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Intimate Violations: Women and the "Ajusticiamiento" of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, 1944—1961 Author(s): Elizabeth Manley Source: The Americas, Vol. 69, No. 1 (July 2012), pp. 61-94 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23270071 Accessed: 26-08-2020 05:24 UTC

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The Americas 69: l/J u ly 2012/61-94

COPYRIGHT BY THE ACADEMY OF

AMERICAN FRANCISCAN HISTORY

Intimate Violations: Women and the Ajusticiamiento of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, 1944-1961

The foundation of social order, the primary essence and basic nucleus

of every political organization, rests in the family, without whose

stable and healthy development, the prosperity of the nation is impossible.1

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina

On the afternoon of August 10, 1959, several dozen Dominican and Cuban women gathered in the streets of Havana.2 Dressed in black as though headed to a funeral, they mourned the political situation in the

neighboring Dominican Republic. Specifically, they targeted the dictator Rafael

Trujillo, calling him the "Jackal of the Caribbean." As they paraded through the

streets carrying placards and visiting newspaper offices, they were focusing attention on their specific struggles as women and mothers. Their posters read,

"Dominican Women Support the Revolutionary Government"; "We Ask for the Expulsion of Trujillo from the OAS"; and "We Represent the Mourning of the Assassinations Committed by Trujillo." They told the Cuban newspaper

The author wishes to thank the many people who read this article and offered suggestions: Thomas Adams,

Guadalupe Garcia, Elizabeth McMahon, Drew Chastain, Jason Bernsten, Elizabeth Hammer, Wendy Gaudin,

Leslie Richardson, and Meg Osterbur; the members of the Seminar for Historical Change and Social Theory

at Tulane University, especially Justin Wolfe for being such an amazing mentor; my colleagues at Xavier Uni

versity of Louisiana; the editors and anonymous reviewers of The Americas; and Neici Zeller for helping me

to poner un grano de arena for gender history in the Dominican Republic. And, of course, the strong and incredible women of the resistance.

1. El fundamento del orden social, la esencia printera y el nucleo bdsico de todo organismo politico, descansa

en la familia, sin cuya estabilidad y sano desarrollo no es posible tampoco la prosperidad de la nacion. Excerpted

from Orestes Herrera Bornia, Prevision Social en la Republica Dominicana (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Arte y

Cine, 1952), p. 7.

2. Justino Jose del Orbe, Del exilio politico dominicana antitrujillista en Cuba (Santo Domingo: Edi

tora Taller, 1983); pp. 145-152. Del Orbe chronicles the event through a series of clippings and photographs

taken from several Cuban newspapers. An Informacion report noted that participants included Carmen

Negret, Petronila Gomez, Altagracia del Orbe (the author's wife), Lupe Luciano, Olimpia Vera, Carmen de

Lara, Maria del Rey, Migdalia Diaz, Yolanda Pulido, Ada Daniel, Elsa Zurita, Elena Quintero, Mercedes Quin

tero, and Saski Prus. Hoy added Matilde Daniel and Marta Duque to the list of women.

61

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62 Intimate Violations

Information that their gestures symbolized "the mourning of our beloved Dominican people, every day more oppressed, humiliated, and enslaved by the crimes committed by the tyrannous regime of Rafael Trujillo." At once inter nationally savvy and domestically focused, these women were central to the resistance movement that developed over the three-decade dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Drawing on the regime's own maternalist discourse of the nation-as-family, these female resister-activists consistently pointed out the fail

ures of "the Jackal" to protect women, children, and the Dominican home. Indeed, their militancy was essential to the termination of the regime.

The story of the fall of the 31-year regime has been told almost exclusively through the eyes of its male protagonists.3 As the most visible members of the resistance that led to Trujillo's ajusticiamiento (execution), Dominican men have taken near-exclusive discursive possession of the last years of the infamous dictatorship, with one major exception—the martyred Mirabal sis ters.4 However, women were far from absent from the larger narrative of political transition that led up to the Trujillo assassination on May 30, 1961.5 Dominican female activists demonstrated that the promises made by the leader—to protect the traditional family and national morality—were not only dubious, but that through the direct violations of the regime their homes and loved ones were being evermore trampled upon. In an altered reflection of the regime's own gendered framework, these women demon strated their skill in political engagement and established an ideological for mulation grounded in their specifically maternal contributions to civic life in

3. Examples range from U.S. journalistic accounts to Dominican histories and participant memoirs. For

the former, see Bernard Diederich, Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000); and

John Bartlow Martin, Overtaken by Events: The Dominican Crisis from the Fall of Trujillo to the Civil War

(New York: Doubleday, 1966). For Dominican historical accounts of these years, see Roberto Cassa, Los ort

genes del Movimiento 14 de Junio. La izquierda dominicana I (Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria, 1999);

Emilio Cordero Michel, "Las expediciones de Junio de 1959," Estudios So dales 25:88 (April-June 1992), pp.

35-63; and Bernardo Vega, Los Estado Unidosy Trujillo. Los dias finales: 1960-1961 (Santo Domingo: Fun

dacion Cultural Dominicana, 1999). For memoirs, see Juan J. Cruz Segura, Bajo la barbarie. La Juventud

Democrdtica clandestina (1947-1959): testimonio de un protajjonista (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1997);

and del Orbe, Del exilio politico, although the last-cited does include some evidence of female activism on the

part of his wife, Altagracia.

4. Ajusticiamiento is directly translated as execution or death penalty, although it also connotes a sense

of "bringing to justice" and is used by Dominicans to refer to the assassination of Trujillo.

5. Several important exceptions include Carolina Mainardi Vda. Cuello's memoir Vivencias (Santo

Domingo: Editora Manati, 2000); and Grey Coiscou Guzman's collection of oral testimonies titled Testimo

nios. La simiente convulsa. Tomo I (Santo Domingo: Editora Buho, 2002) and Testimonios. Lagavilla lumi

nosa. Tomo II (Santo Domingo, Editora Buho, 2002). Alfonsina Perozo and Delta Soto have also published

memoirs that touch on their roles in the resistance movement: Perozo, Los Perozo: su extermino por la dict

dura de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Editora Centenario, 2002); and Soto, Vivencias de una revolucionaria (Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria, 2004). In addition, several authors have published works that discuss

the lives of the important female resistance activists Minerva Mirabal and Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla.

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Elizabeth Manley 63

the Dominican Republic, contributions that persisted well beyond the demise of the infamous leader.

For many Dominicans, the assassination of Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Patria Mirabal in 1960 stands as the beginning of the end for the Trujillo dictatorship,

yet the extant scholarship on the regime fails to fully interrogate this fact. This

article argues that the murder of the three women activists was the breaking

point of the 30-year regime precisely because it challenged deeply embedded beliefs of what the regime, even at very minimum, could do for the Dominican

people. Not simply because it was enacted on supposedly "weak" or "defense less" women and because it was a tremendously shocking action even for Tru jillo, the assassination of the Mirabals exposed the regime's failure to protect the

sanctity of the home, embodied symbolically by women and women as moth ers. As a result, it was an assault on Dominican national morality.

Moreover, while it is readily acknowledged that the assassination marked a sig

nificant turning point in Dominican history, the idea that women other than the

Mirabal sisters participated in the resistance movement is only beginning to enter into the Dominican narrative. As Myrna Herrera Mora points out in her

recent study, many women were actively and valiantly involved in the revolu

tionary movements of the 1940s and 1950s.6 This article expands the narrative

beyond the three martyred Mirabal sisters to highlight how women's activism,

operating through local, national, and international channels and engaging the

gendered discourse of conservative politics, is central to the toppling of author

itarian leaders. The historiography of the resistance generally ignores the con

tributions of women, and the martyrdom of the Mirabal sisters less than a year

before the regime's dissolution further obscures the contributions of Domini can women to the end of the dictatorship. Yet in reality, as Trujillo in effect "created" broken homes and orphans, women more readily entered the move ment as engaged resisters, and Dominican society mobilized around these very

intimate violations committed by the regime.7 Though the fall of the Trujillo

6. Myrna Herrera Mora, Mujeres dominicanas, 1930-1961: anti-trujillistas y exiliadas en Puerto Rico

(San Juan: Isla Negra, 2008). As noted above, there are a number of smaller-scale studies that address Min

erva Mirabal and her sisters, as well as Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla; however, scholars tend to treat the

women as exceptions rather than as part of a larger trend.

7. Lauren Derby refers to the regime's iconography of women in her recent manuscript. On the one

hand were the beautiful young women that Trujillo exploited to demonstrate his sexual prowess, and on the

other were the less visible yet highly accomplished political figures like Isabel Mayer or Minerva Bernardino.

See The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Durham: Duke Uni

versity Press, 2009); pp. 109-134. April Mayes refers to the latter as "Hispanic womanhood," a formulation

employed by both regime supporters and dissenters in pursuit of their political ends. See "Why Dominican

Feminism Moved to the Right: Class, Colour and Women's Activism in the Dominican Republic, 1880s to

1940s," Gender and History 20:8 (August 2008), pp. 349-371.

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64 Intimate Violations

regime was a complex process indebted to multiple forces, one of the most sig

nificant and little-noted factors lies in the resistance movement's ability to high

light the regime's failure to maintain its promised link between "traditional" family values and national unity—and with the women who so vociferously made that failure part of the public debate.

By narrating the involvement of women at several distinct stages of the resist

ance, this article demonstrates how the maintenance of certain traditional, gen

dered ideals framed the terms of the debate about the dictatorship and its spec

ulative and actual end. Rather than employ the typical male-dominated periodization of the resistance, this article engages the narrative of the move

ment in a different way: by focusing on three roughly chronological stages in

women activists' mobilization of gender to protest the Trujillo dictatorship. First addressing the role of the Trujillo regime in creating a maternalist dis course, the article then details the history of women in the resistance movement

as it developed on the island between 1942 and 1950, a period in which women

sought to debunk the regime's own argument that it alone was best suited to defend the traditional home and family. As the regime's pressures on the island

mounted and the resistance transitioned into exile, women emphasized increas

ingly the need to bear witness as women against the abuses of the regime; thus the article focuses next on female activism in exile between the mid-1940s and

1960. Drawing on a legacy of feminine political engagement at both the national and international level, these female resistance activists knew that claims against the dictator needed to be made before both domestic and inter American audiences and to focus on the home and family.

Finally, as tensions on the island increased and international attention to the Dominican situation grew during the mid-1950s, some of the most intense resistance again developed at home. Many women who had not been forced into exile continued or renewed their commitment to revolutionary opposition

work, while demonstrating a parallel dedication to defending the dignity of the

mother and the family. These demands to protect women, wives, girlfriends, and children proved essential to the final push in the anti-Trujillo campaign. In

sum, the article argues for the importance of widening the historical narrative

to explain both the regime's demise and the rise of post-Trujillo feminist poli

tics, two forces that accepted women into the political fold yet held tightly to

traditional formulations of female participation.

