Bullet riddled bodies would
Speaker 1: have made it obvious that the murderers were government soldiers, who,
Speaker 1: unlike most Dominicans, had guns. But death by machete can
Speaker 1: be blamed on peasants, on simple men of the countryside
Speaker 1: rising up to defend their cattle in lands. Even a
Speaker 1: bayonet leaves wounds like those of a simple knife that
Speaker 1: the true authors of the crime can be masked. This
Speaker 1: elaborate facade left out one crucial detail. If the massacre
Speaker 1: was indeed a result of the Dominican peasant uprising against
Speaker 1: the Haitians, why were there no casualties on the Dominican side,
Speaker 1: and why did a number of Dominicans add a great
Speaker 1: risk to their own lives and livelihoods hide Haitians and
Speaker 1: efforts to protect them from Truhio's murderers. Trujillo's men searched
Speaker 1: the houses in estates of the region one by one,
Speaker 1: rounded up Haitians, and initiated deportation proceedings against them. Once
Speaker 1: the paperwork was done, the Dominican government had proof that
Speaker 1: the Haitians had been sent back to Haiti. The Haitians
Speaker 1: were then transported like cattle to isolated killing grounds, where
Speaker 1: soldiers slaughtered them at night, carried the corpses to the
Speaker 1: Atlantic port at Monte Christi, and threw the bodies to
Speaker 1: the sharks for days. The waves carried uneaten body parts
Speaker 1: back onto Hispaniola's beaches. So we are past the fun
Speaker 1: part of the true Heo story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was so much less fun than January sixth
Speaker 4: on Twitter. Yes, yeah, once again throwing shit into the sea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's you know, you can see here too,
Speaker 1: there's this echoing of the path, right, the Americans come
Speaker 1: in because things are too unstable, there's too much fighting.
Speaker 1: We take everybody's weapons so that only the government has guns,
Speaker 1: and then the government uses their guns to get people together,
Speaker 1: to threaten them together. But the killing itself, and this
Speaker 1: is going to be thirty thousand people beaten to death
Speaker 1: with clubs, with shovels, with knives, with picks, like this
Speaker 1: is one of the most physically brutal acts of mass
Speaker 1: killing that I've ever read about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Jesus, Yeah, that's like raven Nan king shit. Just
Speaker 4: like the brutality of the brute force.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the guns can let you collect people, but
Speaker 1: if you shoot them then it's like obviously, right, you
Speaker 1: lose your.
Speaker 4: You know, because all the other guns are sick.
Speaker 1: Yes. Haitian author Jack Alexis later wrote about the massacre
Speaker 1: that day, such horrors took place under the torrential rain,
Speaker 1: that your mouth tasted of ashes, that the air was
Speaker 1: bitter to breathe, that shame weighed down on your heart,
Speaker 1: and the flavor of all life indeed was repugnant. Jesus
Speaker 1: pretty good writer. Yeah. After the first few days, Dominican
Speaker 1: soldiers gave up the charade of avoiding the use of
Speaker 1: their firearms. They started going door to door massacring Haitian
Speaker 1: families anywhere they weren't actively employed and protected by a
Speaker 1: foreign company. Many of the people they were killing were
Speaker 1: lifelong residents of these areas, which means that number one,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a lot of times and to the this
Speaker 1: is a massacre executed by the government. There are certainly
Speaker 1: some civilians, some Dominican civilians, who support the massacre. A
Speaker 1: lot of Dominican civilians hide and try to protect because
Speaker 1: these are their neighbors, These are family in some cases, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, the fucking dictator is part Haitian, right.
Speaker 4: The people who hide them get killed.
Speaker 1: Too sometimes, yes, yeah, I mean yeah, it's a genocide.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that is a problem for
Speaker 1: the government is that because everyone's just kind of lived
Speaker 1: in this area for forever, they don't always look like
Speaker 1: you can't always just tell who's a Haitian who's a
Speaker 1: Dominican by looking at him right, right, because they live
Speaker 1: like three minutes from each other for forever. Right, So
Speaker 1: in order to figure out who the Haitians are, what
Speaker 1: you do have is Haitians speak French right like or
Speaker 1: at least a French creole, and like Dominicans speak like
Speaker 1: kind of a Spanish creole, right, And so Haitians pronounce
Speaker 1: the term for parsley differently than Dominicans. They can't roll
Speaker 1: their rs in the right way. And it's just sort
Speaker 1: of like a thing, right, Like you get this in
Speaker 1: like polyglot community, where it'll be like, ah, they pronounce
Speaker 1: it this way, we call it this way, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like a we even have that with like the British, right,
Speaker 1: like you, my roommate is ethnically British, and like he
Speaker 1: calls it a bath room and like all this shit,
Speaker 1: like you know, this is the less fun that just wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is wrong. Soldiers will go door to door or
Speaker 1: when they're doing checkpoints, they'll hold up a piece of
Speaker 1: parsley and they'll ask the people to to what is
Speaker 1: this called? And if they pronounce it the way Haitians
Speaker 1: pronounce it, they'll kill them. They'll beat them to death,
Speaker 1: they'll shoot them. It becomes called the par Parsley massacre
Speaker 1: by a lot of people as a result of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now it's kind of unclear how often that's the way
Speaker 1: that they do it, but this apparently does happen to
Speaker 1: some extent to some of the victims, so that's kind
Speaker 1: of how it becomes known. The main phase of the
Speaker 1: killing lasts roughly a week, so somewhere between twenty and
Speaker 1: thirty thousand people massacred, and most of them in a week.
Speaker 1: There's some mop up killings the second week. But like
Speaker 1: after about a week of this, the international community finds out, right,
Speaker 1: like this story for one thing, there's like body parts
Speaker 1: washing up in Haiti, right, Like there's survivors who get
Speaker 1: out and stuff, and people don't like it when you
Speaker 1: do this. Generally like it's bad press, and particularly like
Speaker 1: a lot of Americans are like, well, hey, we we're
Speaker 1: backing this guy. What the fuck? We don't like this.
