Antonio Imbert Barrera

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antonio Cosme Imbert Barrera (born December 3, 1920 in Puerto Plata , Dominican Republic , † May 31, 2016 in Santo Domingo , Dominican Republic) was a Dominican two-star general ( major general ), politician and national hero of the Dominican Republic. In 1961 he was involved in the assassination attempt on the dictator Rafael Trujillo . From May 7, 1965 to August 30, 1965, he was President of the Gobierno de la Reconstrucción Nacional Dominican President (President appointed by the revolutionaries was also Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó ). In 1967 he survived an assassination attempt.

youth

Antonio Imbert Barrera came from a rich family with a military tradition from the province of Puerto Plata in the north of the island state. His father, Brigadier General Segundo Manuel Imbert Mesnier (1876–1921), played a leading role in the province, his grandfather, Brigadier General Segundo Francisco Imbert (1837–1905), was Vice President and presidential candidate of the Dominican Republic and fought in the Dominican War of Restoration , and his great-grandfather, Major General José María Imbert (1798–1847), a French immigrant, won important victories in the Dominican War of Independence . The city of Imbert, a traffic junction in the province of Puerto Plata, is named after José María Imbert.

The father died three years after he was born. Imbert grew up as the third of four siblings with his mother María del Consuelo Barrera Steinkopf.

In 1940 Imbert was installed as governor of the province of Puerto Plata by the dictator Rafael Trujillo , but removed from office a year later after sending Trujillo a telegram with the names of the survivors of the unsuccessful invasion of Luperón .

His brother Segundo, also a senior police officer, was arrested by the Trujillo regime in 1956 and sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 1943 murder of Domingo Marión, a railway inspector who uncovered an arms shipment from conspirators including Segundo Imbert would have. Domingo Marión's stepsister, Casilda Guzmán de Reyes, accused Antonio Imbert of covering up the murder in his capacity as governor of the province of Puerto Plata and of accusing Marión's wife, Caró de Los Ángeles, of the murder in place of his brother.

Assassination attempt on Trujillo

After his brother's arrest, Antonio Imbert also joined the resistance and became a member of the group of conspirators that killed Trujillo on May 30, 1961. The plan of the plot was to capture Trujillo in a first phase, under the leadership of Antonio de la Maza Vásquez, and bring it to the government palace. In a second, under the leadership of ex-general Juan Tomás Díaz Quezada, the defense minister and chief of the army, José René Román Fernández (“Pupo”) was to be appointed head of a mixed civil-military junta and proclaimed president. Trujillo and his family as well as the incumbent president, Joaquín Balaguer , were to be taken out of the country and the political prisoners freed immediately. It is not certain whether de la Maza and Imbert Barrera planned to kill Trujillo from the start, or whether the plan on the ground got out of hand. Imbert pointed out several times that he was determined from the start to kill the dictator. Most of the other conspirators assumed the plan was to capture Trujillo alive.

Trujillo drove to his country estate in San Cristóbal on May 30, 1961, as it did almost every day in the evening , without a bodyguard , only accompanied by his driver. Two vehicles were supposed to form a barrier on the road to San Cristóbal to stop and capture the dictator, one, driven by Imbert Barrera, followed Trujillo's car. De la Maza, who had the strongest motive for personal vengeance for his brother Octavio, who had been murdered by the regime, opened fire while overtaking Trujillo's car and an exchange of fire broke out between the group and the dictator and his driver. Imbert later noted in his description of the assassination that he gave the order to fire and fired the shots that resulted in Trujillo's death. Some of the attackers were injured, one seriously. The assassins left the driver Trujillos, who they also mistakenly believed to be dead or had fled, and one of the vehicles because of a flat tire.

For the second phase of the plot, the conspirators gathered in the house of Juan Tomás Díaz and tried unsuccessfully to contact José Román. At his headquarters he found that neither President Balaguer nor Héctor Trujillo accepted his invitation to an emergency meeting, and that Virgilio Trujillo García, commander of the San Isidro Air Force Base, did not obey his orders to put troops on the march. He then changed his tactics and resumed his role as a loyal member of the Trujillo family and as commander of the military, in the futile hope that his involvement in the plot would remain hidden. The plan to overthrow the Trujillist regime and the Balaguer government had thus failed.

A weapon left at the scene of the event, the abandoned vehicle, the surviving driver of the dictator and, in particular, the fact that the seriously injured assassin had to be transferred to the international hospital and there revealed, among other things, José Román's participation in the conspiracy, allowed the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) to identify most of the conspirators that same night. The dictator's eldest son, Ramfis, rushed over from Paris to personally pursue and punish the assassins.

All the conspirators except Imbert and Luis Amiama Tió were killed, some by Ramfis Trujillo himself. Imbert's brother Segundo was also shot in prison on May 31, 1961, on the orders of Ramfis Trujillo. Imbert was taken by the Honorary Consul of Italy to an Italian couple, employees of the Italian embassy, ​​where he was allowed to hide until he returned to public life on December 2, 1961, after Ramfis Trujillo had fled and the overthrow of the Balaguer government had emerged could return. Amiama was also able to hide until the fall of the Trujillo regime.

Imbert and Amiama were declared national heroes and major-generals for life. Because of his involvement in the assassination attempt on the dictator, Imbert kept a heavily armed bodyguard.

In September 2013, the "Foundation of the Constitutionalist Soldiers of April 25, 1965" called on the National Congress to explore the possibility of revoking Imbert's status as a national hero because he had violated the constitution.

Imbert celebrated the anniversaries of Trujillo's murder by putting on the shoes and watch he wore during the assassination attempt.

Political career

From January 1962 to February 1963, after the fall of Balaguer, Antonio Imbert Barrera was a member of the seven-member State Council under President Rafael Filiberto Bonelly . On December 20, 1962, elections were held by the new rulers, which Juan Bosch won in a democratically impeccable manner. However, after a few months, his government was again deposed by the army under General Elías Wessin y Wessin. Whether Imbert was also involved in the coup is controversial, he himself denied it vehemently. The coup led to riots and ultimately the Dominican Civil War in 1965.

When on April 25, 1965 the uprising of the "constitutionalists" broke out under Colonels Vinicio Fernández Pérez, Giovanni Gutiérrez Ramírez, Rafael Fernández Domínguez and Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó , who wanted to reinstate the constitutional president Juan Bosch and the president of the constituent assembly of 1963, José Rafael Molina Ureña, appointed president, the United States set up a naval unit to protect and evacuate US citizens in the country and appointed Pedro Bartolomé Benoit on May 1, 1965, and Imbert as President of the United States on May 7, 1965 supported Gobierno de la Reconstrucción Nacional. For their part, after Molina and the other constitutionalist colonels had already surrendered on April 27, 2015, the insurgents declared Caamaño president on May 4, 1965. After the fighting intensified, the Gobierno de la Reconstrucción Nacional demanded an invasion of the United States to suppress the insurgents and restore order. The United States, fearing the formation of a second Cuba in its hemisphere, sent a reaction force in which small units from various states formed by the Organization of American States took part. A peace treaty was finally signed in September that ended the civil war. Imbert and Caamaño resigned in late August / early September; Héctor García Godoy was installed as the new provisional president, with the task of preparing democratic elections .

Imbert, who was called a traitor by some and who signed one of the appeals for the invasion, defended himself by saying that he had saved many thousands of lives in this way.

On March 21, 1967, while he was out with his bodyguard, Colonel Marino García, he was shot in an assassination attempt, presumably by Trujillo supporters. He survived and was able to drive to a hospital himself. The President Joaquín Balaguer, who had been in office again on July 1, 1966, entrusted the second survivor of the hunt for the May 30, 1991 conspirators, Luis Amiama Tió, with the investigation of the case. The perpetrators could not be identified.

Imbert was Minister of Defense from 1986 to 1988 in the cabinet of Joaquín Balaguer, who had returned from the USA; his second cousin, Mario Imbert McGregor, had previously held this position.

Civil career

After school, Imbert worked, without any higher education, as an administrator of a cement factory and then as manager of a factory for citrus fruit products. He was also vice head of the national lottery.

In 1989 he was named chairman of the board of directors of the Rosario Dominicana Silver Mine.

Private and death

On February 15, 1970 Imbert lost his first wife Guarina Tessón Hurtado, his daughter Leslie Imbert Tessón, a well-known karate athlete, and his sister Aída Imbert in the crash of a Douglas DC-9 of the Dominicana de Aviación over the Caribbean Sea . He later married Maria Sánchez.