Origins of Maternalist Resistance in the Trujillato

The use of maternalism to scaffold conservative regimes is far from new, and as

Victoria Gonzalez and Margaret Power point out in their respective research on

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Elizabeth Manley 65

Nicaragua and Chile, Latin American authoritarian regimes actively recruited women to solidify a number of crucial "mother-centric" national projects in the

early to middle twentieth century.8 The engagement of women in the public arena of politics through programs aimed at assisting children and families was a

tactic of the Trujillato and other Latin American regimes and often led to suf

frage and various concrete goals established by feminist movements.9 Unsurpris

ingly, from its earliest years, the Trujillo machinery dedicated significant effort to

promoting and expanding the stable home and family through these programs,

and they enlisted women to do much of the heavy labor.10

Coming to power through a military coup in 1930, Trujillo quickly recognized

the strength of organized elite women.11 He sought their allegiance by formally

8. Here, I am following scholars Linda Gordon, Pitted But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the His

tory of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 55; and Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Pol

itics and the Origins of Welfare States, Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.

2—4, 30, in their use of 'maternalism' to describe a political approach and discourse that both focused on the

social needs of women and children and created a space for women to participate in the construction of state

programs and policies. For examples of this trend in Latin America, see Victoria Gonzalez-Rivera, "From Fem

inism to Somocismo: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821-1979" (Ph.D. diss., Indi

ana University, 2002); Victoria Gonzalez and Karen Kampwirth, Radical Women in Latin America: Left and

Right (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); and Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women

in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973 (University Park: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2002). This pattern has also been documented extensively in the case of European fascist

regimes, as well as within the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. See Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled

Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the

Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Kath

leen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the / 920s ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

9. For specific work on women and the Trujillo regime, see Elizabeth Manley, " Poner un grano de

arena: Gender and Women's Political Participation under Authoritarian Rule in the Dominican Republic,

1928-1978" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 2008); April Mayes, "Why Dominican Feminism Moved to the

Right"; Neici M. Zeller, "El regimen de Trujillo y la fuerza laboral femenina en la Republica Dominicana,

1945-1951," in La Republica Dominicana en el umhral del siglo XXI, Ramonina Brea, Rosario Espinal, and

Fernando Valerio-Holguin, eds. (Santo Domingo: Centro Universitario de Estudios Politicos y Sociales, Pon

tificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra, 1999), pp. 429—444; and Neici Zeller, "The Appearance of All,

the Reality of Nothing: Politics and Gender in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1961" (Ph.D. diss., University

of Illinois-Chicago, 2010). Melissa Madera has a dissertation forthcoming from SUNY-Binghamton on

women, public health, and the Trujillato. For a similar assessment of the Somoza regime, see Gonzalez-Rivera, "From Feminism to Somocismo."

10. I am drawing on recent analyses of the Trujillo dictatorship that reexamine the regime from the per

spective of informed consent and exchange rather than simply coercion and violence. See particularly Derby,

The Dictator's Seduction, pp. 3-12; and Richard Turits, The Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo

Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

11. Scholarship on the historical origins of Dominican feminism is beginning to grow. See Ginetta Can

delario, "El eco de su voz allende a los mares: la primera etapa en el pensamiento feminista dominicano," in

Miradas desencadenantes, Ginetta Candelario, ed. (Santo Domingo: Centro de Estudios de Genero, INTEC

Universidad, 2005); Ellen Dubois and Lauren Derby, "The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan Amer

ican and United Nations Women's Rights Activist," Women's Studies International Forum 32 (2009) pp.

43-50; Manley, "Poner un grano de arenaLuisitania Martinez, "Abigail Mejia y los inicios del movimiento

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66 Intimate Violations

acknowledging their fledgling feminist group Action Feminista Dominicana and then by granting women full suffrage in 1942. Shortly thereafter, the regime began employing legions of women in the work of social assistance, meant to further solidify the clientelistic nature of the regime.12 Dispersing newly minted female members of the Women's Branch of the Dominican Party

to volunteer in schools, hospitals, and similar public venues, Trujillo sought to

reinforce the idea, both at home and abroad, that the regime was in the busi ness of protecting the traditional family and honoring women's primarily mater

nal role. The party even gave out awards to women who had 11 or more chil dren.13 As "Father of the New Nation," Trujillo established himself as the protective father of a re-envisioned Dominican nation, and drew on female sup

port to scaffold the nurturing and reproductive elements of the state.

Scholars of right-wing women debate the benefits of maternalist policies for feminism and even for the state, and they astutely point out that each conser

vative regime has its own intricately formulated gendered ideals.14 In the case of

the Dominican Republic, women worked to protect traditional values, but their

political efforts were, in many ways, unprecedented. As a result, the regime and

its feministas trujillistas opened, perhaps inadvertently, doors to women's engagement with the state. Notwithstanding, while the regime touted its egal

itarian practices of gender inclusion and other demonstrations of fair and dem

ocratic leadership, it manipulated elections, obstructed civil liberties, and gen erally behaved as a totalitarian state.15

Not all women chose to support what the regime put forth as its "democratic"

principles and traditional values. Resisting the conflation of dictatorial leader ship and apparent democratic practice, many women became involved in the anti-Trujillo movement. While their politicization owed much to the conserva tive maneuverings of their female counterparts within the regime, their conclu

feminista dominicano," in Polttica, identidad y pensamiento social en la Republica Dotninicana, sijjlos XIX y

XX, Raymundo Gonzalez, Michiel Baud, Pedro L. San Miguel, and Roberto Cassa, eds. (Madrid: Ediciones

Doce Calles, 1999); Mayes, "How Dominican Feminism Moved to the Right"; Valentina Peguero, "La par

ticipacion de la mujer en la historia dominicana," Erne Erne: Estudios Dominicanos 10:58 (1982), pp. 21-49;

and Zeller, "The Appearance of All, the Reality of Nothing."

12. For a comprehensive evaluation of the regime's clientalistic nature, see Turits, Foundations of

Despotism.

13. Jesus de Galindez, The Era ofTrujillo: Dominican Dictator (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,

1973), p. 96.

14. See particularly the essays in Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists Around the

World, Paola Bachetta and Margaret Power, eds. (London: Routledge, 2002).

15. Two studies that focus nearly exclusively on the terror imposed by the regime are Galindez, The Era

of Trujillo; and Robert D. Crassweller, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (New York:

Macmillan, 1966).

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Elizabeth Manley 67

sions about democracy and the ability of the state to protect family life landed

them in an entirely separate camp.16 Moreover, they drew on a solid foundation

of earlier female resistance, as historians of the U.S. occupation of the island (1916-1924) document.17 Many women found their Trujillista compatriots' avid support of a violent dictatorial regime increasingly untenable. Through underground activism fomented at the local and university levels, they joined a

campaign that would position women as key actors in the anti-dictatorial move

ment. They turned to the growing underground resistance as a way to channel

their displeasure and found ways to employ the regime's own defense of the stable family and democracy to make their claims.

As has been well documented, particularly in the cases of Argentina and El Sal

vador, women have used their roles as mothers and grandmothers to protest government-sponsored kidnappings, disappearances, and murders. Moreover, as Maxine Molyneux points out, there is a considerable literature addressing the

roles of women in ending Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s,

particularly the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.18 Much of this activism drew on

an established idea of women as the moralizing force of the nation. Diana Taylor argues that the Mothers made "conscious use of the socially sanctioned

role of motherhood for political ends," with those political ends being both "a

bid for political recognition" and the confrontation of the military regime.19

Bringing the "private" into the public sphere was central to these movements,

and earlier examples from the region demonstrate other instances of women participating in the dismantling of authoritarian leadership. Elisabeth Friedman

argues that, in the case of Venezuelan opposition to dictator Perez-Jimenez in

the late 1950s, women successfully infiltrated the movement by serving as

16. While the generational shift of the resistance movement is significant and has been touched upon

by Roberto Cassi, it is beyond the scope of this article. Still, it is worth noting that Alfonsina Perozo, who

lived through the period, commented in her memoirs that by the last decade of the regime, "/il]os sectares de

la sociedad dominicana, especialmente la juventud, no podian soportar mds la opresion del regimen (all sectors

of Dominican society, particularly the youth, could no longer endure the oppression of the regime).-" Future

studies are needed to address the gender component of this shift, as well as the motivations of these new actors

in choosing to protest a violent dictatorship. See Perozo, Los Perozo, p. 146; and Cassa, Los origenes, pp. 41-46.

For similar references to the role of generation in mobilization, see Joe Foweraker, Theorizing Social Move

ments (Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 53; and De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, p. 13.

17. Virtudes Alvarez, Mujeres del 16 (Santo Domingo: Mediabyte, 2005); Valentina Peguero, The Mil

itarization of Culture in the Dominican Republic, from the Captains General to General Trujillo (Lincoln: Uni

versity of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 31-32; and Neici Zeller, "'To Live the Modern Life!' Imperialism, Mod

ernization, and the Gender War in the Dominican Republic, 1916-1924," unpubl. conference paper, Tenth

Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, 1996.

18. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 63.

19. Diana Taylor, "Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo," in Negotiating Performance:

Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin America, Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, eds. (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1994), pp. 275-305.

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68 Intimate Violations

"nonpolitical" actors and engaging their connections to the private sphere.20 She notes that violence committed against women by the Venezuelan dictator ship, as in the Dominican Republic, served as a final straw in the collapse of the

regime.21 Clearly, across time and space, women have been active in resistance

movements not simply as guerillerns, but also through less obvious and perhaps

more ideologically damaging practices.

"Putting women back into the story" and explaining how the violation of tra ditional gender norms served as breaking points for oppressive regimes are important goals, yet the scholarship on gender and authoritarian regimes has expanded into new areas. As the Dominican case illustrates, female resistance activists undertook highly politicized actions and in formulating an argument

against the dictatorship, directly engaged the regime's own maternalist dis course. This study draws on social-movement theories that demonstrate certain

groups' abilities to engage the hegemonic ideals of the state. As Susan Stokes argues in her study of urban protest in Peru, "the weak" may see through a dominant ideology, but "still find it expedient to appeal 'explicitly and ver bally'" to its principles, "because it is in their strategic interest to do so."22 Joe

Foweraker cites Chile and Argentina, where military regimes, violating their own Christian moral values, indirectly mobilized women to confront the state.

In Chile, for example, despite a pattern of conservative female voting, a major

ity of women voted against the continuation of the dictatorship.23 Moreover,

such social mobilization has often led to the institutionalizing of both conser vative and liberal groups and their particular rights discourses, as was the case with women in the Dominican Republic. The post-dictatorship would yield a high level of female involvement in the public arena of politics, without a con

current transformation in the traditional gender structures of society.

Revolutionary Women and the Anti-Trujillo Movement, 1944-1950

An examination of women's activism in the earliest years of the resistance move

ment demonstrates that their revolutionary engagement found acceptance among many because it did not upend the traditional gender roles of mother,

20. Elisabeth Friedman, Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 106.

21. Friedman, Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy, p. 111.

22. Stokes goes on to argue that "[t]he Peruvian state's insistence on the self-reliance of poor commu

nities over the years may ironically have helped lay the groundwork for a more assertive and demanding pop

ular culture." Susan Stokes, Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); pp. 8, 127.

