Rafael Trujillo

Who was Rafael Trujillo?

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, nicknamed El Jefe, ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, ruling for the rest of the time as an unelected military strongman under figurehead presidents. His 30 years in power, to Dominicans known as the Trujillo Era, is considered one of the bloodiest eras ever in the Americas, as well as a time of a classic personality cult, when monuments to Trujillo were in abundance. It has been estimated that Trujillo's tyrannical rule was responsible for the death of more than 50,000 people, including 20,000 to 30,000 in the infamous Parsley Massacre.

The Trujillo tyranny unfolded in a Latin American environment that was particularly fertile in dictatorial regimes. In the countries of the Caribbean basin alone, his dictatorship was contemporaneous, in whole or in part, with those of Machado and Batista in Cuba, the two Somozas in Nicaragua, Ubico and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Hernández Martínez in Salvador, Carías Andino in Honduras, Juan Vicente Gómez and Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, and François Duvalier in Haiti. But in retrospect, the Trujillo dictatorship has been characterized as more naked, more achieved, and more brutal than those that rose and fell around it.