Speaker 1: You know, we're pretty racist, but like, we don't like
Speaker 1: it when this happens, or at least when we're informed
Speaker 1: about it, you know, Yeah, don't like, don't let us
Speaker 1: hear about it if you're gonna do it. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so Rafael orders an official stop to the massacre on
Speaker 1: October eighth, after about a week, but his forces keep
Speaker 1: mopping up. They kill a few hundred more families over
Speaker 1: the next week or so. By the time the killing
Speaker 1: stopped again, the lone estimate is about fifteen thousand. The
Speaker 1: high estimate is thirty thous or so twenty twenty five thousands,
Speaker 1: probably a pretty realistic death toll. The butchery is severe
Speaker 1: enough that international attention lingers, and Raphael he tries to
Speaker 1: stop the international press from coming in. You know, he's
Speaker 1: got a pretty good lockdown in the cities. But one
Speaker 1: American journalist, a fucking hero, really cool guy, Quentin Reynolds,
Speaker 1: makes his way through like these cordons and shit and
Speaker 1: gets into the countryside near the border of the Dominican
Speaker 1: Republican Haiti, and he goes to hospitals, these little field
Speaker 1: hospitals and jungle hospitals and shit just in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, and he starts talking to victims. He meets
Speaker 1: hundreds of survivors, and because of how brutal, he's like
Speaker 1: transfixed by the wounds, people who have like gouges in
Speaker 1: their skulls. A lot of small children whose hands had
Speaker 1: been hacked off, like hundreds of them. And he talks
Speaker 1: to these people. He takes down their stories, he hears
Speaker 1: what happened. He does his work diligently, and then, showing
Speaker 1: more courage than might exist in the American media today,
Speaker 1: he flies to the Capital to talk directly to Truthio,
Speaker 1: to confront him about what he's heard and seen. And
Speaker 1: I should note here that in addition to writing for
Speaker 1: Colliers magazine, Quentin was a former NFL linebacker. So he
Speaker 1: is he is like, yeah, he's pretty cool guy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm hoping that he like mailed, like mailed his ship
Speaker 3: ahead of time before going to the Capitol.
Speaker 1: That is unclear to me. He may just have had,
Speaker 1: you know, this is the thirties. He may have just
Speaker 1: had this kind of like they will not let and
Speaker 1: they're not going to kill me. I am an American
Speaker 1: and like in this period of time, we would have
Speaker 1: sent the fucking Marines back if he murdered it, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's just the way you know it was, we
Speaker 1: take you out. Yeah, he may have just had kind
Speaker 1: of faith that the dictator, but anyway, still a ballsy
Speaker 1: moved to go directly to this guy and Truehillo like
Speaker 1: Winds and dines this journalist, he sits him down for Yeah.
Speaker 1: He gives Reynolds what Reynolds describes as the best champagne
Speaker 1: he ever tasted. And while they're talking, because Reynolds is like,
Speaker 1: here's what people they're saying happened to them. They're saying
Speaker 1: your soldiers did all this horrible shit, and tru Heil's
Speaker 1: like they're exaggerating, Like that can't be what happened. You know,
Speaker 1: there was just an uprising of Dominican farmers against Haitians
Speaker 1: and like they were just he says, it was a
Speaker 1: truly lamentable incident and nobody feels worse about it than
Speaker 1: I do. Fucking yeah, real piece of shit. So Quentin
Speaker 1: points out, like I have seen a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: that directly counters your claims, I don't believe you, and
Speaker 1: Truio says, hey, look, it couldn't have been done by
Speaker 1: my guys. They were all killed by machetes, not rifles.
Speaker 1: My guys would have used rifles. You know, if I
Speaker 1: was gonna do he does like an if I did
Speaker 1: it sort of thing, or if it was gonna be
Speaker 1: my guys. So now I also should note here after
Speaker 1: like Quentin come like, it is because of him that
Speaker 1: a lot of this story gets out. He's not the
Speaker 1: only person who gets it out, but he like writes
Speaker 1: a big article about it. He creates a lot of
Speaker 1: international attends around this. Quentin Reynolds will go on to
Speaker 1: be a war correspondent during World War Two. Pretty cool guy, imo.
Speaker 1: So the River Massacre, as it's also sometimes called, was
Speaker 1: inspired partly by a Nazi racial theories. Truhio was open
Speaker 1: and this is again, as we talked about earlier, kind
Speaker 1: of a long trend in Dominican rulers. He wants to
Speaker 1: whiten his country, right, he wants to make it whiter,
Speaker 1: and he sees the Haitians as darker than the Dominicans, right,
Speaker 1: so he wants That's part of what's going on with
Speaker 1: him here? And he follows up this massacre with a
Speaker 1: dominicanization propaganda campaign that describes his terrible crime as an
Speaker 1: act of protection to save Dominicans from the pollution of
Speaker 1: Haitian blood.
Speaker 4: Is terrible crime. I thought it was the farmer's terrible crime.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, right, yeah, like a little bit, a little
Speaker 1: bit inconsistent here it is then somewhat ironic. And this
Speaker 1: is where it gets real weird. International outcry, especially after
Speaker 1: Quentin's article becomes a big problem for him, and so
Speaker 1: in order to distract from all the people he's killed,
Speaker 1: he offers to take in victims of the Nazi racial policies.
Speaker 1: So the year after the River massacre, in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: FDR had convened a thirty two nation conference in France
Speaker 1: to discuss resettling Jewish refugees from Nazi territory. The war
Speaker 1: had not started yet. Again, this is thirty eight, and
Speaker 1: the Nazis were willing to allow immigration, were willing to
Speaker 1: allow Jews to leave Nazi Germany as long as they
Speaker 1: didn't take their money or property with them. But the
Speaker 1: problem was that everyone's real fucking racist. Right. There are
Speaker 1: caps on how many Jewish refugees on how many Jewish
Speaker 1: people are allowed to enter the United States are allowed
Speaker 1: to enter basically every Western country, right, because real fucking
Speaker 1: racist and fdr. This is a thing that is going
Speaker 1: to be repeatedly an issue for him. Is personally empathetic
Speaker 1: but doesn't want to be seen as like soft on
Speaker 1: the Jews, right, that is bad for you politically. This
Speaker 1: is very racist everyone, like, that's why the Holocaust happens.
Speaker 1: Is everybody's fucking terrible, but so the US and basically
Speaker 1: no one is willing to This is not just the
Speaker 1: United States. He has thirty two countries together, and none
Speaker 1: of them are willing to extend their cap on refugees
Speaker 1: to raise the number of Jews that they're willing to
Speaker 1: take in. They come to this like toothless agreement where
Speaker 1: everyone agrees, yeah, we should resettle Jewish people out of
Speaker 1: Nazi areas, but no country should be expected to take
Speaker 1: in more than their current laws allow. Only one world
Speaker 1: leader stands up and offers to take additional Jewish refugees.
