Santo Domingo, RD.
Santiago Cruz Valerio, the last of the men identified as known killers who participated in the death of the Mirabal sisters in 1960 on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, died last weekend after living in hiding for decades and without serving his sentence . .
Former Deputy Minou Tavárez Mirabal, daughter of Minerva and niece of Patria and María Teresa Mirabal, is attributed to the ‘impunity’ with which the Dominican governments would act that Cruz Valerio lived ‘quietly’ in the country until his death was announced this Monday.
“He was the one who killed Minerva Mirabal (…) it is really very painful for us who thought this man had passed away years ago; that’s what we knew, what they told us,” Tavárez said in statements to Efe.
November 25, the date of the death of the Mirabal sisters, three opponents of the Trujillo regime, was set by the United Nations as the International Day of Nonviolence against Women.
The Dominican media reported on Monday that Cruz Valerio has died at the age of 83 and that he has lived under a false name for decades in a neighborhood of the city of Santiago (north, second in the country).
Cruz Valerio, Emilio Estrada Malleta, Ramón Emilio Rojas and Néstor Pérez Terrero were sentenced to 30 years in prison and Ciriaco de la Rosa to 20 years in 1963 after being found materially guilty of the crime of the sisters and the driver Rufino de la Cruz , who had transported them in his car to Puerto Plata, where their husbands were in prison.
However, they all escaped from the Ozama Fortress in Santo Domingo at the start of the April Revolution of 1965 and never returned to prison.
“They were all able to do this (escape Justice) because of the impunity with which many governments have acted; in this country Trujilloism is still alive and is still ruled by Trujillistas and by the children of the Trujillistas,” said Tavárez. Mirabal, whose father was the national hero Manolo Tavárez Justo.
The former presidential candidate said that “there is no democracy” in the Dominican Republic, “because there is no justice.”
Tavárez said he would like to know how Cruz Valerio lived among neighbors for so long that they never reported him and if there was “someone else” to protect him.
“I’d also like to know, because it would be like a plaster to my heart, to know if there were people around him talking to him, turning him down, trying to sue him …” , he said.
The Mirabal sisters, remembered as Las Mariposas, were posthumously awarded by the Dominican government on November 25, which granted Minerva Mirabal the exequatur as Doctor of Laws Trujillo never issued her for rejecting her regime.