Unraveling Gender, Development and Civil Society in the Caribbean || Women's Political Participation...

Women's Political Participation in the Dominican Republic: The Case of the Mirabal SistersAuthor(s): NANCY ROBINSONSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2/3, Unraveling Gender, Development and CivilSociety in the Caribbean (June-Sept. 2006), pp. 172-183Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654568 .

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Women's Political Participation in the Dominican Republic: The Case of the Mirabal Sisters

by

NANCY ROBINSON

Contrary to traditional perceptions of women's essentially passive role in Hispanic societies, women have often been at the vanguard of popular resistance against dictatorship and military rule. Women have often played a pivotal role in galvanizing public opinion against dictatorship, totalitarianism and state terror. The role of the mothers of the desapare- cidos (disappeared) of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina is probably the most dramatic

example in recent times.

Women have sometimes achieved heroic stature in Hispanic culture in the struggle for social change, from the legendary Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) in the Spanish Civil War, to Evita Perón as standardbearer (abanderada) of the descamisados (shirtless ones) in

Argentina, where she is still revered sixty-odd years after her death. Rigoberta Menchú, a

Maya Quiche Indian leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her struggle against the Guatemalan military, has become an international symbol of the crusade for human

rights. These women are not empty figures, but have become imbued with deep emotive

meaning for women, men and youth in their countries, often serving as potent catalysts for

change.

Women in the Hispanic Caribbean

The Hispanic Caribbean has traditionally been overshadowed by the attention bestowed on the Latin American continent, but women have also played major roles in

political change there. It is important to remember that the Caribbean was the site of the first

major revolution against colonialism in the 19th century (the Haitian Revolution) and the site of the first socialist revolution of the 20th century (the Cuban Revolution) in the Western Hemisphere. Women's traditional roles were actively challenged in Cuba, under Fidel Castro, with Vilma Espín, Haydée Santamaría, and Celia Sánchez serving as influen- tial models for revolutionary youth.

Less known perhaps is the case of Lolita Lebrón and the Independence Movement of Puerto Rico or the tragic history of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic. Lolita Lebrón was a member of the Puerto Rican independence movement and was jailed for her participation in the 1954 Puerto Rican nationalist attack on the U.S. House of Repre- sentatives, in which five congressmen were injured. Finally pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, she returned to Puerto Rico after serving twenty-five years in a women's penitentiary in West Virginia.

The Hermanas Mirabal were assassinated by the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo and are now national heroines in the Dominican Republic, symbols of martyrdom in the



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long struggle against the dictator. Their deaths in November 1960 constituted the beginning of the end of the Trujillo dictatorship because public outrage against him was so great. In an encounter of Latin American feminists held in 1981 in Bogotá, Colombia, the Mirabal sisters were chosen to represent the International Day for Non-Violence against Women on November 25 of each year, transforming them into a continental symbol of women's

struggle and permanently affixing them on the consciousness of feminist thought and action in Latin America. Later, in 1999, the United Nations officially adopted this day as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Historical Background

The story of the Mirabal sisters was until recently fairly unknown outside the Dominican Republic, despite their legendary status in that country. Julia Alvarez's recent novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, has finally made that history accessible to a wider audience in a fictionalized version of their lives, which was later turned into a film. The

film, starring Salma Hayek, was produced in 2000 and universalized their story. The Mirabais sisters were beautiful, young women known throughout the Dominican Republic by their code name, "las mariposas," the butterflies, for their historic role in the under-

ground resistance movement against the dictator.

Born Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, they were married to men identified with the opposition to Trujillo and were political activists in their own right. On the evening of November 25, 1 960, as the Mirabal sisters were returning home after visiting their husbands in jail in Puerto Plata (permission having been granted by the authorities), secret police ambushed their jeep. The three women and their driver were taken out,

strangled and clubbed to death. Then, in a feeble attempt to cover up the murders, their bodies were put back in the jeep and thrown offa cliff. Only one sister, Bélgica Adela

