Report of the Paraguayan Chargé d’Affairs in Madrid on Diplomatic Asylum

Although Paraguay did not break diplomatic relations with Republican Spain at any point during the war, its diplomatic representatives in Madrid used the facilities and apartments of the Paraguayan legation in the Spanish capital to protect more than three hundred Spaniards sympathetic to the rebels throughout the duration of the conflict. According to a December 1937 report by the Paraguayan Chargé d'Affaires in Madrid, Jesús B. Angulo Jovellanos, these asylum efforts constituted a "brilliant action" by the Paraguayan legation. Jovellanos told his Chancellor (Minister of Foreign Affairs) that the main justification for this was "to uphold the traditional principles of the right of asylum."

This does not mean that the Paraguayan representative acted solely to comply with international asylum law, as part of a humanitarian diplomatic exercise, without any sympathies for one side or the other in the Spanish conflict. In fact, in Chapter I of the report he sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Asunción, Angulo Jovellanos mentions the response of the Republican government to the fascist uprising without making any reference to the military rebellion itself, as if the government’s actions had emerged out of nowhere. Moreover, he described what the government in Madrid was doing as “a vast machine of terror set up against the defenseless and powerless population.”

What happened in Madrid during the first months of the war, as in other parts of the country controlled by either side, was terribly harsh. However, the fact that Angulo Jovellanos used those words, and that he omitted the fascist and militaristic nature of the uprising that led to the start of the war, reveals a clearly partial position on the conflict, or at least a lack of thorough observation of the situation as a whole. 

In fact, the Paraguayan Legation deceived the Republican government, because it concealed the fact that some of the more than three hundred people protected by the Paraguayan diplomatic representatives were members of the clergy.  Angulo Jovellanos also concealed in his reports to the Spanish government that among those sheltered in his premises was Enrique Miret Magdalena, who appeared on the lists of the ecclesial movement Catholic Action and had applied to join the Society of Jesus—two conditions the Paraguayan Legation should have reported to the legitimate Spanish government.

ETB