The assassination of the Mirabal sisters

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The three Mirabal sisters were leading figures in the Dominican Republic's opposition movement against the dictator General Rafael Trujillo. They were all killed on the 25th November 1960. We hear from the daughter of one of them, Minerva, who tells us about her family and from Professor Elizabeth Manley on the Mirabal sister's legacy in the Dominican Republic. Also in the programme, the last case of Smallpox in Europe, the woman who helped her mother to die and laid the groundwork for the Netherlands becoming the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia. Also how Estonia led the way on connecting up schools to the internet and the painting by Gustav Klimt which was stolen by Nazis and only returned to its Jewish owners after a lengthy legal battle.

Photo: The three Mirabal Sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa (Credit: Mirabal family collection)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:04.8	stories and characters from the past brought into vivid focus through personal recollection.
0:09.9	This week, from the 1970s in what was then Yugoslavia, the fight against Europe's last smallpox outbreak.
0:16.2	All eight samples were positive.
0:18.2	We were sure that we were about to face a huge epidemic because we knew that if we already had eight positive patients they must have already
0:26.0	spread the virus.
0:27.0	Plus Estonia's bold leap into the digital age.
0:30.0	We've also got an extraordinary legal battle to get back arts stolen by the Nazis
0:35.0	and the Dutch doctor taken to court for assisting her own mother's suicide.
0:39.0	My mother was accused of so-called murdering my grandmother.
0:45.4	That's all coming up later in the podcast.
0:47.2	But we're going to begin with a remarkable and tragic story of repression and defiance in the
0:51.9	middle of the last century.
0:53.2	For 30 years the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean
0:56.5	was in the grip of a hard-lined dictatorship under General Raphael Trujillo.
1:01.0	But the assassination of three sisters marked the beginning of the end of his rule.
1:06.0	Rebecca Kessby has been looking at the story of the Mirabel sisters, Rebecca.
1:10.0	Hello Max, you know stories like this that's one of the main reasons I've loved working on witness history.
1:17.0	It's just such an interesting tale.
1:19.0	I came across it actually when I was researching female political leaders and to my shame
1:24.5	I'd never actually heard of it before then it's the story of the Mirabel sisters
1:29.4	Petria Maria Theresa and the most prominent one Minerva.
	...

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