Mirabal, who had not gone on the trip, survived.2

Historical research has failed to gauge the importance of this single event in

galvanizing national sentiment against Trujillo, who was assassinated six months later. This

might be attributed to the fact that they were seen as women who did not measure up in

importance to other events, such as the OAS embargo, in determining Trujillo's downfall. Nor has their legacy been seriously examined until recently, despite the fact that they left a

very deep imprint on Dominican consciousness: virtually all Dominican towns today have some commemorative marker, school or main street bearing their names. On March 8, 1997, a prominent 137 foot obelisk that Trujillo had built in honor of himself was also transformed into a mural of the Mirabal sisters. The Obelisk eulogizes "the struggle of

many women and men for Dominican liberty" and was painted by muralist Elsa Nunez with the faces of these three young women who now grace the main boulevard along the seafront of Santo Domingo. The date chosen for the inauguration of "Ode to Liberty" was, fittingly, International Women's Day.

Now the Playground of the Caribbean, Once its Killing Fields

Now the playground of the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic was once its

killing fields. The Mirabal sisters were no strangers to Trujillo's notorious jails and were



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imprisoned on more than one occasion for their political beliefs. It is my thesis that women as symbols of national resistence can become springboards for overcoming barriers to female political participation in countries traditionally reticent to accept a feminist agenda per se. Such has been the case in the Hispanic Caribbean, where class or anti-imperialist struggles have taken precedence over gender. This has sometimes been seen as hindering the development of a women's movement. Yet evidence tends to point in the opposite direction, with women having used these opportunities to create a "female space in the political landscape" and institutionalize women's participation in national politics (Lavrin 1993:16).

Since 1966, for example, all the governors of Dominican provinces have been women appointed by the president, and women have come to hold leadership roles in the popular movement. It has been seen as somewhat "noble" on the part of women to enter politics, an extension of their self-sacrificing nature as mothers, hard workers, and good administrators who exceed men in responsibility, honesty and organizational capacity. Gradually, the nation has begun to overcome the tradition of strong man caudillo rule associated with Trujillo and the crippling hold of personalism on Dominican political parties represented by Juan Bosch and Joaquin Balaguer, who dominated politics through the end of the 20th century.

3

The Trujillo Dictatorship, 1930-1961

The Trujillo dictatorship lasted between 1930-1961 and represented a period of unprecedented state terror and violence. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina created the most efficient police apparatus in Latin America utilizing a huge network of informers called calies and a secret intelligence service known as the SIM (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar). He was despised by democratic leaders in Latin America and was behind the June 1960 attempt to kill President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela.. He was infamously known for the case of Jesús de Galíndez, a Spanish exile studying at Columbia University whose dissertation about the Trujillo regime cost him his life in 1956.

Like Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo ran the Dominican Republic as a family business and owned much of the country. He controlled every aspect of Dominican life -

radio, the mail, the press, airport arrivals and departures, who got passports and who didn't-and rose to power through the U.S.-supported National Guard. Under Trujllo, the Dominican Republic became a nation of sycophants. Adulation of the "Benefactor of the Country" took on unreal proportions. Exile communities flourished in New York and elsewhere. Every Dominican family had a victim of Trujillo in its closet.

The Mirabal Sisters

Ojo de Agua, the birthplace of the Mirabal sisters, is a small community near Salcedo in the heart of the rich agricultural valley of the Cibao in the Dominican Republic, where coffee, tobacco and plantains are still grown. The Mirabal were fairly prosperous and represented a provincial elite possessing some agricultural land and a dry goods store. The four daughters studied at a Catholic boarding school in the nearby town of La Vega.



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Patria, the eldest, was born February 27, 1924, Dominican independence day, which is why she was given her name. She was married at age 17 to Pedro González, a

farmer, with whom she had three children, the last named Fidel Raúl Ernesto in honor of the Cuban revolutionary leaders. Patria was the most traditional and religiously devout of the four sisters. Though never imprisoned for her political leanings, she saw both her husband and older son jailed. It was at her home on January 10, 1960, that the 14th of June Movement was formally established. It took its name in honor of the ill-fated invasion of Dominican exiles from Cuba on June 14, 1959, all of whom were caught and slaughtered by Trujillo. Patria and her husband and children are said to have made home made bombs on their kitchen table utilizing materials from firecrackers. She was 36 at the time of her death in 1960 (Arias 1992:4).