Speaker 1: That's thirty two. Yeah, Raphaeltruhio because again he's a stan
Speaker 1: of Hitler, but he doesn't really believe he has a
Speaker 1: different belief set about racial policies. They are inspired by
Speaker 1: the Nazis, but in his view, Jews are white. So
Speaker 1: if I take Jews in and they start marrying, it'll
Speaker 1: whiten this up, you know. Like that is the attitude
Speaker 1: that he's coming into this with. Right, So he says
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic can host between fifty thousand and one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand Jews. That's a big deal, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how many people live in the country at that point?
Speaker 1: I think a little like a million and a half
Speaker 1: something like that at this point.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's a huge amount of immigration.
Speaker 1: And that's a lot of potentially a lot of lives
Speaker 1: to say, right, yeah, that's that's significant. Does he actually
Speaker 1: do it to a degree? We'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: a little bit obviously, Like I don't give him moral
Speaker 1: credit for this. For one thing he is it's weird
Speaker 1: because like he is the only world leader who offers
Speaker 1: to do this and as a result of it, a
Speaker 1: lot of people's lives are saved. He does it for
Speaker 1: the most racist and shitty reasons possible, right, right, Like
Speaker 1: he is he is saving Holocaust victims in order to
Speaker 1: cover up a genocide that he did. There's no lessons
Speaker 1: sometimes from history. Just it's a thing that happened.
Speaker 4: Though, you know, it's a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: And obviously, like you, yeah, if you're one of these,
Speaker 1: you you get out of Nazi Germany, however the fuck
Speaker 1: you can, Like I'll go to Like I don't care
Speaker 1: if this dictator is shitty, like I like, I have
Speaker 1: no other options, Like it's nineteen thirty eight, and I'm
Speaker 1: a Jewish guy in Germany, Like I'm gonna do whatever,
Speaker 1: Go hang.
Speaker 4: Out in the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 1: Hell of a lot better than staying in fucking Germany. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: no shade on those people. So we will talk about
Speaker 1: what happens with this very strange offer. But first, you
Speaker 1: know who else wants to go to the Dominican Republic?
Speaker 1: Tell me sponsors of our podcasts.
Speaker 4: Wow, yeah, the racist reasons are not racist.
Speaker 1: It's a roll of the dice. Cat, that's a roll
Speaker 1: of the dice, flip of the old coin right there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads. Oh, we're back, and we are talking about
Speaker 1: Raphael Truhio's very odd offer to take a bunch of
Speaker 1: Jewish refugees in. Now he is still pretty racist, among
Speaker 1: other things. He's willing to take these immigrants in as
Speaker 1: long as they don't take jobs in certain fields that
Speaker 1: he sees as like Jewish fields, like finance. Right, Like, basically,
Speaker 1: I will let you come here if you work as
Speaker 1: farmers and if you ideally marry and have kids with Dominicans.
Speaker 4: Right, He's like, you can come here, I just don't
Speaker 4: want you to be like too.
Speaker 1: Jewy, you know, that is basically what he says, right.
Speaker 1: But obviously the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, who are
Speaker 1: like some of the people trying to get Jewish people
Speaker 1: out of Europe, are like, well, this is the literally
Speaker 1: the only offer on the tape. Of course we're going
Speaker 1: to take it. Like what else are we going to
Speaker 1: fucking do? So they take the offer, and again a
Speaker 1: big part of what Truhillo is trying to do here
Speaker 1: is distract from the fact that he has just carried
Speaker 1: out a genocide. But you know, you can't be picky
Speaker 1: if you're the JCS in this situation. So they create
Speaker 1: a special organization. The acronym for it is DORSA. I
Speaker 1: don't remember what it stands for. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: And the purpose of this organization is to take money
Speaker 1: generally from diaspora Jews who are trying to get people
Speaker 1: out of Europe and buy up land twenty six thousand
Speaker 1: acres I think in the Democratic or in the Dominican Republic,
Speaker 1: and then settle Jewish people on that land as farmers.
Speaker 1: Upon arrival, each new settler is supposed to be given
Speaker 1: eighty acres of land ten kyat cows, a mule and
Speaker 1: a horse, which compared to Auschwitz is pretty good deal, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: not bad. It's not a great plan. I don't think true.
Speaker 1: HEO knows a lot about farming. The specific area that
Speaker 1: these folks are able to are given to, like allowed
Speaker 1: to buy acre g In is not fertile farmland for
Speaker 1: what they want to grow because their initial plan is tomatoes.
Speaker 1: I don't exactly know why, but it's a bad place
Speaker 1: to grow tomatoes, and there are other problems. For one thing,
Speaker 1: most of the younger Jewish people who could get out
Speaker 1: of Germany already have, so most of the people who
Speaker 1: are coming into the Dominican Republic are fifty year older,
Speaker 1: which makes sense when you look at the dim graphics
Speaker 1: that remained in the German Jewish and Austrian Jewish communities
Speaker 1: in this period of time. But TRUEEO, a lot of
Speaker 1: this is like he wants to breed them, right, so
Speaker 1: like the fact that they're old, he's not thrilled with.
Speaker 1: There's other issues with the colony. For one thing, most
Speaker 1: of the people who come there, their goal is not
Speaker 1: to actually stay in the dr right. Their goal is
Speaker 1: to get there to save their lives and then get
Speaker 1: a visa to enter the US, which totally reasonable. Like
Speaker 1: I'm not criticizing them for this, but it doesn't it's
Speaker 1: part of why the plan doesn't entirely work the way
Speaker 1: that Truhio wants it to. But also the colony doesn't collapse,
Speaker 1: and this is really fascinating. So they're having this issue.
Speaker 1: The first crops that they tried to work to grow
Speaker 1: doesn't work. So Dorset inputs or imports a bunch of
Speaker 1: Jewish Palestinians who have been living on kibbutzes and brings
Speaker 1: them over and has them like helps set up like
Speaker 1: farms and meat processing plants and like dairies and stuff
Speaker 1: to make cheese. And this actually takes off. Like with
Speaker 1: these like kibbutzam in they build a thriving community. I
Speaker 1: think there's never more than about five hundred people who
Speaker 1: live in it at a time, but something like ten
Speaker 1: thousand something like that, like fifteen hundred, mite, Like there's
Speaker 1: there's a few thousand people the numbers are kind of unclear,
Speaker 1: who move through the colony on their way to the US.
Speaker 1: So this does save a lot of lives. And there
Speaker 1: is still a Jewish population in this area, in this
Speaker 1: colony called Sosua to this day. And in fact, most
Speaker 1: of the butter and cheese made in the Democratic or
Speaker 1: made in the Dominican Republic is made by businesses run
Speaker 1: by these Jewish families, so to this day still around.
Speaker 1: So that's that will be the only nice thing we
Speaker 1: talk about today. But that's nice. Yeah, that's good. Again,
Speaker 1: I don't give Truheo credit for this. I give these
Speaker 1: people credit for like surviving and making something actually kind
Speaker 1: of rad out of a very.
Speaker 4: Bad hands up for racism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is this is the one time racism
Speaker 1: saved lives in the Holocaust.
Speaker 3: We're solving one genocide with another gener Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, there's not always lessons to take out.
Speaker 4: Of fiery fire. I guess, or cancel each other out.
Speaker 1: I don't know math it doesn't can't. No, it certainly
Speaker 1: does not cancel it out.
Speaker 6: It's just a thing that's just for the sake of
Speaker 6: everyone that.
Speaker 4: Loves to hate me. I'm totally kidding. Genocide is bad.
Speaker 4: I've always been consistent about that, anti.
Speaker 1: Genesis, anti genocide. Yeah, for example, a nice man would
Speaker 1: have tried to save people from the Holocaust, not to
Speaker 1: cover up his genocide. Totally agree, Yeah, much better.
Speaker 4: Sophie is suspiciously quiet about being anti genocide.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, Sophie's I don't actually know how to
Speaker 1: make that into a joke. So as you all might
Speaker 1: have picked up about the fact that you know he's
Speaker 1: he's talking about wanting to whiten up the Dominican Republic
Speaker 1: and all that stuff that that's a big factor in
Speaker 1: like what he's doing here, I should start talking about
Speaker 1: how he conceived of his own race, because obviously Raphael
Speaker 1: has some Haitian ancestry and has some weird hang ups
Speaker 1: with this, which brings me to the matter of his face.
Speaker 1: One of Truheillo's great shames is again that he is
Speaker 1: darker than he wants to look like he is. He
Speaker 1: considers that to be to having he considers having darker
Speaker 1: skin to be something shameful, and as a result, he
Speaker 1: is known to wear thick it's described as pancake makeup
Speaker 1: at all time. He always has whitening makeup on his face,
Speaker 1: and he's bad at applying it, like it is like noticing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he looks like a mannequin, like he's just got it
Speaker 1: slathered on all the time. Yeah, yeah, come on, man,
Speaker 1: Like Bare Minerals has some good stuff, like yeah, anyway, whatever.
Speaker 3: He knows that, but not a third basketball player happening?
Speaker 1: What is happening?
Speaker 2: Why do you know what Bare Minerals is?
Speaker 1: I don't know because I I have your I've had,
Speaker 1: you know, dated people and stuff. You go buy gifts
Speaker 1: and ship and the sport. I'm I'm good at getting gifts.
Speaker 1: You know you are.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, I I can't even I can't even
Speaker 2: deny Robert.
Speaker 1: Sarcastic, thoughtful as ass.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he knows Minerals. That's very sweet.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, so one of again.
Speaker 2: So no the basketball player's name by end of day
Speaker 2: or we're gonna have our problem.
Speaker 3: Uher, that's my favorite player.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So he's wearing this pancake makeup
Speaker 1: and this is kind of This is very much in
Speaker 1: line with It's not just about like skin color, it's
Speaker 1: about He's very insecure about his origins, right, including the
Speaker 1: fact that he comes from poverty. And this insecurity extends
Speaker 1: to like he when once he One of the reasons
Speaker 1: why we don't have as much to hail about his
Speaker 1: childhood as we'd like is that he goes too great
Speaker 1: links to cover up everything about his early life once
Speaker 1: he is in power, including he kind of goes to
Speaker 1: war against his old nickname chippeda or bottle cap. And
Speaker 1: this is a fun little anecdote from The Little Caesar
Speaker 1: of the Caribbean, which is a biography of truthio quote. Somehow,
Speaker 1: the nickname was eventually eliminated as a result of one
Speaker 1: of Trujillo's earliest biographical rewrites. To accomplish this, however, he
Speaker 1: had to banish the word from the language. Many people
Speaker 1: who stubbornly disregarded the prohibition paid dearly for their daring.
Speaker 1: Though successful in suppressing the word, the General Lissimo has
Speaker 1: failed to abolish its meaning. The natural and probably innocent
Speaker 1: boyhood passion for collecting meaningless trifles remains with him to
Speaker 1: this day. Although considerably changed in scope in his maturity.
Speaker 1: Trujillo collects medals and decorations, of which he possesses more
Speaker 1: than fifty.
Speaker 4: So God, I loved her dictators, which is like a
Speaker 4: shit on a.
Speaker 1: Fake Yeah that why wouldn't so.
Speaker 4: The heavish jacket in the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is funny. It's also very funny to me.
Speaker 1: I mean it's horrible, but like he has people killed
Speaker 1: and tortured for using the word bottle cap.
Speaker 4: That is insane. That is an insane thing to do.
Speaker 4: Then will literally.
Speaker 3: Torture people instead of just collecting bottle caps and going
Speaker 3: to therapy.
Speaker 1: It is. It's also this weird pattern with Truhio where
Speaker 1: there's so many aspects of him that are like related
Speaker 1: to things every dictator does, but just twisted in a
Speaker 1: weird direction. Like Joseph Stalin has like people air brushed
Speaker 1: out of pictures and shit, you know, once he has
Speaker 1: them killed in order to hide that they ever existed.
Speaker 1: Raphael does the same thing with the colloquial term for
Speaker 1: bottle cap. Like that's such a weird anyway, and like
Speaker 1: so unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. Also, like it's like it's pretty
Speaker 1: normal in this in the Dominican Republic, and I think
Speaker 1: elsewhere for kids to collect bottle caps, like it's not
Speaker 1: a great shame, but it makes this it's a thing
Speaker 1: that a poor kid does. Rich kids are not collecting
Speaker 1: bottle cap you know. And he doesn't want people to
Speaker 1: think that about him.
Speaker 3: I think it's cute. I think it's cute that he
Speaker 3: was collecting bottle caps. That he was beating up people
Speaker 3: and getting his brothers to hurt people to get bottle
Speaker 3: caps well charming.
