Rafael Trujillo

Plummer's Haiti and the United States places Trujillo within a wider hemispheric frame — not primarily as a Dominican internal phenomenon but as an actor whose relationship with Haitian governments and U.S. tolerance requires understanding within Cold War-era Caribbean geopolitics. She documents how the minimal indemnity agreement after the 1937 massacre was shaped by both Haitian president Sténio Vincent's domestic political calculations and U.S. interest in regional stability. Plummer's hemispheric framing complements Turits's domestic social history by showing how the regime's external relationships reinforced its internal position.

Trujillo's regime was sustained not only by domestic agrarian incorporation but by U.S. tolerance and Haitian government complicity in containing the aftermath of the 1937 massacre.

Turits's Foundations of Despotism argues that the Trujillo regime's durability cannot be explained by terror alone — the regime built genuine rural support through agrarian reform, land redistribution to peasants, and the construction of a Dominican national identity that gave small farmers a stake in the state. This complicates anti-Haitianism as an explanation: the 1937 Parsley Massacre was the violent edge of a broader nationalist project that was simultaneously redistributive and exclusionary. Turits grounds this argument in rural Dominican social history rather than in Trujillo's personality or pure coercion, making the regime's stability a product of structural incorporation rather than mere fear.

The Trujillo regime's durability rested on genuine rural support built through agrarian reform and nationalist incorporation — terror alone cannot explain thirty years of stability.