Following Patria in age was Bélgica Adela Mirabal, or Dédé as she was known, the most politically uninvolved of the sisters. In 1948, Dédé married to Jaime Fernández, a local businessman, with whom she had three sons. Though never jailed by Trujillo, Dédé was left to raise her nieces and nephews after her three sisters were killed. She still lives in the family home in Ojo de Agua, near a small plaza where the remains of the car that was thrown over the mountainside with her dead sisters inside, are still on display.

Maria Teresa was the youngest sister. Born in October 1935, she was 25 at the time of her death and had one daughter, Jacqueline. She married Leandro Guzman, an

engineer and an important leader of the 14th June Movement who managed to survive the

Trujillo dictatorship and still lives the Dominican Republic. Maria Teresa studied agron- omy at the University of Santo Domingo and was an active participant in the underground movement. She was jailed on two occasions with her sister, Minerva, in 1960. Her diary, discovered years after her death, revealed the close relationship she shared with Minerva, whom she greatly admired (Arias 1992:4).

Minerva, born in March 1927, was considered the "true" revolutionary leadership behind the 14th of June Movement (Aquino 1996; Galván 1982; Ferreras 1978). She

spoke out boldly against the dictatorship and was widely respected throughout the country for her courage. By the time of her death at age 33, Minerva had achieved national stature as a symbol of resistance. Overcoming her family's reluctance, Minerva enrolled in the

University of Santo Domingo in 1957, to study law. In 1955, at the age of 28, she married Manolo Tavares Justo, also a lawyer, with whom she had two children, Minou and Manolo, born in 1956 and 1959. Manolo Tavares Justo became the charismatic leader of the 14th June Movement and was killed in guerrilla warfare in December 1962 in the Dominican

Republic.

Dédé, the only sister to survive, became the surrogate mother to her many nieces and nephews. She faced the daunting task of raising them during the difficult period which followed Trujillo's assassination in the Dominican Republic. Popular elections brought the leftist leader Juan Bosch into power in 1962 to begin what could have ushered in a process of democratization in the country. However, he was allowed to govern only 7 months before the military forced him out of office and into exile.



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The growing chorus of voices clamoring for Juan Bosch's return sparked the Revolution of April 1965, led by liberal army officers. But the US was determined to prevent "another Cuba" from emerging in the Caribbean. In 1 965, over 40,000 OAS troops were dispatched to occupy the country to end the "Dominican Crisis", while elections were

being organized. Sensing his opportunity, Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's former puppet president, slipped back into the country, ostensibly to visit his sick mother. He was no doubt seen as an acceptable future candidate by the United States, which permitted his return from exile in New York.

Balaguer predictably won the 1965 elections. Dominicans still shudder when

recalling Balaguer's infamous "12 years" as president between 1966-1978, in which torture and disappearances were still carried out, lending continuity to the practices of the Trujillo regime.

Trujillo's Relationship to Women

Latin American novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa have often captured a dimension of the caudillo or Latin American dictator in relation to women: machismo as the necessary underpinning for the cult of the leader. Trujillo was no exception. In fact, he was probably the example par excellence of this tendency.

Personally vain, Trujillo's appetite for young women was legendary. Families in the Dominican Republic used to hide their daughters when Trujillo was visiting their areas, for if one of these girls was seen and caught the eye of the dictator, there was no way of refusing the invitations that were later delivered by messenger. Trujillo's long-suffering wife turned a blind eye to the many young women who were delivered to the National Palace on a weekly basis by "beauty scouts" or buscones, sent for this specific purpose into the countryside. The fate of these young women could be night with the Generalísimo and Benefactor of the Country, or a short period as his mistress, but they were invariably very young, often school girls.

Much has been written about the party to which the Mirabal family was invited at Trujillo's estate in San Cristóbal, his birthplace outside the capital. There was no possibility of "not going" when summoned to these social events. The Mirabal sisters were extremely attractive young women and still unmarried at the time, with the exception of Patria. Apparently, Minerva Mirabal had already caught Trujillo's eye and there may have been a seduction strategy in place in extending the invitation. While dancing with the dictator, Mirabal apparently rejected his advances by slapping him and the family was forced to beat a hasty retreat from the party.

