Status Updates From Jarčeva fešta

“Perhaps it was true that because of the disastrous governments that came afterward, many Dominicans missed Trujillo now. They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. “Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.”

“That Trujillo pulled a vocation for masochism up from the bottom of your souls, that you were people who needed to be spat on and mistreated and debased in order to be fulfilled.”

“The colonel may be a devil, but he’s useful to the Chief: everything bad is attributed to him and only the good to Trujillo. What better service is there? For a government to last thirty years, it needs a Johnny Abbes who’ll stick his hands in shit.”