How did Trujillo achieve such control?
The regime insinuated itself into people’s lives — it used networks of rumor and gossip as a form of social control, as well as gift exchange to entrap people into relations of indebtedness with the regime. Outsiders scoffed at the excesses of the Trujillo regime as a kind of comic opera, but I try to reveal how it was perceived as serious business by the poor and marginal. For example, I explore how Trujillo’s own rise from the son of a cattle rustler to one of the richest men in the Americas conformed to a mythos of race and class mobility which Dominicans reluctantly respected. The U.S. government must have known about the Trujillo regime. Why didn’t they do anything about it? Because of the Good Neighbor policy and the Cold War. The U.S. pledged to respect Latin American sovereignty so as to have its support during World War II. Later the United States government was fearful about the spread of communism in its backyard. The Cuban Revolution didn’t happen until 1959, but you had th