This action represented a sheer calamity for the Mirabal family, who were subsequently harassed, imprisoned, and ostracized by their neighbors. No amount of formal apologies by Minerva's father sent in writing could undo the slight to the dictator's machismo. It marked a turning point. Vengeance took the form of long imprisonment for Minerva's father, who emerged a broken man and never regained his physical or mental health, dying shortly after his release. Minerva and her mother were also summoned to Santo Domingo and kept as virtual prisoners in a hotel until an audience was granted by the



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dictator, who again attempted to coerce Minerva into accepting his demands in return for her father's liberty.

Humiliation was another strategy used against Minerva to condition her gradu- ation from university. In 1953, Trujillo blocked her enrollment as a second year law student until she gave a public speech eulogizing the dictator. After graduating summa cum laude at the top of her class in 1957, Minerva found that she could not practice law because the authorities would not grant her license to practice. By this point, Santo Domingo's four hundred year old name had also been changed to Ciudad Trujillo by the dictator, who also commissioned large portraits of himself with the words "God and Trujillo" embossed upon them.

Thus the psychological war of fear, humiliation, abuse and sexual harassment became an arm of torture used by the Trujillo regime against women and their families, such as the Mirabais. As in colonial times when plantation owners considered it their privilege to take women at will, so too did strongmen caudillos such as Trujillo believe this to be an inherent right. It constituted a manifestation of their absolute power which no-one would dare question. Sexual politics thus crossed the threshold into the political realm.

Minerva Mirabal and Trujillo

Trujillo never doubted for a moment that Minerva-not her husband Manolo-was the brains behind the pro-Castro 14th June Movement (Aquino 1996). The head of Trujillo's much feared secret police, Johnny Abbes once commented, " Minerva Mirabal was the one who had taken the seed of sedition to her family and(her husband Manuel) Tavarez Justo... (she was) sick with radical Leftism, which, spreading during that time, drove her to her death and took her family to tragedy."

Trujillo held a special grudge against Minerva Mirabal and reduced her family to financial ruin as he had done with countless other opposition families (Vega 1986d). As a family in disfavor with the regime, the Mirabais were shunned and blacklisted. An innocent conversation with Minerva could mean being brought in and tortured by SIM agents, who circulated around the country in black Volkswagen bugs called "cepillos," the mere sight of which struck terror in the hearts of the Dominicans. The most minute incidents were overheard and reported. When a traveling car salesman praised a certain model by saying that Trujillo owned one, Minerva retorted that that was all the more reason not to buy one. This was reported. On another occasion, her refusal to toast to Trujillo's health was also reported by informers (Aquino 1996).

What began as Minerva's refusal to succumb to Trujillo's advances became a relentless need to humiliate a political opponent. In the course of the 1950's underground anti-Trujillo movements began to proliferate. Opposing the dictator was dangerous business, as whomever was caught was imprisoned, tortured or brutally killed. Minerva was the first of the sisters to become involved in the underground movement to overthrow the government. She became a friend of Pericles Franco Ornes, the founder of the Popular Socialist Party. He was a known anti-Trujillista and was jailed several times for his political activities. Other influences on Minerva's growing anti-Trujillo sentiment included leftist



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literature and illegally intercepted radio stations from Cuba and Venezuela that objectively discussed the political situation in the Dominican Republic.

The Cuban Revolution and the 14th of June Movement

1959 marked a watershed in Caribbean politics due to the triumph Cuban Revolu- tion. After years of believing that Trujillo could never be toppled, that possibility now seemed within reach. "Educated and well-positioned youths," wrote Diederich, "shamed and chagrined by their parents' nauseating surrender to Trujillo, had quietly begun to rebel, even as in Cuba Fidel Castro came out of the mountains to give them an example (Diederich 1 978:34)." The movement brought together middle and upper class youth and professionals who now believed they could replicate the Cuban experience by emulating Fidel. Minerva, Maria Teresa, Patria and their husbands stood at the center of the gathering storm.

