Torpedo boat Tucumán Passenger List

This document is a list of the Argentinian and Spanish nationals who boarded the Argentinian naval vessel Tucumán in Alicante on 23 January 1937.  

When the military uprising in Spain took place, Argentina’s ambassador Daniel García Mansilla was renting a summer house in the town of Zarauz, near San Sebastian, with his wife. On 24 July, García Mansilla began to take family friends: tourists, industrialists, aristocrats, women with young children, who were seeking diplomatic protection into his large house. Some had even been born in Argentina.  

From 1 August, local popular militias demanded that ambassador hand them over and threatened to attack his house. However, García Mansilla was applying a Latin American legal doctrine: the right of asylum, which “this government considers sacrosanct and will not allow to be flouted”. President Justo decided to send a warship to back up its diplomats as well as to protect the Argentinians, other Latin Americans, and Spaniards who were trying to get out of Spain. As the people under  the ambassador’s protection were evacuated on the orders of Minister of State  Augusto Barcía a few days later, and García Mansilla was able to cross the border into France, the warship 25 de Mayo headed for Alicante. By this time, the Argentinian embassy in Madrid had been granting asylum to Spanish citizens who felt endangered by the violent events that were taking place in the capital. As the days passed and the number of people receiving asylum grew, offices and even diplomats’ homes were repurposed to house them. In August 1936 there were no more than twenty; by January 1937 there were more than four hundred. 

By the middle of December 1936, the 25 de Mayo had made five voyages to Genoa, Lisbon and Marseille carrying 450 Argentinian, Spanish, and other refugees as well as transporting supplies and communications for Argentinian diplomatic posts. To support this vessel – and eventually replace it - the government assigned the more maneuverable torpedo boat Tucumán. It arrived in Alicante on 5 November and by June 1937 had made 12 voyages to Marseille and one to Lisbon. Its mission was to evacuate the refugees sent by the embassy in Madrid and liberated by the Republican government as well as those under the protection of the Argentinian consulates in Alicante and Valencia and to assist in transporting refugees from the embassies of Chile and other Latin American countries. According records, the Tucumán evacuated more than 1,000 Spaniards, but since many of its departures were clandestine, the number is likely much higher. Among the refugees were Agapito García Atadell, head one of the chekas in Madrid, who travelled on the 25 de Mayo, and Franco’s brother in law and future Foreign Minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer, who was a passenger on the Tucumán.