The Mirabal Sisters: The Women Trujillo Had Killed, and the Courage That Ended a Dictatorship
- Nov 25, 2025
- 7 min read
On November 25, 1960, three sisters were ambushed and killed on a mountain road in the Dominican Republic. Their names were Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal. The fourth sister, Dedé, survived. Six months later, the dictator who ordered their deaths, Rafael Trujillo, was himself assassinated. The murder of the Mirabal sisters hadn't just failed to silence the resistance. It had ended him.
Today, November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, designated by the United Nations in 1999 in honour of the date the three sisters were killed. In the Dominican Republic, they appear on the 200-peso note. The province of Salcedo, where they grew up, was renamed Province Hermanas Mirabal in 2007. They are known as Las Mariposas, the Butterflies.
Trujillo's Dominican Republic
To understand the Mirabal sisters, you need to understand what they were up against. Rafael Trujillo seized power in 1930 and ran the Dominican Republic as a personal fiefdom for 31 years. His regime was characterised by mass murder, torture, censorship, and an absolute cult of personality. Every household was required to display his portrait. Towns, streets, and mountains were renamed after him. He had himself declared Benefactor of the Fatherland and took a cut of most significant business transactions in the country.
International observers knew what was happening but largely looked away. The United States supported Trujillo throughout the Cold War era, viewing him as a reliable anti-communist ally. It was only after he attempted to have Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt assassinated in 1960 that Washington finally began to distance itself from his regime. The Mirabal murders happened in that same year, as international pressure on Trujillo was mounting from multiple directions at once.
One of the most revealing examples of Trujillo's methods came in October 1937, when he ordered the massacre of between 17,000 and 35,000 Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic.
Soldiers were ordered to identify Haitians by asking people to say the word "perejil," the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians, who spoke Creole rather than Spanish, typically couldn't pronounce it correctly. Those who failed the test were killed. The massacre became known as El Corte, the Cutting, and the CIA knew about it and said nothing. Trujillo paid the Haitian government $750,000 in reparations and the international community moved on.
The Mirabal Family
The Mirabal sisters were born into a prosperous landowning family in the village of Ojo de Agua, near the town of Salcedo in the Cibao region. Their parents, Enrique Mirabal Fernández and Mercedes Reyes Camilo, ran a farm, a store, and a coffee mill. All four sisters attended a Catholic boarding school, the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción in La Vega, for their secondary education.
Patria Mercedes Mirabal was born in 1924, the eldest. She was deeply religious and initially the least politically engaged of the sisters, but became increasingly radicalised by what she witnessed. Dedé Mirabal was born in 1925. She did not join the resistance, partly because her husband forbade it, and survived her three sisters by more than 50 years, devoting her life to preserving their memory. Minerva Mirabal, born in 1926, was the most politically active, the most defiant, and the one Trujillo fixated on. María Teresa, born in 1935 and the youngest, followed Minerva into the resistance as a teenager.
Minerva and Trujillo
It was Minerva who became Trujillo's specific target, and the story of how that happened tells you a great deal about the kind of man he was. Trujillo maintained what were described as beauty scouts who travelled the country identifying attractive young women to bring to him. Families routinely hid their daughters when he was travelling nearby. The Mirabals were invited to a Discovery Day party at Trujillo's estate in San Cristóbal, an invitation that could not be refused. While there, Minerva caught his attention.
What happened next is disputed. Some witnesses said Minerva slapped Trujillo across the face when he became physically aggressive on the dance floor. Dedé, in her own memoir, denied the slap happened, saying instead that there had been a tense confrontation in which Minerva rebuked him sharply in front of other people. Whether or not a physical slap occurred, Minerva had done something almost no one ever did: she had publicly humiliated Trujillo. He was, in the words of one historian, "a man for whom no slight was too small, no grudge too big." The family left the party early, which was itself technically illegal. When they returned home, two guards were waiting. Minerva's father was arrested and imprisoned. Minerva and her mother were held under house arrest in a hotel until Minerva agreed to meet Trujillo again. He tried to coerce her into having sex with him in exchange for her father's release. She refused.
Her father's health was broken by his imprisonment. When Minerva graduated at the top of her law class, Trujillo refused to grant her a licence to practise. The family's finances were systematically destroyed. Every avenue of normal life was closed to her. It was in this context that she and her husband Manolo Tavárez Justo founded the 14th of June Movement, a resistance organisation named after a failed anti-Trujillo uprising in 1959. Patria and María Teresa and their husbands joined them. Patria's house was used to store weapons. Her family dismantled firecrackers at the kitchen table to make bombs.
