Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship.
" In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and the survivor, Dede--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule.. In the Time of the Butterflies, Paperback - Julia Alvarez It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.