The Trujillato, now acknowledged as one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the history of the Americas, was finally over. Only six months later, El Jefe was ambushed and shot to death on a public road just outside the capital. Their brutal assassination shook public opinion and helped propel the movement which culminated in Trujillo’s demise. They were thirty-six (Patria), thirty-four (Minerva) and twenty-four (Maria Teresa) at the time. Their bodies were placed in a jeep and dumped off a cliff in order to make their deaths look like an accident. On a rainy night on November 25, 1960, as the Mirabal sisters returned from visiting their husbands in prison, they were stopped, taken into a sugar cane field by a team of Trujillo’s most trusted henchmen, clubbed and strangled to death.
«Iconizing them only robs them of the real meaning of their resistance to violence» In the following years, the three sisters and their family members were repeatedly arrested and tortured for their activities against Trujillo’s dictatorship. Together with her sisters, Patria, Maria Teresa and Dedé, Minerva Mirabal helped to organize and promote the anti-regime movement 14 de Junio and they became known affectionately by their underground name Las Mariposas. Minerva’s father was thrown into jail and the Mirabal family eventually lost their land, house and properties. There are many different versions of how things went, but it is often said that she rejected his inappropriate advances by famously slapping ‘El Jefe’ in the face on the dance floor, to the horror of everyone present. Invited to one of Trujillo’s parties, Minerva was asked to dance by the Colonel himself, a notorious womanizer 35 years older than her. She was a 23-year-old law student from a rural village in the Valle del Cibao, born into a middle-class family of landowners. He was the man who had come to power in a rigged election and used a culture of terror and brutal oppression to turn the Dominican Republic into his Trujillato. History blends with myth when it comes to the first encounter between Rafael Trujillo and Minerva Mirabal. Mirabal Sisters’ Monument in Dominican Republic.
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