"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 Tomás 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 Cristóbal 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 Héctor, 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 José Trujillo Valdez.