The brilliant writer Dominican Manuel Matos Moquete (Tamayo, 1944), known as José Antonio in his native Tamayo, remembers the days when he and his siblings They wielded the weapons in April 1965. Today, 60 years later, the survivor of that war Urban carries the weight of a double loss: two of its siblings were missingand their remains have never been found. Neither his mother was able to bury them.
“We were four: Rafael, who told Fellito a student of agronomy; Sunday, nicknamed Ciro, he was in the third year of medicine; Pliny And me, “says Matos Moquete.” We were all in the war“. Of the four, only him and Pliny They survived. Rafael and Domingo were killed or missing in the middle of conflict. “My mother, Rita Emilia Moquete, spent the rest of her life looking for her bodies, never finding them.”
For years, Mrs. Moquete toured cemeteries, villages and churches, looking for signs that could lead her children. “He always hoped that one day they would appear. And like her, there are hundreds of families Dominican“The writer.
Matos Moquete is based on academic studies to point out that these are more than five thousand people died during the April revolution And they disappeared. And there is no distinction between constitutionalists or not. They were Dominicans. The majority, he says, were not combatants or military, but civilians trapped in a war Urban.
“In sectors such as Villa Juana and Villa Consuelo, the people were killed. The bodies were collected in garbage trucks, in ambulances, without any protocol. And there are still common graves that have not been discovered”
“A society cannot be free with so many shadows. It is not a private matter. It is a matter of the country,” he claims Matos Moquete.
Every April, the country remembers the revolution, but in the opinion of Matos Moquete, it does it wrong. “I am fed up that anniversaries are commemorated without talking about the dead, of the victimsof the missing. You only remember the heroes, and that is incomplete. “
The memoryhe insists, it cannot be selective. “A country cannot live where victims They leave, “he warns.
He recalled that “in Spain, after Franco, they began to look conflict of Statethe duel is also from State“
The legend of Pliny
The other survivor was Pliny Matos Moquete, protagonist of the book Plinythe terrible years, which will be presented on May 7 at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD). The story of Pliny It is also that of a missing, but from one who fled from the persecution policy.
Mortar wounded during the call “Cleaning operation“, Plinio was given dead and transferred in an ambulance.
“In the hospital they told him that military They went bed for bed to look for the injured To finish them. Then, he jumped through a window and fled. “They spent between 15 and 20 days before his family knew he was alive.
![[object HTMLTextAreaElement]](https://resources.diariolibre.com/images/2025/04/25/plinio-los-anos-terribles-66492f79.jpg "Manuel Matos Moquete: \"I'm fed up to commemorate the dates\"")
The worst would come later: for seven of the 12 years of Balaguer He lived in hiding, pursued by all forces of order. “It was one persecution Systematic, “he explains Manuel. “They didn’t want to judge it, they wanted to control, silence, exile.”
That constant harass cemented the legend. “Pliny He was accused of everything, persecuted by all, “he says. book That Matos Moquete dedicates to his brother reconstructs those years of uncertainty.
“It wasn’t that Pliny He committed crimes, was that Balaguer I didn’t want free adversaries. I preferred it in jail or in the exile. And if exile It was an option, sometimes it was worse than prison. An exile loses everything: validity, resources, roots, contact with reality, “he said.
He himself was exiled and imprisoned. “I know what it is to feel uprooted, foreigner, invisible. Therefore, when I see emigrants Anyway, I respect them. Because I have lived your pain“
Forged in adversity
At 17, Matos Moquete was already in the heat of the struggle policy. “There was a different maturity. Since children we had responsibilities. I milked cows, I sold milk, I went to school. The young people then trained at home, at school and with work.”
That early formation was conjugated with a repressive context, of the dictatorship of Trujillowhich drove young people to take sides. “After Trujillothe country was empty. There were no institutions, or freedoms. Everything had to be built. That’s why I say we were the generation of the freedom“
That youth organized Unionsbelieve companiesHe created newspapers, founded matches. “Everything was a creation from scratch. Even universities. Everything was done from the conscience that the country needed to be built.”
For Matos Moquete, the theme is not just historical. It is deeply human. “Every human being has the right to bury their dead. To cry.
And he adds: “That is not a private matter. It cannot be said that the disappeared are things of each family. They are things in the country. And it is the state who must seek, identify, return those bodies, or at least recognize them.”
In his recent speech before the UASD, Matos Moquete requested that the university and the State assume a pending task: “We must scientifically investigate the common graves of the April War. You have to look for the missing. And you have to appoint them. Because without that, there is no justice. Without that, there is no country.”
