A Lesson in Migration by Pablo Neruda

Chile, like many other countries, has argued whether to welcome immigrants from Haiti, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela or to evacuate. Although only five hundred thousand immigrants live in our nation of 17.7 million, right-wing politicians have planted an anti-emigration session, opposing the rate of rising migrants in the past decade and leading it especially towards those from Haiti.

Migration was a major issue in the November and December elections here. The winner was Sebastian Pinera, 68-year-old centre-right, a billionaire who was president from 2010 to 2014. Mr. Pinera blamed the immigrants for delinquency, drug trafficking and organised crime. He took advantage of the support of Jose Antonio Kast, an extreme right politician campaigning to build physical barriers along the Peru and Bolivia border to stop immigrants.

Chileans are not the only ones who are in front of xenophobia and Nazism, but we would do well to remember our own history, which offers a model of how we should behave when confronted with strangers seeking refuge.

On August 4th 1939, Winnipeg left for Kil from the French port of Paulakut with more than 2,000 refugees who had fled their home country in Spain.

A few months earlier, Francisco Franco ʹ, assisted by Mussolini and Hitler, had defeated the democraticly elected Spanish government forces. The fascists brought in a wave of violence and murder.

Among the hundreds or thousands of desperate supporters of the Republic of Spain who left the Pyrenees to flee that violence were men, women, and children aboard Winnipeg, who arrived months later at the port of Valparaisos.

The person responsible for their salvation was Pablo Neruda, who, at the age of 34, was already considered a large poet. His expectations in 1939 were indeed significant enough for him to be able to convince his president of the pound, Pedro Agguire Cerda, who was encouraging for his small country to offer asylum to those who had been mistreated in Spain.

Not only would this set a humanitarian example, it said, Neruda, but it would also allow Chile much needed foreign expertise and also talent to promote development. The president agreed and authorised the issuance of several visas, but the poet himself was taken with the finding of funds for expensive travel of migrants for food, and for staying in the country's first six months. And Neruda, while she was in France coordinating the operation, did it to ensure that immigrants had the most technical skills and moral character unmatched.

It took considerable courage for President Aguire Cerda to welcome Spanish refugees to Chile. The country was poor, still suffering the severe effects of depression, with a very high unemployment rate, and it had just suffered a devastating earthquake that killed 28,000 people and left many more injured and homeless.

The tough nationalist campaign of its parties and media, smelling the chance to attack the government of the president's People's Front, presented a prospect of asylum seekers of” undesirable”: rapists, criminals, anti - Christian Egyptians whose presence, according to an editorial chauvinist in Chile's conservative newspapers, would be like the “incompatible with social calm and better ways. ”

Neruda realized that it would be cheaper to take an amok yesterday to fill it with refugees than to send one family after another to Kil. Winnipeg was free at the time, but since it was a cargo ship, it had to be renovated to accommodate 2,000 passengers.

Volunteers from the French Communist Party working to get the ship ready, Neruda collected donations from all over Latin America and from friends like Pablo Picasso to finance among extremely expensive. Time was short: Europe was suffering for war, and the bureaucratics in Santiago and Paris were sabotaging the effort. With only half the cash in their hands a month before the ship was ready for departure, a group of Americans suddenly offered to cover the rest of the funds.

Of all of this, Neruda was filled with his love for Spain and compassion for the victims of fascism, including that of his best friend, poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed by fascist death squads in 1936.

As consul of Chile during the early years of the Spanish Republic, Neruda witnessed the bombing in Madrid. The destruction of the city that loved him and the attacks on culture and freedom dramatically changed his life and literary traits.

After the fall of the Republic, he declared, “Beth to defend to death what was killed in Spain: right to happiness.” It's not surprising that he kept Winnipeg from being the most beautiful poem”

And when this amazing, giant, floating range arrived in Valparaiso, its passengers despite protests by nationalists and Nazi sympathies received a welcome like they had been heroes.

Waiting for the poor survivors of Franco's legions was President Aguiirre Cerda's personal sponsor, the young doctor named Salvador Alles. The joyful crowd gathered there sang Spanish songs of resistance and greeted refugees, some of whom had quit their jobs.

The refugees who had arrived ashore would help build a more prosperous and open Chile. They included historian Leopoldo Castedo, then Maurizio Amster, playwright and essayist Jose Ricardo Morales, and painters Roser Bru and Jose Balmes.

About 80 years later, something similar concerns us in Kill and inexorably. Where are the presidents who welcomed refugees with open arms despite harsh slander? Where are the Neruda, ready to assist in ships and in protecting the right to happiness?

The New York Times ] Periscope