The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America
Introduction
Prolog
The Spanish Civil War is rarely used as a lens to understand the postwar era. Remembered as a decisive prelude to World War II, the battle between the Republican revolutionaries and the Francoist nationalists may seem to have little heuristic value for subsequent Cold War rivalries and anticolonial struggles. Perhaps this is due to its complicated legacy. Despite the assistance it received from Hitler and Mussolini, Francisco Franco’s regime ended up being drafted into the ranks of the ‘antitotalitarian’ camp. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the veterans of the International Brigades were among the first victims of Stalinist purges.
Latin America is no exception. The succession of revolutions, coups, democratic experiments and military dictatorships that shook the subcontinent during the Cold War are mostly interpreted as expressions of and challenges to US dominance.
However, for the Canadian historian Kirsten Weld, the Spanish Civil War has never ceased to be a defining point of reference in the imaginary of Latin American political actors. On both the left and the right, the tragic fate of the Spanish Republic provided inspiration – less as a milestone in European history, and more as a model for the ongoing battles in which Latin American progressives and conservatives were engaged.
In her recent articles and forthcoming book titled Ruins and Glory, Kirsten Weld reveals the hidden histories of what she calls the Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America. The origin of this project, Weld explains in her interview with Diagrammes, was an archival discovery: a private conversation between Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger in 1976. To give the American Secretary of State a clearer idea of his own agenda, the Chilean dictator explained that his own struggle consisted of advancing the very conflict that had erupted with Franco’s military uprising forty years prior. Soon after making this discovery, Weld found that reactionary rulers were not the only ones to use the Spanish Civil War as their compass. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Nicaraguan intellectual Sergio Ramirez wrote in his memoir about the Sandinista revolution of 1979 that he and his comrades had inherited “the lost dreams of the Spanish Republic, passed down through generations.”
Once you start looking for them, Weld told us, references to the Spanish Civil War appear everywhere: from the writings of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Roberto Bolano, to the childhood memories of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, both of whom were trained in guerrilla warfare by Spanish exiles, but also in the alarmed sermons of conservative bishops and the rants of reactionary ideologues. More than a memorable episode, the conflict between the Spanish Republic and its falangist foes formed a rich and complex object lesson for both the Left and the Right.
To Latin American conservatives, Franco’s Spain represented a uniquely attractive blend of Catholic anticommunism and antiliberal racialism. The Generalissimo had not only reasserted the colonial privileges of Hispanidad to which the Latin American ruling elites claimed to belong. He had also revived the imaginary of the medieval Reconquista: communists, according to this vision, were not just political adversaries but an invasive race of aliens who carried what the Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Najéra called a “red gene.” The endgame, therefore, was not merely to ward off socialist revolutions or the election of popular front governments, but also to turn back the clock to an early modern and decidedly pre-democratic social order.
For their part, Latin American progressives pondered the lessons that needed to be drawn from the fall of the Spanish Republic: Had its elected leaders been too timid or too radical in their antifascist struggle? What part did the fractiousness of their own coalition play in their eventual demise? And what were the chances of achieving democratic reforms in postwar Latin America given that Western leaders of the so-called free world had no qualms about making Franco’s Spain a member of the UN and were now sponsoring the coups of its admirers in the subcontinent?
The democratic transitions that accompanied or followed the end of the Cold War did not diminish the symbolic importance of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America. On the Left, the anticolonial dimension of the social movements that would eventually bring about the Pink Tides of the 2000s attests to what they were up against, namely a postcolonial order very much predicated on the Hispanic supremacy championed by Franco’s followers. On the right, the old falangist contention that liberal democracy was not the antithesis of communism but the gateway to it goes a long way in explaining the rise of postmodern caudillos, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Milei in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile.
As illiberal or neo-fascist regimes proliferate and endeavor to criminalize all forms of anti-fascist resistance, it has become common place to evoke a return of the 1930s. Yet, as Kristen Weld demonstrates, what we are witnessing – in and beyond Latin America – is less a resurgence of supposedly discarded ideologies after decades of dormancy than the surfacing and morphing of intellectual and political currents that never disappeared. The enduring imprint of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America is exemplary in this regard.
Our interview took place in New York, on March 19, 2026.
Prolog
The Spanish Civil War is rarely used as a lens to understand the postwar era. Remembered as a decisive prelude to World War II, the battle between the Republican revolutionaries and the Francoist nationalists may seem to have little heuristic value for subsequent Cold War rivalries and anticolonial struggles. Perhaps this is due to its complicated legacy. Despite the assistance it received from Hitler and Mussolini, Francisco Franco’s regime ended up being drafted into the ranks of the ‘antitotalitarian’ camp. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the veterans of the International Brigades were among the first victims of Stalinist purges.