23. Foweraker, Theorizing Social Movements, pp. 74, 110.

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Elizabeth Manley 69

wife, and daughter; rather, early female resisters argued that the only way to pre

serve these formulations was through the termination of the rapacious regime

of Rafael Trujillo. Given the growing presence of women at the universities of

the region in the 1940s, several key female activists began clandestinely encour

aging others to protest the increasingly violent tactics of the regime.24 The group was predominantly middle- to upper-class, educated, and from a few key

urban areas across the country. They utilized the democratic opening afforded

by World War II to mobilize, and came to serve as the inspiration for a larger

group of women who would become the vanguard of the protest movement as it moved into the 1950s and 1960s.25 The efforts of these women were foun

dational to the movement as it grew, and they conveyed the avenues to politi

cal participation available to women through the consistent defense of the stable

home and family.

Grey Coiscou Guzman, a young child in the 1940s, documented her mother Rita Violeta Guzman Gonnell's memories from the winter of 1944, and her words bring out the idea that women had come to revolutionary stances out of

their anguish over destroyed families.26 She noted that "the resistance [move

ment] against the tyranny became more intense with the increase in losses of

human lives. In many homes, as much in the interior of the country as in the

capital, mourning shrouded the bodies of mothers, wives, and children of those

opposed to the regime."27

Coiscou Guzman's study, in providing the testimony of a self-proclaimed "loyal

witness," contributes to the efforts to reconstruct a movement that, at the time,

was meant to go unrecorded or at least undetected. Though most of the voices

are male, the tales of a few women do come through, proving if nothing else that the Mirabal sisters were not the only female figures in the struggle to end

the dictatorship. However, what the quote from Guzman Gonnell so pointedly

illustrates is that women within the movement engaged in discussions of famil

ial destruction as the primary justification for resistance to the regime.

Although Coiscou Guzman talks little about her own involvement in the resist ance, the work of a woman named Josefina Padilla illustrates the role of women

in pushing the regime's rhetoric in service of revolutionary change. Padilla, a

24. Angela Hernandez, Emerjjencio del silencio. La mujer dominicana en la education formal (Santo

Domingo: Editora Universitaria, 1986), pp. 122-126.

25. Bernardo Vega, Un interludio de tolerancia: el acuerdo de Trujillo con los comunistas en 1946 (Santo

Domingo: Fundacion Cultural Dominicana, 1987).

26. Grey Coiscou Guzman, Testimonios. La gavilla luminosa. Tomo II (Santo Domingo, Editora Buho,

2002).

27. Ibid., p. 4.

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70 Intimate Violations

young woman from Santiago, enrolled at the University of Santo Domingo in 1943, which afforded her the opportunity to make contact with other young adults in opposition to the dictatorship. The year was propitious, as 1943 was also the year the Partido Democratico Revolucionario Dominicano (PDRD; later the Partido Socialista Popular, or PSP) formed in Santo Domingo (then Ciudad Trujillo) and assumed its closed Marxist-Leninist ranks.28 As a result, Padilla found herself amid many young adults who were questioning the exist

ing state structure and authority and refusing to abide by the current single party system.29

The year following her enrollment at the university, Josefina Padilla joined the

recently formed and clandestine Juventud Revolucionaria, initially the youth wing of the PDRD and the driving force behind the youth resistance move ment. She remembers that it was a fellow student in medicine, Bolivar Kun hardt, who introduced her to the group, which she described as a "movement of youth trying to raise consciousness about the reality of the dictatorship" and

attempting to inculcate their fellow students with the idea that there were other

elements—"liberty, democracy, human rights"—essential to genuine national leadership.30 She called it "an educational process," in reference its search for both alternatives to dictatorship and ways to fight it. The group organized in

secret into three-person cells, until the regime offered a brief window for legal

opposition in August 1946. The group's first documented collective activity was

the distribution of pamphlets at the Congreso Internacional de Juventudes during Trujillo's grand celebration of the nation's centennial in 1944.31 The group continued to distribute information, although participation in such actions was still a large risk.

The small window created by the regime for political opposition in 1946 was a

result ofWorld War II. Global pressure for democratic governance reached even

the smallest countries in Latin America, particularly those under the watchful

eye of U.S. politicians.32 Trujillo, according to Padilla, "wanted to appear dem ocratic," and the quickest way to win that recognition was to publicly proclaim

openness to opposing parties. The Juventud Revolucionaria wanted to call the

28. Cassa, Los origenes, p. 78.

29. The Partido Dominicano, run by Virgilio Alvarez Pina, was the nation's only legal party.

30. Personal correspondence with Josefina Padilla, October 2004.

31. This period coincides with female suffrage and in many ways demonstrates the regime's larger inter

national show of democracy and transparency.

32. For more on the origins of what Richard Turits calls a "brief wave of liberal idealism," see Turits,

Foundations of Despotism, p. 236; and Eric Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the

Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For a global

perspective, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the V/orld: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cam

bridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 172.

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Elizabeth Manley 71

regime's bluff, to demonstrate publicly that its discourse of democracy and sta

bility—paraded around by Trujillo's female supporters particularly—was devoid

of substance. When Juventud Revolucionaria was given legal status in 1946, Padilla was the sole woman on its central committee.

Upon this legal reorganization in October, members of the group, newly renamed Juventud Democratica declared themselves to be "neither communist

nor anticommunist" and professed commitment to the struggle for democratic

principles. Padilla argued that her 11 co-leaders "in no way marginalized her [from the organization]" and noted that there were a number of active women

in other parts of the country including Santiago and La Vega.33 Though hidden

in the narrative much more deeply than were their male counterparts, women

participated in the organization and growth of the Juventud Democratica in both its clandestine and legalized stages and centered their activities in familial

circles and hometown networks.34 Moreover, while mention of their specific actions is limited, female participation did not go unnoticed by male activists.35

33. Included, among others, were Gilda Perez, Brunilda Sone (who was head of her group in La Vega),

Sobeya Mercedes Almonte, Edna Moore, Leila Pantaleon, and Dinorah and Ligia Echevarria.

34. Homes and local communities were essential to the movement in both phases and they provided a

platform for female participation. For example, Ligia Echevarria Hernandez and her sister Dinorah became

involved in the movement through the activities of their brother Vinicio. According to memorialist Juan J.

Cruz Segura, the home of the Echevarrias served as a sort of "center of the diffusion of revolutionary ideas."

See Cruz Segura, Bajo la barbaric, p. 29. Similar examples include Josefina Padilla's sister Silvia, as well as

Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla and her sister Carmen Julia who also lived in a home of opposition activi

ties. In addition, women who hailed from the same hometown often found that ties of friendship drew them

into the movement. Violetica Martinez, Ruth Fernandez, and Lourdes Pichardo, all from the small but afflu

ent town of Moca, formed a cell of the Juventud Democratica with Federico Pichardo. This connection of

women is noted in an interview with Violetica Martinez in Mu-Kien Adriana Sang's ;To soy Minerva! Confe

siones mas alia de la vida y la muerte (Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar, 2003), p. 53. Gilda Perez y Perez

became part of the organizing committee in Santiago through several male friends. See Fundacion de los

Heroes de Constanza, Maimon y Estero Hondo, Memorias de la lucba contra la tirania (Santo Domingo:

Fundacion de los Heroes de Constanza, Maimon y Estero Hondo, 1982), p. 38. Another large contingent of

active women can be traced through connections they made at the Colegio Inmaculada Conception in La

Vega. Brunilda Sone Perez, Tomasina Cabral, Dulce Tejada, and Emma Rodriguez all shared connections

through either the region generally or their school. Memorias de la lucha contra la tirania, p. 48.

35. Activist Rafael Rodriguez Mendez heaps praise on the work of Josefina Padilla and Carmen Natalia

Martinez Bonilla. In discussing an early Juventud Democratica meeting, another activist, Virgilio Diaz Grul

lon, mentioned Martinez Bonilla's constant work, adding that it "was not possible to imagine what we would

have done without her" or without her permanent example of commitment, values, and self-denial. Activist

Juan Bautista Ducoudray Mansfield, attests that "while the JD was legal, there was one person who played an

important role, from 1946 to 1947, and that person was Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla." See Coiscou

Guzman, Testimonios. La jjavilla luminosa, pp. 106-107. In another article, Diaz Grullon called Martinez

Bonilla "el alma presente" of the Juventud Democratica and argues that she was in the "center of it all," offer

ing her enthusiasm, constant work, and her "fe en el futuro democratico de nuestro pueblo (faith in the dem

ocratic future of our people)." The article appeared in a magazine dedicated entirely to Carmen Natalia

Martinez Bonilla. Centro de Solaridad Para el Desarrollo de La Mujer, Inc. Ambar 7: Revista de Mujeres 3:6

7 (November 1991-April 1992), p. 83.

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72 Intimate Violations

Josefina Padilla and another young woman, Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla, assisted the movement through their editing and writing for several resistance

newsletters, including Juventud Democrdtica, published bi-monthly between November 1946 and May 1947, and El Popular, also published between 1946 and 1947. Along with Padilla, Martinez Bonilla was one of the most active female participants in the early youth protest movement.36 Writing in the first

edition of Juventud Democrdtica, Martinez Bonilla argued that it was the aspi

ration of every individual to work toward a representative government, and away from the current condition in which the "voice of the people—the voice

of truth—constituted a moral threat to the force that oppressed it."37 She val

orized the effort and hope implicit among Dominican youth to combat oppres

sion and injustice. Padilla, in the second edition of the same publication, addressed Dominican women directly. She expressed her confidence that women would join the struggle for democracy, knowing that they too played a

pivotal role in representative and just governance.38 Both Padilla and Martinez

Bonilla spoke regularly at various meetings, exhorting women to join the fight

to redeem the nation and regain its liberties, rights and sense of justice.39 The female activists connected Dominican women's unfulfilled needs and desires

with the failures of the regime, while also expressing their personal dissatisfac

tion with the government for ignoring themselves and other women—the true ciudadanas libres.

Despite its self-proclamations of democratic governance and adherence to the reigning global opposition to fascism, the Trujillo regime quickly realized that

its foray into political openness was leading to major disaster. Almost as abruptly

as it had declared the legality of opposing parties, it changed course, punishing

many of those political activists who had joined the movement.40 The regime immediately shuttered both public demonstrations, including pamphleteering and protest marches, and private organizing. Many individuals faced imprison

36. Martinez Bonilla's extensive lifework is honored in the memoirs of many participants of the resist

ance, including Juan J. Cruz Segura in Bajo la barbaric. A selection of her letters is reproduced in Pensantes,

Angela Hernandez, ed. (New York: Ediciones Caliope, 2004), pp. 111-118; there is a short article about her

life and literary work by Sherezada Vicioso (ed.), "Carmen Natalia: 'De la Soledad al Compromiso,'" in Algo

que dear: ensayos sobre literature femenina, 1981-1991 (Santo Domingo: Editora Buho, 1991), pp. 43-50.

Following the end of the regime, Martinez Bonilla also became involved with the OAS Inter-American Com

mission of Women and served as the organization's president, adding to her reputation as an accomplished

member of the left concerned with the rights of women.

