The Hat Passer

Still among the missing last week was Jesus de Galindez, the Columbia University lecturer who disappeared without a trace in Manhattan one night last March (TIME, April 2). Missing, too, was any solid evidence to fortify the widely publicized charge that the Dominican Republic's long-armed Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo had Galindez rubbed out for writing a devastating (but still unpublished) 750-page Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Era of Trujillo. And seemingly missing, according to stories printed by the New York Herald Tribune, was about $500,000 that Galindez had collected as the U.S. representative of a shadowy Basque exile government.

Though born in Madrid, far from the rugged Basque region athwart the western Pyrenees, Galindez considered himself a citizen of the short-lived autonomous Basque republic abolished by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.* As an exile in the Dominican Republic (1939-46) and the U.S., Galindez kept in touch with the Paris "government" headed by Jose de Aguirre, first and only President of the Basque republic. Aguirre himself appointed Galindez as the official Basque representative and fund raiser in the U.S. In his half-yearly statements filed with the foreign agent section of the U.S. Department of Justice, Galindez reported taking in $1,023,004 in contributions during the past seven years and paying out $32,108 in expenses.

Asked about the balance last week, President Aguirre momentarily darkened Galindez' reputation by declaring that the exile government had received only $500,000 or so from him. But in a later interview Aguirre explained that Galindez sent a large part of the funds he collected to the Basque underground in Spain and to various Basque welfare organizations scattered around the globe. "Every cent was accounted for," Aguirre insisted.

One striking fact stood out in the flurry of news about Galindez' fund raising: in the generous U.S. it is entirely possible for an obscure exile to pass the hat for the nonrecognized government of a nonexistent country--and take in a cool million.

*The Basques are fiercely proud of being a distinct ethnic group, different in origin and language from all other Europeans. Some ethnologists consider them a remnant of the peoples who inhabited Western Europe in the Stone Age, long before the prehistoric Indo-European migrations from the east. In the complex Basque language--so difficult that, according to a Basque proverb, the devil himself failed to learn it in seven tries--stone is aitz, knife is aizto. Though basically a mountain folk, Basques make good seamen, like to point out that the pilot of Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, was a Basque. A Basque legend has it, indeed, that a dying Basque seafarer told Columbus of the New World's existence.

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