Photograph of Andres Rodriguez Barbeito

When the Civil War broke out in July 1936, the Spanish embassy and consulates in Brazil experienced a sweeping change in personnel, as most of the diplomats there supported the rebellion. In addition to confronting an unfavourable situation internationally, the government of the Republic had to restructure its diplomatic corps, sending people from outside the service to take up posts abroad.  

One of these people was Andrés Rodríguez Barbeito, who appears in this photograph.  He was a journalist by trade and had worked as private secretary for Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero. He arrived in Brazil in 1937 to work in the consulates in Santos and São Paolo preparing propaganda. He helped found a Spanish Republican Centre In the important port city of Santos. Because of his intensive activity, the political police deemed him a “dangerous communist” and he was expelled from the country in December 1937. This was possible because the government of Brazil had not recognized his status as a diplomat. 

The staff of the Spanish embassy in Río de Janeiro changed a number of times during the Civil War. The charges had the difficult task of convincing the Vargas government that pro-Republican activities in Brazil did not constitute interference in the country’s domestic politics. Fernando Morales Llamas, the charge during most of 1937, informed the Minister of Foreign Affairs that he had expressed his indignation to the Brazilian Foreign Minister for describing the government of the Republic as “Bolshevik” and reminded him that Brazil recognized it as the government of Spain.  

When he returned to Spain, Morales Llamas was among the thousands of Spaniards who suffered Francoist revenge. The documents in his file among the documentation for the repression of communism and masonry show that in 1942 he was arrested and obliged to sign a document in which he rejected masonry and affirmed his believe in the Catholic Church. It was only in 1955, and thanks to the intervention of a nun who, in the name of the Catholic Church, testified to his religious devotion and aversion to communism, that Morales Llamas succeeded in having his sentence converted to house arrest.