37. Cited in Herrera Mora, Mujeres dominicanas, p. 77.

38. Ibid., p. 78.

39. Ibid., p. 80.

40. The transition had much to do with international pressures and the rise of a Cold War mentality that

would support a brutal dictator rather than admit the possibility of communism. See Roorda, The Dictator

Next Door, pp. 230-231.

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Elizabeth Manley 73

ment, interrogation, and even torture.41 Others took the lonely route to exile.

When the Trujillo regime ended its experiment in early summer 1947, Josefina

Padilla chose a form of exile; after first seeking asylum in the Mexican embassy,

she brokered an agreement with the Dominican government that forced her into nearly a year of house arrest and daily reporting to the Mexican embassy.

Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla and her family were also among the many who paid dearly for their involvement in the resistance. A series of letters, span

ning several years of struggle for Martinez Bonilla and her family, attests not

only to her tenacious opposition, constructed around a moral defense of her family's dignity, but also to the particularly gendered framing of regime oppo

sition.42 Beginning in 1946, the young woman wrote to the Dominican gov ernment protesting the regime's unjust persecution of her family. The dispute,

which would end in 1950 with the family's exile to Puerto Rico, began with the

expulsion of her brother Andres from the Colegio La Salle for belonging to Juventud Democratica. Martinez Bonilla's critiques were patently provocative from the beginning, despite her awareness of the repercussions that the regime

visited upon dissenters. She demonstrated her awareness of the regime's failure

to live up to its promises to protect the Dominican family and maintain the nation's moral rectitude. Although indirectly, Martinez Bonilla was clearly ref

erencing the Trujillato's motto, an acronym for Trujillo's initials that appeared

on nearly all its correspondence: "RectitudLibertad, Trabajo y Momlidad" (Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina). The national situation, she argued, pre vented an honest man from dedicating himself solely to his studies. A decent person such as her brother could "not remain indifferent in the face of such abject villainy." Unafraid of indicting the regime, she contended that his expul

sion had exposed once again "the painful and tragic situation of this poor Dominican nation, forgotten by all, even those who claim to be the ministers of

God and say they preach equality and love among men in His name." Finally, in the same initial missive fired at the director of her brother's school, Martinez

Bonilla defended Juventud Democratica, calling it an organization "whose prin

ciples are to create better men for a better country, in support of our Constitu tion and within the most strict Christian moral codes."

As the family's situation deteriorated and Martinez Bonilla received no response

to her initial letter, she chose to write directly to Trujillo. In her February 1947

41. Exile groups published reports of the actions of the Dominican government widely. See the Frances

R. Grant Collection (hereafter FRGC), Boxes 34, 37, 38, 43, and 61, Rutgers University.

42. All of the letters, minus the final one to the Mexican Embassy, can be found in a compiliation of

primary documents by Angela Hernandez. Carmen Natalia Martinez, "Coraje y dignidad," in Hernandez,

Pensantes, pp. 111-118; The final letter, signed by the entire family, is in Herrera, Mujeres dominicanas, pp. 218-221.

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74 Intimate Violations

communication, she reiterated her concerns about Andres and listed other injustices done to her father, another brother, and her sister. According to Martinez Bonilla, the national lottery had fired her brother Jose Antonio after

two years of steady employment, and the Dominican telephone company had dismissed her father from his position. Her sister Carmen had been fired from

her job at the Colegio Santa Teresita and her brother from a private company

after 10 years of service, and the entire family had been evicted from their home.

Her conclusion was that the family, unable to freely exercise "the basic right to

work honestly and to live in a home—something to which all people aspire," had no choice but to abandon the country. She politely but firmly requested passports for the entire family, citing Article 10 of the Dominican constitution,

which proclaimed free transit for all citizens.43 Moreover, in choosing to write

to the president himself, she implicitly cited the upper echelons of government

as the originators of her family's multiple problems and their ultimate inability

to live and work "honestly" in their own nation.

The regime's reply supported Martinez Bonilla's assumption that Trujillo was papering over the reality that his administration protected only certain homes

and families. The response was terse, explaining that the firings, because they

had been undertaken by private businesses and the education system, fell under

the purview of the Secretaries of Labor and Education, respectively. The evic tion issue was the concern of the Ministry of Housing, and any requests for passports were to be directed to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Finally, the

regime denied all allegations of involvement in the issues facing the family and implied that the accusations against specific employees mentioned in Martinez

Bonilla's letter could be attributed only to wrongdoing on the part of her father

at the Dominican telephone company In her rebuttal, Martinez Bonilla stated what many knew but were afraid to voice: that is, while the stated officials should be responsible, it was ultimately the job of the president "to attend to

the loyal execution of the laws." As a parting shot, Martinez Bonilla reminded

her reader that while the Ministry of Foreign Relations should be the depart ment making decisions about her family's passports, she well knew that it was

"the President of the Republic himself who decides which persons will be per

mitted to leave Dominican territory."

On March 10, 1947, Martinez Bonilla wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Rela tions to again request passports for her entire family. She repeated her previ ous reference to Article 10 of the constitution, which guaranteed Dominicans the right to travel as honest and respectful citizens. Apparently, regime officials

43. During this time all passports were held by the Dominican government and individuals and families

had to request them for travel.

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Elizabeth Manley 75

ignored the letter at the time. Correspondence from 1950 to the Mexican ambassador signed by the entire family indicated that the regime had not only

denied their earlier requests, but escalated their persecution of the entire family, whom the Trujilllato had branded as "enemigos del Gobierno."44 Finally, three years after Martinez Bonilla's initial request, the regime grudg ingly and seemingly under international diplomatic pressure, granted the family permission to leave. The Martinez Bonilla family headed to Puerto Rico

where they joined a large group of exiles and remained for the next 10 years.

These letters testify to the realities of the regime as it affected many women

and their families, as well as the will among some women to stand up to the machinery of dictatorial rule. Never submissive, Martinez Bonilla refused to use the servile language expected in letters to the president. She understood the rights granted to Dominican citizens through the constitution and demanded nothing more than their full compliance for her family. Her experi

ences make it clear not only that individual lives and livelihoods were being threatened, but that the regime's behavior tore at the fabric of the "moral" and

"Christian" Dominican family.

Female dissidents and regime officials alike struggled with the discourse of gender, home, democracy, and morality. As Martinez Bonilla railed at the Tru

jillo regime, she expressed concerns about the sanctity of the Dominican home

and family—in no way did she seek directly to subvert gender norms through

her activism. Josefina Padilla indicated support of a similar status quo when she

rejected the idea that feminism was in any way part of her activism at a young

age. Rather, these women relied on the discourse of democracy, morality, basic

human decency, and family in what each argued was an important—if futile—

attempt to make the regime accountable to the Dominican home.

By the late 1940s, in response to the resistance movement, the regime began to

push the boundaries of its own paternal protections; at the same time, it strug

gled to maintain its position as moral guardian. Officials were aware of the danger posed by the involvement of women in the resistance. Virgilio Alvarez

Pina, president of the Partido Dominicano, the only state-sanctioned party, reminded Dominicans how Trujillo himself had transformed women into citi zens. He warned women, particularly by writing in the newspaper La Nation, that the resistance groups were nothing more than a bunch of seditious com munists and that individuals should guard against becoming victims of their "pernicious and dangerous" message 45

44. Herrera, Mujeres dominicanas, pp. 218-221.

45. Virgilio Alvarez Pina, "Partido Dominicano: advertencia" La Nation (Octobcr 19, 1946), p. 1. Cited in Herrera, Mujeres dominicanas, pp. 81-82.

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76 Intimate Violations

Josefina Padilla and Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla played instrumental roles

in the development of a resistance movement during the early years of the Tru

jillato, and their lives illustrate how women came to ally themselves with such

dangerous political activism. Avenues created during the Trujillo regime, often

as a result of its own efforts, brought greater numbers of women into higher

education and encouraged a more active role for them in the public sphere.46 In addition, more women came to see possibilities for themselves within the political arena as resistance activists because they felt violated by the regime's

claims of maternalism. Most importantly, Padilla and Martinez Bonilla demon strate that while women took a stand against the regime, issues of gender were

galvanizing points in the resistance movement for all participants. Nonetheless,

along with many others in the late 1940s, they realized that the battle to restore

the nation to a moral democracy would take much more time and retreated into

exile, only to seek other avenues to resistance a short time later.

Women in the Exile Movement: Bearing Witness to an International Audience

Arriving in Puerto Rico in 1950, Martinez Bonilla joined a growing group of women exiles who were active in efforts against Trujillo. By the mid-1940s, groups in Puerto Rico, New York, Venezuela, and Cuba were organizing to help

bring an end to the dictatorship. Although a varied group, these women demon

strate a deepening connection to the use of gender and transnational networks in the debate over dictatorship. Drawing on the solidarity of other Latin Ameri

can women through writing, radio speeches, public demonstrations, and marches, the Dominican exile population invoked women as the spiritual center

of both the resistance and the hoped-for democratic future. The efforts of female

exiles, along with those of their male compatriots and international supporters,

scaffolded the most central critique posed by the resistance. In emphasizing Dominican women's "quiet and heroic sacrifice," activists attacked directly Tru

jillo's inability to maintain the morality and dignity of the nation.

Exile groups began to consolidate nuclei of resistance across the Dominican dias

pora as early as the 1940s, and they employed both periodicals and radio to high

light their particularly gendered national crisis. Quisqueya Libre, a Havana-based

magazine of the Union Democratica Antinazista Dominicana (later the Frente Unido de Liberacion Dominicano) anchored by the regime's earliest dissidents, published a call to women in its first months of publication. In September 1944,

46. Hernandez, Emergencio del silencio; Manley, Poner un grano de arena"-, and Zeller, "The Appear ance of All."

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Elizabeth Manley 77

its editors argued that Dominican women were particularly well placed to actively

support the resistance by focusing on the importance of the Dominican home

and calling attention to the regime's failures in "food, housing, health and public

education."47 The same issue included a reprint of an article by a Venezuelan female supporter titled "The Quiet and Heroic Sacrifice of the Dominican Woman."48 In their introductory note, the editors argued that the author was

"doing justice to the Dominican woman, who, in her silence, carried one of the

most heroic battles against the treacherous barbarism" of the Trujillato. Carmen

Clemente Travieso, identified as "the illustrious Venezuelan writer," argued that

Dominican women and mothers, while living a "horrible tragedy," continued to

maintain the dignity of the home despite their situation, all the while following

the "spirit of struggle and sacrifice that animates all Dominican women."

Similarly, the magazine reproduced the radio address of a Cuban female sup porter who lamented the suffering of Dominican women. The first in a series of

" voces femeninaf that would be broadcast weekly by Cuba's Mil Diez radio, Graciela Heureaux de Cesar's speech called attention to the "cry of the mother

... of the girlfriend, or the woman desperately facing the absence of her beloved." Heureaux de Cesar, announcing herself as the daughter of a Domini can, emphasized the urgency of women's roles in the resistance and in the "reclaiming of public liberties," clearly indicting the regime and its inability to

protect even the most basic freedoms. Like her Venezuelan counterpart, Heureaux de Cesar assured her listeners of the solidarity of Cuban women, a pool from which Dominican women could presumably draw strength in their time of crisis.

While Quisqueya Libre did not boast its own female contributors, its editors made sure to demonstrate the significance of women's involvement in the resistance,

both within the Dominican population and across the female population of the

Americas. Reporting on a 1946 conference of women in the United States, the editors thanked the attendees on behalf of "the true Dominican woman who suf

fers the horrors of Trujillo."49 While the women of the Dominican Republic pur

portedly suffered most the abuses of Trujillo, they could count on the support of an international audience of women, to whom they would continue to look through the 1950s for legitimization of their struggles. Dominican female activists, both directly and indirectly, requested that the women of the Americas

pay attention to their particularly dire form of suffering.

47. Quisqueya Libre 1:7 (September 1944), p. 4.

48. Ibid., p. 7.

49. "Trujillo es repudiado tambien por las mujeres," Quisqueya Libre 3:1 (January-February 1936),

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78 Intimate Violations

The work of Altagracia del Orbe demonstrates the tactics used by women in exile to reveal the true nature of the Trujillo regime to the world and to call on

the assistance of the women of the hemisphere. Del Orbe, wife of the active resistance member Justino del Orbe, was not engaged in the opposition move ment against Trujillo until she traveled to Cuba in 1952 to meet her husband, who had joined the Dominican labor movement in the 1940s and, after anger ing the regime, spent more than two years in prison. He had then fled to exile

in Cuba.50 Upon joining her husband with her four children there, she "imme

diately" became involved in the opposition movement.51 As she remembers, "I

got caught up in the struggle; I was a militant, and had a committee of Defense

of the Revolution in my house." According to her oral history, del Orbe was a

pioneer in her anti-Trujillo struggles—her experiences as the wife and mother

in a family classified as dissident had moved her to action. Despite an upbring

ing that had taught her that women were not political, del Orbe had been curi

ous about her husband's subversive activities even before they left the Domini

can Republic. As she remembers, upon hearing their whisperings, "It interested

me, I liked it, but I didn't dare say I wanted to join the party (the Partido Socialista Popular)." Once settled in Cuba, del Orbe became very active in the organizing efforts of the group. She was frequently present among distin guished male leaders, usually as the only female attendee at weekly meetings, and she organized other women in the movement and encouraged them to defend the dignity of the nation's mothers.52 The involvement of women like

del Orbe illustrates the continuity of women's involvement in the resistance and

their deepening commitment to demonstrating the regime's violation of its patriarchal protections.

One of the most visible roles of exile women was bearing witness through organized activities, and they did so before an international community, as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Altagracia del Orbe addressed the abuses

of the regime when she spoke out for female Dominican exiles in Cuba in an article titled "We Fight for the End of the Trujillo Regime."53 Speaking for "Dominican women," the author informed her readers that their common wish

in commemoration of International Women's Day could be nothing other than

50. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico.

51. Centro de Investigation para la Action Femenina (CIPAF), "Quehaceres: We were Ready to Go,"

Connexions 36 (1991), pp. 19-20; original in English.

52. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 65-75. The meeting minutes reproduced in del Orbe's book span

from early January 1959 to late February of the same year.

53. Although they might be distant from the island itself, political exiles were not completely safe. The

Trujillo regime was known to have disappeared and murdered several vocal male exiles with the help of noto

rious regime henchman Felix Bernardino. Moreover, the existence of several military regimes throughout

Latin America made organizing an exile liberation movement a difficult task. See Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 18, 132.

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Elizabeth Manley 79

"to see our country free from the ferocious tyranny that has oppressed and bled

it for more than 30 years." The female exiles called on the solidarity of Latin

American nations in a common struggle against dictatorship and for democratic

freedoms. Moreover, they highlighted the total lack of rights and freedoms available to the women who, unlike themselves, still labored under the dicta torship in the Dominican Republic. As mothers, they pointed out, these reali ties were even harder to bear. "As a mother," del Orbe wrote, "I wish for the

triumph of peace from the bottom of my heart, and as a mother I am conscious

that only peace will bring humanity the tranquility and well-being it desires."

Expressing anxiety for children still in their native land, desire for the peace and

well-being of their nation, and worry over the fate of other mothers like them

selves, the female exiles in Cuba effectively put the Latin American community

on notice that they would not stand by and ignore the situation in the Domini

can Republic.

In Puerto Rico, public demonstrations by exile groups often included women, and women were similarly active in resistance groups in other countries where

disaffected Dominicans lived.54 Several women joined a group of male exiles in

1950 to protest the Pan-American Union's decision to hold a World Health Organization conference in Ciudad Trujillo. Signatories of the open letter to the

press included Martinez Bonilla and her sister, as well as a former Trujillo func

tionary living in exile, Carmita Landestoy.55 Upon her arrival in Puerto Rico,

Martinez Bonilla also started writing for the publication Boletin, which was the

voice of the Comite Puertorriqueno Pro Democracia Dominicana. Her first piece appeared on the front page of the June/July 1950 issue and was ominously

titled "La democracia esta en peligro inminente [Democracy is in Imminent Danger.]"56 While she noted that it was not yet time to discuss why Trujillo chose to inflict suffering on Dominican women, it was time to realize that unless the

forces of democracy stood up and found a way to overthrow the dictatorship,

there might never be a guarantee of democracy. She continued to write in serv

ice of the opposition through the end of the regime, calling on her knowledge

54. Carolina Mainardi Reyna, who had joined the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) with her

husband when it formed in Puerto Rico in 1942, recalled picketing the Dominican consulate in 1958 on the

fourth anniversary of the disappearance of Jesus de Galindez, a vocal opponent of the regime who had been

living in New York City. Known for her oratorical skills, Maricusa Ornes was invited often by the Vanguardia

Revolucionario Dominicana (VRD) to be the voice of its weekly radio program in the capital.

55. Herrera Mora, Mujeres dominicanas, p. 224.

56. Boletin 2:6 (June-July 1950), p. 1. As in the earlier resistance movement on the island, writing was one of the most accessible tools available to female activists in exile. Both Carolina Mainardi and Carmen

Natalia Martinez Bonilla served as administrator or editor during the run of Exilio, the monthly paper of the

Frente Undido Dominicano (FUD), and Martinez Bonilla also served as the secretary of public relations for

the Union Patriotica Dominicana (UPD) at various points. Altagracia del Orbe was similarly involved in writ

ing campaigns in Cuba. See Del Orbe, Del exilio politico; and Herrera Moya, Mujeres dominicanas.

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80 Intimate Violations

of history and contemporary conditions in the Dominican Republic to highlight

the ways in which the Trujillato was destroying the nation and its citizens.

Increased involvement among women is evidenced by several successful attempts to create women's branches of existing organizations, a move that sup

ports the idea that female participants felt they had a distinct and essential per

spective. While creating such branches had not been a practice of earlier resist

ance activists, organizers drew on the structure of the Partido Dominicano, which had a distinctive women's branch. Early in 1959 Carolina Mainardi formed a Comite Femenino of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) in Puerto Rico, with another female activist. The two women circulated their letter of invitation throughout San Juan, encouraging Dominican and Puerto Rican women to join their struggle against the "dean of dictators of America"

and follow the example of a similarly organized group of New York City exiles.57

The correspondence demonstrates the unique role women had constructed for themselves within the opposition. The organization, they stated, was comprised

solely of "women who love liberty" and who were willing "to face the most immense sacrifices in order to liberate our sons, husbands, boyfriends, and col

leagues" from the clutches of the Trujillato. They called on Puerto Rican women to join them in making America a "continent of liberty, justice, and equality." Not only were female exiles demanding attention to a situation that violated the vaunted role of motherhood and the values of the traditional home,

but they were also arguing that women were particularly obligated to sacrifice

for the attainment of more just conditions.

In Cuba, Altagracia del Orbe headed a group of women who formed a female branch of their local resistance group, the Union Patriotica Dominicana (UPD),

and by September 1959 the Seccion Femenina was actively seeking greater cooperation from fellow UPD members exiled in Puerto Rico. It is likely that this group's membership grew significantly as a result of the participation of the

husbands and children of female exiles in the June 1959 anti-Trujillo expedition

of Constanza, Maimon y Estero Hondo. A letter from Dominga Montesinos dated January 3, 1960, requested membership status in the UPD based on her "condition as mother of a member of the Dominican Liberation Army."58 The

57. Reprinted in Herrera Mora, Mujcres dommicanas, p. 248. The other activist was Mercedes Borel.

58. Dei Orbe, Del exilio politico, p. 47. For more information on the invasions at Constanza, Maimon

y Estero Hondo see Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, as well as the information that appears on the website of the

Fundacion de los Heroes de Constanza, Maimon y Estero Hondo at http://museodelaresistencia. org/museo/federaciones/cmh.html (accessed July 13, 2010) and the Museo de la Resistencia main site at

www.museodelaresistencia.org (accessed April 29, 2012). The expedition began on June 14, 1959, and lasted

under a week. Word of the movement reached Trujillo in time for him to mobilize a counterattack, and the

expeditionaries never received the support they thought they might in the countryside. Nearly all who had

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Elizabeth Manley 81

August 1959 protest by the Seccion Femenina in Havana attests to their strength as a collective.59 Numerous newspapers covered their demonstration with pictures and short articles, and their public presence dressed in black demanded international attention to the egregious crimes committed against mothers by the "Jackal of the Caribbean." In addition to demanding change in

Santo Domingo and garnering support from their Cuban compatriots, they expressed solidarity with fellow exiles in New York, who undertook a hunger strike in protest of the regime's crimes. Thus their presence as political mourn

ers drew attention not only to the dictatorship but also to its direct attack on women and families.

In Cuba in 1959, the wives of the June expeditionaries and members of the Sec

cion Femenina of the UPD wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro that was printed in the daily newspaper Hoy.60 The female writers of the letter hinted that

Castro had decided to turn his back on the June expedition and that blame for

its failure was in large part his, yet they then insistently denied "such slanderous

accusations." They affirmed their faith in Castro as "a great democrat, friend of

the Dominican people, and enemy of tyranny wherever it might be found." Despite the somewhat obsequious opening, the writers got straight to the point

in the second half of their letter. Their immediate goal was obtaining weapons.

They appealed to Castro's known support for social revolution and liberation, expressing confidence that as a "true revolutionary" he could not but throw his

support behind their continued struggle against the dictatorship. The women of the UPD also used the letter to call on the support of their Latin American

sisters as yet another resource in their cause, as well as to gain the attention of

North American diplomats.61

Less well-known than Castro but a prominent North American political actor nonetheless, Frances R. Grant also received correspondence from Dominican women. In one particularly long, poetic letter, the unidentified female author

headed out from Cuba (one boat had to turn back) were killed, or arrested and then killed. The resistance

movement that grew in Santo Domingo subsequent to the failed attempt took the name of the July 14th movement in honor of the effort.

59. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 145-152.

