Uruguay

The Basque exile passed through Uruguay in a particular way. Euskal Erria, the society that had been born to bring together all the Basques of Montevideo, began by declaring itself neutral in the war; a few years later, with a delegation of the Basque Government in the city and the lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) reappearing there, it lent its halls to the Gran Semana Vasca (Great Basque Week) of 1943 and went through what its historians call its “cultural revolution”.

A society neutral in the war

When the war reached the Basque Country, Euskal Erria declared itself neutral and did not answer the requests for help that reached it in 1937. At the assembly of June that year, one of its members called that attitude a “dark page” in the life of the institution.⁵ The first help did not come until the end of the war: in March 1939 the society gave 100 pesos to a subscription for the Basque children who were victims of the war, and in May it raised the sum to 500.⁵

By then the Basque Government had already passed through Montevideo. On 15 November 1938 the members of the delegation of the Government of Euzkadi that was to settle in Buenos Aires arrived aboard the Asturias, and they explained to the Uruguayan press what they had come for: to negotiate with the governments of Uruguay and Argentina the entry of thousands of Basque refugees.⁵

In 1940 the Basque Government opened a Delegation of its own in Montevideo. Its delegates were Ricardo Guisasola (1941-1964) and Pedro Artetxe (1964-1971), although between 1943 and 1955 the person who actually held the post was Vicente Amezaga, who was never officially appointed.¹¹

The reappearance of lehendakari Aguirre (1941)

In May 1940 the German advance caught lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre in Belgium, and for more than a year his whereabouts were a secret. He crossed occupied Europe and the Atlantic, entered Uruguay across the Brazilian border in October 1941, and it was in Montevideo that he appeared in public again.⁵¹¹

His arrival put the neutrality of Euskal Erria to the test. On 6 October the board voted on whether to send a delegation to greet him, and the answer was no: five votes against, two in favour and one abstention.⁵ Several members wanted to resign in protest, and it was Aguirre himself who advised them to stay and change things from within.⁵ Outside the club, the deputy Julio V. Iturbide proposed in the Chamber of Representatives a tribute to the lehendakari, whose arrival is told in his own words in Basques in Uruguayan history.⁵

The Gran Semana Vasca of 1943

Two years later Montevideo lived through the great cultural event of the exile in Uruguay: the Semana Cultural Vasca (Basque Cultural Week), from 30 October to 13 November 1943, a “week” that lasted fifteen days.⁵ The idea came from Aguirre and from the Basque delegates in Buenos Aires, and in Montevideo both societies took part: Euskal Erria gave up its halls to serve as the general secretariat, and the Centro Euskaro Español organised a festival to raise funds.⁵

It was opened by the president of the Republic, Juan José de Amézaga, a descendant of Basques from Algorta, at an exhibition in the Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes with works by Zuloaga, Ramiro Arrue, the Zubiaurre brothers, Gustavo de Maeztu and Néstor Basterretxea. His wife, Celia Álvarez de Amézaga, chaired the ladies’ committee. During those fifteen days, the radio stations of Montevideo broadcast Basque music and lectures.⁵

What the Semana Vasca left behind

The Semana Vasca opened a period in Euskal Erria that its historians call “the cultural revolution”.⁵ In April 1944, at the prompting of Vicente Amezaga, the first chair of the Basque language on the American continent was created at the Universidad de la República.⁵¹² On 13 May that year the Plaza Gernika was inaugurated in Montevideo, in honour of the victims of the bombing.⁵ On 20 March 1945 the Departamento de Estudios Vascos (Eusko Ikaskuntza Mintegia) was born.⁵ Between 1945 and 1946, faced with an urgent request for help for three thousand Basque refugees in France, Euskal Erria set up the Comité Pro Ayuda a los Vascos en Francia (Committee for Aid to the Basques in France).⁵ And between 1948 and 1949 Amezaga presented a radio programme on Basque subjects, Euzkadi Irratia.⁵

According to the authors of the Urazandi volume on Euskal Erria, Uruguay was, together with Mexico, the only American country that kept up its support for the Basque cause against the Franco dictatorship without wavering in the decade after the Second World War. As an example they give a scene from 1954: during the UNESCO Conference held in Montevideo, the Uruguayan minister Justino Zabala Muniz gave the floor to the Basques Xabier Landaburu and Santiago Onaindia in front of Franco’s minister of education.⁵

The period came to an end with the Uruguayan economic crisis of the mid-fifties, and Vicente Amezaga moved to Caracas in July 1955.¹²