End of the Dictator

"I heard machine-gun fire right behind us," said Dominican Republic Army Captain Zacarias de la Cruz from a hospital bed last week. "The rear window was shattered. The bullets had wounded Generalissimo Trujillo. We carried three machine guns in the car at all times, but the generalissimo had no chance to use any of them because he was too badly wounded. As soon as I stopped the car. the generalissimo jumped out, firing his revolver. Blood was spurting from his back. Seven men with machine guns and pistols piled out of the other car. There was a burst of gunfire, and the generalissimo fell face down on the pavement."

Model Strongman. In the 31st year of the Era of Trujillo, Generalissimo Doctor Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. 69, Benefactor of the Fatherland, Rebuilder of the Financial Independence of the Republic, Father of the New Fatherland, Chief Protector of the Dominican Working Class, Genius of Peace, was gone, his body, grotesquely disfigured by 27 bullet wounds, stuffed in the trunk of the soon-to-be-abandoned car belonging to a disgruntled general named Juan Tomas Diaz. Outlived among the world's strongmen by Portugal's milder Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Trujillo had been the model for every tinpot, medal-jingling dictator that ever rifled a Latin American treasury. Even as he died, he was on a typical Trujillo mission--a midnight meeting with one of his many mistresses, Moni Sanchez, at his San Cristobal farm, 15 miles from Ciudad Trujillo.

The only thing out of keeping about Trujillo's death was the aftermath. Instead of serving as a signal for revolution to sweep down the hills into the capital, the assassination was followed by stupefied silence among his 2,900,000 subjects. General Diaz, the assassin, may have hoped in some vague way that without the strongman, the Trujillo regime would crumble. But Diaz' main motive was apparently revenge, not revolution. A favorite of Trujillo's brother Hector, he had fallen into disgrace when some of his relatives were implicated last year in a plot against Trujillo. Diaz joined a group of three civilians and four other former Trujillo tigers who were ready to turn against the man with the whip.

Marquis or Postal Clerk? They had no elaborate plans, but simply awaited the opportunity. Last week, tipped off that The Benefactor was on his way to see his mistress, they caught up with him on the road to San Cristobal, the town where it all began 69 years ago.

Though official eulogists proclaimed that "one of his ancestors was a distinguished Spanish army officer, and another was a French marquis," Rafael Leonidas Trujillo actually was one of eleven children of an aimless, part-Negro postal clerk named Jose Trujillo Valdez.

He grew up in grinding poverty, a wiry, vicious brawler in his sugar-cane town of San Cristobal. Opportunity arrived with the U.S. Marines, who landed in 1916 to watch over customs collections and bond payments, and who used Trujillo as an informer and procurer of obliging ladies. Trujillo's idol was a trigger-happy captain named C. F. Merkle, whose idea of order was shooting "troublemakers." Merkle was finally arrested, and committed suicide before he could be tried. But Trujillo went on to become boss of the Dominican armed forces, a position he used to make himself President in 1930. "God & Trujillo." No absolute ruler--not even France's Sun King--was more foppishly vain. Applying his own version of droit du seigneur, Trujillo took three wives, countless mistresses. Scattered about his peanut-sized fief were twelve palaces and ranches at which a full staff of servants faithfully prepared every meal every day just in case the master dropped in. At each mansion, Trujillo kept a full wardrobe of uniforms complete with white-plumed fore-and-aft hats.

Busts of Trujillo adorned every park; plaques proclaiming that "in this house, Trujillo is boss" dangled from the wall of every shop. Along the roadside, signs proclaimed "Thank You, Trujillo," and neon beacons flashed the message "God and Trujillo." No Dominican dared oppose, or even snicker.

Object Lesson. For Trujillo understood the power of terror. Thousands of opponents perished quietly in SIM secret-police dungeons, in spectacular "auto accidents" and incredible "suicides." Trujillo's avenging arm reached even to the U.S. in the famed 1956 kidnap-murder of Columbia University Lecturer Jesus de Galindez, a bitter Trujillo critic and onetime tutor of the dictator's children. The peak of his terror was reached one October night in 1937, when Trujillo issued instructions to eliminate Haitian squatters along the northwest border. Working nonstop for 36 hours, Trujillo's highly efficient army butchered a reported 15,000 men, women and children.

Looking the Other Way. Trujillo horrified many people in the U.S. and Latin America. But he did not rule by terror alone. He had a natural talent for autocratic management. Starting with the 1930 hurricane that destroyed 70% of the capital, Trujillo imposed a rigidly controlled economy that rebuilt the city in short order. When he took power, the republic was burdened by a $20 million unpaid--and unpayable--debt. Trujillo decreed such heavy taxes that the debt was paid off in 17 years.