60. Hoy, September 1959 (Havana), cited in Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 93-94.

61. Justino del Orbe mentions briefly the Congreso Latinoamericano de Mujeres that was held from

October 9-12, 1959, and includes a letter signed by attendees. Although he gives little background on the

event, the appeal to "hermanas de America Latina" written by event attendees and reproduced in his book was

signed by several active female Dominican exiles, including Altagracia del Orbe and Graciela Heureaux.

Justino del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 94-96, 153-154. The appeal to brothers and sisters in Latin Ameri

can was not a technique used exclusively by women. Del Orbe notes the March 1960 Semana de Solidaridad

in which activists from various Latin American countries gathered to protest the oppressive conditions exist

ing in their native lands. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 98-101, 133.

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82 Intimate Violations

nearly begged Grant, who was then president of the Pan-American Women's Association and active in the Women's International League of Peace and Free dom, to intervene on behalf of the beleaguered Dominican Republic.62 "I need a channel, a North American channel," she wrote, adding that she wished only

"to prevent bloodshed in Santo D[omingo]" and that "Trujillo must fall." Through as many channels as they could find, female activists sought attention

to both the crimes of Trujillo, but also to their suffering as women.

As the stakes grew higher, female exiles continued working to protect their spe

cific rights as women and mothers. In New York City in early 1960, over 200 Dominican exiles went directly to the office of Dominican consul Luis Mercado

to protest against the dictator.63 Officials allowed only 75 women to picket, and

when a five-woman delegation entered the building, Mercado refused to see them. The women had brought with them a list of all individuals incarcerated

by the regime and requested that the consul deliver it to the Dominican Repub

lic, and they asked specifically for information on their incarcerated children and

husbands. The New York Times reported that in the end the list was left "with

some minor employee at the consul's office."64

To Martinez Bonilla's constant resistance publications and to the frequent speeches of theater director and actress Maricusa Ornes, another Trujillo dissi

dent added her voice in protest. Carmita Landestoy, exiled in 1945 after nearly

a decade in service to Trujillo's Women's Party and a signer of the letter protest

ing the 1950 World Health Organization conference in Ciudad Trujillo, pub lished a scathing indictment of the regime titled jTo tambien acuso!65 In it, she

detailed the many abuses of the regime, particularly in reference to its purported

claims to have given women full and equal rights as citizens. Calling it a "strange

paradox," she argued that once the regime had officially granted women their

civil liberties, they ironically "no longer had the right to either express or write

anything approaching the truth, nor to broach any fundamental issues."66 Having been a vocal proponent of Trujillo's maternalist policies, her claim that

the regime denied all means of women's expression argued strongly for the sig

nificant disjuncture between official policy and reality for the Dominican public.

In the documents illustrating female engagement with the antitrnjillista move

ment in exile, an appeal to Latin American women as empathetic mothers and

62. FRGC, Box 43, Folder 27. She identifies herself as the wife of Movimiento de Liberacion Domini cano leader Alfonso Canto.

63. "8 Trujillo Foes Reported Killed," New Tork Times, January 31, 1960, p. 9. 64. Ibid.

65. Carmita Landestoy, ;Yo tambien acuso! (Havana: Impresora Editorial, 1946).

66. Ibid., p. 130.

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Elizabeth Manley 83

wives is the trope most frequently found. As a call to female exiles to unite in

their struggles against dictatorship generally, joined with an exhortation to women in the region to identify with their anguish as mothers, wives and citi

zens, their efforts combined two powerful discursive techniques—both used by

the regime itself—to demand support in overthrowing the Trujillo regime.67 As

a collective, they demanded that attention be paid to the true ideals of democ

racy, which they felt were withering rapidly under the many military govern

ments in Latin America. Women in the opposition sought Latin American soli darity in their struggle for "the complete triumph of peace" and invited "mothers, wives, sisters, [and] girlfriends" to unite in the cause.68 Furthermore,

as demonstrated by their August 1959 public protest in Cuba, women of the opposition movement sought the attention of not just everyday Latin Ameri cans, but also of the diplomatic corps and other well-placed officials through out the hemisphere. As their male colleagues noted, they exemplified the "tra

ditional spirit of sacrifice of the Dominican woman," and they actively conveyed

the "pain of the Dominican tragedy" to others.69 They urged the American nations to "enact a robust isolation of and embargo against the Jackal of the Caribbean, the international symbol of tyranny" in hopes of bringing an end to

the regime that stained not only the nation, but its families.70

Beyond picketing the Dominican embassy in their country of exile and publicly

demonstrating their continued displeasure at the world's lack of attention to the

abuses of Trujillo, some women stepped directly into revolutionary action, fore

shadowing the shift that would occur as the movement intensified back on the

island.71 However, the major contribution of women during this period of exile

was their ability to engage the regime's own politics of gender across national

boundaries. In demonstrating the Trujillato's inability to protect Dominican homes, families, and the integrity of women and mothers, these female activists

not only provided the movement with significant momentum, but also solidi

67. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, pp. 93-94, 111-112.

68. Ibid., pp. 112, 132. 69. Herrera Mora, Mujeres dominicanas, p. 244.

70. Del Orbe, Del exilio politico, p. 148.

71. One woman served as a spy for the opposition movement, while another prepared to join the rev

olutionary forces. Others worked clandestinely to shuttle information, goods, and even weapons, making dan

gerous trips to transport funds to exiled family members. Irma Hernandez Santana, an exile in New York and

member of the Movimiento de Liberation Dominicana, was sent by fellow activist-exile Alfonso Canto to con

duct research back in the Dominican Republic. As historian Roberto Cassa relates, her assignment was to make

a "reconnaissance of the conditions." Clearly, the more visible and active male exiles would have been quickly

jailed for such actions while women were, up to that time, better protected from imprisonment and torture.

At a time when the various exile groups were attempting to coordinate their activities with each other and with

the movement underway in their native land, such diligences could often be completed only by women. Cassa,

Los origenes, p. 130; Herrera Mora, Mujeres dominicanas, p. 107.

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84 Intimate Violations

fied the discourse that would become vital in dismantling the regime. In essence, while many women became more radicalized in their political stance, their argument against the regime still hinged on a maternalist discourse of national stability and morality.

Renewed Opposition at Home: Women and the Movimiento 14 de Junio

In the Dominican Republic, and particularly Santo Domingo, resistance activists remobilized in the early to mid-1950s. The post-World War II period presented difficulties for the movement, given the regime's totalitarian crack

downs (coming soon after its self-proclaimed "openings"). The core of the revi

talization lay in the University of Santo Domingo, where given the rising level

of female enrollment, women became key players in the renewed spread of anti

Trujillo ideology.72 One woman who became most intimately connected with this movement was Minerva Mirabal. By the time she entered the university to

study law in 1952, a fledgling resistance movement operating in the same kind

of cellular structure followed by the earlier Juventud Democratica was coming

back to life. The reinvigoration of the movement highlights a transition to even

stronger revolutionary stances among women, and it also illustrates that young

female activists had begun to denounce the regime's violations of its own pro fessed gender norms with increasing frequency.

The efforts of Minerva Mirabal and her sisters Maria, Teresa, and Patria were

not unlike those of other women active in resistance, but they stand out, obscuring the work of many other women who were similarly engaged. In real

ity, the political awakening of Minerva Mirabal in her secondary school and col

lege years mirrors the experiences of many other women of her generation. Although legally tolerated opposition had ended by the time Mirabal entered the university, her awareness of the political conditions of her country had begun earlier, during her school years in La Vega at the Colegio Inmaculada Concepcion. Included in that cadre of female students were other women who

would become active in the opposition movement.73

72. Some women, however, were hamstrung by their previous involvement in the resistance. Josefina

Padilla, for example, was allowed to return to the university after her year of house arrest only because of a

family friend's intervention and was forced to sign an agreement promising her total lack of involvement in

any political activities. She termed herself "marcaia" by the regime but argued that if the regime had made

any other demands placed on her—for example, to serve as a spy on the regime's behalf—she would not have

complied. Personal correspondence with Josefina Padilla, October 20, 2004.

73. They included, among others, Brunilda Sone, Violeta Martinez Bosch, and Emma Rodriguez. William Galvan argues that it was particularly the friendship between Mirabal, Martinez, and Rodriguez in

1944 that galvanized the women's political engagement. Minerva Mirabal. Historia de una heroina (Santo

Domingo: Editora de la Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, 1982), p. 107.

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Elizabeth Manley 85

Although the political maneuverings of the resistance following the brief "legal"

period of Juventud Democratica are cloudy at best, Mirabal was arrested in Octo

ber 1949 along with several other women, presumably for opposition activities.74

Their arrests garnered significant international press. Precisely because they were

women, the regime both underestimated their involvement and was wary of the

negative effects of meting out harsh punishments for female dissidents. Officials

questioned the women but then released them. Still, the regime continued its repression of the entire Mirabal family in hopes of halting the activities of its most

political daughter, attempting to provide a cautionary example for other women

who might consider similar engagement.75 In the second year of her legal studies,

the regime demanded Mirabal write and perform a speech praising Trujillo as a condition of her continued enrollment at the state institution.

After her 1955 marriage to activist Manolo Tavarez Justo, Mirabal and her sis

ters became even more intimately tied to the small opposition movement oper

ating throughout the country. Together Manolo and Minerva gathered support

among individuals in Tavarez's hometown province of Monte Cristi until regime pressure and her second pregnancy forced Mirabal's return to her family

home in Salcedo. She continued her work in that region, securing contacts with

the newly formed Accion Clero Cultural, a Catholic organization formed under

the guise of regime support but actually a resistance group.76 By 1959, several

different focuses of resistance had begun to coalesce into a national movement

against Trujillo, and the groups of women who gathered around the activities of Juventud Democratica and subsequently through the university played a large part in this unification.

In January 1959, at a small meeting convened by Minerva and Maria Teresa, their husbands, and several others, the group began formal organizing of a

74. Ibid., p. 160. Brunilda Sone, Violeta Martinez and Emma Rodriguez were the others.

75. In July 1951, Mirabal and her mother were confined to the Hotel Presidente in Santo Domingo

while the girls' father, Enrique Mirabal, was imprisoned nearby. Although the regime shortly released the

senior Mirabal as well as Minerva and her mother, the confinement was meant to terrorize the entire family

into compliance. Nonetheless, the following fall Minerva Mirabal convinced her family to allow her to enroll

at the University of Santo Domingo.

76. The most prominent member of the group was a young priest named Daniel Cruz. Roberto Cassa

reports that the group included several nuns. See Cassa, Los ortgenes, pp. 113-121. While the Church hierar

chy actively supported the regime until its very last year, more research needs to be conducted on the poten

tially important role of lay men and women, as well as other grassroots religious groups, in the resistance

movement. As has been pointed out in the case of Brazil, regime support from Church hierarchy does not

necessarily rule out the possibility of lay activism. See Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church: Politics in

Brazil, 1916-1985 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 60-78. More recently, Jan French argues

for the importance of problematizing the notion of the "Church" as a "homogeneous institution." French,

"A Tale of Two Priests and Two Struggles: Liberation Theology from Dictatorship to Democracy in the

Brazilian Northeast," The Americas, 63:3 (January 2007), p. 413.