Imprisonment and Release
In January 1960, the movement's plan to assassinate Trujillo at a cattle fair was discovered before it could be carried out. Most of the members of the 14th of June Movement were arrested, including Minerva, María Teresa, and their husbands. Patria's husband was also arrested, though Patria herself was not jailed. The sisters were held and subjected to interrogation. International pressure eventually contributed to their release later in 1960, as Trujillo's position was becoming increasingly untenable. The Organisation of American States had voted to impose sanctions. The Catholic Church in the Dominican Republic, which had previously supported Trujillo, issued a pastoral letter condemning his regime. Trujillo reportedly said he had only two problems left: the Church and the Mirabal sisters.
That statement was effectively a death sentence. Their husbands remained imprisoned. The sisters were allowed to visit them in the Puerto Plata jail, travelling the mountain road regularly.
The Assassination
On November 25, 1960, Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa made the mountain journey to visit their imprisoned husbands. On the return trip, Trujillo's secret police, the SIM, ambushed their Jeep Cherokee on a remote stretch of road near Salcedo. The three sisters and their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, were pulled from the vehicle, beaten, strangled, and their bodies placed back inside the car. The vehicle was then pushed over a cliff to make it look like an accident.
It didn't work. Local people who came to the scene immediately recognised that the crash had been staged. The bodies showed ligature marks inconsistent with a road accident. Word spread quickly. The regime's attempts to control the narrative collapsed almost immediately, and the murders became a rallying point for opposition that had been building for years.
Three of the perpetrators were eventually tried and convicted: Johnny Abbes García, head of Trujillo's secret police, and two SIM agents, Ciriaco de la Rosa and Ramón Emilio Rojas. A fourth, Emilio Estrada Malleta, was also convicted. Their sentences were later commuted.
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.
The Fall of Trujillo
The murders of the Mirabal sisters had the opposite effect to what Trujillo intended. Rather than silencing opposition, they galvanised it. Six months later, on May 30, 1961, Trujillo was shot dead in his car while being driven along the coast road outside Ciudad Trujillo. The assassination was carried out by a group of conspirators, some of whom had been members of his own inner circle. The CIA had provided weapons to the conspirators, though the extent of direct involvement remains debated. Trujillo's son attempted to maintain the dynasty but was forced into exile within months. The dictatorship was over.
Dedé and the Legacy
Dedé Mirabal lived until 2014, dying at the age of 88. She raised the six children her three sisters left behind, including Minou Tavárez Mirabal, Minerva's daughter, who later served as deputy foreign minister and then as a deputy in the Dominican Congress. Dedé also oversaw the transformation of the family home into a museum and spent decades telling her sisters' stories to the journalists, tourists, and researchers who came to Salcedo seeking them out. "I'm the one who was left to guard all the memories," she said.
In the Time of the Butterflies
The sisters story remained largely unknown outside the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora until 1994, when Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez published In the Time of the Butterflies, a novel that reimagined the Mirabal story through the perspectives of all four sisters. Alvarez had grown up hearing about the sisters: her own family had been involved in the opposition to Trujillo and fled the country shortly before the sisters were killed. She later said they were the Kennedys of the Dominican Republic and that everyone knew who they were.
The novel became one of the most widely taught texts about Latin American history in American schools and universities, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made Las Mariposas internationally recognisable for the first time. In 2001 it was adapted as a television film starring Salma Hayek as Minerva and Edward James Olmos as Trujillo, with singer Marc Anthony in a supporting role. Mario Vargas Llosa's 2000 novel La Fiesta del Chivo, translated as The Feast of the Goat, also references the sisters extensively in its account of the final years of Trujillo's regime.
The sisters' story sits alongside other examples of women who took on authoritarian regimes at enormous personal cost. Sophie Scholl, who was executed by the Nazis in 1943 for her role in the White Rose resistance movement, became a symbol of individual conscience against a system of terror in the same way the Mirabal sisters became symbols in the Dominican Republic. Both cases are reminders that the people who resist dictatorships are rarely soldiers. They're usually students, housewives, teachers, and lawyers who decide, at some point, that they've had enough.
Sources:
1. Wikipedia: Mirabal Sisters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters
2. Britannica: The Mirabal Sisters. https://www.britannica.com/biography/The-Mirabal-Sisters
3. Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994.
4. UN Women: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/end-violence-against-women/2018/the-mirabal-sisters
5. History.com: The Mirabal Sisters. https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/mirabal-sisters
6. Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast: Mirabal Sisters. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-missed-in-histor-21124503/episode/symhc-classics-mirabal-sisters-130661346/
