As irmãs Mirabal, “the Butterflies”
The Mirabal sisters are national heroes for their efforts to overthrow the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. It went badly for them (but not bad enough).
On November 25, 1960, a jeep fell 46 meters from a mountain in the Dominican Republic. It appeared to be an accident, just the latest in a series of mysterious car accidents.
But are there supposed to be so many cars falling off cliffs? For the country’s dictator, Rafael TrujilloYes. This was the method he used to eliminate his opponents, says .
But the women who were in that car, who were going to visit their husbands in prison, ended up becoming, to this day, heroines of the nation: it was about the Mirabal sisters, known in the Dominican Republic as “Las Mariposas” (butterflies, in Portuguese).
It was the beginning of the end for Trujillo. Just six months later, he met a similar fate when he was attacked by a group of seven dissidents who intercepted him as he went to visit his lover.
The sisters’ killers were also arrested, convicted and imprisoned — although they ended up escaping from prison and never served their sentences.
But who are these women and how did they put an end to the dictatorship?
Military commander Rafael Trujillo was elected president in a fraudulent election. The new dictator of the Dominican Republic, known as The Boss (“the Boss”), became all-powerful, controlling every aspect of government and purging his rivals.
The oldest of the sisters, with the curious name of Patria, was just 13 years old when Trujillo instigated one of some 30,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, and the girls grew up in a society where publicly questioning the Trujillo government was dangerous and could even lead to death.
In 1949, the Mirabal sisters, raised in a prosperous family in Ojo de Agua, attended a social event apparently intended to introduce the beautiful and single Minerva Mirabal to Trujillo.
The dictator was famous for using his political power to pressuring young women to have sex and, when Minerva refused Trujillo’s advances, the dictator took revenge quickly.
“A true calamity began for the Mirabal family, who were subsequently harassed, arrested and ostracized by their neighbors”, says the historian Nancy Robinson.
The regime then interrupted the education and professional opportunities of its daughters, arrested the father and “reduced the family to financial ruin.”
In response, Minerva, María Teresa and Patria began to oppose politically.
His work gained new urgency after a failed coup d’étaton June 14, 1959, led the government to repress opponents. The Mirabal sisters and their husbands helped organize the June 14th Movementa national opposition effort, in memory of the dissidents who had led the coup.
Codenamed “las Mariposas”, the sisters collected weapons and suppliesdistributed leaflets and organized resistance cells across the country. When their activities were discovered, the sisters were arrested, tortured and persecutedeven ending up being murdered.
The political opposition killed the Mirabal sisters, but Minerva’s daughter, Kittywrote that the three sisters “possessed extraordinary political and military lucidity and were willing to give their lives” for your cause.
In 1981, one of the feminists began celebrating the day of the sisters’ deaths as a holiday in honor of all victims of femicide and in 1999, the United Nations followed suit. November 25th is now the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The Mirabal sisters became national icons.
Some of their children served in the Dominican government and “the Butterflies” became a national symbol of bravery and resistance. Their faces appear on Dominican currency and their lives also inspired a popular novel, In the Time of the Butterfliesby Julia Alvarez, from 1994.
