Under Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship, the limited industrial development of the Dominican Republic was systematically monopolised by the dictator, his associates, and his family. State institutions—including the army, police, and security services—were placed at the service of their economic interests. As historian Juan Bosch observed, Trujillo turned himself by force into the “great captain” of national industry.

At the time of his death, Trujillo controlled about 51% of all industrial capital in the country. His personal fortune included factories, plantations, vast cattle ranches, sugar mills, airlines and shipping companies, and large bank deposits. It was estimated at over 600 million U.S. dollars of that period—equivalent to more than three billion today. For comparison, in 1960 a four-door Chevrolet automobile cost around one thousand pesos.

The night I arrived at the torture center, the place seemed like something out of a Dantean hallucination. Throughout the prison courtyard and its various rooms, torture was carried out in every imaginable way, amid a bestial frenzy in which guards and naked, handcuffed men were mixed together—screaming and writhing like decapitated chickens. It is hard for even the calmest mind to witness a defenseless, naked man turned into a mass of lacerated flesh, transformed into a kind of bipedal zebra with his entire body covered in black, bleeding welts caused by more than two hundred lashes delivered with whips, thick wires, and plastic tubing.

The screams produced by the application of electric current—its burning effect running through the entire nervous system—were especially wavering and wrenching. The sight of a naked man strapped to a chair covered with copper plates was particularly dramatic: the victim twisted violently under the shocks, his body contracting, his facial rictus shifting between howls of pain, creating a truly unbearable vision. Meanwhile, during pauses, the chorus of torturers exchanged jokes and sarcasm about the victims, while amusing themselves by continuously extinguishing cigarettes on the bodies of the bound men in La Silla. When someone lost consciousness from the beatings delivered in a ring called El Coliseo—by two or three guards at once on the skinned, bleeding, raw flesh of the captive—a can of salt water was poured on him, or he was placed in La Silla to be revived with electric shocks.

A powerful spotlight produced a blinding light that felt as though it burned into one’s brain, even with eyes closed, while the interrogation continued. El Coliseo was also used to unleash two trained dogs upon the captive—always naked and handcuffed—who endured intermittent attacks with pauses of thirty seconds to a minute. During each pause, the interrogators resumed their questioning before signaling the dogs to attack again. The dogs obeyed automatically, both the order to assault and the order to stop. It was a system of physical and psychological torture: the dogs remained practically on top of the victim, growling, waiting for the next signal.

Electric tubes applied to vital areas were common, but the most terrible aspect of this infernal catalog was not the torment each person received. Ultimately, there comes a moment when pain plunges one into a fog, a kind of half-conscious state in which the mind goes blank, fainting occurs, and a strange numbness sets in. Even more unbearable than one’s own punishment is witnessing—or hearing—the torment inflicted on others.

—Rafael Valera Benítez
Complot Develado, Vol. I, pp. 32–33.