Mexico, to Companys' widow: "His name will be a symbol in the history of democracy"

BarcelonaOn October 15, 1940, at 6:30 in the morning, 86 years ago today, at the Santa Eulàlia moat, a firing squad killed President Lluís Companys. On November 8, 1940, three weeks after the assassination of Companys by order of General Franco, the government of the Republic of Mexico sent its heartfelt condolences to his widow, Carme Ballester. This is demonstrated by a letter, hitherto unpublished, which the Associació Memòria i Història de Manresa is publishing this Thursday. In the missive, the secretary of the Mexican legation in Paris, Bernardo Reyes, expressed to her a message of solidarity and recognition:

"On instructions from the Minister of Mexico and on my own behalf, I fulfill the duty of expressing to you and your distinguished family my deepest condolences for the irreparable loss you have just suffered with the death of your illustrious husband. The name of Companys will be a symbol in the history of democracy, and we have the absolute certainty that his sacrifice will not have been in vain. I take this opportunity to present to you all my consideration and my deepest respect," the letter reads.

This diplomatic gesture was not an isolated event. Under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico always supported the republican cause. After the defeat at the hands of the coup plotters, the American country welcomed thousands of refugees who had been locked in French concentration camps starting in 1939. Mexico not only offered asylum but also financed transatlantic passages that allowed for the saving of the lives of a good part of the Catalan intelligentsia and political class.

Lluís Companys could not benefit from that protection. Six agents arrested the president in La Baule (in the German-occupied zone of Brittany), where he was living in exile, on August 13, 1940. His wife, Carme Ballester, witnessed it. Two of the men were dressed in civilian clothes and four in German soldier uniforms. According to Ballester's account, they entered with submachine guns in their hands and searched everything looking for money. Inside a drawer, they located 70,000 francs. “Then they started to be happy about the find, immediately they put it in their pockets, they also took all the documents they found,” explained Ballester in a letter that the historian Joaquim Aloy located at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The key figure in the arrest of Companys was the Francoist police officer Pedro Urraca, who had been monitoring Companys since his arrival in Paris and had the complicity of French collaborators.

They transferred him to the Parisian Santé prison and subsequently handed him over to the Francoist authorities, who subjected him to a summary court-martial before executing him by firing squad. Francesc Ballester, Carme Ballester's nephew, was also arrested. The Mexican Republic communicated to Carme Ballester in a second letter that it was granting her a subsidy of 5,000 francs per month, with retroactive effect from October 15, the date of her husband's execution. "Grateful for your letter and for the affection for my martyr husband. You can already understand how great my pain and despair are," replied the president's widow.

The loneliness of the widow

Ballester requested Mexican diplomatic intervention to secure the release of her nephew Francesc Ballester, imprisoned at La Santé, and to facilitate his transfer to Mexico, which she achieved. The monthly Mexican subsidy to Carme Ballester was maintained, it seems, until the rupture of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the Vichy regime in November 1942. Afterwards, over time, she was left alone and for years lived in hardship, ill and without resources, in Paris. She survived by doing odd jobs for a dressmaker –who used her to attract clientele by presenting her as Companys' widow– and by cleaning houses. Even so, she took care of Companys' son, who suffered from schizophrenia. She mobilized and did everything she could to secure resources so that Lluïset could receive the necessary care at the sanatorium. She loved him and had promised Companys that she would not leave him alone, as recorded by historian Oriol Dueñas in the biography of Ballester.