Latin America is no exception. The succession of revolutions, coups, democratic experiments and military dictatorships that shook the subcontinent during the Cold War are mostly interpreted as expressions of and challenges to US dominance.
However, for the Canadian historian Kirsten Weld, the Spanish Civil War has never ceased to be a defining point of reference in the imaginary of Latin American political actors. On both the left and the right, the tragic fate of the Spanish Republic provided inspiration – less as a milestone in European history, and more as a model for the ongoing battles in which Latin American progressives and conservatives were engaged.
In her recent articles and forthcoming book titled Ruins and Glory, Kirsten Weld reveals the hidden histories of what she calls the Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America. The origin of this project, Weld explains in her interview with Diagrammes, was an archival discovery: a private conversation between Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger in 1976. To give the American Secretary of State a clearer idea of his own agenda, the Chilean dictator explained that his own struggle consisted of advancing the very conflict that had erupted with Franco’s military uprising forty years prior. Soon after making this discovery, Weld found that reactionary rulers were not the only ones to use the Spanish Civil War as their compass. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Nicaraguan intellectual Sergio Ramirez wrote in his memoir about the Sandinista revolution of 1979 that he and his comrades had inherited “the lost dreams of the Spanish Republic, passed down through generations.”
Once you start looking for them, Weld told us, references to the Spanish Civil War appear everywhere: from the writings of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Roberto Bolano, to the childhood memories of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, both of whom were trained in guerrilla warfare by Spanish exiles, but also in the alarmed sermons of conservative bishops and the rants of reactionary ideologues. More than a memorable episode, the conflict between the Spanish Republic and its falangist foes formed a rich and complex object lesson for both the Left and the Right.
To Latin American conservatives, Franco’s Spain represented a uniquely attractive blend of Catholic anticommunism and antiliberal racialism. The Generalissimo had not only reasserted the colonial privileges of Hispanidad to which the Latin American ruling elites claimed to belong. He had also revived the imaginary of the medieval Reconquista: communists, according to this vision, were not just political adversaries but an invasive race of aliens who carried what the Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Najéra called a “red gene.” The endgame, therefore, was not merely to ward off socialist revolutions or the election of popular front governments, but also to turn back the clock to an early modern and decidedly pre-democratic social order.
For their part, Latin American progressives pondered the lessons that needed to be drawn from the fall of the Spanish Republic: Had its elected leaders been too timid or too radical in their antifascist struggle? What part did the fractiousness of their own coalition play in their eventual demise? And what were the chances of achieving democratic reforms in postwar Latin America given that Western leaders of the so-called free world had no qualms about making Franco’s Spain a member of the UN and were now sponsoring the coups of its admirers in the subcontinent?
The democratic transitions that accompanied or followed the end of the Cold War did not diminish the symbolic importance of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America. On the Left, the anticolonial dimension of the social movements that would eventually bring about the Pink Tides of the 2000s attests to what they were up against, namely a postcolonial order very much predicated on the Hispanic supremacy championed by Franco’s followers. On the right, the old falangist contention that liberal democracy was not the antithesis of communism but the gateway to it goes a long way in explaining the rise of postmodern caudillos, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Milei in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile.
As illiberal or neo-fascist regimes proliferate and endeavor to criminalize all forms of anti-fascist resistance, it has become common place to evoke a return of the 1930s. Yet, as Kristen Weld demonstrates, what we are witnessing – in and beyond Latin America – is less a resurgence of supposedly discarded ideologies after decades of dormancy than the surfacing and morphing of intellectual and political currents that never disappeared. The enduring imprint of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America is exemplary in this regard.
Our interview took place in New York, on March 19, 2026.
Biography of Kirsten Weld
Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, and historical memory.
Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's 36-year civil war, concealed from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s end, stumbled upon by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. It won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section, and it was published in Spanish by AVANCSO as Cadáveres de papel: Los archivos de la dictadura en Guatemala (2017).
Her second book, the forthcoming Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America, examines the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas from the 1930s through the present. It will be published by Harvard University Press in early 2028. Research from this project has been published in Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Dissent, and Public Books.
Born and raised in Canada, Weld holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University. She is co-president of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Biography of Kirsten Weld
Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, and historical memory.
Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's 36-year civil war, concealed from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s end, stumbled upon by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. It won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section, and it was published in Spanish by AVANCSO as Cadáveres de papel: Los archivos de la dictadura en Guatemala (2017).
Her second book, the forthcoming Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America, examines the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas from the 1930s through the present. It will be published by Harvard University Press in early 2028. Research from this project has been published in Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Dissent, and Public Books.
Born and raised in Canada, Weld holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University. She is co-president of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.