Victor de Frutos, militiaman and officer

More than one thousand Argentines volunteered to serve in Spain. Of these, around 400 left Argentina to join the Republican Popular Army, the militias or the International Red Aid organization. Most were members of the Argentine Communist Party (PCA), which paid for their travel and supplied them with passports, many of which were forged. The anarchists mobilized members who carried out tasks in the rearguard, although some did serve at the front. There were also some exceptional cases of Argentines living in Europe who went to Spain on their own, such as Carlos Kern from Switzerland or Hipólito Etchebéhère from Santa Fe and his wife, Mika Feldman, the only foreign woman to become an officer in the POUM militias. There were also the Argentine-born children of Spanish immigrants who had gone to Spain for economic or political reasons following the end of the Primo de Rivera regime, the beginning of the fascistic military dictatorship of José Félix Uriburu Argentina in 1930, and the Second Republic’s amnesty for military deserters. Victor de Frutos, born in Rosario and a member of the PCA who became the commander of the 10th Division of the Army of the Centre, shown in the photograph, was one of them. 

Some Argentines volunteered for the rebels, either as combatants or to serve in the medical services. Some 70 Spaniards or children of Spaniards belonging to the Falange left from Buenos Aires in the first months of the war. As well, a few individual Catholics went to join what they saw as the emerging collective defence of Christian Europe against communism. There were also Argentines resident in Spain who were conscripted into the Francoist army. In 1941, more than 500 of them were still waiting to be demobilized so they could return home. 

The combatants who survived the war had a number of different fates. Some managed to be repatriated to Argentina and some PCA members were evacuated to the Soviet Union. Those who ended up in concentration camps in France escaped and some joined the Resistance. Ten others were deported to the Nazi extermination camps.  

In Spain, Argentines suspected of having supported the Republic or who had returned to the country to fight against the Francoist dictatorship and been captured, wound up in Spanish jails and detention centres like San Pedro de Cardeña en Burgos y Miranda del Ebro. The poet Luis Alberto Quesada and Juan Arhancet, who had been convicted of crimes against the security of the state, remained in prison until 1959 when the government of Arturo Frondizi (1958-1962) secured their release. They were expelled from Spain and their sentences commuted to banishment for life.