page_title: The Feast of the Goat
section_title: The Trujillo regime
hierarchical_section_title: The Feast of the Goat / Characters / The Trujillo regime
caption_attribution_description: English: Rafael Trujillo, 1952 (cropped)
context_page_description: The Feast of the Goat is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s, and its significance for the island and its inhabitants.
  The novel follows three interwoven storylines. The first concerns a woman, Urania Cabral, who is back in the Dominican Republic, after a long absence, to visit her ailing father. Eventually, she ends up recalling incidents from her youth before recounting a long-held secret to her aunt and cousins. The second story line focuses on the last day in Trujillo's life from the moment he wakes up onwards, and shows us the regime's inner circle, to which Urania's father once belonged.
context_section_description: Rafael Trujillo, known also as The Goat, The Chief, and The Benefactor, is a fictionalized character based on the real dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and the official President of the Republic from 1930 to 1938 and 1943 to 1952. In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa imagines the innermost thoughts of the dictator, and retells the Goat's last hours from his own perspective.
  Trujillo's character struggles with aging and the physical problems of incontinence and impotence. Through fictional events and first person narrative, the reader is given insight into the man who, during his "thirty-one years of horrendous political crimes", modernized the country's infrastructure and military, but whose regime's attack against its enemies overseas (particularly the attempted assassination of Rómulo Betancourt, president of Venezuela) led to the imposition of economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States in the 1950s. The resultant economic downturn, in conjunction with other factors, leads to the CIA supported assassination plot that ended Trujillo's life on May 30, 1961.
  Trujillo's regime is supported by Johnny Abbes García, the head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), a brutal man to whom many "disappearances, ... executions, ... sudden falls into disgrace" are attributed.  Abbes and his intelligence officers are notorious for their cruelty, particularly their habit of killing dissidents by throwing them into shark-infested waters. Colonel Abbes "may be the devil, but he's useful to the Chief; everything bad is attributed to him and only the good to Trujillo". Trujillo's son, Ramfis Trujillo, is a loyal supporter of the Chief. After unsuccessful attempts at schooling in the United States, Ramfis returns to the Dominican Republic to serve in his father's military. He's a well-known womanizer. Upon Trujillo's death, Ramfis seeks revenge, even going so far as to torture and kill his uncle by marriage, General Jose Roman, for his part in the assassination conspiracy.
  Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's puppet president is also a supporter, and initially his seemingly innocuous character holds no real power. Following Trujillo's death, the calm and serenity of Balaguer bring about real change in his character, and General Román comments that "this insignificant man whom everyone had always considered a mere clerk, a purely decorative figure in the regime, began to acquire surprising authority". It's Balaguer who guides much of the action in the last sections of the book.
caption: The Dominican Republic's dictator, and the central figure of The Feast of the Goat, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
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