This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
For over 50 years, Dedé Mirabal carried a crushing weight: All three of her sisters were murdered in 1960 by henchmen of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic.
As the sole Mirabal sister who survived Trujillo’s regime, Dedé was left to wrestle with her guilt and find meaning in being alive. She did so by carrying the torch of her sisters’ legacy, as if it were being borne by “las mariposas” themselves the code name, which means “the butterflies,” that her sisters had given themselves as Trujillo opponents.