By Irene Escudero |
Bogotá (EFE).- Judith Gómez, daughter of the last Minister of the Interior of the Spanish Republic, says that she does not talk about politics because she does not want to fight.
He left Spain at the age of 13 and still from exile in Colombia, after voting for the general elections on July 23, looks with some disdain at the possible entry of a far-right party back into the Government.
“A Government of Goths? No, no,” Gomez says. After 80 years in Colombia, he adopts the popular Colombian term for conservatives, those of the right or extreme right, but explains with a smile: “I call fachis Goths.”
Accompanied by her niece, the last exile in Colombia goes to vote at the Spanish consulate in Bogotá and, although she does not select the ballots herself because her eyesight fails her at 95, she says proudly: “I am a liberal here in Colombia, but in Spain I am a socialist.”
She is the daughter of Paulino Gómez, the last Minister of the Interior (Interior) of the Republic, during the Government of Juan Negrín, the Republican government that resisted in Spain until the victory of Francisco Franco.
It was a “girl of the war”, the tens of thousands of minors who were shipped alone out of Spain to save them from the confrontations. Judith and her brothers, Paulino and Eduardo, were first sent to the United Kingdom and then joined her mother, Judit Basterra, in France from where they left for America; First Mexico and finally Colombia.
A life in exile
“They didn’t expel us, we left,” she says with a firm voice and a brilliant memory despite her age and some oversights that lead her to repeat what she is most proud of: she barely knows how to write, since she couldn’t go to school because of the war and exile, but she knows how to speak English and French from her time in the two European countries.
He arrived in Colombia, a country that had some reluctance to welcome exiled Republicans. Colombian governments have always been very right-wing and they were afraid that the country would be filled with communists, Judith explains spontaneously, although she acknowledges the good treatment of then-President Eduardo Santos, who gave her and hundreds of Spaniards asylum who fled Francoism.
For this reason, with a strong Spanish accent, she proudly considers herself Colombian, she says from her living room in a house in Teusaquillo, a residential neighborhood in Bogotá, located in a building with a Basque name built by her brother, the architect Paulino Gómez Basterra. And she never returned to Spain because when Franco died she had already built her whole life in her new home.
Thanks to his command of French, he worked with the Swiss commercial attaché in Colombia and dedicated his efforts to the Spanish community, establishing the Spanish Health Foundation to provide health coverage to Spaniards who did not have it and the Basque Center.
The times he has returned to Spain, he has done so as a tourist and without talking about politics. “So that? If I was going to have a good time, not to start fighting ”, he wields.
The return of the far right
Now, almost 50 years after the death of Francisco Franco, the elections next Sunday could leave a panorama in which the extreme right, which defends values similar to those of the dictatorship, can come to govern if the conservative Popular Party (PP) needs them to reach an absolute majority in Congress and form a government.
However, Gómez is not intimidated and even looks optimistic. “I think they have become a bit civilized, they are no longer so… as they were,” he says and gives his reasons: “Europe is very close and in Europe they don’t really like those parties that do what they want.”
Also, he got tired of fighting; “You cannot live fighting with your compatriot over a political issue from 30 years ago,” he repeats. He doesn’t talk about politics because he knows that whoever doesn’t want to be convinced doesn’t come to reason.
So with a glass of wine in her hand, she claims something that she could not do in Spain for decades: “You have to be free to vote.”