Republican refugees arrive in Chile

This document from the Chilean National Archives lists the twenty men, three women and one child who disembarked SS Winnipeg at the port of Arica on 30 August 1939. They were among the 2,072 people, most of whom had been in concentration camps in France, who traveled in Chile on board this French ship.

Almost no countries in Europe opened their borders to Spanish refugees. Those who reached France or its African possessions were interned. The Soviet Union took some 1,400 carefully selected people, including leading figures of the Spanish Communist Party, in addition to the 3,000 children it had already received.

Latin America was more welcoming, accepting some 59,000 refugees.
Mexico, which had already taken in 456 children in 1937, accepted 22,000, by far the most. Argentina overcame initial hesitance to accept 10,000. The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia took in smaller numbers.

The decision to admit the Spanish exiles gave rise to a heated debate in the Chilean parliament, but the political situation there was very different than in France. A Popular Front government led by Pedro Aguirre Cerda had been elected in 1937, and it was President Aguirre who appointed the poet Pablo Neruda as Special Consul for Republican Immigration to Chile. Neruda worked with the Spanish Refugee Evacuation Service, which had been established in Paris in February 1939 by prime minister Juan Negrín, to organize the voyage.

Built in Dunkerque in 1918, the Winnipeg was designed to carry cargo and required a major reconditioning to accommodate so many passengers. It sailed from the French port of Pauillac on 4 August 1939. After the small group got out in Arica, it continued onto Valparaiso, where the remaining passengers disembarked on September 3.

Spanish refugees in Latin America made major contributions to their new homes in a range of fields, but especially cultural and intellectual life. Among the passengers on the Winnipeg was 12-year old José Balmes whose father, a member of Manuel Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana, had been mayor of Montesquiu (Girona). Balmes became a distinguished artist. Like many other Spaniards who had fled to Chile in 1939, Balmes was forced into the cruel fate of a second exile following the Pinochet coup in 1973. In his case, it was in Paris, where he lived until returning to Chile in 1986.

The memory of the Winnipeg remains very much alive in Chile, in part because of the country’s own, more recent experience of its citizens having to flee abroad to avoid repression by the Pinochet dictatorship. In 2019, novelist Isabel Allende published A Long Petal of the Sea, based on the story of the Spanish refugees. Allende’s title and a number of chapter epigraphs are lines from poems by Neruda. That same year, the 80th anniversary of the ship’s arrival was celebrated with a diverse range of activities, including a re-enactment of the ship’s arrival in Valparaiso and the installation of a mural entitled The Travelers of the “Winnipeg” in Santiago’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights.