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"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.
All the while, public outrage mounts. In the north coast town of Puerto Plata last week, news spread that two former Trujillo secret police agents were about to flee to Haiti aboard a Dominican freighter. Before long an angry crowd had gathered at the dock, hurling stones at the ship, screaming for the pair to be handed over. An army unit arrived, took the men from the ship to the local garrison. The mob followed, still protesting, and the soldiers reacted in familiar Dominican fashion—a burst of machine-gun fire killed one man and wounded three. Next day, in the city of Santiago, another crowd shouting "The assassins must be punished!" was dispersed by bullets, with two wounded. In Santo Domingo, the capital, night raiders revenged themselves by shooting from speeding cars at policemen, killing one and wounding two.
But no one thought that would be revenge enough.