Chile

The Basque mark on the history of Chile is, above all, a mark of names: that of a saying attributed to Unamuno, those of four hundred streets in Santiago, those of several presidents, that of a Jesuit who wrote from confinement and those of two boys who crossed the ocean on the Winnipeg.

“The Basques have made two things”

The saying is attributed to Miguel de Unamuno and is often repeated in Chile: “The Basques have made two things: the Society of Jesus and Chile”.⁴ Madariaga records it in her study of what it means to be Basque in Chile and how that image has been built.

Four hundred Basque streets in Santiago

The writer Miguel Laborde set about counting them in Vascos en Santiago de Chile (1991): more than four hundred streets in the capital bear the names of people, surnames and places that point back to the Basque Country. Only five bear a woman’s name.⁴

Manuel Lacunza, the Jesuit who stirred theology

Manuel Lacunza was born on 19 July 1731, the son of a Basque whose family had its ancestral house in Irañeta (Navarre). He was a Jesuit, and when his order was expelled he spent five years shut away in the cloister of Imola. There he wrote La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad, a work that was translated into Latin and Italian and stirred up an intense controversy in theology all over the world.¹

Presidents with Basque surnames

In the nineteenth century, Madariaga recalls, Chile had three presidents with the surname Errázuriz, and in the twentieth Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet Ugarte were of Basque descent.⁴ Salazar and Hernández go further back and devote a chapter to the Basque ancestor, on his mother’s side, of Bernardo O’Higgins.¹⁴

A Basque choir on board the Winnipeg

Ignacio Sagasti was five years old when he crossed the Pyrenees on foot with his mother and his brothers and sisters, fleeing the war. Then came a concentration camp in France and the Winnipeg: “On the coal ship there were two thousand and something of us”.⁵ Julio Garrote was nine, and what he remembered of that ship was that he learned chess there and that there was a choir, conducted by the maestro Muguruza, that went by singing.⁵

The delegate who left his party

Pedro de Aretxabala had been a member of the Basque Nationalist Party for thirty years when, in 1945, he resigned so that his membership would not cloud his role as delegate of the Basque Government.¹⁰ Leaving did not break his relationship with the party, which remained cordial.¹⁰