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The Long Reverberation: How the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Years Shaped Latin America

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) did not end on the Jarama or the Ebro; it spilled across the Atlantic and took up residence in classrooms, publishing houses, barracks, parishes, ports, and party headquarters from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. The Franco regime that followed became, at once, a source of exiles who rebuilt Latin American culture and a distant mirror admired by certain strongmen. Out of that contradiction—a defeated republic fertilizing democratic life abroad, and a surviving dictatorship flattering authoritarian imaginations—Latin America inherited institutions, habits, and cautions that still matter. What follows is a map of those legacies: intellectual, diplomatic, cultural, migratory, and political.