Palma Sola - Truth or Fiction

Does anyone know if this is true or not?

In 1962, some 18 months following the murder of President Trujillo, Olivorio Mateo known as Papa Liborio was a religious leader and healer based in Palma Sola, near Las Matas de Farfan, some 60 miles from Jarabacoa as the crow flies and 20 miles from San Juan de la Maguana. He had reportedly disappeared during a hurricane in 1908 and reappeared on the ninth day following his supposed death. He said that he had been to heaven and God sent him back to earth and established a following. He was considered a threat to the religious status of the country and the socio economic make up and so the Dominican government (and according to local gossip ? backed by the Americans) on December 28, 1962 decided to end the mass movement, and dispatched a military contingent that performed a napalm airstrike killing 600 people in the area.

Matilda

Xavier_Onassis said:

I have heard some vague tale about this guy Liborio and that he was killed, but I have no clue about the veracity of this or lack of same.

Google the name and see what comes up.

Click to expand...

Funnily enough I did Google in English and Spanish and lots came up. i just wondered if someone was here at the time or had heard talk about it. There is plenty in the press but I was looking for some first hand information rather than just google.

This is what the Rough Guide says - slightly different version mind:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a charismatic faith healer named Liborio established a self-reliant commune in the mountains north of San Juan de la Maguana that attracted thousands of followers. Local peasants considered him a reincarnation of Jesus and worshipped him as such, though detractors maintained that he planned to march on Santo Domingo and set up a Voodoo theocracy with himself as high priest. He was branded a bandit by the American army during their occupation of the 1910s and 1920s; seeing his populist commune as a threat to their rule, they put a bounty on his head and sent out regular patrols to hunt him down. For six years he evaded capture by hiding out in the heart of the Cordillera Central with a handful of followers. When he was finally caught and murdered by American troops in 1922, rumours quickly spread through San Juan and Las Matas that Liborio had risen from the dead, and the soldiers had to dig up his corpse, drive it through the streets of San Juan in the back of a truck and display it in the Parque Central to prove otherwise.

The movement he founded, though, continued, with several local brujos claiming to have had direct spiritual contact with Liborio. In the early 1960s a group called Palma Sola, run by two peasant priests known as The Twins, set up a 1200-member utopian Liborista commune in the fields just west of Las Matas, by all accounts peaceful but deemed subversive enough by the government that on December 11, 1962, the military dropped napalm on them from airplanes – burning six hundred people to death and sending the rest scattering back to their villages. The fields outside Las Matas bear no marker to indicate that the commune members died here, but the Liboristas still dwell in the mountains around San Juan.



Read more: http://www.roughguides.com/destinat...c/southwest/liborista-massacre/#ixzz4DHO1t6eI

And interesting article here in Spanish.

http://www.elcaribe.com.do/2015/01/03/palma-sola-bajo-manto-los-mitos-magia

Matilda

Thanks very much Bob. The more I read and learn the more it seems likely that a napalm bomb was dropped here in this country killing hundreds during my lifetime. I had simply no idea this had happened.

Matilda