On November 25, 1960, three sisters – Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal – were reportedly killed in a “car accident”. Reports said that a car they were riding in plunged over a cliff in the Dominican Republic.
At least that was the story of El Caribe, a newspaper sanctioned by the government of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who had taken control of the island nation in a military coup 30 years earlier. In fact, the Mirabal sisters were active members of the growing underground resistance against the Trujillo regime, and everyone knew their deaths were no accidents.
Growing up in the Trujillo dictatorship
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, c. 1960.
Joseph Scherschel / LIFE Photo Collection / Getty Images
As middle-class women, wives and mothers, the Mirabal sisters did not appear to be obvious revolutionaries. Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, along with their sister Dedé, grew up in the town of Ojo de Agua, in the province of Salcedo, where their parents owned and operated a thriving farm, as well as a coffee mill and general store. .
After attending Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, a Catholic boarding school in the town of La Vega, Minerva headed to the University of Santo Domingo, the capital, to study law. By this time, she had become increasingly aware of the injustices that existed in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s time.
Known as “El Jefe” (“the boss”) or “el Chivo” (“the goat”), Trujillo was the commander-in-chief of the army before taking power in 1930. Prosperity, modernization and the stability that his regime brought the country came at a high price: Trujillo took over the country’s economy, including the production of products such as salt, meat, tobacco and rice, and channeled the profits to his own family and supporters. Civil and political liberties disappeared and only one political party, the Dominican Party, was allowed to exist.
Trujillo’s formidable secret police rooted out the dissidents, using tactics of intimidation, imprisonment, torture, kidnapping and rape of women, and murder. His regime would ultimately be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including the massacre of around 20,000 Haitians living near the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1937.
“There was enormous danger during this time,” says Elizabeth Manley, associate professor of history at Xavier University in Louisiana and author of The Paternalism Paradox: Women and Authoritarian Politics in the Dominican Republic (2017). “People were missing, imprisoned and killed.”
Join the resistance
Portrait of Minerva Mirabal from Dominican money.
Johan 10 / Getty Images
Resistance was still growing against the regime, both among the groups of Dominicans exiled abroad and at home. The majority of those involved were men, but many women also joined the movement, including the Mirabal sisters. By the end of 1949, Minerva had been arrested for suspected opposition activities; she also allegedly angered Trujillo by rejecting his sexual advances. At the University of Santo Domingo, she met her fellow activist Manolo Tavárez Justo, and they married in 1955.
Minerva and her husband became leaders of the resistance, and Patria, María Teresa and their husbands soon joined them. In the early 1960s, they helped form the June 14 Movement, named for the date of a failed insurgency against Trujillo led by a group of exiled Dominicans with support from the Cuban government the previous year. Shortly after the movement was officially organized, Trujillo began mass arrests of resistance fighters, including sisters and their husbands, but later released female prisoners as a supposed gesture of clemency.
After the attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt on orders from Trujillo in June, the Organization of American States (OAS) severed diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic and imposed sanctions, and the United States withdrew its regime support. Trujillo was also losing ground at home, with the powerful church condemning his government’s actions.
In this context, the Mirabal sisters went on November 25, 1960 to visit their husbands in prison in Puerto Plata. On the way back, Trujillo’s henchmen stopped their car along a mountain road and killed their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, before kidnapping the sisters at gunpoint, to beat them and strangle them. The assassins then returned the four bodies to the car and pushed it over a cliff to make it look like an accident.
Impact of the murders of the Mirabal sisters
The Butterflies, as they were called the Mirabals, instantly became martyrs of the revolutionary cause, helping to solidify resistance in Trujillo both at home and abroad.
“Killing women… was just beyond what people could take, and it made a lot of people become more active in the movement,” Manley says. Trujillo had presented himself as a champion of women and mothers, granting full suffrage to women in 1942 and sending one of the first female delegates (of any country) to the United Nations in 1945. “He has bragged about these things and said they were an item. of its progressivism, ”says Manley. “So this inability to protect women and [going] against this kind of maternal policy was a blow.
On May 30, 1961, seven assassins (including former members of the armed forces) ambushed the dictator’s car along a coastal road and killed him. Although Trujillo’s death did not immediately bring democracy to the Dominican Republic – his successor, Joaquin Balaguer, continued the authoritarian tradition until the late 1970s – the country has not returned to the level of brutal repression suffered during his reign.
Dedé Mirabal, who largely maintained his distance from the resistance, survived the Trujillo regime and continued to raise the children of his sisters, as well as his own. Minerva’s daughter, Minou Tavárez Mirabal, became Congresswoman and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, while Dedé’s son, Jaime David Fernández Mirabal, served as Vice President of the Dominican Republic (1996-2000).
The fame of the Mirabal sisters, fueled by the historical novel by Julia Alvarez In the age of butterflies (1994), widespread worldwide. In 1999, the United Nations designated November 25, the anniversary of their deaths, as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Dedé Mirabal also ensured the legacy of his sisters by running a museum in their childhood home, the Casa Museo Hermanas Mirabal. She died in 2014, at the age of 88.
