The legacy of José María Solabarrieta, a historic Basque politician during the Second Republic, has been marked by tragedy following the strong earthquake registered this Thursday in northern Venezuela.
Among the victims is Alazne Solabarrieta Lecea, 65, granddaughter of the jeltzale leader exiled after the Civil War.
In Basque political history, Solabarrieta is linked to one of the foundational moments of Basque self-government: the constitution of the first Government of Euskadi and the election of the first Lehendakari, José Antonio Aguirre, in October 1936 in Gernika.
Solabarrieta, then mayor of Ondarroa, traveled to the Casa de Juntas de Gernika to participate in that historic event, in which the PNV and other Basque political forces formed a government of unity in the midst of the Civil War. That Executive was born with a program of a distinctly progressive character and with an unprecedented structure in Basque institutional history.
That episode would mark his later life, as he could not return to his town for a long period and ended up in exile after the war, like many of the political leaders of that first Basque Government.
The birth of the first Basque Government in the midst of the Civil War
The election of Aguirre in Gernika marked the launch of the first Basque autonomous Executive, in a context of open war and with part of the Basque territory under the control of the rebel troops.
That Government included the participation of different political sensibilities, including socialists, among them leaders like Santiago Aznar, and became a symbol of institutional unity against the advance of the conflict.
In that framework, Solabarrieta was part of the group of local representatives who participated in the construction of that new political structure.
Exile and family reunion in Venezuela
After the Civil War, José María Solabarrieta's career was marked by exile, as was that of many institutional officials of the Basque Government.
In the family narrative, his story intersects with that of Santiago Aznar, a socialist leader and councilor of the Basque Government, with whom he maintained political ties that later transformed into a family relationship in exile.
Both ended up coinciding in Venezuela, where their families reunited as in-laws, a reflection of the Basque political diaspora after the war.
War, exile, and political reconstruction
Solabarrieta's career is framed within a generation of Basque leaders whose political lives were interrupted by the Civil War and the subsequent exile.
Many of the members of that first Basque Government ended up outside the country, while others returned years later, during the postwar period, in a completely different political context.
A commemorative event held decades later in Gernika served to recover the memory of those first institutional leaders.