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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2005 
Late President Honored for Giving Refuge
 EFE
One of Spain's top universities paid homage to late Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas and to some 200 scholars who were among the more than 20,000 Spaniards given refuge in Mexico after the fascist victory in their country's 1936-39 civil war.
On hand for the ceremony, which took place in a packed auditorium at Madrid's Universidad Complutense, were Cárdenas's widow, Amalia Solórzano, son Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and grandchildren.
Also honored Monday were the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the National Polytechnic Institute and the Institute of Mexico, which provided academic appointments for the Spanish exiles.
Spanish Culture Minister Carmen Calvo recalled Cárdenas as a "key figure for Spain" by virtue of the succor he provided to the civil war refugees. She noted that those refugees numbering more than 20,000 - were not just members of the intelligentsia, "60 percent were farmers, 30 percent were technicians and skilled workers and 10 percent were intellectuals."
The exiles, Carmen Calvo said, "went on defending the values of liberty and dignity."
Author Caballero Bonald hailed "the refuge, the solidarity and the employment" the civil war exiles found waiting for them in Mexico, whose embrace of the Spanish refugees established a "universal paradigm."
"Scientists, historians, artists, writers, poets could pursue there (in Mexico) their work of investigation" even as other nations refused to help them, writer Juan Manuel Caballero Bonald said.
He wondered aloud "what would have become of that fundamental part of our culture" without Mexico's generosity, a gesture he said left him "moved as a Spaniard, as a republican and as a writer."
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Batel, grandson of the late president, said that the Mexico of the late 1930s "understood like no one else the gravity of the Spanish Civil War" and that his grandfather's government spoke out against Franco in international forums at a time "when France, England and the United States preferred to wash their hands of the whole affair."
Cárdenas Batel is the son of a better-known Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a former governor, mayor presidential candidate who was the son of Lázaro.
Even before the end of Spain's civil war, Mexico took in some 500 children from the Iberian nation at the behest of a group of influential women led by then-first lady Amalia Solórzano. |
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