As the treasury began to fill, Trujillo built schools and boasted that he had raised the literacy rate from 30% to 96% during his regime. Efficient hospitals were built; good roads (with military check points every few miles) crisscrossed the island to carry a rich sugar and coffee harvest to market. Trujillo spent millions on self-glorifying publicity (hiring such U.S. agents as F.D.R.'s Attorney General Homer Cummings and F.D.R. Jr. himself), and won such influential champions as U.S. Democratic Senators James O. Eastland and Allen Ellender, who once said, "I wish there were a Trujillo in every country of South and Central America." Other apologists, ignoring Trujillo's terror, pointed to the Dominican Republic's sharply improved per-capita yearly income ($225, about average for Latin America). But the average did not reflect the disproportionate share of the wealth acquired by the ubiquitous Trujillo family through The Benefactor's standard 10% cut on all public-works contracts, his heavy interests in sugar, textiles, cattle, insurance, and his monopolies of salt, cigarettes, lumber, matches, milk and peanut oil. When the coffin lid shut on Trujillo's business career last week, he was worth an estimated $800 million. Feeding the Chaos. The man who will reap the whirlwind, rushing home from Paris in an Air France jet chartered for $28,000, was Rafael Leonidas ("Ramfis")

Trujillo Jr., 32, one of Trujillo's four acknowledged offspring. A polo-loving playboy, his main claim to fame until now was flunking out of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth while AWOL in pursuit (despite a wife and six children) of Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor (to whom he gave a $5,500 Mercedes-Benz, a $17,000 chinchilla coat). Commissioned by Daddy as an army colonel at the age of three and promoted to brigadier general at nine, Ramfis has little in his record to suggest the tenacity and talent needed to cope with the chaos he has inherited.

Beneath the fac,ade of order, the Dominican Republic left by Trujillo is a political vacuum, and its economy is near collapse. As he grew older, Trujillo embarked on grandiose projects of no merit, lost $35 million on an international fair that flopped in 1956, drained away another $50 million for arms in the space of two years. Trujillo compounded his growing troubles by a foolish and abortive plot to assassinate Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt in Caracas last June. As a result, Trujillo was ostracized by all the other nations of the hemisphere.

Increasingly, his raw nerves lay close to the surface. In fits of blind rage, he slapped his puppet President Joaquin Balaguer, kicked palace functionaries in the groin, spat on his assistants. But he still had an instinct for survival. Aware that the main threat of internal revolution lay within the literate middle class, he kept up the pressure of arrest and harassment to prevent organized opposition. He even took on the Roman Catholic Church, which at last went into open opposition.

As the pressure of the U.S. and Latin American nations hardened against him, Trujillo last year mischievously began a defiant courtship with Moscow. He let leftists take over a radio station and a newspaper, sent emissaries behind the

Iron Curtain, negotiated a nonaggression pact with Fidel Castro. He promised to let a Fidelista political party organize and sent flunkies around the country making leftist speeches. Son Ramfis faces the certainty that of all Dominican opposition factions, the Communists and the Castroites are best organized to fill the power vacuum left by his father's death.

And vacuum there will be. After years of autocracy, the Dominican Republic was a stunned place. Thousands of Dominicans, many of them wailing hysterically, tried to jam into the tiny crypt of the church in San Cristobal, where Trujillo's closed coffin was laid to rest. Ramfis ordered them out, then, with eyes blazing, vowed at his father's tomb to kill every one of the opposition. After the funeral, 1,000 suspected opponents of the regime were rounded up. Diaz' son was reported killed, and his wife held for torture; the government announced the death of one assassin, the capture of three others.

Into the Vacuum. In one sense, Trujillo's death had cleared the air. Many Latin American nations had been unwilling to move against Castro so long as Trujillo's longer-lasting dictatorship continued unchecked and uncondemned. But in the chaotic aftermath, there was danger of a bloodbath instituted by Trujillo's unproved heirs, or the counterdanger of a revolt in which a Castro might emerge triumphant. Washington sounded out members of the Organization of American States on the possibility of joint action to maintain order inside the Dominican Republic, got firm assent from key nations. As the threat of Ramfis Trujillo's reprisals grew stronger at week's end, the U.S. served notice that it wanted the era of terror ended. State Department Press Officer Lincoln White reported that "unwarranted repression" was being employed in Ciudad Trujillo "against anyone who is felt to be not loyal to the regime." Pointedly, he opened the possibility that U.S. forces, already gathering in the Caribbean, might move in to protect U.S. lives "should this situation erupt."

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