Just days after Castro's triumphant march into Havana, the idea of launching a national resistance movement to Trujillo was proposed at a lunch attended by Minerva and Maria Teresa. On January 6, 1959, Maria Teresa, Minerva and their husbands excitedly discussed the turn of events at the home of Yuyo D'Alessandro and his wife Josefina Ricart. "If in Cuba it has been possible to bring down the dictatorship, then in our country, with so many anti-Trujillo youth, we can do the same," Minerva was reported to have argued (Aquino 1996: 107). A plan of action was quickly formulated by those present, including Josefina Ricart, whose sister, Octavia Ricart, (though not present), was married to none other than Ramfis Trujillo, son of the dictator. Maria Teresa, Minerva, their husbands, and a few others subsequently traveled throughout the country organizing revolutionary cells and locating sites for arm airdrops.

A plot was devised to blow up Trujillo at a cattle fair on January 21, 1960. But just one day before the scheduled assassination, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) began a massive roundup of June 14 supporters, among them the Mirabal sisters and their husbands. Wrote one observer:

The movement was the biggest threat ever to the regime and was particularly disconcerting to Trujillo because of its size and the identity of the participants. The list of those arrested read like a Dominican Who's Who. Most were sons and daughters of middle and upper class families, many from prominent Trujillista homes (Diederich 1978: 35).

Massive arrests and torture took place, prompting increasing repudiation of Tru- jillo by all sectors of Dominican society and strong protests from the Catholic Church. Trujillo broke with his old ally, the Catholic Church, after the Pastoral Letter of January 1960, in which the bishops denounced the dictatorship. The attempt on Venezuelan Presi- dent Betancourt's life also turned many countries against Trujillo, including his former ally the United States, which voted in favor of sanctions on August 6, 1960, at a conference in Costa Rica. The Organization of American States (OAS) condemned the actions of the



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Dominican government and sent representatives on a fact finding mission visiting the country's jails. Because of this, many female prisoners were freed by Trujillo's government, including Maria Teresa and Minerva Mirabal, but their husbands remained incarcer- ated. 7

Assassination of the Mirabal Sisters

Feeling betrayed by the United States as a staunch anti-communist ally and stunned by the magnitude of the 14th June Movement, Trujillo responded defensively. Unable to quell internal dissidence and slapped with OAS sanctions, Trujillo came to believe that the only way to "put a stop to it once and for" all was to eliminate the real source of his problems, the Mirabal sisters. This is the only way Trujillo seemed to explain to himself the continuing problems he was facing in the country, since most of the male leaders of the 14th June Movement were in prison.

Trujillo transferred Patria and Minerva's husbands to a jail in Puerto Plata on the north coast that required travelling over a solitary mountain range. Then, on November 2, 1960, while on a tour of the interior of the country, Trujillo publicly observed that he had only two problems left: the Catholic Church and the Mirabal sisters. This was interpreted as a death sentence for the Mirabal sisters by those who knew Trujillo. Many friends came to admonish them to be careful and begged them not to make the trip to visit their husbands in jail (Aquino 1966).

The Mirabal sisters were aware of the dangers they faced. But they had made two trips without incident, and were planning on renting a house and moving to Puerto Plata to be closer to their husbands.

November 25, 1960 was to be their last trip. After leaving Puerto Plata, Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa and their driver were overtaken by Trujillo agents on a deserted stretch of road, who ordered them to stop. Patria, seeing a truck approach, managed to

escape and run to the driver. She screamed to him that the calies were going to kill them and told him to contact the Mirabal family in Ojo de Agua. The terrified driver took off. The sisters and their driver were bludgeoned over the head and strangled. They were then put back in their jeep and pushed over a cliff.

News of "the accident" spread rapidly. Fingerprints where they had been strangled were still reportedly visible when their bodies were brought in to a hospital in Santiago for autopsy. No one doubted for a moment who the intellectual author of the crime was and popular indignation against the dictator spread like wildfire (Aquino 1966; Galván 1982; Valera 1984).