Speaker 1: You know what, kat, When I sacrifice a ram tonight
Speaker 1: in order to commune with the deceased soul of Raphael Trueel,
Speaker 1: I will let him know that you thought that was cute,
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: And then he's in a torture me until eternity.
Speaker 1: No, he's dead now. All he can do is like
Speaker 1: knockover trinkets on your wall.
Speaker 4: I don't have any bottle caps from knockover. Reason to
Speaker 4: be disappointed.
Speaker 1: He's gonna be pissed. So as as the forties become
Speaker 1: the fitties, true Heo grew increasingly comfortable in his role
Speaker 1: as dictator. He built a rigid schedule for himself, one
Speaker 1: that assured he was awake every day at five am
Speaker 1: and followed the exact same route every day in his routine.
Speaker 1: This would eventually be the death of him, but for
Speaker 1: a while it works pretty well. After his early evening walk,
Speaker 1: he often had a driver take him around in a
Speaker 1: small car through the streets of the capitol, always without escort,
Speaker 1: usually without bodyguards. Some of this is that, like he
Speaker 1: just has that much faith in the system he's built
Speaker 1: to protect him, and it works for like thirty years,
Speaker 1: Like he has legitimately built, like done such a good
Speaker 1: job of kind of cracking down on resistance that for
Speaker 1: the most part this works for him.
Speaker 4: So do the peasants still like him?
Speaker 1: A lot of them do. I don't, like, there's no
Speaker 1: pole data, right, but he does seem to be pretty
Speaker 1: popular for most of his reign with the peasantry. And
Speaker 1: when he has resistance and shit, when he's finally killed,
Speaker 1: it's not the peasants that do it, right, it's the
Speaker 1: kind of like upper middle class to rich families and stuff,
Speaker 1: these families who had maybe more power before he got in.
Speaker 1: That's it's like the elites were. Resistance to his regime
Speaker 1: primarily comes from so yeah esplay and his early biographers
Speaker 1: often describe him as having a lot of dates with girls.
Speaker 1: This like that's also a major part of his his
Speaker 1: day to day schedule. Obviously, women are being induced to
Speaker 1: sleep with him through direct threat, but it's it's generally
Speaker 1: enough to know that, like while the old man wants
Speaker 1: your company, and you can either have this be a
Speaker 1: violent process or you'll get something out of it at
Speaker 1: the end, right, like normal dictator stuff, not to you know,
Speaker 1: wash over it. There's just not a lot of direct detail.
Speaker 1: But this thing that's happening, I think he I believe
Speaker 1: he has a number.
Speaker 4: Of kids, like a wife or like an air parent.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, well that the air thing is
Speaker 1: more complicated. He kind of goes back and forth somewhat,
Speaker 1: but like, yes, to an extent, he attempts to do that.
Speaker 1: So yeah. A good example of the stakes here, you know,
Speaker 1: of being one of the women that he is pursuing
Speaker 1: is the case of Maria Mercedes Merabal. She was an
Speaker 1: upper class woman who married into a family that was
Speaker 1: anti true heel and was committed to the underground resistance
Speaker 1: efforts to his regime. Right, So these are elites, These
Speaker 1: are wealthy people who are trying to fund and carry
Speaker 1: out resistance to eventually force Trueio out of power, and
Speaker 1: she marries into a family doing this. So, because she
Speaker 1: is in the upper crack class, she's rich. She's still
Speaker 1: attending social events where Trujillo is present, right, and at
Speaker 1: one of these dances, he makes sexual advances towards her, and,
Speaker 1: fully aware of how dangerous this is, she slaps him.
Speaker 1: Now that's pretty baller. But also there are going to
Speaker 1: be consequences for slapping the dictator, right, yeah, because he's
Speaker 1: the dictator in this case, she spends a little bit
Speaker 1: of time in jail. He puts her father in prison
Speaker 1: for two years, and because he's an old man, he's
Speaker 1: basically starved and tortured and then released and dies pretty
Speaker 1: much immediately after getting out of prison. Now that makes
Speaker 1: Maria angry. Probably don't need to belabor that point. So
Speaker 1: she and her sisters Patria and Minerva start to organize
Speaker 1: together and they create the nexus of an underground movement
Speaker 1: aimed at ousting Trujio from power. They came to be
Speaker 1: known as the Butterflies or Las Matoposas, and they were
Speaker 1: a major part, like a nexus of the underground resistance
Speaker 1: to the regime until in nineteen fifty nine, a group
Speaker 1: of Dominican exiles try to overthrow the government. This had
Speaker 1: happened a decade earlier, right, a bunch of like Dominicans
Speaker 1: who'd been forced out by Trujeo came in with guns
Speaker 1: to try to overthrow the government. But when this cracked out,
Speaker 1: or when this insurgency in nineteen fifty nine gets defeated,
Speaker 1: there's a crackdown and it's so brutal that it convinces
Speaker 1: the mariposas they have to accelerate their plans to force
Speaker 1: Truio out, so they start planning to assassinate the president. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: they get caught. Trueo's secret services are competent, they're good
Speaker 1: at what they do. They uncover evidence that this is
Speaker 1: being planned, and you know, sexism being what it is.
Speaker 1: trueO arrests their husbands and throws them in prison. Right,
Speaker 1: so the Marabelle sisters are stay out of jail for
Speaker 1: a while. They actually travel up to visit their husbands
Speaker 1: who are in jail as they're kind of like waiting
Speaker 1: to be sentenced, and then on their way back into
Speaker 1: town from this visit. On November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: Trueo's men ambush them on a rural mountain road, forced
Speaker 1: them out of their car, and beat all of them
Speaker 1: to death. This is a very famous moment. It's kind
Speaker 1: of it catalyzes a lot of the resistance Hero's regime.
Speaker 1: Their Mariposas are still celebrated today for their role in
Speaker 1: the resistance. This is like one of the really searing
Speaker 1: moments of Trueheo regime. For obvious reasons.
Speaker 4: Was it in like the Dominican press at all? No?
Speaker 4: Or was that suppressed?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean, I think this is the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that spreads primarily through the conversations in the underground,
Speaker 1: I believe, if I'm not mistaken. Truhio's regime tries to
Speaker 1: claim that it's like bandits or something. You know who
Speaker 1: doesn't so there is some news about it. But Trujillo's
Speaker 1: regime has its secret police, which initially is a military unit,
Speaker 1: but in nineteen fifty seven he creates a civilian led
Speaker 1: intelligence directorate loyal to the dictator, specifically to watch the military.
