The Mirabal Sisters

The Mirabal sisters (also known as “Las Mariposas”) were Dominican revolutionaries and activists. Three of them, Patria Mirabal (1924–60), Minerva Mirabal (1926–60), and María Teresa Mirabal (1935–60), engaged in resistance activities against Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship, leading to their brutal murder on his orders. The fourth, Dedé Mirabal (1925–2014), devoted her life to commemorating their legacy.

Born in Ojo de Agua, near Salcedo, in the Dominican Republic, the sisters were raised in a prosperous landowning family that was part of the provincial elite. In 1937 Patria and Minerva started attending the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, a renowned Catholic boarding school in the nearby town of La Vega. Dedé and María Teresa later joined them. Patria did not graduate and instead married. Dedé also left school early when asked by her father to help him with accounting for the family’s business. While attending boarding school, Minerva met a grieving student who confided to her that she had seen her father killed on Trujillo’s orders. Early experiences such as this shaped the sisters’ political consciousness. According to Dedé’s memoir Vivas en su jardín (2009; “Alive in Their Garden”), this moment was one of the early sparks of Minerva’s resistance to the authoritarian rule of Rafael Trujillo.

In 1930 Trujillo, a general trained by U.S. Marines during the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, seized power of the country and quickly established a dictatorship. While his regime provided financial stability and developed the country’s infrastructure, it came at the cost of civil liberties and personal freedoms. During the 31 years of his dictatorship, he managed the Dominican Republic as a family business, putting relatives and loyalists in control of key economic and political sectors. Trujillo’s regime was notorious for its brutal repression and human rights abuses, among which was the 1937 mass killing of Haitian residents near the border between the two countries that came to be known as the Parsley Massacre.

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Early involvement in the opposition movement

On October 13, 1949, the Mirabal family attended a party in San Cristóbal that upended the sisters’ lives. Trujillo had personally requested the Mirabal family’s presence, an invitation that could not be declined without severe consequences. Among those attending was Minerva, who had first caught Trujillo’s attention at the inauguration of the Municipal Palace of Santiago. Since that encounter, he had pursued her persistently, pressuring her to become his mistress.

Although Minerva attempted to avoid Trujillo during the party in San Cristóbal, she eventually had to dance with him. Some sources state that in order to reject his advances, she left him on the dance floor, some claiming that she slapped him. However, Dedé denies these accounts in her memoir and instead recalls Minerva telling them about a tense exchange she had with Trujillo on the dance floor. When Minerva showed no interest in him, he asked her, “And are you not interested in my politics, or don’t you like them?” to which she answered, “No, I don’t like them.” Trujillo retorted, “And if I send my followers to conquer you?” Minerva responded, foretelling her future role as a leader of the resistance, “And what if I conquer them?” To avoid further aggravating the situation, the Mirabal family left the party early, an act that was interpreted as disrespectful to the regime.

The sisters’ father promptly sent his apologies by telegram to Trujillo, but he was soon detained in retaliation for Minerva’s rejection of Trujillo. Minerva and her mother were taken to a hotel in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital, where they remained under surveillance while awaiting an interview with Trujillo. He eventually allowed them to return home, but the family was ostracized. In 1951, their father was jailed under a pretext. Although he was later released, his health issues worsened during his incarceration, leading to his death in 1953.

Since graduating from high school in 1946, Minerva had aspired to attend law school despite her parents’ initial opposition. In 1952 she finally enrolled at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD). Under Trujillo’s regime, women were expected to pursue traditional paths such as motherhood and homemaking. However, starting in the 1940s, some women pursued secondary education as a means of resistance and encouraged their fellow female students to protest the regime’s brutal repression. With its main campus in the capital, UASD played a key role in revitalizing the opposition movement that had previously been crushed. After specializing in mathematics in high school, María Teresa joined Minerva at the university in 1954 to study engineering. During their time at UASD, both sisters became involved with the opposition movement. They organized secret meetings and recruited new members.

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Trujillo’s vendetta against the Mirabal family continued. In September 1953 Minerva was told she could not enroll for her second year of law school until she wrote and publicly delivered a speech praising Trujillo. In 1957 she graduated from law school, one of the first women in the Dominican Republic to do so. However, the authorities refused to grant her a license to practice as a lawyer. In an act of redress, almost three decades later the university decided to award her the title that she deserved for her academic achievements: Doctor of Law summa cum laude.

The Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio

By 1958 each of the Mirabal sisters had married, and all of their husbands (except Dédé’s) were also dissidents. After completing her legal studies, Minerva and her husband, Manolo Tavárez Justo, gathered support for the opposition movement in his home province of Monte Cristi. Owing to pressure from the state and the beginning of her second pregnancy, Minerva returned to Salcedo to continue their work. There, she secured contacts within Acción Clero Cultural, a collective of Roman Catholic priests who opposed the regime, although the Roman Catholic Church remained Trujillo’s ally until 1960.

On January 6, 1959, at a small gathering ostensibly to celebrate the new year, the sisters and their husbands decided to create a nationwide anti-Trujillo movement that would unite local resistance cells. Minerva was particularly inspired by the recent success of the Cuban Revolution, which gave her hope that the Dominican people could also overthrow their dictator. On June 14, 1959, a small group of Dominican exiles from Cuba, aided by Fidel Castro, invaded the Dominican Republic to topple the dictatorship. But the regime had been previously informed of the attack, and most of the insurgents were captured and executed.

By the end of 1959, the sisters’ movement had acquired a formal structure. On January 9, 1960, it held its first official meeting at Patria’s house. There, the group adopted a basic set of principles and the name Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio (also abbreviated as 1J4), in honor of the failed invasion. To lead the movement, they formed an inner central committee, which included only two women, one of whom was Minerva.