Consequences of the Mirabal Sisters9 Murders

Trujillo could not withstand the growing pressures against his regime, which intensified greatly after the Mirabal sisters' deaths. "The cowardly killing of three beautiful women in such a manner had greater effect on Dominicans than most of Trujillo's other crimes," noted one journalist:



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It did something to their machismo. They could never forgive Trujillo this crime. More than Trujillo's fight with the Church or the United States, the fact that he was being isolated by the world as a political leper, the Mirabais' murder tempered the resolution of the conspirators plotting his end (Diederich 1987:71-72).

Six months later Trujillo was assassinated by military leaders. Shortly thereafter, the Mirabal sisters' assassins were caught and made to stand trial. The American ambassa- dor, John Bartlow Martin, captured the significance ofthat trial for Dominicans in his book, Overtaken by Events: the Dominican Crisis from the Fall of Trujillo to the Civil War. "On Wednesday, (June 27, 1962), the long-awaited trial began of the men charged with murder- ing the Mirabal sisters, and for days Dominicans listened to radio and television sets (Martin 1966:165)." No less than thirty-five televised reports were aired of the trial of the seven SIM agents later sentenced to 20-30 years hard labor by the court (Galván 1982: 286).

Though brought to trial for the murders of the Mirabal sisters, Trujillo's henchmen escaped from jail during the 1965 Civil War and never served out their sentences. Yet a measure of poetic justice may have been achieved in an interesting turn of events under the leftist Partido de Liberación Dominicana (PLD) government elected in 1996.

Chosen for Vice President of the Dominican Republic was Jaime David Fernández Mirabal, son of the only surviving Mirabal sister, Dedé. Selected for Under Secretary of Foreign Relations was his cousin, Minou Tavares Mirabal, the only daughter of Minerva Mirabal, widely remembered as the "revolutionary" of the four sisters. Minou was born in 1956, and thus was only four at the time of her mother's death.

The Impact of the Mirabal Sisters on Women's Participation There was an extraordinary mobilization of women in the 1965 Dominican Crisis,

better known in the Dominican Republic as the Civil War. Women participated for the first time in significant numbers in the 14th June Movement headed by Minerva and her husband, inspired by the possibilities for change that the Cuban Revolution had awakened.

Yet there was not to be another Cuba. Manolo Tavares was tracked down and killed by government troops along with many of his guerrilla followers. The promise of revolutionary change was snuffed out by the 1965 US/OAS occupation of the Dominican Republic, placing Joaquín Balaguer back in power. As mentioned, Balaguer had been a close Trujillo collaborator and was officially president when Trujillo was killed. It was only in 1996 that Balaguer finally left power, by this time ninety years old and nearly blind. Thus there was never any true break with Trujillismo in the Dominican Republic, impeding a much needed catharsis with the past.

The enduring significance of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic is that they have legitimized women's political participation not as "mothers of the disappeared" or widows, but as political activists in their own right. Indeed, it might be argued that their lives eloquently portray the experience of a new generation of young, middle class, university-educated Latin American women coming of age during the turbulent years of the 1950's through 1970's, who fervently believed in the possibility of social change. The



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Cuban Revolution provided a critical example that it could be done and represented an inspirational model.

The Dominican national poet, Pedro Mir, eulogized the Mirabal sisters in his poem, "Ode to the Butterflies:"

When I heard the three Mirabal sisters had fallen I said to myself: established society has dies...

Cuando supe que habían caído las tres hermanas Mirabal Me dije: la sociedad establecida ha muerto.

The Legacy Today

Today in the Dominican Republic, the Mirabal sisters have become national icons. In the small town of Conuco, the last house they lived in has been converted into a museum with memorabilia of their lives, photographs and clothes of the era. Alongside Patria's teacup collection, Minerva's paintings and Maria Teresa's embroidery are the artifacts of the sisters' murder: the shoes, handbags and papers, as well as the long braid of hair which Dédé cut from Maria Teresa's head at the morgue. School children regularly visit the house and its surrounding gardens, in which commemorative busts to each of the three Mirabal sisters have been placed. Dédé has dedicated her life to preserving the memory of her slain sisters, setting up the Mirabal Sisters Foundation.