Speaker 1: This is normal shit. You know. He's got like his
Speaker 1: famous prison where he tortures people, right, He's got his
Speaker 1: secret police who do normal secret police shit. That is
Speaker 1: all what every dictator is. I think we have talked
Speaker 1: enough about that that I'm not glossing it over. What
Speaker 1: I think is interesting because it's very different from a
Speaker 1: lot of dictators I've read about, is what actually keeps
Speaker 1: him in power is not just terror. At the same
Speaker 1: time as he is building this very traditional repression apparatus,
Speaker 1: he is also systematically extending himself into every major industry
Speaker 1: in the country. He is nationalizing a number of foreign businesses,
Speaker 1: and he makes himself and his family the center of
Speaker 1: the entire economy. By the nineteen fifties, most Dominican peasants
Speaker 1: are in some way employed by the Trujillos, and so
Speaker 1: that's how they make their living. Right, It's directly connected
Speaker 1: to this family, how because they control every industry. If
Speaker 1: you have a job in the dr it's probably through
Speaker 1: a company that they own, one way or the other. Right,
Speaker 1: in addition to handing out jobs in the government through patronage,
Speaker 1: he's a lot.
Speaker 4: Slicker than like a lot of other dictators. I feel
Speaker 4: like they get sloppy.
Speaker 1: Around your ten He's very smart, and he does get sloppy.
Speaker 4: He gets sloppy with like the genocide inconsistent, but like
Speaker 4: it's smart. He's still doing moves to keep peasants on
Speaker 4: the side.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's very Yeah, he is a very he's
Speaker 1: a methodical thinker. Yeah, in a way that a lot
Speaker 1: of dictators they're like like possibly, you know, carrying out
Speaker 1: that genocide. There are these moments where his kind of
Speaker 1: passions carry him, but he thinks through what he's doing
Speaker 1: to a significant extent. And I'm going to quote again
Speaker 1: from Lauren Derby's book The Dictator's Seduction, which I really
Speaker 1: do recommend. It's a great book about Truheo. He then
Speaker 1: fashioned all public works, policy, formation and patronage is personal
Speaker 1: gifts from the dictator to the pueblo or people. With
Speaker 1: his family and a few close friends, Trujillo used the
Speaker 1: state to develop a system of highly profitable economic monopolies.
Speaker 1: As he gradually took over all core national industries such
Speaker 1: as meat, milk, sugar, rice, oil, cement, and beer. He
Speaker 1: then used the law to guarantee their profitability and allocated
Speaker 1: state contracts to his family and cronies. For example, he
Speaker 1: prohibited the production of sea salt, so the public would
Speaker 1: have to purchase salt from the Baharuna Mines, which he controlled.
Speaker 1: His wife, Maria Martinez, was allotted a government bank for
Speaker 1: casing state paychecks. Trujillo's sister's husband was given the military
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical contract, a highly lucrative enterprise given the massive expansion
Speaker 1: of the armed forces. In this extreme example of prebndalism,
Speaker 1: the appropriation of the state for private ends, the state
Speaker 1: became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo
Speaker 1: and his circle. Trhi eventually became one of the wealthiest
Speaker 1: men in Latin America. Under his regime, there was no
Speaker 1: effective distinction between the national treasury and the dictator's own purse.
Speaker 1: He also used the state as a legal screen which
Speaker 1: shielded the public from the regime's extraordinarily lawlessness and corruption.
Speaker 1: He enabled his own divorce, for example, by altering divorced legislation,
Speaker 1: and this is very effective. This is a big part
Speaker 1: of what allows him to maintain power. It is also
Speaker 1: going to be part of his downfall because where this
Speaker 1: leads is the nationalization by trueO of foreign owned businesses,
Speaker 1: including businesses owned by Americans. Right, so he is kind
Speaker 1: of taken. He is reducing our ability to profit. Now
Speaker 1: we had been on his side and had helped fund him,
Speaker 1: had given him more loans, had given him weapons through
Speaker 1: the early stages of the Cold War. Because he's an
Speaker 1: anti communist. Right now, our support of Truhio, to be fair,
Speaker 1: is not rooted in anti communism because of how long
Speaker 1: this guy is in power. It goes back further than that,
Speaker 1: right But once the Cold War really gets going, he
Speaker 1: re fashions himself as an anti communist. Some of this
Speaker 1: came naturally to him. He and Castro hate each other.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen fifty six, when Castro is planning his
Speaker 1: revolt against Batista, Trujillo had offered the Batista regime military
Speaker 1: supplies that didn't wind up working out for Batista. Castro
Speaker 1: overthrows Batista. And in nineteen fifty nine, when that Dominican
Speaker 1: exile force had attempted to overthrow the Trujillo regime, a
Speaker 1: lot of the guys who go in with that are Cubans.
Speaker 1: Like the Cuban government is arming, like it's a little
Speaker 1: bit their bay of pigs, right, is trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: Trujillo's government. Obviously not a bad thing to want to
Speaker 1: overthrow the Trujillo regime. I'm not really being critical here,
Speaker 1: but it is a big part of why Castro supports
Speaker 1: this is because Trujillo had tried to stop him, right like,
Speaker 1: so these guys have a little bit of like a
Speaker 1: thing going on. Trujillo responds to this by plotting his
Speaker 1: own invasion of Cuba, which would not have worked and
Speaker 1: never winds up panning out. So he constant compensated by
Speaker 1: having his men loot the Cuban embassy in Trujillo the city,
Speaker 1: which is what he's renamed the Capitol right. Raphael also
Speaker 1: had a long standing rivalry with Romulo Bettencourt, the president
Speaker 1: of Venezuela. In nineteen fifty one, one of his men
Speaker 1: had tried to kill Bettencourt when he visited Havana by
Speaker 1: stabbing him with a poisoned syringe. This led to some
Speaker 1: understandable anger by Bettencourt against Trujillo, and so Bettencourt started
Speaker 1: publicly accusing the Dominican dictator of being a crooke and
Speaker 1: a gangster, which is not wrong here. So Trujillo, now
Speaker 1: that he's been insulted, tries to blow up Bettencourt with
Speaker 1: a car bomb, and Bettencourt survives with severe burns. Now,
Speaker 1: all of this is fine, dictator on dictator violence, no
Speaker 1: problem either way here. Really it's just fun to read about.
