The Dominican Republic's Role in Orange Week

Nobody will ever know what Patria (36), Minerva (34) and María Teresa Mirabal (25) talked about in the jeep. But you can imagine the tense atmosphere in the car: concern for their husbands, anger at the arbitrary behaviour of the regime, perhaps a last vestige of hope. The three sisters were on their way back from Fortaleza San Felipe: the coastal fortress where the dictatorship routinely disappeared political opponents. The two older sisters had seen their imprisoned husbands there.

The journey ended abruptly on the winding road near La Cumbre. The jeep was stopped and faceless men from the secret service dragged the women and their driver out. What happened next was the brutal routine of a repressive regime that had already lasted 30 years at the time and no longer differentiated between man, woman, friend and foe: torture, rape, murder and finally the attempt to hide the crime behind a fake accident. The perpetrators then stuffed the bodies back into the car and pushed it over a cliff.

It was 25 November 1960 and the three sisters – known and loved throughout the country under the code name "Las Mariposas", the butterflies – were the symbolic figures of the underground movement of June 14th, fearless opponents of Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship, a symbol of hope, courage and strength. Their deaths were supposed to look like an accident. But the badly abused bodies told a different story. Just a few months later, Trujillo met a similar fate when he was killed in an assassination attempt on his car.

The butterflies are followed by orange

In 1981, the first Latin American-Caribbean feminist meeting (a so-called "Encuentro") took place in Bogotá, Colombia, as recorded in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. At this meeting of around 200 people, activists proposed establishing 25 November as a day of remembrance against violence against women, in memory of the Mirabal sisters from the Dominican Republic.