On November 25, 2000, forty years after their death, the remains of Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, and those of Minerva's husband Manolo, were moved to the museum grounds in a ceremony attended by important personages of Dominican life, including President Leonel Fernández.. By presidential decree, the Museum was officially declared an extension of the National Pantheon of Heroes located in Santo Domingo, where the founding fathers of the country are buried.

Within the past two decades, the Mirabal sisters have been fully vindicated for their historical actions and have become important role models for citizens of the Domini- can Republic. The Mirabal sisters have received numerous tributes and memorials posthu- mously for their struggle against one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the Caribbean. Dominican textbooks are no doubt making the necessary changes for teaching history to young students to incorporate this new vision of historical events. Interestingly, the last name "Trujillo" has vanished into oblivion from the Dominican Republic, without leaving so much as a trace.

Foreign tourists who now arrive by the millions to the Dominican Republic have yet to begin to make the trek inland to the Mirabal Museum over the northern mountain ranges where the Mirabal sisters were killed, from their luxurious beach resorts on the north coast. Yet the contrast could not be greater: a country until the 1960's associated with the repression and iron fisted rule of a cruel Dominican tyrant, now transformed into a first class destination for world tourism and a country on its way to the consolidation of democratic rule. Repression as previously practiced is a thing of the past and the military stays out of politics.



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What role would the Mirabal sisters have played in this new context, had they survived? What lingering significance does the story of their lives hold for contemporary Dominicans? No doubt the recognition of their actions and place in history stands in lieu of what today most certainly would have been a U.N. -sponsored Truth Commission sent to the

country to restitute and dignify the many, many victims of the Trujllo dictatorship. Therein lies their particular significance to a nation which was never able to confront the crimes of its own past in the aftermath of Trujillismo, nor known truth or justice for victims. The Mirabal sisters to a certain extent symbolize this ersatz restitution.

Conclusions

The role of women in the struggle against dictatorship and military rule in Latin America in the post war period has not been fully recognized by scholars. Standard histories of the Dominican Republic have failed to assess the importance of such women as symbols of popular resistance, testimony to a long-standing tendency to overlook women's significant contributions to national life. The Mirabal sisters capture the story of a new generation of university-trained women in Latin America in the 1950's and 1960's deeply committed to social change. Foreshadowing later generations of Latin American women who contin- ued to oppose military regimes throughout the 1970's and 1980's, they also came to

symbolize one of the most important of women's human rights: the right to a life free of violence.

Notes

I . See Acosta Belén 1986 on Puerto Rican women. See Hernández Medina 1995, Mota 1975, Olivier, 1975 and Tancer 1973 on the history of Dominican women.

2 See Arias 1992, Aquino 1996, Ferrera 1976 and Gal van 1982 for biographical source material on the Mirabal sisters.

3 Joaquin Balaguer and Juan Bosch were each other's nemesis, occupying opposite ends of the political spec- trum and dominating Dominican politics until the close of the 20th century. Both were prolific writers and made an indelible mark on Dominican literature. While Balaguer was able to occupy the presidency again and again through 1996, even when virtually blind, Bosch was frustrated in his reiterative attempts to do so in 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994.

4 See Aquino 1995, Diederich 1966,Craswaller 1996 and the works by Bernardo Vega 1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1986d on the history of the Trujillo dictatorship. Vega offers and invaluable collection of historical documents and correspondence taken from the presidential archives. An August 24, 1954 CIA report matter-of- factly noted, "The Dominican Republic is a one-party state and is administered, in substantial effect, as the private estate of the Trujillo family." CIA August 21, 1954:5

5 In 1956 Galindez was kidnapped in New York City and flown to Santo Domingo by an American pilot, who was also killed.

6 General Johnny Abbes Garcia, Trujillo y Yo, cited in www.learntoequestion.com

7 Aquino 1996: 125, 128. Also imprisoned along with Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal in the January 1960 roundup of the 14th of June Movement members were Sina Cabral, Miriam Morales of Puerto Plata, Dulce Tejada and Ásela Morel of Santiago and Fe Ortega of Salcedo, all professional women: doctors, lawyers and engineers.



183

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Valera Benítez, Rafael. Complot desvelado. Santo Domingo: Fundación Testimonio, 1984

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www.learntoequestion.com



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