Speaker 1: But by nineteen sixty the United States is starting to
Speaker 1: get pissed off. Eisenhower considered the attacks on Bettencourt to
Speaker 1: be the last straw and was somewhat confusingly convinced. Like
Speaker 1: Eisenhower's worry and why he's like allows the CIA to
Speaker 1: try to overthrow Trujillo is he's he's convinced that Trujillo's
Speaker 1: going to turn the Dominican Republic into a fortress for communism,
Speaker 1: which is completely illogical. I think it might have been that,
Speaker 1: like he thinks that Trujillo is so out of pocket
Speaker 1: that he's going to create a revolution and then the
Speaker 1: communists will get in power. Oh okay, yeah, because he's
Speaker 1: like he's so bad at being like He's like, I
Speaker 1: think this guy is out of control now, and I
Speaker 1: don't want him to be replaced by communists. He is.
Speaker 1: I don't see much evidence that the Communists were ever
Speaker 1: likely to take over. I don't think they could have
Speaker 1: done worse than Truio, but I just don't think that
Speaker 1: that was really likely but that Eisenhower is convinced of
Speaker 1: that in any case, so he tells the CIA to
Speaker 1: help the anti Trujillo underground do a coup. Now, I
Speaker 1: will say, of all of the coup is that the
Speaker 1: US has backed. I don't really have a problem with
Speaker 1: trying to kill Raphael Trujillo, right, Like I'm not don't
Speaker 1: have a super big issue with it. But we're bad
Speaker 1: at this, like we usually are when we try to
Speaker 1: do cus right, Like, we're pretty dog shit at this
Speaker 1: stuff for the most part. And it is a messy process. Now,
Speaker 1: part of why it's messy is just the fact that
Speaker 1: Eisenhower kind of approves trying to do this, but he
Speaker 1: does it right at the end of his administration, and
Speaker 1: then the Kennedy administration, and so it's just chaotic, right,
Speaker 1: We're changing administrations and this kind of get lost in
Speaker 1: the mix. And then right when we start, so Kennedy's
Speaker 1: people do send a bunch of guns, like a bunch
Speaker 1: of rifles over to some Dominican dissidence to assassinate tru Heio.
Speaker 1: But like a week after we give them guns, the
Speaker 1: Bey of Pigs happens. And again there's just not a
Speaker 1: lot of focus on follow up. We kind of hand
Speaker 1: them some guns. We fuck up overthrowing the Cuban government. No,
Speaker 1: we're terrible at that. It's just no one's priority, you know.
Speaker 1: It's it's one of those kinds of things.
Speaker 4: We can't let them go to the crime. Yes, so
Speaker 4: it's just like you know.
Speaker 1: Whatever, Yeah, well, whatever happens, you know, we're gonna go back.
Speaker 1: Really this thing. Yeah, you got to remember here, everybody
Speaker 1: in the JFK administration is on fuckloads of amphetamines right now.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to focus, you know, or it's easy
Speaker 1: to focus, but it's easy to lose track of stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they talk about how they want to open a
Speaker 4: bar together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: a write up by the Warfare History Network about what
Speaker 1: happens next. In February fifteenth, nineteen sixty one, Secretary of
Speaker 1: State Dean Rusk sent a letter to President Kennedy informing
Speaker 1: him of the developments regarding the Rafael Trujillo assassination plots.
Speaker 1: It read, our representatives in the Dominican Republic have at
Speaker 1: considerable risk to those involved, established contacts with numerous leaders
Speaker 1: of the underground opposition and the CIA has recently been
Speaker 1: authorized to arrange for delivery to them outside the Dominican
Speaker 1: Republic of small arms and sabotage equipment Now equipment sat
Speaker 1: like bombs and ship you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sorry. After the Bey of Pigs disaster, the Kennedy administration
Speaker 1: tries to convince the dissidents not to kill tru Heio,
Speaker 1: as the political climate was not conducive at that moment. However,
Speaker 1: the machine guns were dispatched to the US consulate and
Speaker 1: we're taken into possession. Two days before Truhio's murder, Kennedy
Speaker 1: sent a cable to Dearborn informing him that the United
Speaker 1: States did not condone political assassination in any form and
Speaker 1: that the United States must not be associated with the
Speaker 1: attempt on Truio's life. So I will say, we're this
Speaker 1: is like the one time where we tried to assassinate
Speaker 1: a guy and it was like, yeah, I probably should
Speaker 1: have gotten got but we immediately try to get out
Speaker 1: of it, like we do machine guns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: Please get get it.
Speaker 4: You could use it for something else, like use it
Speaker 4: some art.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we don't like this. We're not part of the
Speaker 6: throw the sea with the others again. Can I don't
Speaker 6: know how much experience you have with dissidents, but historically,
Speaker 6: when you give them a bunch of guns, they're gonna
Speaker 6: use them. Right, It's kind of what everyone knows about dissidents. Bulletles,
Speaker 6: that's right, that's right, all those dissidents you're arming. So
Speaker 6: in the end, it was true Hello's iron rigid schedule
Speaker 6: and his habit of driving around without guards that would
Speaker 6: do him in. On May thirtieth, a group of assassins
Speaker 6: armed with US guns waited by the route they knew
Speaker 6: the dictator would take from his girlfriend's house to the Capitol.
Speaker 6: When Trujillo's car approached, they opened fire. You know, they
Speaker 6: wound him.
Speaker 1: His his his driver response returns fire, so does tru Heio.
Speaker 1: He like gets out of the car with a gun,
Speaker 1: but some of the assassins double back and they just
Speaker 1: they gun him down and he dies on the spot.
Speaker 1: They throw his corpse in the trunk of a car,
Speaker 1: and they like park it outside the American Consulate because
Speaker 1: they don't really know what to do after that point, right, Like,
Speaker 1: uh shit, what do we do with this guy? Fuck?
Speaker 4: I guess this is logical. Just throw this see, man,
Speaker 4: that's what we've been doing this whole time.
Speaker 1: You can't throw them in the sea. Now the assailants
Speaker 1: like fleet at this point, and some of them do survive.
Speaker 1: I actually read an we know who they are? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: their names are their heroes now, oh yeah, we actually
Speaker 1: I read an interview with like one of these dudes
Speaker 1: who was like alive pretty recently and was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have I still have the shoes that I killed
Speaker 1: him in, and every year on the anniversary of his murder,
Speaker 1: I like put them on again just to like walk
Speaker 1: around down in my killing the president's shoes.
