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At one point, in 1869, the hapless Dominicans actually sought annexation by the U.S. and won support from President Ulysses S. Grant. Congress refused on the grounds that it would violate the country's sovereignty. In 1916 the U.S. did the next best thing?it sent in the marines after a bloody series of revolts. Unlike the intervention in Haiti, there were no puppet Presidents. In the words of the U.S. Navy's official order, it was "military occupation . . . military government . . . military law." The occupation lasted eight years, and along with their public works the marines created a national police to keep peace after their departure. The police became the instrument for one more dictator: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, an ambitious colonel who rigged elections in 1930 and ruled the country for 31 deadening years.
Trujillo's favorite titles were "Benefactor of the Fatherland," "Chief Protector of the Working Class," "Genius of Peace." In a grim way, there was something to the brags. He imposed a rare order on his powder-keg country, built efficient hospitals, crisscrossed the country with good roads, built housing projects for his 2,900,000 people, improved the water supply and increased literacy. Business prospered, and so did Trujillo?to the tune of an estimated $800 million fortune. He and his family owned 65% of the country's sugar production, twelve of its 16 sugar mills, 35% of its arable land. Home was a dozen palaces and ranches dotted around the country, each with a full staff of servants who faithfully prepared every meal every day in case the Benefactor stopped by.
Thousands of political opponents died in his secret police dungeons, mysterious "auto accidents" and "suicides." There were electric chairs for slow electrocution, another many-armed electrical device attached by tiny screws inserted into the skull, a rubber collar that could be tightened to sever a man's head, plus nail extractors, scissors for castration, leather-thonged whips and small rubber hammers. P.A. systems in the torture rooms carried every blood-curdling scream to other prisoners waiting their turn. If Trujillo favored variety, he also favored volume. One October night in 1937, he ordered his army to eliminate all Haitian squatters in the Dominican Republic. In a 36-hour bloodbath, some 15,000 men, women and children were massacred.
Trujillo's end came in 1961 when four gunmen intercepted his car on a lonely road outside the capital and riddled him with shotgun and pistol fire. In the four years since, the Dominican Republic has suffered four coups and five changes of government, trying to find its way out of the political vacuum created by Trujillo's death. Democracy is still hardly more than a word in a land that has never known any law save force.