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86 Intimate Violations

nationwide movement. Maria Teresa's husband, Leandro Guzman, later reported that it was at this meeting that Mirabal expressed her conception of the Dominican Republic's connection to other revolutionary movements in Latin America. As Guzman remembered it, Mirabal argued that their country was equally prepared to overthrow the repressive chains of dictatorial rule:

There could not have been a stronger sentiment in Cuba against Batista than there was here against Trujillo. I do not know why there they could create a revolution and overthrow tyrants, while here, with the same conditions, we cannot. ... It is clear that if we organize against Trujillo, we can have success here too.77

In other areas, a similar optimism pervaded the work of women who had become involved in the anti-Trujillo movement, yet their efforts remained pro

foundly gendered. Miriam Morales, a native of Puerto Plata, began in the early

months of 1959 to organize women into a collective that would eventually inte

grate into the group of Mirabal, Tavarez, and Guzman. Her group collected money and medicine and constructed rucksacks that would be used by the planned guerrilla invasion from Cuba.78 Much like women in previous revolu tionary struggles, their efforts coalesced around the auxiliary needs and their

"feminine" skills of organizing, preparing food, and sewing.

In June 1959, one event drastically altered the course of anti-Trujillo activities

in the Dominican Republic. A small group of insurgents, organized in Cuba and

supported by the newly installed Castro government, launched an assault on the Dominican Republic in the three towns of Constanza, Maimon, and Estero Hondo. Informed of the event prior to its occurrence, the regime quickly dis patched a counterattack and easily overwhelmed the group, which was unable to call upon planned support from the local peasantry. As Richard Turits argues,

the continued "loyalty to the state among much of the peasantry," particularly

in the areas chosen for invasion, helps explain why the action failed so miserably

in comparison to similar actions in Cuba and Nicaragua.79 Regime officials cap

tured the men of the insurgency and executed the majority. However, despite

its lack of military success, the invasion caused a significant increase in support

for the anti-Trujillo movement, particularly following on the regime's brutal

treatment of those involved.80 As fellow activist Tomasina Cabral argued, "the

77. Galvan, Minerva, p. 246. Other biographies of Mirabal have noted Guzman's recollection of that

initial meeting, although it is likely her sentiment had been developing for some time.

78. Cassa, Los origenes, p. 172. Cassa reports that in addition to Morales, members included Aida

Arzeno, Ana Valverde Vda. Leroux, Argentina Capobianco, Italia Villalon, Elena Abreu, and Carmen Jane

Bogaert de Heinsen.

79. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, p. 252.

80. Ibid. Turits argues that "the insurgents' quixotic gesture was nonetheless effective. It inspired the

urban resistance and fueled the cycle of intensifying state terror and growing opposition that would create

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Elizabeth Manley 87

detonator for the massive escalation of the resistance struggle to the national

level was the assassination of so many good Dominicans and foreigners, now sons of glory, whose holocaust lit the sacred spark of rebellion latent in our hearts."81

By the end of 1959 the incipient national movement had both greater inspira tion for its activism and a formal organizational structure. The influence of the

January 1, 1959, triumph of the Cuban revolution, noted attentively by many

of the group's participants, motivated the core committee, which by January

1960 had devised a basic set of principles and a name: Movimiento Clandestino

14 de Junio, in honor of the failed invasion. Two of the opposition's most active

women participated in its very first official meeting.82 Minerva Mirabal and another female activist collaborated with the small group that drafted the orig

inal declaration of principles. While neither woman was designated as an officer

of the leadership group, historian Roberto Cassa argues that the group consid

ered Mirabal for a position "in recognition of her skills and role as a mentor."

He contends that members excluded the two women from these positions of responsibility due to the high level of danger. Nonetheless, while Mirabal was

not elected to the position of president of the group, participants later asserted

that she had soundly rejected the idea that women should not participate in the

movement.83 According to the testimony of several activists, it was Mirabal, and

not her husband, who exercised true leadership for the group.84

Shortly after the group's official organization, regime officials caught wind of

the resistance movement and mobilized quickly to put an end to its activities.

Hundreds of resisters were jailed and savagely tortured by the regime, ostensi

bly to prevent further organizing and to force them to reveal the names of every

fertile terrain for a coup and lead to the collapse of the regime." Similarly, Roberto Cassa notes that "« ratz

de este hecho [the invasion] sobrevino un vasto sentido de compromiso que tuvo for efecto multiplicar los efectivos

de losgrupos clandestinos (as a result of the invasion what followed was a vast sense of committment that in

effect multiplied the forces of the clandestine groups)." Cassa, Los orijjenes, p. 105. One of the participants in

the 14 de Junio movement declared that the invasion "tuvo por efecto conmover la conciencia de todo el

pueblo y provocar un impacto psicologico que descongelo a todo el mundo, impulsando como un torrente la

organizacion de la oposicion a Trujillo (had the effect of moving the consciousness of the entire nation and

provoking a pyschological impact that shocked the entire world, impelling a torrent of organizing in opposi

tion to Trujillo)." Rafael Valera Bem'tez, Complot develado (Santo Domingo: Fundacion Testimonio, 1982),

p. 19.

81. Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorias, p. 195.

82. Vega, Los Estados Unidosy Trujillo. Los diasfinales, 1960-61 (Santo Domingo: Fundacion Cultural

Dominicana, 1999), p. 42.

83. Cassa, Los orijjenes, p. 241. Cassa offers these conclusions based on the testimony of several of the

original members. However, he admits to being unable to interview the surviving female participant in the

meeting, Dulce Tejada.

84. Ibid., p. 127.

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88 Intimate Violations

participant involved.85 This time, women were not exempt from the horrendous

treatment meted out to organizers. On January 22, 1960, shortly after her hus

band's arrest, Minerva Mirabal was jailed for the third time, along with several

other female activists.86 In a collection of testimonies from participants, two of

these women recorded the brutal treatment they received from regime officials.

In the January arrests, several of the more prominent female members were brought into the regime's famous prisons, La Cuarenta and La Victoria, for interrogation alongside their male colleagues. Regime officials brought activist

Asela Morel to La Cuarenta and paraded her in front of her fellow male activists,

naked, handcuffed, and displaying massive bruises from their savage beatings.87

Several other women, including Minerva Mirabal, who had been arrested days earlier, were already in the single jail cell when she arrived. Tomasina Cabral, arrested on January 20, witnessed the beatings of her fellow detainees, and offi

cials paraded her in front of their entire array of torture devices, including the

infamous electric chair.88 For her, the worst sight of all was the congregation of

regime officials in preparation for continual rounds of torture. After "a wave of

indecent insults and threats," her captors tortured her with an electric prod, with what she described as "evident pleasure."89

While Cabral offers the only direct testimony of physical torture, other partici

pants indicated that regime officials treated all the female prisoners savagely. At

one point, officials placed all five in a cell together with only a miniscule window, no circulating air, and a mere three cans for food, "potable" water, and waste. Guards removed the women from their cell in the middle of the night

for interrogations, transported them randomly from prison to prison, separated

and placed them in solitary cells, allowed them no contact with family, and would not provide information about their arrests. Cabral described the food they had as a "cornmeal with something like pig ears or snouts, nauseating."90

They witnessed the torture of their companions who, in most cases, were their

85. The massive wave of arrests began January 17, 1960. Former secret police member Clodoveo Ortiz

Gonzalez offered his version of the arrests in a report he submitted to U.S. Ambassador John Bartlow Martin.

In it, he stated that some 350 individuals were imprisoned, including five women. Other reports have indi

cated higher numbers, as well as more females arrested. Vega, Los Estados Unidos y Trujillo, pp. 42^14. As

before, the exile community publicized these numbers widely.

86. They included Tomasina Cabral, Fe Violeta Ortega, Dulce Tejada, Miriam Morales, Asela Morel, and Minerva's sister Maria Teresa.

87. Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorial, p. 188.

88. Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorias, p. 197.

89. Cabral's description of the torture was likely softened in her own retelling. While he does not iden

tify her by name, fellow inmate Rafael Valera Benitez offers a significantly more chilling narrative of the actions

taken against "una companera del clandestinaje," which includes details of the entire macabre scene. Valera

Benitez, Complot develado, pp. 36-40.

90. Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorias, p. 189.

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Elizabeth Manley 89

own husbands, brothers, and friends.91 After what could only be considered the

merest semblance of a trial, the women received penalties averaging 30 years in

jail along with heavy fines.92 However, the combination of international pres sures and continued internal struggle weighed heavily on the regime and in early February they released the women, and many of the men, to house arrest.

The brutal change in the regime's treatment of women dissidents had shocked

the Dominican public, and an international audience as well. By making women

targets of their draconian practices, the regime publicly and unequivocally vio

lated its own declared gender norms. The "sacred spark" described by Cabral may have been lit by the 1959 deaths of the revolutionaries, but it was aggres

sively fanned to a flame by the treatment of these young women. The massive

arrests and imprisonments carried out by the Trujillo regime drew significant

national and international attention to the dictator's crumbling political drama.

During this final year and a half of the regime, Trujillo's grip over the country,

and even perhaps his sanity, began to slip precipitously. Responding to the arrests

and imprisonments, the Church, despite its strong support over the preceding

30 years, issued a pastoral letter condemning the actions of the government and

demanding fair treatment for all Dominican citizens. The letter was read at every

mass in the country on January 31, 1960, immediately following the arrests 93 It

served as a major blow to Trujillo's power base—the Church had always sup ported his policies, regardless of his blatant violations of human rights 94 The

91. U.S. Embassy reports include descriptions of the torture of Tomasina Cabral and Asela Morel that

were forwarded to the OAS as part of their investigation of human rights abuses. See Bernardo Vega, LosEsta

dos Unidosy Trujillo, p. 114.

92. According to Cassa, several groups gathered at the trials began spontaneously singing the national

anthem, and Cabral affirms this in her own testimony. Cassa goes on to argue that "[l]os juicios tuvieron

repercusion nacional, pues algunos de los procesados denunciaron la dictadura y sus sistema legal, como hizo

Tomasina Cabral (the trials had national repercussions, as some of the defendants, including Tomasina Cabral,

condemned the dictator and the legal system)." Cassa, Los origenes, p. 274. Although Cabral does not narrate

her words before the court, she certainly affirms the fact that the valiant performance of the audience offered

incomparable solidarity. As she recalls, "[p]or primera vez en nuestras vidas fiiimos testigos de algo nunca visto

en muchos anos. El publico que presencio el juicio entono el Himno Nacional y practicamente empujaron a

los guardias que con fiisiles y en numero muy crecido nos custodiaban. La presion fue tan fiierte, que sus

pendieron la entrega de alimentos por familiares negociada por el Fiscal con los guardias (for the first time in

our lives, we were witness to something that had not been seen in many years. The public who witnessed the

trials sang the National Anthem and practically pushed the armed guards, of whom there were many. The

pressure was so intense that they stopped the provision of food from our familias that had previously been

negotiated between the district attorney and the guards)." Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorias, p. 198.

