When the two SIM policemen heard this, one of them laughed and exclaimed, "Why?! Come here, cielito lindo, and let me show you why your father has put locks on the door" (Alvarez 199). The man showed the little girl his gun which demonstrated that he could've murdered her father if the door wasn't locked. This showed that no Dominican family was safe during Trujillo's rule. SIM stood for Trujillo's Military Intelligence Service or Servico de Militar in Spanish, and was used so Trujillo could maintain control of the people in order to search out possible rebels planning to overtake him within the Dominican Republic (bio.com). In my opinion, Trujillo went too far when forming this secret police due to the plethora of people who ended up getting tortured and even killed. In Alvarez's Postscript, three sisters traveled a long distance to visit their husbands in prison who were captured for being part of an underground plot to assassinate Trujillo. All three of them were killed on their way home except for the fourth sister who stayed behind. "To Dominicans separated by language from the world I have created, I hope this book deepens North Americans' understanding of the nightmare you endured and the heavy losses you suffered-of which this story tells only a few" (Alvarez 324). In this quote, Alvarez is speaking to the Dominicans in hope that her literature will open up the eyes of North Americans to help them understand the nightmare the Dominican people suffered under Trujillo's dictatorship. Alvarez uses the Mirabel sisters as an allegory in her story Postscript to demonstrate a political significance towards the dangers of living under a dictatorship. However, not only did numerous Dominicans suffer, thousands of Haitian immigrants did as well.
"In 1937, El Generalisimo (Trujillo) ordered the overnight slaughter of some eighteen thousand Haitians, who had come across the border to work on sugarcane plantations for slave wages" (Alvarez 104).