Speaker 3: I was looking at pictures of true hero and there's
Speaker 3: like this BBC article that I'm piking on now and
Speaker 3: it says I shot the corolest dictator in the Americas,
Speaker 3: And it's just like this really old dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and honestly, like what a flex being, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: killing the president's shoes. I put them on when I'm
Speaker 1: killing the president or just you know, having a walk about. Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like people are like these are like my lucky boxers.
Speaker 4: We're like, this is my assassination, this is.
Speaker 1: My shot president pants fucking dope, like really like like God,
Speaker 1: tear flex right there.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying assassinate anyone, but if you do, make
Speaker 3: sure your outfit is crush.
Speaker 1: You have a nice outfit and save the shoot well no,
Speaker 1: don't actually bad idea, burn everything you're wearing. I mean
Speaker 1: to assassination sense, right.
Speaker 3: Just make sure you get like hanged in like a
Speaker 3: cool outfit. The moral of the story is dressed well
Speaker 3: all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Also with Druhu, I do.
Speaker 3: I mean, I can't use the word respect, but I
Speaker 3: like that he went out shooting, Like I appreciate that yours. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean he's like, after all these years, he's driving
Speaker 3: to his girlfriend's house and he gets shot, and he's like,
Speaker 3: fuck it got a gun somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he does kind of scarface it a little bit,
Speaker 1: tries to at.
Speaker 4: Least, yeah, tries to. It totally feels Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, the coup that these assassins had had like hope
Speaker 1: that there would be a coup government and up they
Speaker 1: would overthrow. That does not really happen. Trujillo's son, Ramphis
Speaker 1: takes over their presidency and gets rounds up a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys and a lot of their friends and family.
Speaker 1: He kills a bunch of people. He feeds some of
Speaker 1: them alive to sharks. Rampis sucks os so is not
Speaker 1: in power long right, because Trujillo Raphael Trho, pretty smart dictator.
Speaker 1: Ramphis again up for one thing, you just know by
Speaker 1: that name, he's not right.
Speaker 4: There's never going to be another president and it's not
Speaker 4: spelled the way you know.
Speaker 1: And so within a couple of months he's got this
Speaker 1: power struggle with a jou Joaquin Bellagher, who is another
Speaker 1: Dominican politician, and uh, it just doesn't work out. There's
Speaker 1: a bunch of rioting in the streets, and Ramphis winds
Speaker 1: up fleeing the country with a bunch of stolen money,
Speaker 1: uh and and never comes back. Yeah, you know, there's
Speaker 1: more riots and stuff in his wake. The American embassy
Speaker 1: becomes convinced that the Communists are going to take over
Speaker 1: the country, and so LBJ sends twenty two thousand American
Speaker 1: troops to restore order. Yeah, there was no communist revolt,
Speaker 1: This was never a real threat. But we wind up
Speaker 1: there again.
Speaker 4: Or like no.
Speaker 3: Ramphis Also, I just looked at Ramphis on his Wikipedia page.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you looked at this, but some
Speaker 3: say that his dad made him a brigadier general at
Speaker 3: the age of nine and also a colonel when he
Speaker 3: was four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's classic dictator stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with the equivalent pay and privileges of being a colonel.
Speaker 4: He was like, I'm a doctor, you're a colonel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yep. And he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't
Speaker 1: live that long. He dies in sixty nine, thankfully.
Speaker 4: So that's how long are we in the Dominican Republic
Speaker 4: after that?
Speaker 1: Not that long, I don't think, but also, you know,
Speaker 1: to an extent kind of forever too. Yeah, that's story
Speaker 1: for another day though, what happens next. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think the important thing to take out of this
Speaker 1: is that when the US gets involved in your country,
Speaker 1: it always ends well, and it always ends cleanly. We're
Speaker 1: not just like back again and again over and over again,
Speaker 1: like fucking shit up with guns and you know, backing dictators.
Speaker 1: That never happens. Like we're we come in clean and
Speaker 1: we come out clean.
Speaker 3: That's when you depose the dictator of the country, we'll
Speaker 3: back you up. You don't just leave him in the
Speaker 3: trunk of a card for the embassy.
Speaker 4: You know we're there.
Speaker 1: It's oh man, it is funny, good stuff. So that
Speaker 1: was bad raphaeol truheo. Bad us involvement in his dictatorship.
Speaker 1: Also bad us involvement after his dictatorship not great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, as far as dictators go, there were
Speaker 3: like a bunch of little twists, like he did everything
Speaker 3: just slightly.
Speaker 1: Differ interesting dictator.
Speaker 3: Interesting dictator for sure, Like he followed a lot of
Speaker 3: the formula, but he was like, I gotta do it
Speaker 3: my way.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he's a little bit like, you know, like
Speaker 1: the Bloodhound Gang, right, Sophie, come on, we all we're
Speaker 1: all big fans of the Bloodhound Gang. He's a little
Speaker 1: bit like.
Speaker 4: The third Property brother.
Speaker 3: You know, he looks like the other Property brothers, but
Speaker 3: they just got a.
Speaker 4: Little something different.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, came a third basketball player. Do it? Do it?
Speaker 4: Do it?
Speaker 1: Uh? Uh? The one?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 2: A third one? I know you do? You claim you're Jackson,
Speaker 2: You claim you're better at basketball, you say, Andrew Jackson. Well, Lebron, Lebron,
Speaker 2: thank you. I feel better.
Speaker 1: Welcome.
Speaker 4: I just took like two and a half hours to
Speaker 4: get there. That was healing for me.
Speaker 1: That's good. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2: Can't you have anything you want to plug.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, I talk about right wing media and Fox
Speaker 3: News and commedia, just like all those assholes doing stuff.
Speaker 3: You can check me out on TikTok at Katamboo and
Speaker 3: then same on YouTube.
Speaker 4: Whe I do long form content.
Speaker 1: Sweet excellent. Well you can find uh me listening to
Speaker 1: the Bloodhound Gang, which I will be doing after this
Speaker 1: episode of our show finished.
Speaker 5: Happy for you. You can find my book After the Revolution
Speaker 5: wherever books are sold, and you can find Rafael true
Speaker 5: heio dead because he's.
Speaker 1: Fucking got got oh yeah deadish ship. So yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh you know, for those of you listening, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I would never encourage anyone to assassinate an elected leader.
Speaker 1: But if you do, keep your shoes.
Speaker 4: Keep the shoes, Yeah, keep the shoes, shoes.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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