Although Patria was not as involved as Minerva and María Teresa in the opposition, she repeatedly offered her house as a venue for the movement’s meetings and storage space for its weapons. She also transmitted secret messages between members. The three sisters became known by the codename “Las Mariposas,” or “The Butterflies”—the plural form of La Mariposa, which is what fellow revolutionaries started calling Minerva when she first joined the opposition movement.

“Perhaps what is closest to us is death”

By the end of January 1960, Trujillo’s regime had learned of the 1J4 movement and arrested hundreds of dissidents, including Las Mariposas (with the exception of Patria) and their husbands. Accused of threatening the security of the Dominican state, they were jailed under inhumane conditions, and male prisoners were tortured.

On January 31 a pastoral letter issued by the Roman Catholic Church condemning the regime’s actions and demanding the fair treatment of all Dominican people was read at every mass in the country. This prompted Trujillo to declare in fall 1960 that he had only two problems left: the Roman Catholic Church and the Mirabal sisters. His comment was a thinly disguised death sentence for Las Mariposas. At the same time, he was also steadily losing the support of his long-term ally, the United States, which feared its dominance in the Caribbean would diminish if it continued to support the dictatorship. By February 1960 the United States was trying to ally with the opposition, which was mostly in exile. The United States definitively ended its relationship with Trujillo after his failed attempt to have Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt assassinated on June 24, 1960.

The combination of international and domestic pressure led to an early release of female prisoners, including Minerva and María Teresa, in February. However, their husbands remained jailed, and Minerva and María Teresa were promptly arrested and jailed again. By mid-August 1960 they were finally released and put under house arrest. In early November Las Mariposas’ husbands were transferred to a jail in Puerto Plata, a two-hour drive through the mountains from Salcedo. The sisters soon received permission to visit but had to notify the authorities beforehand.

On November 25, 1960, despite the anxiety and warnings of their friends and relatives, Las Mariposas departed for Puerto Plata with Rufino de la Cruz, an acquaintance who was the only person willing to drive them there. At the time, the regime had not openly murdered any women, and the sisters likely believed that the international scrutiny on the Dominican Republic would offer them some measure of protection. As they were returning home, though, Trujillo’s henchmen attacked their car and viciously killed the sisters and their driver. They then tried to stage the murder as an accident, placing the bodies in the car and pushing it off a cliff.

They dragged them off the road    El poder de
La tormenta    es en el oscuro y los manos
I howled for a country    I’m mostly made of ghost


Stories and rumors

“If they kill me, I shall reach my arms out of the grave and I shall be stronger.”

The clumsy cover-up did not fool the Dominican people or the international community. By early December 1960 reports began to circulate that the “strange accident,” as it was first described by The New York Times, had in fact been murder. Six months after ordering the brutal assassination of Las Mariposas, Trujillo himself was killed, an event referred to in the Dominican Republic as his ajusticimiento, meaning an execution that brings justice. The murder of Las Mariposas has been recognized as a key factor in the regime’s downfall. Beyond the widespread outrage, their deaths forced even loyal supporters of Trujillo to confront the truth: a regime that claimed to protect women had been willing to shed their blood.

On June 27, 1962, the trial for the murder of Las Mariposas began. It was the first televised trial in the Dominican Republic and was closely followed by the public. Murder charges were brought against five men: Ciriaco de la Rosa Luciano, Manuel Alfonso Cruz Valerio, Emilio Estrada Malleta, Ramón Emilio Lora, and Néstor Antonio Pérez Terrero. Six others were charged with complicity for facilitating the murder. The five main participants were found guilty and condemned to the maximum prison sentence of 30 years (except de la Rosa, who received a reduced sentence because he collaborated with the prosecution). However, they served little of their sentences because of the 1963 coup against newly elected president Juan Bosch, which led to the 1965 civil war. Some of them even obtained political asylum in the United States.

After the deaths of her sisters, Dedé raised their six children alongside her own. Minerva’s daughter, Minou Tavárez Mirabal, became a congressional representative, deputy minister of foreign affairs, and presidential candidate. One of Dedé’s sons, Jaime David Fernández Mirabal, was the vice president of the Dominican Republic from 1996 to 2000. Dedé also founded the Mirabal Sisters Foundation and turned their home into the museum Casa-Museo Hermanas Mirabal, which, by a 2000 presidential decree, became part of Panteón de la Patria, the burial site of important historical figures. She spent the rest of her life telling their story, whether during guided tours at the museum or in her memoir.

Across the Dominican Republic, numerous homages commemorate Las Mariposas. In 1997 an obelisk built by Trujillo in his own honor along Santo Domingo’s seaside promenade was transformed with murals depicting the four Mirabal sisters. Las Mariposas appear on the 200 Dominican pesos bill, and their hometown province, Salcedo, was renamed Province Hermanas Mirabal in 2007.

Their story has been retold in various books and movies. In the English-speaking world, the most prominent retelling has been the novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) written by Julia Alvarez, which was adapted as a TV movie, released in 2001, starring Salma Hayek as Minerva. Among Spanish-language works, Mario Vargas Llosa often references Las Mariposas in his novel La Fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat), which reflects on Trujillo’s rule and his assassination. Their story was also portrayed in the movie Trópico de sangre (2010; Tropics of Blood) and in the documentary Nombre Secreto: Mariposas (2009; Code Name: Butterflies) by Chilean American filmmaker Cecilia Domeyko.

As female victims of political violence, the Mirabal sisters have become enduring symbols in global feminist movements. In 1981 at the first Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro (“Meeting”) held in Bogotá, delegates designated November 25 as a day of protest against gender-based violence, in honor of Las Mariposas. In 1999 the United Nations officially recognized November 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.