Expelled from Brazil

In July 1937, the ship Alsina left the port of Santos for Marseille carrying 27 Spaniards. They had all been expelled from Brazil for being deemed threats to national security. Disembarking in Vigo, in territory controlled by by Franco’s forces, would have been a death sentence. This fear was not simply a theoretical possibility but was based on the sad fate of Francisco Márquez Sánchez, a Spaniard who had been expelled from Brazil at the start of the Civil War and sent to Vigo where he was summarily executed. 

The decision to send them to a French port was not taken by the agencies of the government of Brazil responsible for the deportation of foreigners, but by Andrés Rodríguez Barbeito, the Republican vice-consul in Santos who, according to a report of the political police, had paid the difference in the fares out of his own pocket. 

Julia García y García, shown here in a photograph from her record with the Department of Political and Social Order, was the only woman among this group of Spaniards expelled for political reasons. A young woman who had lived in Brazil since early childhood, the Vargas government considered undesirable and a threat. During the months she spent in prison, she witnessed her companions, who were also accused of endangering national stability and order, suffer repeated torture and abuse. 

After arriving in Marseille, she and her companions went to Spain. Months later, in December 1937, she witnessed many of them die in an aerial bombing of the city of Valencia.  Twenty years later, when the bureaucratic hurdles entailed in her deportation order had been overcome, she returned to Santos. 

The process that led to her deportation was based on a letter from her brother Víctor in Spain, who had been expelled from Brazil in 1934. In it, he told her about his activities as a member of the Spanish Communist party in Asturias and requested that she send him copies of the newspaper The Working Class. In the minds of the police, Julia’s “crime” consisted of being a potential intermediary between “conspirators” in the two countries. 

In an interview in 2001, Julia said that, contrary to what the police claimed, she was not involved in politics and certainly did not work for the communist cause. Julia was probably the only one among that group of deportees who returned to Brazil. Her story helps us understand the repressive universe to which many Spaniards in Brazil were subjected.