Imbert died at the age of 95, according to his niece Carmen Imbert Brugal, of complications from pneumonia, in the Centro de Diagnóstico Medicina Avanzada y Telemedicina (Cedimat) in Santo Domingo. He left behind his third wife, Giralda Busto Sánchez de Imbert, his sons Antonio Imbert Tessón, a former police officer, and Oscar Imbert Tessón, and a nephew he had adopted, Eduardo Domínguez Imbert. One son, Manuel Imbert Sánchez, had died earlier, like daughter Leslie Imbert Tessón. President Danilo Medina ordered a three-day national mourning.

literature

  • José Miguel Soto Jiménez: Malfiní. Santo Domingo 2010, 757 pp.
  • Víctor Grimaldi: Sangrue en el barrio del jefe. Editora Corripio, Santo Domingo, 2007/2008/2009, ISBN 978-9945-14-019-4 , 352 pp.
  • Miguel Ángel Bissié: Trujillo y el 30 de Mayo. En honor a la verdad. Ediciones Susaeta, Santo Domingo 1999.
  • Eduardo García Michel: 30 de mayo, Trujillo ajusticiado. Santo Domingo 1999, 316 pp.
  • Bernard Diederich: Trujillo. The Death of the Goat. The Bodley Head, London / Sydney / Toronto 1978, ISBN 0-370-10286-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d Fallce el héroe nacional Antonio Imbert Barrera. In: El Caribe. May 31, 2016.
  2. a b c d e f g h Kirk Semple: Antonio Imbert Barrera, Who Helped Assassinate Dominican Dictator Trujillo, Dies at 95. In: New York Times . June 7, 2016.
  3. ^ A b Life and History of Dominican President Antonio Imbert Barrera. In: PresidentsOfTheDominicanRepublic.com.
  4. ^ Germán E. Ornes: Trujillo: pequeño César del Caribe. Editorial Las Novedades, Caracas 1960, p. 189 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  5. Francisco Reyes: Acusan hermanos Imbert Barreras crimen en Puerto Plata en 1943. In: AlMomento.net. June 16, 2016.
  6. a b Héctor Minaya: Dicen mayoría complotados ignoraba matarían Trujillo. In: El Nacional. May 30, 2009.
  7. a b Imbert Barrera deja carta sobre ajusticiamiento de Trujillo. ( Memento of the original from July 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Noticias SIN. June 1, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.noticiassin.com
  8. Tim Mansel: "I shot the cruellest dictator in the Americas". In: BBC News . May 27, 2011.
  9. ^ Bernard Diederich: Trujillo. The Death of the Goat. The Bodley Head, London / Sydney / Toronto 1978, ISBN 0-370-10286-X , pp. 133-141.
  10. ^ Pupo Román interrogado. Sus declaraciones. In: Historia dominicana en graficas. June 11, 2016.
  11. Julio Amable González Hernández: 30 de mayo: sus héroes (2 de 3). In: Website of the Instituto Dominicano de Genealogía.
  12. Imbert Barrera dijo: “No iba a dejar que me mataran”. In: Listín Diario. 30 Mao 2011.
  13. ^ Bernard Diederich: Trujillo. The Death of the Goat. The Bodley Head, London / Sydney / Toronto 1978, ISBN 0-370-10286-X , p. 253.
  14. Bethania Apolinar: Constitucionalistas piden despojar a Imbert Barrera de condición de Héroe Nacional. ( Memento of September 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). In: Listín Diario. 3rd September 2013.
  15. ^ Néstor Medrano: Imbert Barrera: el último de los héroes. In: Listín Diario. June 1, 2016.
  16. ^ Salvador Holguín: Héroe Nacional o traidor de la patria ... In: El Nuevo Diario June 7, 2016.
  17. La intervención de los Estados Unidos de America en el Caribe: La crisis de 1965 en la República Dominicana. In: Website of the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, Madrid.
  18. Pilar Moreno: atentado Imbert cumple 44 años. In: El Nacional. March 21, 2011.
  19. ^ Bernard Diederich: Trujillo. The Death of the Goat. The Bodley Head, London / Sydney / Toronto 1978, ISBN 0-370-10286-X , p. 256.
  20. Chichi de Jesús Reyes: El atentado a Imbert Barrera y las conjeturas sobre el hecho. In: Hoy. June 12, 2016.
  21. ^ Dalton Herrera: Adiós al último héroe que ajustició a Trujillo. In: Listín Diario. June 1, 2016, p. 6A.
  22. Antonio Imbert Barrera, who toppled Dominican dictator, dies. In: BBC News. June 1, 2016.
predecessor Office successor
Pedro Bartolome Benoit President of the Dominican Republic
1965
Héctor García Godoy