Johnny Abbes García

This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Abbes and the second or maternal family name is García.

Johnny Abbes García (1924, Santo Domingo - 1967, Haiti) was the chief of the governmental intelligence office - the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar - during the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. A man of violence and a murderer, he ruled under Trujillo during the end of his era, and later served Duvalier in Haiti.

Rise to power

Abbes was born in 1924 in Santo Domingo as the son of an American who was an accountant, and a Dominican woman.[1] As a young man he was interested in sports, and one of his first jobs was as a sports reporter. In the mid-fifties, he moved to Mexico, where he worked as an official in the embassy. He started to gather information on anti-Trujillo dissidents and relayed this information to the island. Abbes also studied the technical aspects of spying and intelligence gathering. In 1956 he returned to the Dominican Republic and, after Trujillo's half brother Nene introduced him to the dictator, quickly rose to power.

Head of SIM

In 1958 he became the head of the newly created Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM)[1] and the chief planner of assassinations of the regime's adversaries abroad. SIM employed thousands of people and was involved in immigration, passports, censorship, supervision of aliens, and undercover work, including foreign operations.[1] Thus he was instrumental in the two attempts to kill Venezuela's then-president Rómulo Betancourt; first there was an attack on Betancourt in the streets of Havana to inject him with poison, later a car bomb blew up his Cadillac in Caracas, killing the driver and a bystander, while Betancourt survived.[2]

The level of cruelty and sadism of Abbes is legendary. Dominican ex-president, and well-known writer Joaquín Balaguer (who was one of Trujillo's closest aides) wrote that he once ran across him in the halls of the Dominican Presidential Palace, and saw him avidly reading a book on Chinese torture methods. It is said that many of the dissidents that were imprisoned by the Dominican intelligence services were tortured and killed by Abbes himself; a favorite method of killing was to toss the still-living prisoners to sharks in the waters of the Caribbean Sea.

After Trujillo

After Trujillo's assassination in 1961, Abbes moved quickly to hunt down the assassins and bring Ramfis Trujillo from Paris to the Dominican Republic to step into the place of his father. But soon the Trujillo era was over. Balaguer named Abbes consul to Japan to remove him from the spotlight. Not long after that, Abbes became a sort of nomad wandering around Europe, before he finally settled back in the Caribbean, though this time in Haiti. There he began working for François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, the then dictator of that country, as a security advisor. True to his scheming ways, he was later involved in a plot with Duvalier's son-in-law to oust the tyrant. Papa Doc's response to this was to send a death squad to his home, shoot him and his family, and then blow up the house. Though there was one eyewitness to the execution (a woman who lived next door, and belonged to an international organization), some say that Abbes survived the explosion, and changed his name and lived/lives incognito at some undisclosed location. Bernard Diedrich only indicates that Abbes and his wife and maid disappeared in 1969, after coming under suspicion for plotting against Duvalier.[3]

There is also a story by a Gerry Hemming (leader of a group of anti-Communist soldiers of fortune who trained anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s), who says that in 1963, Abbes and Trujillo's eldest son, Ramfis Trujillo, were in a meeting, in Haiti, with other unknown men for the purpose of giving money to partly finance the plot which would result in the John F. Kennedy assassination, allegedly as revenge for the supposed CIA involvement in the assassination of Rafael Trujillo.[4]

In the fictionalized historical novel The Feast of the Goat, about Trujillo and his regime, Mario Vargas Llosa devotes many paragraphs to describing Abbes and his work, exile, and ultimate death at the hands of Duvalier's regime.

Sources and references

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Crassweller RD. Trujillo. The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator. The MacMillan Co, New York (1966). p. 329ff.
  2. ↑ Junot Diaz. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, New York (2007). pp. 110–111. ISBN 978-1-59448-958-7.
  3. ↑ Bernard Diederich. Trujillo. The Death of the Goat. Little, Brown, and Co., 1978. p. 260. ISBN 0-316-18440-3.
  4. ↑ JFK and Hemming
Los Rasputines - Mario Vargas Llosa, 1998.