“Pepito. To my brother”

The vast majority of those who died in the Civil War were Spaniards, but there were also thousands of people from other countries who lost their lives in Spain or in the French internment camps due to their war wounds or to disease. One of those men was the Paraguayan José Durá Campos was one of them. Known in his family as "Pepito," he passed away on 8 September 1939, in Gurs, where his Paraguayan comrades cared for him until his last breath. Pepito had left Asunción at a very young age and was already living in Spain before the Civil War began. In 1936, he joined the Carabineros after the military uprising.

The document that can be read here is a poem written by Pepito's brother, Vicente Durá Campos, which was not published until 1988.  He also fought in Spain and was one of the few Paraguayan volunteers who survived. After the war, and following the death of his brother, Vicente Durá decided to return to Paraguay, where he had to live in hiding because life in the country for leftists was far from easy during the fifty years between 1939 and 1989. Out of fear of political repression or social isolation, neither Vicente nor his family dared to inform the Paraguayan authorities that he had fought in Spain on the democratic side. As a result, the life and death of Pepito also had to be kept within the 

In 1988, shortly before his death, and while Paraguay was still under the terrible dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), an aged Vicente Durá Campos, decided that it was time to remember his brother. He did so by publishing a poem he titled "Pepito, to my brother" which was included in the book Evoking Traces (Evocando Huellas). It contains these lines.

Long fratricidal war
Destroyed Pepito, my brother.
Buried among mountains
Insensitive to his libertarian desires. 

He fell fighting adversities.
The shrapnel of the mercenary forces
Dragged him, from the Catalan Ebro
To the edge of hope,
In the Pyrenees Mountains, which he crossed
In the heart of a marching column
His destiny was fulfilled.

ETB