Anti-Haitian Rhetoric, Oct 1937 Massacre 20,000 Haitians Dominican Republic, Dictator Rafael Trujillo

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Sun Oct 6, 2024, 08:17 PM - Edit history (1)

'Caribbean Matters: Trump’s anti-Haitian rhetoric evokes 1937 massacre,' Daily Kos, Oct. 5, 2024. Ed. - The 1937 Parsley Massacre, in Dajabon, Dominican Republic was ordered by then- Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The massacre killed an estimated 20,000 Haitians.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been ramping up their violent and racist rhetoric against Haitian Americans and the nation of Haiti, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as Trump sounds more and more like the dictators he admires and seeks to emulate.

He is often mentioned in connection with past and present fascist European leaders like Adolf Hitler and Viktor Orban, but when it comes to sheer mendacity and obsession with race, Trump resembles a historic figure much closer to home: Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.

In last week’s Caribbean Matters, we examined a shared history between the U.S. and Haiti. But we should also be aware of a horrific episode at the hands of a U.S.-backed dictator who used racism and scapegoating to murder innocents.
* This week is the anniversary of the Trujillo-ordered October 1937 slaughter of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, which has been called “The Parsley Massacre.”

Violent rhetoric targeting immigrants has consequences.

We see it now in the threats against Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, whose members are living in fear after Trump and Vance amplified hoaxes and lies about them stealing and eating domestic pets. Let us never forget that this kind of rhetoric has frequently escalated into genocides. While most readers are probably familiar with genocides that have taken place in Europe or in the U.S. historically against Native Americans, rarely is the horrific story of what happened in the Dominican Republic a part of our school curricula...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/5/2273740/-Caribbean-Matters-Trump-s-anti-Haitian-rhetoric-evokes-1937-massacre
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- Dominican Republic, wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_Republic
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- Rafael Trujillo, Central American dictator, Dominican Republic, ruled 1930-1961, assassinated. Brutal Cult of Personality, instinct for power, desire for money. State oppression, terrorism, security force. Parsley Massacre Oct. 1937 of Haitian Population, est. 20,000 killed; Mirabal Sisters, dissidents.
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Wiki. Ed - Rafael Trujillo was a Dominican military commander and dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from Aug. 1930 until his assassination in May 1961. He served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, ruling for the rest of his life as an unelected military strongman under figurehead presidents. His rule of 31 years, known to Dominicans as the Trujillo Era, was one of the longest for a non-royal leader in the world, and centered around a personality cult of the ruling family.
It was also one of the most brutal; Trujillo's security forces, including the infamous SIM, were responsible for perhaps as many as 50,000 murders. These included between 12,000 and 30,000 Haitians in the infamous Parsley massacre in 1937, which continues to affect Dominican-Haitian relations to this day...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo

- (6 mins, 2023). - The Parsley Massacre, Trujillo, Haiti and A Dark Chapter. The massacre of 20,000 Haitians in Dajabon, Dominican Republic began on October 2, 1937.

[appalachiablue]

1. Rafael Trujillo: Intimidation and Assassination in the Dominican Republic

Biographics (2022, 24 mins).

[Judi Lynn]

2. Isn't it sad that US schools have not considered it worth acknowledging atrocities like this

coming from countries with leaders who were fully supported by the US government officially throughout the history of US policy in the Western Hemisphere?

The barbarity, cruelty, and evil behind this war upon Haitians by Trujillo couldn't be more horrendous.

Thank you, so much, for supplying a light to critically important information which was deliberately withheld from students' basic understanding of history known by everyone else in the Western Hemisphere south of the US Souther Border.

Thank you, again, appalachiablue.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Follow-up info. concerning how great Trujillo was among his own citizens from Time Magazine, 1962

Last edited Tue Oct 8, 2024, 10:29 AM - Edit history (1)

(Graphic contents follow, sadly)

TIME
April 13, 1962 12:00 AM GMT-5

In the 4½ months since the last of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s family departed, thousands of Dominicans previously silenced by terror have come forward to describe the crimes of the dead dictator’s secret police, his army and personal goon squads. Last week Dominican Attorney General Eduardo Antonio Garcia Vasquez, who investigated the stories, reported a preliminary toll: known murders plus those missing and presumed dead come to 5,700 in the past five years. The total for the Trujillo regime’s full 31 years may run to the tens of thousands.

Justice has been slow in coming to the Dominican Republic. Of the several thousand members of Trujillo’s dread S.I.M. (Military Intelligence Service), only a handful are under arrest; not one has been tried. The rest have either been permitted to slip into exile or are openly walking the streets; some are still on active duty.

The reason is not hard to find. Though President Rafael Donnelly’s seven-man Council of State has been installed to guide the country toward democracy, it operates under a shaky truce with the still powerful military that remains from Trujillo’s time. In plain language the council is afraid to anger the trigger-happy officers by searching out the killers in their ranks. Says an official of the council: “Lots of military men are implicated. You know where we would end up if we pressed too hard.”

Nine & Forty. The civilian council may find itself forced to act before long as more and more of the Trujillos’ grisly secrets are put before the public. Attorney General Garcia Vasquez reports that two of the busiest murder factories were located in the capital’s environs—”La Carenta” (The Forty), so-called because it was on 40th Street in Santo Domingo, and “Kilometer Nine,” beside a highway nine kilometers east of the capital. Both were run by the S.I.M., and both were equipped with relatively unsophisticated but highly effective torture instruments. One device was an electric chair used both for shocking and for slow electrocution.

Survivors know it was slow because the P.A. system blared the victims’ screams throughout the cell blocks. A variant was the Pulpo (Octopus), a many-armed electrical device attached by means of small screws inserted into the skull. Trujillo’s men also employed a rubber “collar” that could be tightened enough to sever a man’s head, an 18-in. electrified rod (“the Cane”) for shocking the genitals, nail extractors, leather-thonged whips, small rubber hammers, scissors for castration.

“Burned Alive.” Sometimes the dictator himself took a hand in the proceedings. Carlos M. Nolasco, a former sergeant implicated in a 1959 air force conspiracy, tells of Trujillo’s arriving one night at Nine to deal with eight officers arrested after the plot was broken. Says Nolasco: “The tyrant ordered the compromised officers burned alive.” Other survivors tell of a ferocious murder binge immediately after Trujillo’s assassination by a band of gunmen last May. Literally scores of people were horribly tortured and killed. Among the victims: General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in-law of Trujillo and secretary of the armed forces, who was suspected of playing a role in the plot. S.I.M. agents took the general to Nine, where he was left for days with his eyelids stitched to his eyebrows; he was then beaten with baseball bats, drenched with acid, exposed to swarms of angry ants, shocked repeatedly in the electric chair, and finally put out of his misery with 56 submachinegun slugs.

What eventually happened to the bodies is still largely a mystery. Only a few were handed back to relatives. The majority, investigators believe, were tossed to sharks, or were stuffed into an incinerator at nearby San Isidro airbase. Almost every day, pathetic appeals are made asking information about the disappearance of a brother, a sister, a parent. The air force has repeatedly refused the attorney general permission to look into the incinerator.

More:
https://time.com/archive/6623424/dominican-republic-chambers-of-horror/

[Judi Lynn]

4. Outstanding video, 1 yr. old, "How The World Destroyed Haiti"