Tuesday, February 26, 2019

The Mirabal sisters


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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