Trujillo: The Death of a Dictator

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GOOD BOOK

Great product!

The event happened almost 50 years ago, but the book reads with the immediacy of today's headlines. Diederich did a thorough job of research and a masterful job of bringing it all together in a history book that reads like a novel.

Anyone interested in a thorough and accurate description of the events surrounding the assassination of Trujillo should read this book.

Very insightful and documented story of the assassination (well done) of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

In I think 2000, articles at Lew Rockwell Com by her nephew explained how Trujillo's libertarian Minister without portfolio Lillian De Lemos who had moderated his rule and kept tabs on other Latin and African dictators for years, got fed up arranged the plot, and even had the weapons under Trujillo's bed the night before as an added touch. This led to the libertarians and their liberal allies working to wipe out petty dictatorships starting in the PI and then USSR in the 1980's through people power movements and citizen diplomacy.That said, the book gives other details around the plot and does a great job. What a read!

Anyone wanting to understand Latin America or the Kennedy Administration's approach to Latin America, Castro and the Alliance for Progress must read this book.I served as an American diplomat in Santo Domingo 20 years after the assassination. There I met several people intimately familiar with events leading up to the assassination and afterwards. Donald Reid Cabral, who was involved in planning for a civilian, elected government (but was not a shooter), told me that "everything in the book is true, but not everything that is true is in the book. We talked to Diederich, but we had to protect our friends."This book is valuable far beyond the immediate facts of Trujillo's death. Explicit or implicit in all this is how the New Frontiersmen's "can do" attitude, infatuation with covert operations drove events they hardly understood. The book reminds us that people everywhere operate on what they see as their own requirements and not our calendar. After the Bay of Pigs led to a rethinking of this covert action program, a CIA officer told the assassins to postpone things while Washington was cogitating. The assassins made it clear that they were not killing Trujillo for our reasons, but for their own. They wanted U.S. help, but would not allow it to make them into puppets.All of which leads me to speculate on alternate outcomes. Had the assassins received the automatic weapons we had promised them, the assassination might have gone more "cleanly" and scores of lives might have been saved.