Mexico and the Spanish Civil War by Mario Ojeda Revah

Author:Mario Ojeda Revah [Revah, Mario Ojeda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845197728
Google: UM-rjwEACAAJ
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2015-01-15T02:49:13+00:00

OPPOSITE ENGAGEMENTS: ANDRÉS IDUARTE AND CARLOS PEREYRA

Two Mexican intellectuals, Andrés Iduarte and Carlos Pereyra, both resident in Spain before and during the war, offer incomparable illustrations of these antithetical allegiances assumed by numerous Mexicans along the dividing line created by the war.

Iduarte arrived in Spain in 1933 as a student and a correspondent of El Nacional. He rapidly engaged in political activities and came in contact with sundry Spanish socialist politicians and trade unionists. During the war, Iduarte contributed as radio anchor for the propaganda broadcasts of the Ministry of State. There, Iduarte befriended Anselmo Carretero, an official at the Ministry of State, who invited him to collaborate with him.

Under direct instructions from Negrín, Iduarte outlined a Republican-sponsored propaganda broadsheet to make the American public aware of the “fairness” of both the Mexican oil expropriation and the Spanish people’s “resistance against the foreign powers that had violated its soil.” 30 It would have been published in New York, had the Republic not collapsed. Iduarte complemented his propagandist activities in Antonio Machado’s magazine Hora de España, where he regularly contributed with articles promoting of the Republican cause.

Conversely, Carlos Pereyra, naturalized as a Spanish citizen since 1915, became a prominent figure of the Francoist establishment. Pereyra had served as Foreign Under-Secretary during Victoriano Huerta’s dictatorship. After Huerta’s downfall, he became an expatriate in Spain. There he gained celebrity as an historian, specializing in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and in the Colonial era. Pereyra spent the duration of the war in Madrid, writing articles for El Universal, with no reference to current events, but about Spanish Imperial past, which made him highly suspect of having pro-Nationalist sympathies. The Mexican Embassy, under Pérez Treviño, offered him sanctuary in order to spare him from reprisals by disorderly militias, protection which he refused, even though he burnt several manuscripts for fear that the militias might use them against him.

After the Civil War, Pereyra became a prominent member of the Consejo de la Hispanidad. In that capacity, he wrote several pamphlets denouncing Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbour” policy as a “sinister plot” to undertake a surreptitious penetration of Spanish America. In 1940, Pereyra published El Panamericanismo en el momento actual where he vitriolically denounced Pan-Americanism as an “insidious” scheme to alienate Ibero-American nations from their ‘mother country” and complete their domination by the United States.31 Together with Rodolfo Reyes, General Millán Astray, the rector of the University of Madrid, Pío Zabala y Lera, and Franco’s first Minister of Education, José Ibáñez Martín, Pereyra contributed to a series of broadcasts for the newly formed Radio Nacional de España which transmitted a series of propagandist conferences to the American continent called Voces de la Hispanidad. His affected Hispanism brought him to write Mejico instead of Mexico.32 Until his death, Pereyra worked as an academic of the Francoist intelligentsia which appointed him to preside over the prestigious Instituto Gonzalo Fernández of Oviedo, devoted to the study of (Spanish) American History.33

These men’s divergent trajectories show the conflicting ways in which Mexicans placed

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