Distasteful Dictator

As he gets older, Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo has not got any more adroit in his rough ways. His misdeeds have only become more conspicuous. Last week Trujillo angrily demanded the removal of a U.S. embassy officer for "conveying certain material derogatory to the Dominican Republic to a British newspaperman." The U.S., as a sign of Washington's distaste for Trujillo, seized the occasion to recall Ambassador Joseph Farland for an indefinite time. And as separate evidences of their displeasure with the dictator's methods, Colombia and Peru last week severed diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic.

The increasing international disgust at Trujillo's conduct could be understood by the news from Greece and Mexico. In Athens, 46 Greeks got out of a plane overjoyed to be back from Trujilloland. They had been recruited nine months ago by the promise of jobs at salaries ranging between $300 and $600 a month--big money in Greece. Once they got to the Dominican Republic, they were ordered to draw uniforms and arms as members of Trujillo's foreign legion. When they refused, they were thrown naked into communal and solitary cells at La Victoria prison outside Ciudad Trujillo. They ate slop, were beaten unconscious with clubs and wire whips, scalded with boiling water. Treatment got better when they agreed to try soldiering, but after two months they still refused to enlist and were tossed back into jail. The Greek embassy in Washington finally negotiated their freedom.

In Mexico, Trujillo's hoods caught up with a Spaniard named Jose Almoina Mateos, who had been the dictator's private secretary from 1945 to 1947. Though Almoina had written a slavishly pro-Trujillo book called I Was Trujillo's Secretary, he was also the author of an anonymous and bitter denunciation of the dictator called Satrap in the Caribbean. One morning last week, as Almoina walked to work in Mexico City, a green 1958 Ford ran him down. Then, just to be sure, one of the occupants of the car ran back and pumped three slugs from a .38-caliber automatic into him. As stretcher men carried Almoina into the hospital, he cried out: "Trujillo's gunmen did this." He died the next day.

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