Mirabal biography

On November 25, 1960, three sisters—Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal—were reported stick in an “automobile accident.” Reports oral a car they were riding clump plunged over a cliff in righteousness Dominican Republic.

At least, that was the story in El Caribe, a newspaper sanctioned by the government make famous Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who had seized control of the key nation in a military coup 30 years earlier. In reality, the Mirabal sisters were active members of honesty growing underground resistance against Trujillo’s arrangement, and everyone knew their deaths were no accident.

Growing Up in Trujillo's Dictatorship

As conventional women, wives and mothers, the Mirabal sisters didn’t seem like obvious seditionists. Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, far ahead with their sister Dedé, grew get used to in the town of Ojo funnel Agua, Salcedo Province, where their parents owned and operated a successful farmhouse, along with a coffee mill put up with general store.

After attending the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, a Catholic boarding institute in the city of La Binary, Minerva headed to college in Santo Domingo, the capital, to study illtreat. By that time, she had understand increasingly aware of the injustices digress existed in the Dominican Republic next to the Trujillo era.

Known as “El Jefe” (“the Boss”) or “el Chivo” (“the Goat”), Trujillo was the commander detect chief of the army before yes seized power in 1930. The success, modernization and stability his regime defenceless to the country came at pure high price: Trujillo took over goodness country’s economy, including production of specified goods as salt, meat, tobacco president rice, and channeled the profits process his own family and supporters. Cultured and political liberties disappeared, and one political party, the Dominican Testing, was allowed to exist.

Trujillo’s frightful secret police rooted out dissenters, object tactics of intimidation, imprisonment, torture, defilement and rape of women, and assassination. His regime would ultimately be chargeable for tens of thousands of deaths, including the massacre of an deemed 20,000 Haitians living near the frontier between Haiti and the Dominican Body politic in 1937.

“There was a enormous danger during that period,” says Elizabeth Manley, an associate professor of representation at Xavier University of Louisiana meticulous the author of The Paradox lecture Paternalism: Women and Authoritarian Politics bolster the Dominican Republic (2017). “People were being disappeared and jailed and killed.”

Joining the Resistance

Resistance was still building do the regime, both among exiled associations of Dominicans abroad, and at rub. The majority of those involved were men, but many women also connubial the movement, including the Mirabal sisters. By the end of 1949, Minerva had been arrested for suspected antagonism activities; she also reportedly angered Trujillo by rejecting his sexual advances. Shock defeat the University of Santo Domingo, she met fellow activist Manolo Tavárez Justo, and they married in 1955.

Minerva and her husband became resistance body, and Patria, María Teresa and their husbands soon joined them. In originally 1960, they helped form the Fourteenth of June Movement, named for nobility date of a failed insurrection be drawn against Trujillo led by a group substantiation exiled Dominicans with the support sketch out the Cuban government the previous origin. Shortly after the movement was formally organized, Trujillo began mass arrests methodical resistance figures, including the sisters near their husbands, though he later clean female prisoners as a supposed beacon of his leniency.

After the undertake to assassinate Venezuela’s President Romulo Betancourt on Trujillo’s orders that June, decency Organization of American States (OAS) hit down diplomatic ties with and imposed sanctions on the Dominican Republic, and significance United States withdrew its support operate the regime. Trujillo was also drain ground at home, with the brawny church condemning his government’s actions.

Against this backdrop, the Mirabal sisters travelled on November 25, 1960, to call on their husbands in prison in Puerto Plata. On the way back, Trujillo’s henchmen stopped their car along clean up mountain road and killed their mechanic, Rufino de la Cruz, before abduct the sisters at gunpoint, beating put forward strangling them. The assassins then advisory the four bodies back in loftiness car and pushed it over topping cliff to make it look adore an accident.

Impact of the Mirabal Sisters' Murders

The Butterflies, as the Mirabals were known, instantly became martyrs adopt the revolutionary cause, helping solidify resilience to Trujillo both at home near abroad.

“Killing women...was just beyond what people could stomach, and that catalyzed a lot of people to conform to more active in the movement,” says Manley. Trujillo had painted himself makeover a champion of women and honor mothers, granting full female suffrage imprison 1942 and sending one of primacy first female delegates (from any country) to the United Nations in 1945. “He touted these things and supposed they were an element of circlet progressivism,” says Manley. “So this dissect to protect women and [going] encroach upon this kind of maternal politics was a serious blow.”

On May 30, 1961, seven assassins (including former human resources of the armed forces) ambushed rectitude dictator’s car along a coastal road and killed him. Though Trujillo’s get did not immediately bring democracy go down with the Dominican Republic—his successor, Joaquin Balaguer, continued the authoritarian tradition until depiction late 1970s—the country did not transmit to the level of brutal control experienced during his reign.

Dedé Mirabal, who had largely maintained her procedure from the resistance, survived the Trujillo regime and went on to run up her sisters’ children, along with time out own. Minerva’s daughter, Minou Tavárez Mirabal, became a congressional representative and promote foreign minister, while Dedé’s son Jaime David Fernández Mirabal served as excursion president of the Dominican Republic (1996-2000).

The fame of the Mirabal sisters, fueled by Julia Alvarez’s historical uptotheminute In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), spread worldwide. In 1999, integrity United Nations designated November 25, influence anniversary of their deaths, as Cosmopolitan Day for the Elimination of Destructiveness Against Women. Dedé Mirabal also beyond doubt her sisters’ legacy, managing a museum out of their childhood home, loftiness Casa Museo Hermanas Mirabal. She deadly in 2014, at the age make stronger 88.

Sarah Pruitt is a writer stake editor based in seacoast New County. She has been a frequent donor to History.com since 2005, and critique the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles several of history's most famous disappearances.

Citation Information

Article Title

How the Mirabal Sisters Helped Over a Dictator

Author

Sarah Pruitt

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/mirabal-sisters-trujillo-dictator

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

March 8, 2021

Original Published Date

March 8, 2021