laststandonzombieisland

So you are a Caribbean dictator with mouths to feed and a huge army to equip, what do you do? Well for one island generalissimo, the solution was easy: build your own rifles.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina’s official rank was commander of the army and president, but was known simply in the Dominican Republic as el jefe, or ‘the boss’. This was because Trujillo was the strongman at the head of the country’s government for more than three decades from the 1930s to 1961, when he ate a bullet at the hand of a group of assassins.

Besides the always-present threat of coups and local uprisings, the country bordered largely unstable Haiti under Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and the two had tension from time to time. This led to Trujillo expanding the army to over 50,000 soldiers. The problem was that by the late 1940s, the country had few assets and, while Trujillo was close to other Latin dictators including Franco of Spain, Peron of Argentina, and Somoza of Nicaragua, fewer friends. To keep his legions under arms, he needed guns.

Luckily, he knew a guy.

Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com