Galíndez

The mysterious disappearance on the streets of New York of Jesús de Galíndez, a professor and representative of the Basque Government in exile at the United Nations, shook international public opinion in 1956. The victim had just presented his doctoral thesis at Columbia University on the regime of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who was responsible, according to various investigations, for his kidnapping, torture and murder. Despite the fact that, in 1990, when Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published his ambitious novel about the case, it had already been largely forgotten, "Galíndez" caused a stir, since it was an accomplished political and literary artifact that reopened the memory of a past badly buried. An immediate success among critics and the public, translated into ten languages and made into a film, this is one of the author's most successful novels, as it perfectly combines the narrative mechanisms of the investigation with the political and moral themes that constituted the axis of his thought.