Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain is presented as a state institution whose authority serves more than diplomacy: under José Félix de Lequerica, it helps Nazi collaborators take refuge in Spain. Across the novel’s wider history, the ministry’s political setting is connected to a recurring machinery of official concealment, forged identity, and impunity, though the evidence does not assign every act of repression directly to the ministry.

Leadership and Protection of Collaborators

José Félix de Lequerica, a Spanish fascist politician and diplomat, served as minister of foreign affairs from August 1944 to July 1945. The novel identifies him as having helped numerous Nazis and collaborators find refuge in Spain. His ministry thus occupies a consequential place in the postwar landscape: a formal government office becomes associated with sheltering people sought for their wartime conduct, rather than with their apprehension or extradition.

This role connects the ministry to Clara Stauffer’s broader escape network without making the institution synonymous with that private operation. Stauffer’s home at Galileo 14 receives fugitives, provides food and clothing, and handles practical arrangements; the minister’s recorded contribution is distinct and political, locating official assistance alongside the networks that made refuge workable. The distinction matters: the novel depicts protection as an overlap between state authority and private organization, not as a single office acting alone.

Documents, Visibility, and State Power

The novel repeatedly makes paperwork a means of deciding who can be recognized, protected, or pursued. During the Republic, Manuel Arroyo Benítez receives documents identifying him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, an invented identity supported by official-looking papers. Later, he passes that identity on to Guillermo García Medina, revising its biographical details so that Guillermo can present himself as a Madrid resident without a left-wing political record. The documents’ power lies in their capacity to make a person legible to authorities while concealing who he is.

That vulnerability persists under later regimes. When Guillermo presents Rafael’s identity papers at a Madrid police station to exchange them for documents of the Nationalist zone, the attendant directs him to the appropriate counter without recognizing the concealed history behind them. The scene sets administrative routine against the defeated population waiting nearby: identification is not a neutral formality when the same state apparatus can sort people into categories of safety and danger. The papers offer provisional survival, but their usefulness depends on the authorities’ willingness—or failure—to look closely.

Concealed Violence and Impunity

The account of the Madrid wartime security apparatus shows how official orders could obscure a person’s fate. After guards mistake a wounded man for a corpse, a police commissioner instructs the military commander to bury him as unidentified if dead, or to save him without registering his name if alive. The stated purpose is to prevent another attempt on his life; the handling of his identity therefore becomes part of his protection. The episode reveals a system in which survival may require avoiding the very records through which the state ordinarily recognizes its citizens.

A later episode gives concealment a more openly criminal form. After a body is found in the Casa de Campo, an inspector and his superior agree to bypass an autopsy and describe the death as a routine cardiac arrest. The corpse, bearing a fatal gunshot wound to the neck, is sent to a common grave at La Almudena under the same unexplained cause of death used for other undocumented victims. The gravediggers notice the wound, but the burial proceeds; even the dead man’s coat becomes an object to take and gamble over. The passage turns bureaucratic euphemism into a physical process: a false cause, a hurried burial, and the destruction of the distinctions that might identify a victim.

The Ministry in the Novel’s Political Landscape

The novel’s account of the Argentine dictatorship extends this analysis of state violence beyond Spain. Before the 1976 coup, President María Estela Martínez de Perón’s decree establishing Operation Independence gives military commanders broad powers under the stated aim of defeating guerrillas; the operation instead directs terror against civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures. Under the subsequent dictatorship, thousands disappear, while clandestine task groups divide repression into specialized functions that include kidnapping, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children. These events are not attributed to the Spanish ministry, but they sharpen the novel’s larger comparison of regimes that use official structures, concealed procedures, and erased identities to evade accountability.

Within that broader pattern, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain represents a particular form of complicity: the use of diplomatic office to assist fugitives who might otherwise face justice. The novel sets that political protection beside falsified papers, unregistered bodies, and euphemistic death records. In each case, power over names and records shapes what can be proved—and whether those responsible can be held to account.