The Mirabal Sisters And The Courage That Helped End a Dictatorship
- Cassy Morgan
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
On a winding road in the northern Dominican Republic, a jeep went over a ravine on 25 November 1960. The official story was a crash, tragic but ordinary. Almost nobody believed it. Inside were Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal, three sisters already known across the country for refusing to bow to Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who had ruled since 1930. Their murders were meant to stop a movement. Instead, those deaths became one of the clearest signs that Trujillo’s grip was beginning to fail.
What follows is the story of Mirabal sisters’ lives, their political work as Las Mariposas, and the legacy carried by their surviving sister Dedé. It is a story of family, of faith and argument, of how private relationships can collide with public power. It is also a story about a state that built fear into daily life and about three women who decided fear would not be the last word.
A countryside childhood in the Cibao
The Mirabals grew up in the central Cibao region, an area of fertile tobacco fields and family farms. Their parents, Enrique Mirabal Fernández and Mercedes Reyes Camilo, were landowners of comfortable means, rooted in the village of Ojo de Agua near Salcedo. The sisters were raised with the routines of rural Dominican life but also with the expectations of a family that valued education. At primary school they were close to home. For secondary education, all four were sent to a Catholic boarding school, El Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción, in La Vega.
In the Dominican Republic of the 1930s and 1940s, this schooling mattered. Trujillo’s government wanted loyal citizens, and Catholic schools often provided a more protected space for middle class families. Yet even then, the Mirabal household stood apart. In most homes, Trujillo’s portrait hung prominently. The Mirabals refused. In a country where dissent could be detected in small gestures, this quiet act was noticed.
The family also suffered direct consequences of authoritarian rule. As Trujillo extended control over the economy, many landowners lost property or income. The Mirabals were no exception. What began as a personal loss became a political lesson for the sisters.
Trujillo’s Dominican Republic
Trujillo rose through the National Guard, becoming commander of the Dominican National Police before seizing the presidency in 1930. Although he served in official terms between 1930 and 1952, he effectively controlled the country until his assassination in 1961.
His rule blended public works with repression. Roads, monuments, and administrative reforms coexisted with strict censorship, a one party state, and a network of secret police. Opposition brought imprisonment, torture, disappearance, or death. The regime’s violence could also be racial. In October 1937 Trujillo ordered the massacre of Haitians living near the border, an atrocity remembered as the Parsley Massacre.
Dominicans lived in a climate of caution. People measured their words, worried about surveillance, and understood that safety depended not only on loyalty but on the appearance of loyalty. The Mirabals, like many others, learned to navigate this atmosphere.
Patria, Dedé, Minerva, and Maria Teresa
Patria Mercedes Mirabal Reyes, born 27 February 1924, was the eldest. She attended the Catholic boarding school at La Vega before marrying Pedro González. They had three children. Patria combined deep religious faith with a firm sense of justice. Her often quoted remark, “We cannot allow our children to grow up in this corrupt and tyrannical regime,” shows how she linked motherhood to moral responsibility.
Bélgica Adela Mirabal Reyes, known as Dedé, was born on 1 March 1925. She remained the most private of the sisters, helping with family affairs and raising her own children. While personally sympathetic to her sisters’ views, she stayed out of political activity, partly due to her husband’s disapproval. Dedé would later describe survival as her destiny, believing she lived to preserve her sisters’ legacy.
Minerva Mirabal, born on 12 March 1926, was the intellectual heart of the four. From an early age she immersed herself in books and debate. Minerva studied law at the University of Santo Domingo, graduating with honours, though the regime later blocked her from practising. Her confrontations with Trujillo, especially after rejecting his advances, left her under constant watch. She quickly became one of the most outspoken critics of the dictatorship.
Antonia Maria Teresa Mirabal Reyes, born 15 October 1936, was the youngest. She studied mathematics and kept detailed diaries that reveal her growing political conviction. Strongly influenced by Minerva, she joined the underground movement and recorded both her fear and determination. Her courtship with Leandro Guzmán is remembered for the moment she refused to hold his hand until she was sure he did not support Trujillo.
Minerva meets Trujillo
One of the most remembered episodes in Dominican political history took place in 1949, when the Mirabal family attended a gathering where Trujillo noticed Minerva. A second event followed, and there Trujillo made aggressive advances. Minerva rejected him publicly. Accounts of a sharp verbal exchange exist in Dominican oral history and literature, though details vary. What is certain is that Trujillo was enraged, and Minerva was marked as an enemy.
Her family initially refused to let her attend university out of fear for her safety. Eventually they relented, but the regime found other ways to punish her, including the suppression of her law licence.
Turning to resistance
Minerva’s political views sharpened at school, especially after learning that a friend’s father had been killed for opposing the regime. Maria Teresa joined after living with Minerva and seeing her work firsthand. Patria’s turning point came in 1959 when she witnessed a massacre carried out by Trujillo’s men during a religious retreat. The sight of violence transformed her quiet sympathy into active commitment.
