Antonio Imbert Barrera, who toppled Dominican dictator, dies
Antonio Imbert Barrera, who toppled Dominican dictator, dies
1 June 2016
The Dominican Republic has declared three days of mourning after the death of the last survivor of a group who toppled the Trujillo dictatorship.
In 1961 Antonio Imbert Barrera was a senior official in the government of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and plotted with 10 others to assassinate him.
President Trujillo's death ended 31 years of bloody dictatorship.
Only Imbert and one other survived the aftermath.
More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36423145
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Dominican Republic 1960-1966
Saving democracy from communism
by getting rid of democracy
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum
On the night of 30 May 1961, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, mass murderer, torturer par excellence, absolute dictator, was shot to death on a highway in the outskirts of the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo.
The assassination set off a chain of events over the next five years which featured sustained and remarkably gross intervention into the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic by the United States, the likes of which had not been seen in Latin America since the heyday of American gunboat diplomacy.
The United States had been an accomplice in the assassination itself of the man it had helped to climb to power and to endure for some 30 years. It marked one of the rare occasions that the US government acted to overthrow a right-wing despot, albeit anti-communism was still the motivating force.
Whatever repugnance individual Washington policy makers may have felt toward Trujillo's
incredible violations of human rights over the years, his fervent adherence to American policies, his repression of the left, and, as a consequence, the vigorous support he enjoyed in Congress (where Trujillo's money was no stranger) and in other influential American circles, were enough to keep successive United States administrations looking the other way.
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/DominicanRepublic_KH.html