Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (review)

Foundations of Despotism is a well-crafted, effective blend of primary source documents, secondary sources, and interviews of people who lived during the era of Rafael Trujillo. Turits investigates the social foundation of Trujillo's dictatorship, arguing that the peasant class was the foundation for his "hegemony over the nation" (1). Previous studies seeking to understand Trujillo's ability to control the Dominican Republic for more than three decades have emphasized his support from the U.S. government, U.S. multinational corporations, the Roman Catholic Church, and co-opted members of elite society, as well as the dictator's charisma, iron will, and use of brute force. Turits, however, contends that Trujillo's extraordinary political control and longevity in power "finds explanation partly in the support Trujillo cultivated among the peasants" (2).

Paying special attention to the peasant class, Turits traces the history of the Dominican Republic from the 1490s to the end of the Trujillo regime. The book's greatest strength is its ability to illuminate the process by which Trujillo obtained the peasants' support, and the often ambivalent nature of that support. Turits' interdisciplinary approach to history, which relies extensively on methodologies developed by sociologists, utilizes numerous testimonies from elderly peasants. Turits spent months canvassing the Dominican countryside in search of peasants to interview. In addition, he examined letters written to the Dominican government by the peasants during the Trujillo years. He provides ample evidence that the Trujillo regime generated widespread support among the peasant class by initiating agrarian land-reform programs. He also points out that Trujillo's government, for the first time in Dominican history, was able to incorporate the peasants into mainstream society. Dominican peasants were engaged in a symbiotic alliance whereby the peasants were granted access to large amounts of land in return for performing a variety of civil obligations and rituals that linked them to the state.

By examining how Trujillo secured peasant support, the book also reveals the process of state formation in the Dominican Republic. According to Turits, "Trujillo oversaw virtually every aspect of modern state formation" (9). During Trujillo's regime, the state greatly expanded its political and economic control over the country. For the first time in Dominican history, the government penetrated rural life through new policies and institutions, which resulted in an increasingly integrated city and countryside. By distributing fixed plots of land, and by providing the infrastructure necessary to develop agriculture, Trujillo brought the peasants within his effective control. The Dominican Republic also benefited from increased agricultural production, which made Trujillo's nation virtually self-sufficient in food production.

Trujillo's efforts to create an expansive state-run sugar empire during the 1950s, however, had a negative impact on peasant-state relations, especially in the areas where the expansion of sugarcane cultivation resulted in the eviction of peasants from the land. Trujillo's dramatic conflict with the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the 1950s further eroded his legitimacy in the eyes of the peasants. According to Turits, at the time of Trujillo's demise, it is unlikely that the opposition forces "would have been so bold or effective had the regime's rural support not been on the wane" (234).