Santiago's pamphleteers

In the final days of 1959, almost parallel to the emergence of the June 14th Revolutionary Movement, founded by national heroes Manuel Aurelio Tavárez Justo, his wife, Minerva Mirabal, Leandro Guzmán, Pipe Faxas and others, in the city of Santiago,under the guidance and leadership of a young man barely 20 years old, Wenceslao Guillen Gómez, better known as Wen, the Union of Independent Groups (UGRI) was created, whose members were named after his imprisonment as "Los Panfleteros de Santiago" (The Panfleteros of Santiago).

Historical documents show that most of its members were teenagers and not a few were barely 15 years old, and that they all came from the lower middle class and that some were children of families living in the slums of that city.

The few surviving members of the group described Guillén Gómez, Wen, as a young man of extraordinary political clarity, cultured and studious, a frequent visitor to the library of the cultural society "Amante de la Luz", where he occasionally met with his friends, who drew up a systematic plan of action aimed at destabilizing the dictatorship, through the intensive use of propaganda against the regime, accompanied by actions of sabotage to the "solemn" political acts of the tyrant.

Within this order, we remember the successful act of sabotage organized by the Panfleteros de Santiago, at the inaugural act of the Baseball Championship at the end of 1959, and shortly after, in January 1960, that of hundreds of pamphlets against the Trujillo dictatorship distributed stealthily in the main roads of Santiago, which caused a scandal in that city and frightened the secret service of the tyranny.

One of those pamphlets had the following message written on it: "Pardon the expression: Trujillo sucks", others were aimed at denouncing the atmosphere of oppression in which people lived in those times.

It is known that the distribution of this propaganda was carried out by almost all its members and that some children who could barely read and write, and even some who were illiterate, participated in this activity.

The activities of the "Panfleteros de Santiago" were exposed by a collaborator who had recently joined the group and almost all of its members were imprisoned and sent to the extermination center known as the "Cárcel de la Cuarenta" where they were subjected to weeks of torture and then almost all of them were murdered by hanging and their remains disappeared.

Several witnesses, also prisoners and victims of torture, have reported that the young Wenceslao Guillén, convinced of his tragic end, after going through the worst of martyrdoms several times, the experience of the electric chair without mentioning the name of any of his companions, almost dying, faced his murderers with such courage that his example became a legend.

Of the members of the group of the Panfleteros de Santiago, among others survived: Ramon Antonio Veras and Manuel Bueno. Almost all the others, whose names we will mention below, were assassinated on January 29, 1960.

Wenceslao Guillén. Student Pedro Jaime Tineo. Santiago high school teacher Luis Prud`Homme. Student Manuel Medina Pedro Sánchez Bourdier Frank Benedicto Rodriguez Homero Herrera Miguel Luna Estrella José (Cheché) Contreras José Camilo Disla Ramon Mejia Henry Streese Cepeda