José Antonio Aguirre's Bio II

As promised, here you have the second installment on José Antonio Aguirre's bio:

Jose Antonio Aguirre y Lekube

A Basque Professor at Columbia University

by Prof. Gorka Aulestia, University of Deusto

Mayor and Parliamentarian

Jose Antonio followed those events with concern but with optimism for the future. He was at the time mayor of Getxo. He missed no occasion to speak publicly. He wanted young Basques to be studious. He spoke to workers of their rights. He tried to make women see their role in the future of Euskadi.

Primo de Rivera’s Spanish dictatorship finally fell in January of 1930. On the morning of April 14, 1931, Eibar proclaimed the Spanish Republic and our young mayor of Getxo did the same hours later in the name of his party.

Agirre was a born organizer. Within the PNV, almost continually in conflict, he stanched wounds and united personal wills. On July 14, 1931, the Cortes Constituyentes (Constituent Courts) were formed and Agirre took part as a parliamentarian within the small Basque minority group.

Those were convulsive years during which religion was offended even in the Cortes. The Basques were insulted and jeered, their language euskara was mocked, and little by little what started out as a breath of liberating air became a disappointment for Agirre and many Basques. Faced with parliamentarians of more advanced years armed with science, like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Besteiro, Alcala Zamora, Azaña, Prieto, and Gil Robles, 27-year-old Agirre broke the mold of the two irreconcilable Spains by speaking of a New Spain of autonomous nations. He declared himself Catholic and nationalist, and developed a reputation as an able parliamentary negotiator.

But in response to his political demands, the Republic sent the Guardia Civil to break up the meeting between parliamentarians and Basques beneath the Tree of Gernika. In 1932 the Jesuits were expelled from Spain, as were the Jews and the Moors centuries before, thereby incurring more disfavor. Jose Antonio opposed Madrid in this matter.

On the personal level, Agirre married on July 8, 1933 in the Basilica of Begoña. With his wife María Zabala, he had three children, Aintzane, Joseba, and Iñaki, born in Bilbao, Paris, and New York respectively.

Agirre’s health deteriorated greatly during 1932 and 1933, so much so that on July 4, 1933 he stepped down as mayor of Getxo. In 1934, in spite of his parliamentary immunity, he was imprisoned at Larriñaga, but he was not cowed by the experience. His people beaten, slandered, persecuted, and imprisoned, the young representative began to demand the Statute [of Autonomy] and to speak of Euskadi’s aspirations for sovereignty. In 1935 he spoke in euskara before an international forum at a Conference on Nationalities in Geneva. That same year he published his book Entre la libertad y la revolución in which he told of his political experiences during the five years of the Spanish Republic.

The Civil War

The Spanish Civil War broke out on July 18, 1936. Agirre acquitted himself well during the conflict. On October 1, 1936 the Spanish Cortes approved the Basque Country’s Statute of Autonomy. On October 7 Agirre offered his life to the service of Euskadi in the Basilica of Begoña, and in Gernika he was elected President of the Basque Autonomous Government, with three-quarters of his territory in the hands of Franco’s troops.

The new lehendakari and his government, composed of a group of young politicians, were obliged to take on three dangerous and nearly impossible tasks: maintaining resistance in an unevenly matched war; being the leaders of all Basques with a multicolor government that did not skimp in its efforts or sacrifices to unite all the Basque political forces; and organizing a small nation with its own army, passports, and money.

The war was lost, and thus began the exile and exodus of more than 150,000 Basques. The lehendakari was forced to flee Euskadi in July of 1937, only one year into the war. He would never set foot on his native soil again. From Trucios, the last little village in Bizkaia, Agirre wrote these heartfelt lines full of confidence and hope: “The territory may have been conquered; but the soul of the Basque People has not; nor will it ever be.”

In Exile

An enormous task awaited Agirre in France. He had to organize the Basques in exile, regroup families, create children’s colonies, maintain contact with the Basque diaspora, escape the Gestapo and assure his own survival. The Gestapo had arrested his friend Companys, president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, in France, to send him to Spain to be executed in Barcelona. On May 8, 1940, Agirre moved from France to Belgium. There he found his mother who had been fined 3 million pesetas by the Franco authorities. Two days later Hitler’s troops invaded the Low Countries and surprised the lehendakari in Belgium. Misfortune piled upon misfortune, and his sister Encarna was killed in the Nazi bombing of La Panne. The Falangists of the Spanish consulate rubbed their hands in anticipation of capturing a big fish, the president of the Basques. Thus began the great odyssey described by Agirre in his book Escape Via Berlin, a chronicle of his fight for freedom. In it he says, “Our entire history is nothing but our people's most constant, persistent struggle for freedom.”

From the beginning of the Second World War (October 1939) Agirre urged free Basques to support the Allied cause. “We are fighters in this war.” He was the best symbol of a man fighting for freedom. He crossed the German front lines and hid in the Jesuit school St. Francis Xavier in Brussels. When the Gestapo began to register the convents in Brussels, he fled to Antwerp. Thanks to a false passport provided by the Panamanian consul, Agirre became “Dr. Alvarez Lastra,” citizen of Panama, completing his transformation with eyeglasses and a beautiful moustache. Later, he decided the best way to throw the Gestapo off his track was to hide in the wolf’s den, so he traveled to Berlin on January 7, 1941, and lived close by the Chancellery of the Reich for more than four months. After being reunited with his family, he managed to travel to Sweden on April 30.

New problems awaited “Alvarez” in the Swedish port of Göteborg because there were not enough ships leaving for America to accommodate all the people fleeing the war and the Nazi concentration camps. At last, after revealing his true identity to the Swedish customs officer, he obtained four tickets for passage on the Brazilian cargo ship Vasaholm that sailed on July 31, 1941. It arrived in Río de Janeiro on August 27.

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