93. Vega, Los Estados Unidosy Trujillo, pp. 55-58; Cassa, Los origenes, pp. 260-270. The letter is repro

duced in its entirety in Rafael Valera Benitez, Complot develado, pp. 156-160.

94. Richard Turits argues for the importance of the pastoral letter at the local level, although undoubt

edly it was extremely important in urban areas as well. He writes that among peasants, the pastoral letter "pre

sented an open repudiation of official discourse by an alternative source of authority, thus exposing the limi

tations of the regime's hegemony." Turits, Foundations of Despotism, p. 256.

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90 Intimate Violations

United States also began to actively pursue an alliance with the opposition, although this effort was focused mosdy on the resistance in exile. Finally, the

Organization of American States (OAS) became increasingly concerned about the violations of human rights in Trujillo's brutal persecution of his opposition.95

In response to the regime's actions and the increasing concern over dictatorship

in the Caribbean, the OAS, the United States, and the opposition began com munications regarding an appropriate response as early as February 1, I960.96

Particularly among the families affected by the disappearances and imprison ments, most of whom were identified by many accounts with the upper classes, responses were surprisingly bold, public, and gendered, and women assumed even larger roles in these activities. According to missives from U.S. Ambassador Joseph Farland, a group of "women dressed in mourning" had been regularly using Church confessionals to pass along information about clandestine groups, as well as to convey their concern for loved ones.97 Tru jillo's legal agent in charge of reporting on subversive publications and activ ities, Dulce Maria Sanchez de Rubio, expressed aggravation at the many groups (including those headed by women) that depicted the regime as authoritarian.98 According to her reports, the magazine Libertad published Juana Ramona Castillo's letter to the oppositionist group Movimiento Popu lar Dominicano (MPD), in which Castillo requested aid in locating her son who had been detained for nearly a year without communication.99 Contin ued public protest by youth groups and the MPD, particularly in Santiago, proved a constant aggravation to regime officials. Moreover, the publication Libertad wrote around the same time that "female organizations" as well as student and worker groups, had been unable to organize since 1930 because of the repression of the regime, and that women in particular were growing anxious for change. "Women and housewives," they argued, "have not had the opportunity to defend their interests nor to see improvements on the part

of the state relative to maternity, education, or childcare."100 While women were not frequently among the upper echelons of leadership, their involve ment and the safeguarding of proper gender norms were key to mobilizing political activism at the local and community levels.

95. Valera Benitez, Complot develado, p. 43. The investigation was requested by Venezuela.

96. Vega, Los Estados Unidosy Trujillo, pp. 63-65.

97. Referenced in Vega, Los Estados Unidosy Trujillo, pp. 54, 110.

98. Dra. Dulce Ma. Sanchez de Rubio to the Secretario de Estado de Interior y Cultos, Interior y

Policia, Deposito 4, Legajo 5204, Archivo General de la Nacion (hereafter AGN), Santo Domingo, Domini

can Republic.

99. For more on the Movimiento Popular Dominicano, their return from exile in June 1960, and

their publication Libertad, see Cassa, Los ortgenes, pp. 293-316. 100. Ibid.

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Elizabeth Manley 91

In the last decade of the Trujillo regime, women from multiple socioeconomic

levels enrolled in the resistance movement. Yet, more to the point, participants

of both genders found the dictatorship's violations of maternalism and family its

greatest point of weakness. The resistance used Trujillo's own rhetoric—pro tecting maternalism, education, mothers' rights, and families—as a vehicle for

pointing out the regime's downfalls. Before 1959, many had been able to over

look the regime's farcical displays of "democracy," but they found the regime's

attacks on women and entire families in its final years untenable. Many asked

themselves whether the dictatorship, unable to live by its own gendered rheto

ric, could do anything to protect the Dominican people. As the regime's own inconsistencies were pointed out more forcefully, many individuals joined the

movement against the dictatorship, either explicitly or implicitly, giving it the

authority and weight it would need to eventually topple the regime.

In November 1960, the excesses of the Trujillo regime destroyed the politics of

clientalism that had maintained it for 30 long years. After the Church response

to the massive arrests of 1959, Trujillo reportedly stated that he had only two

problems: the Church and the Mirabal sisters.101 When the regime moved to solve the latter problem by creating a sham automobile accident as the three women returned from visiting their jailed husbands on November 25, 1960, many believed Trujillo had sealed his own fate. By violating the norms of gender

that he himself had so widely institutionalized, Trujillo set in motion the events

that led to his demise. At the same time, his incensed response to the Church's

objections brought on an extreme violation of his own terms of maternalism.

Reacting in April 1961 to the adamantly oppositional stance of a church in La Vega, Trujillo reportedly sent prostitutes to create a spectacle in the cathedral

and desecrate the sanctity of the institution.102 According to newspaper reports,

the women, "of doubtful reputation," entered the church and "stopped the mass

with their dancing of merengue and yelling 'Long Live Trujillo.'"103 Reportedly,

the prostitutes carried placards that read "In the Church and Everywhere, Long

Live Trujillo" and "Down with Regime Traitors." If punishing female dissidents

violated the internal guidelines laid down by the regime to protect women, send

ing "prostitutes" to a mass and raping and murdering three sisters and mothers

went above and beyond what the Dominican public could accept.

101. Galvan reports that he made this statement during a visit to Villa Tapia, a town close to the

women's hometown of Salcedo. Galvan, Minerva Mirabal, p. 317. Bernard Diedrich makes a similar asser

tion. Diedrich, Trujillo, p. 69. Court records from the subsequent trial of the Mirabal assassins indicate that

the statement was made at the home of Jose Quezada on November 2, 1960. See Valera Bem'tez, Complot

develado, p. 126.

102. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, p. 257.

103. El Caribe, April 23, 1961; cited in Vega, Los Estados Unidosy Trujillo, pp. 610-611. Cassa also

makes reference to the presence of prostitutes in the church in La Vega. Cassa, Los orijjenes, p. 283.

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92 Intimate Violations

Conclusion

While the death of the Mirabal sisters was a brutal and intensely emotional event

for the Dominican public, the massacre of women completed the destruction of

the gendered politics the Trujillato had created. The idea that women could be

assassinated for their unrepentant role in public politics shattered ideas about "propriety." While the specific reasons behind the murder of the three sisters lie

in the realm of Dominican mythology, the result was incontrovertible. Accord

ing to the New Tork Times, the New York-based Dominican Liberation Move ment called the murders "the most abominable assassination in the 31-year his

tory of the Trujillo dictatorship."104 While the Trujillo-controlled newspaper El

Caribe reported the deaths as an inexplicable accident, countless Dominicans consider the act the final straw in a series of horrific acts. Exile groups in New

York picketed the Dominican consulate demanding action by both the United States and the OAS.105

In addition, the massive arrests and assault on the Church provoked a response

among mothers and family members who might previously have been apoliti cal. The testimony of Gloria Cabral de Macarrulla sheds light on the responses

of "ordinary" women to the crumbling control of the Trujillo regime.106 Her

nephew, Lisandro Macarrulla, was present in La Cuarenta during the period of arrests and torture. Cabral de Macarrulla visited every Sunday, bringing news

from the family and kind words. Her memories serve as testament to both the

conditions borne by the prisoners, but also to her own response to the regime's

inhumane treatment of the country's youth. She had begun to collect crucifixes

to bring to the prisoners, realizing that the objects brought comfort to her oth

erwise miserable family members and friends. According to her count, she col

lected nearly 200. Despite the fact that the objects were eventually destroyed by

prison guards, her efforts serve as testimony to both the growing radicalism of Dominican women and their continued dedication to maternal activities in their

efforts to find an alternative to dictatorship.

The murder of the Mirabal sisters and the increasing violence during the final

years of the regime, particularly against women, provoked a visceral reaction among the Dominican populace. For many, the regime's total abandonment of its maternalistic protections—its charade of promoting the idea of nation as family and the blatant flaunting of its own standards for the proper treatment

of women—demonstrated to the public that the regime was collapsing under

104. "Wives of 3 Foes of Trujillo Dead," New Tork Times, November 30, 1960, p. 5.

105. "100 Here Protest 3 Dominican Deaths," New Tork Times, December 4, 1960, p. 50.

106. Valera Benitez, Complot develado, pp. 139-143; Fundacion de los Heroes, Memorias.

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Elizabeth Manley 93

the weight of its own perfidy. Acceptance by the public of a facade of democ

racy had been a consistent element in maintaining the regime; however, many

understood their return for such acceptance to be the paternalistic protection of

homes and families. As women and men pointed out repeatedly, particularly in

the final years of the regime, Trujillo's persecutions and violations of women betrayed that compact.

Such violations of human life were not unprecedented, yet it was the steadily

increasing assaults on maternalism and family that truly created the crisis. Rafael

Valera Benftez, member of the resistance, expressed a sentiment that echoed through the efforts of those who became involved in the movement. As he put

it, the assassinations "had their roots in [the regime's] absolute devaluation of the life of women, and, worse still, children."107 While the regime had indeed

reached a point at which its value of human life was nearly nonexistent, it was

specifically the violation of gender norms, as pointed out by both men and women, that truly mobilized the Dominican public.

On May 30, 1961, a group of six men assassinated Rafael Trujillo Molina as he headed west along the oceanside highway, en route to his famous Casa de Caoba retreat in San Cristobal. While the final end may have come at the hands

of male protagonists, the process that led to that juncture was undeniably gen

dered. As Carmen Natalia Martinez Bonilla argued later, the end of the regime

had come as a result of "an army of women, without any weapon other than the

powerful weapon of the heart, the heart tempered by sorrow and sacrifice."108

Women had become involved in significant numbers, demonstrating not just their political capabilities but also their skill in reappropriating the regime's own

discourse in service of the opposition. As other scholarship has demonstrated,

Trujillo worked meticulously to create a political role for women that allowed

them to actively support his policies—in fact, women were a major element in the success of such tactics. However, as the resistance movement grew and women became visible players in the drama that was unfolding against him, they

brought evidence that the Dominican public was rejecting Trujillo's image of himself as the larger-than-life, generous protector of national morality, the "Father of the New Nation." Dominican women argued and acted in ways that brought an integral and distinct element to the functioning of democracy and

107. Valera Benitez, Gomplot develado, p. 9. Journalist Bernard Diederich expresses a similar conclusion.

He argues that the "cowardly killing of three beautiful women in such a manner had greater effect on Domini

cans than most of Trujillo's other crimes. It did something to their machismo. They could never forgive Tru

jillo this crime. More than Trujillo's fight with the Church or the United States, or the fact that he was being

isolated by the world as a political leper, the Mirabals' murder tempered the resolution of the conspirators

plotting his end." Diederich, Trujillo, pp. 71-72. 108. FRGC, Box 43, Folder 21.

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94 Intimate Violations

domestic stability. Employing local, national, and even international channels,

they worked consistently to bring attention to what would become glaringly obvious to the population at large with the murder of the Mirabal sisters: that

vague promises of domestic and international stability would no longer stand on the legs of the regime's gendered rhetoric.

Xavier University of Louisiana

New Orleans, Louisiana

Elizabeth Manley

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