Patria,
Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé Mirabal were four sisters in the Dominican
Republic, who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (El Jefe.
They formed a group called the Movement of the Fourteenth of
June, named after the date of the massacre Patria witnessed, to oppose the Trujillo
regime. They distributed pamphlets about the many people whom Trujillo had killed
and obtained materials for guns and bombs to use when they eventually openly
revolted. Within the group, the sisters called themselves "Las
Mariposas" ("The Butterflies"), after Minerva's underground
name.
On 25 November 1960, Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and
their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, were visiting María Teresa and Minerva's
incarcerated husbands. On the way home, they were stopped by Trujillo's
henchmen. The sisters and de la Cruz were separated, strangled and clubbed to
death. The bodies were then gathered and put in their Jeep, which was run off
the mountain road to make their deaths look like an accident. Dedé, died of natural causes on 1 February 2014.
The
assassinations turned the Mirabal sisters into "symbols of both popular
and feminist resistance".
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