A Museum of Repression Aims to Shock the Conscience

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Melba Navarro froze at the image of the man with bulging eyes, his mouth flung open in terror. Or was it pain? He was strapped into an electric chair.

“How horrible was the suffering,” she said, a replica of the chair — a simple wooden seat with straps, a little light bulb on the armrest, a wire snaking from the handle to the socket — behind her. It sits under a single light bulb in a bare, chilly subterranean room meant to evoke the feeling of a torture chamber.

A shock to the conscience is the goal of the new Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance, which brings into stark relief the years of repressive rule in this country, principally the 30 years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961, considered among the bloodiest in Latin America....