The Dictator's Seduction Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

he then fashioned all public works policy formation and patronage as personal gifts from the dictator to the pueblo or people with his family and a few close friends Trujillo used the state to develop a system of highly profitable economic monopolies as he gradually took over all core national industries such as meat milk sugar rice oil cement and beer he then used the law to guarantee their profitability and allocated state contracts to his family and cronies for example he prohibited the production of sea salt so the public would have to purchase salt from the Baharona mines where he could which he controlled his wife Maria Martinez was allotted a government bank for cashing state paychecks Trujillo's sister's husband was given the military pharmaceutical contract a highly lucrative enterprise given the massive expansion of the armed forces in this extreme example of pre-bindalism the appropriation of the state for private ends the state became an instrument that guaranteed flows of profit to Trujillo and his circle Trujillo initially eventually became one of the wealthiest men in Latin America under his regime there was no effective distinction between the national treasury and the dictator's own purse he also used the state as a legal screen which shielded the public from the regime's extraordinarily lawlessness and corruption he enabled his own divorce for example by altering divorce legislation

Widespread resistance to becoming part of the United States-led force meant that recruiters were forced to enlist what a witness described as the worst rascals, thieves and assassins in the country.

If the military had previously been a means of social assent for the respectable poor, it was now open to the anonymous crowd.