Jesús Galíndez

He was allegedly kidnapped and murdered by intelligence operatives of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, based on a direct order from Rafael Trujillo, the caudillo of the Dominican Republic.

Galíndez was born in Madrid[2] or Amurrio, Alava,[3] and, as a Basque Nationalist Party member, took part on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Through the network he met with Ibero-American Poets, the Writers Guild, the International League for the Rights of Man, and the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom.

The trial in the US of John J. Frank in November 1956 as an unregistered agent for the Dominican government provided further insights into the Galíndez–Murphy connection.

He stated that Galíndez had been under Dominican supervision for some time, and it was feared that he was writing a critical volume about Trujillo and his family.

[5] A plan was hatched to use an American pilot, Murphy, who rented a Beech aircraft, equipped it for long-distance flight and landed on March 12 in Amityville.

[10] The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute published an investigation in 2018 titled Professor Galíndez: Disappearing from Earth: Governments, Complicity, and How a Kidnapping in the Midst of American Democracy Went Unsolved.

[14] Julia Alvarez references the disappearance of Galíndez in her 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies during a section from María Teresa Mirabal's perspective.

[16][17] In the 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa writes at length about Galíndez and his disappearance.