$648 million

Diego Rivera mural, La colonización o llegada de Hernán Cortés
(The colonization or arrival of Hernán Cortés),
via Jay Galvin 

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was an artist famous, in part, for his murals about Mexico.  This one is on the first floor of the Presidential Palace, Mexico. He is also knows as the husband of Frida Kahlo. More of his work here. He also did a striking portrait of dictatorship (1936). It was the time of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco while Latin America had more than its fair share of despots. Besides Trujillo, Getúlio Vargas was in power in Brazil (1930-1945). In 1937 he would establish the authoritarian "Estado Novo". In Nicaragua, the Somoza dynasty began its rule in 1936 which didn't end until 1979. In Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, "Central America's Napoleon," was in power (1931-1944). In El Salvador Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1931-1944) had come to power through a military coup. Argentina was under the conservative "Década Infame" (Infamous Decade), from 1930 to 1943 and the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela had ended just the year before Rivera's painting.

See also Botero's satirical The Presidential Family.

This is the fourth consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel (2000), 'The Feast of the Goat' by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The 'Feast' referred to in the title is the power and control, the dictator Trujillo wielded during his time ruling the Dominican Republic. The reader's first association with the novel is, then of appetite, of satiation, of power, control, money and sex through the metaphor of food.

When the end was upon them, all the  Trujillo family, bar the particularly thuggish, boorish uncles, hived off money abroad. While taking money out of the country was forbidden to most people, naturally, the Chief turned a blind eye to his kin acting so wisely.  The family controlled much of the Dominican Republic’s land and its companies.  Much of this reverted to the state when the family left.  

I mentioned that tyranny is often passed on through families. Ramfis, Trujillo's brutish son,

"...cediera al Estado, es decir al pueblo, las tierras, fincas y empresas agrarias del Generalísimo y sus hijos. Ramfis lo hizo, en carta pública. De este modo, el Estado pasó a ser dueño del cuarenta por ciento de todas las tierras arables, lo que lo convirtió, después del cubano, en el que más empresas públicas tenía en el continente."

“...ceded to the state the land, farms, and agricultural enterprises that had belonged to the generalissimo and his children... In this way, the state became owner of 40% of all arable land, making it the government which controlled more enterprises than any other in the hemisphere, except Cuba.”  

You can hear Ramfis in a 1961 interview, smug and arrogant, during the brief period he held power after his father’s assassination.  He was at this time drinking, torturing and killing those who would later become heroes of the Republic, most of them after their murder by Ramfis. He was to die, aged 40, a few years later from injuries sustained after crashing a Ferrari car in Spain, ten days after killing a woman in the same accident.

The country haemorrhaged money for the family’s golden exile: “Donia Maria [wife] $12 million, Angelita [daughter] $13 million, Radhame $17 million [younger son], and Ramfis [older son] about $22 million so far, which added up to $64 million.” 

The brothers were paid off by Balaguer, another $2 million each, to leave the country quietly. 

Today, the total the Trujillos left with is about $648 million, well over half a billion for services rendered or maybe just blood money.  I read somewhere that some of them live in Spain now. The population didn't get blood money though, for their murdered and their disappeared; the Dominican population that is. The Haitians nominally got 'compensation' after the Parsley Massacre, but that's another tragic tale.