Around the same time, Minerva married Manolo Tavárez Justo, and Maria Teresa married Leandro Guzmán. The sisters’ husbands became key figures in the formation of the 14 June Revolutionary Movement, named for the date of a failed 1959 uprising against Trujillo. Within this group, Minerva used the code name Mariposa, and soon the three sisters were collectively known as Las Mariposas, The Butterflies.
Their work was dangerous. They distributed pamphlets, organised meetings, stockpiled materials for future uprisings, and used their homes as safe spaces for planning. Surveillance intensified, and arrests followed.
Prison and persistence
Minerva and Maria Teresa were imprisoned multiple times, held in La Victoria and La 40, both known for harsh interrogations. Earlier detentions involved physical abuse. Later, with growing international scrutiny, the regime stopped short of torture, though conditions remained grim.
Yet the sisters were unshaken. Minerva declared, “It is a source of happiness to do whatever can be done for our country that suffers so many anguishes.” Maria Teresa wrote, “Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me.”
Patria was not imprisoned, but her home was burned down after authorities discovered that meetings were being held there. Her husband and son were jailed. Dedé remained in the background, caring for the extended family.
In 1960, under pressure from the Organization of American States, Minerva and Maria Teresa were released from prison. Their husbands were not. The sisters remained politically active, which made them visible at a moment when Trujillo’s regime was increasingly fragile.
25 November 1960
On 25 November, the three sisters travelled with their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, to visit their imprisoned husbands. Patria joined her sisters despite her husband being held elsewhere. On the return journey, their jeep was stopped by Trujillo’s henchmen.
The four were taken from the road, separated, beaten with clubs, and strangled. Their bodies were placed back into the jeep, which was pushed over a cliff to stage an accident.
After Trujillo was assassinated on 30 May 1961, General Pupo Román admitted to having personal knowledge that the sisters were killed by Victor Alicinio Peña Rivera (Trujillo's right-hand man) along with Ciriaco de la Rosa, Ramon Emilio Rojas, Alfonso Cruz Valeria, and Emilio Estrada Malleta, members of his secret police force.
As to whether Trujillo ordered the killings or whether the secret police acted on its own, one historian wrote, "We know orders of this nature could not come from any authority lower than national sovereignty. That was none other than Trujillo himself; still less could it have taken place without his assent."
Also, one of the murderers, Ciriaco de la Rosa, said "I tried to prevent the disaster, but I could not because if I had he, Trujillo, would have killed us all."
The women were 36, 34, and 25.
A murder that changed a country
Shock spread quickly. Even in a climate of violence, the deaths of the Mirabal sisters carried a symbolic weight. They were known, respected, educated, and family centred. Their murder struck at the heart of Dominican identity and exposed the regime’s desperation.
When six months later, on 30 May 1961, Trujillo himself was assassinated by a group of conspirators, some of them former loyalists. While the Mirabals were not the sole cause, their deaths had helped solidify opposition.
Their story complicates the idea that resistance is only carried out by fighters or politicians. The Mirabals built a movement through everyday trust, family networks, and small acts of defiance that added up. They were not powerful in the conventional sense, yet Trujillo saw them as a threat.
Dedé and the long work of memory
Dedé survived and raised the six children of her murdered sisters along with her own. Her nephew and niece later became public figures, including Minou Tavárez Mirabal and Jaime David Fernández Mirabal.
In the 1990s Dedé founded the Mirabal Sisters Foundation and opened the Mirabal Sisters Museum in Salcedo, preserving the family home and its artefacts. She later published a memoir, adding depth to the public memory of her sisters. Dedé remained in the family home until her death in 2014.
She often said she survived “to tell their story”, and she did.
Legacy
The sisters are now recognised as national heroines. Their childhood home became a museum. Their faces appear on Dominican currency. Salcedo Province was renamed Hermanas Mirabal Province. Schools, streets, and monuments across the Dominican Republic and abroad bear their names.
In 1999 the United Nations designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in their honour. The date now marks the beginning of sixteen days of global activism.
Their story remains a reminder of how ordinary life can collide with public injustice, and how resistance can begin with a refusal to stay silent.
Minerva once said, “If they kill me, I shall reach my arms out from the grave and I shall be stronger.”
In the decades since, she has been proved right.
Sources
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The Mirabal Sisters”. https://www.britannica.com/biography/The-Mirabal-Sisters
TIME, “The Mirabal Sisters 100 Women of the Year”. https://time.com/5793594/mirabal-sisters-100-women-of-the-year/
National Geographic, “How three sisters took down a dictator in the Dominican Republic”. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mirabal-sisters-heroes-dominican-republic
JSTOR Daily, “Remembering the Mirabal Sisters”. https://daily.jstor.org/remembering-the-mirabal-sisters/
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 54 134, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/404761
UN Women Watch, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women background. https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/news/vawd.html
House of Lords Library Briefing, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/lln-2018-0128/
Chicago Public Library, “About Trujillo”. https://www.chipublib.org/about-trujillo/
Zinn Education Project, “Mirabal Sisters Murdered in Dominican Republic”. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mirabal-sisters-murdered/
