2023-09-18 06:05:12
The news hit the media in December 1948, with the dictator Francisco Franco at the helm. And ABC, as it could not be otherwise, echoed her: «If this is not sensational, what can be? A first class man, […] “has discovered an unknown Spanish province.” The headline was crystal clear: “Spain has four groups of islands in Micronesia.” Since then, and until 2014, when the house of cards fell due to a parliamentary question, the myth that our country had sovereignty over a series of atolls in the Pacific thanks to an error in a nineteenth-century treaty has been recurrent.
The territories in question have little in the way of large areas of land. Rather, they are atolls, small ring-shaped islands with an interior lagoon; a good part of them, uninhabited. And they are all in the Pacific, in what is known as Spanish Micronesia, between Melanesia and Polynesia. Their names still resonate in the media because of the noise they caused: Guedes, Coroa, Pescadores and Ocea. Or, currently and subsequently, Mapia, Ronguerik, Kapingamarangi and Nikuoro. The first and the second are found in the Marianas archipelago; the third, in Palau and the last, in the Carolina group.
Of treaties and sales
The historical enigma was born in the heat of a dispute. At the end of the 19th century, three of the great European powers – Germany, Great Britain and Spain – were fighting over the sovereignty of the many islands that our country had discovered for almost half a millennium in the Pacific. The tension grew to such a point that Pope Leo XIII was forced to mediate between them to reach an agreement; and this was left blank in a protocol dated December 17, 1885. The result was clear: it was recognized that “the archipelagos of the Carolinas and Palau” belonged to the Rojigualdo empire, but the Germans were also allowed to establish shipping routes. trade and maintain certain relationships with them.
There were dozens of arguments that the Pope put forward to hand over sovereignty to Spain. Although what had more weight was the work that the Hispanic Monarchy had carried out in favor of the natives. And let his words go ahead like a blow against the Black Legend: «Spain’s beneficial action towards those islanders cannot be ignored. It should also be noted that no other Government has exercised similar action against them. In exchange, however, he determined that the king must “make this sovereignty effective” by establishing “a force sufficient to guarantee order and acquired rights.” Logical, since both Germany and Great Britain had criticized the lack of presence of peninsular authorities in the area.
In addition to knowing who the hell had sovereignty, the protocol made it clear that Germany yearned for the Spanish islands in the Pacific. And that whim was fueled even more in 1898, when the United States hit the battered Hispanic Empire in the belly and had to mourn the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. As explained by the doctor in History of Law and Institutions Francisco Javier Díaz González in the dossier ‘Historical-legal study of the liquidation treaties of the Spanish Overseas Empire’, The German Emperor William II then took advantage of the opportunity and formulated, through his ambassador in Madrid, the intention of taking over “the archipelagos of the Carolinas, Palau and Marianas.”
Spain could do little more than go through the hoop. The Presidency accepted the proposal on February 12, 1899 in exchange for 25,000,000 pesetas, although it was necessary to wait until June of that same year for the law to officially allow the transfer and it to be published in the Gazeta de Madrid, the Official State Gazette of the time: “The Government is authorized to cede the Carolina Islands, with the Palau and the Marianas, except Guam, to the Empire of Germany.” Along the way, some tariff concessions were established between one and the other, in addition to the Hispanic power to “establish and preserve, even in time of war, a coal deposit for the war and merchant Navy in the Carolinas archipelago.” In July the debate ended… Or so it seemed.
A thousand theories
According to the myth, in this mess of reports, protocols and various paperwork, an error as formal as it was blunder occurred: it was not specified geographically which islands were or were not ceded to the Germans. And that, in an area where there were – and still are – dozens of them, some tiny and many others scattered across the waters, caused a certain ‘legal vacuum’. The conspiracists are not without reason, since none of the Royal Decrees published in the Gazeta of Madrid in 1899 – two in June and one in July – specified beyond the delivery of “the Caroline Islands, with the Palau and the Marianas, except Guam.
Although there are hundreds of theories in this sense. In his essay ‘That was not in my History of Spain book’ (Almuzara), The historian and doctor in archeology Francisco García del Junco maintains that “as incredible as it may seem,” the treaty “specified each and every one of the islands that made up this archipelago,” and that our four protagonists were not included in them. «The islands, belonging to the archipelagos of Palau, Marianas and Carolinas, were not named. They forgot. Nobody realized that the archipelagos that were sold were not complete. “Over time, after the First World War, Germany lost them to Japan,” says the expert in the aforementioned work.
Map published by ABC in the late 1940s ABC
What is clear is that the first to give wings to this theory was Emilio Pastor Santos. The former member of the CSIC said in 1948 that he had discovered in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid some documents referring to the Madrid treaty in which it was clear that the islands had not been included. «This would be explained by the fact that on some old maps certain small islands do not appear. The consequence would be that, by not appearing on the maps on which the agreements were made, they were left out of them », explains Del Junco in his work.
ABC echoed the news the following year: “The news has caused excitement, not just curiosity: that Spain has four archipelagos near the Philippines, and that it can also establish itself in the Palau, Marianas and Carolinas with base stations.” . And that was the second part of his thesis: that our country had reserved “for uses of commerce, navigation and civil life, some bases in the Pacific.” To support this thesis, the 33-year-old researcher clung to the third article of the 1899 treaty; the one that raised the possibility of establishing factories in said territories. Without knowing it, he was the one who gave free rein to the myth.
Against the myth
Del Junco in 2016, as well as many other authors such as the doctor in Contemporary History Carmen Guillén –this was on TVE a few months ago–, they maintain that the matter reached the Council of Ministers on January 12, 1949. Francisco Franco toyed with the idea of raising the claims; and, in the words of the expert, he did it, but his lukewarmness condemned him. The situation, however, was not very favorable, since the islands were then under the trusteeship of the United States due to countless historical ups and downs – two world wars. To make matters worse, the internal situation in the country was terrible and the dictator did not want to poke his finger in the country with which, in the end, he agreed on the arrival of military bases to the peninsula.
The matter was swept under the rug until recently. In 2014, the controversy once again hit the media. And, in this case, it was stopped in a flash by the Government. In a parliamentary response to Amaiur’s deputy, Jon Iñarritu, specified that “the most logical interpretation of the 1899 Treaty between Spain and Germany is that both parties were clear that what they were transferring were all the possessions that Spain still retained in the Pacific” and that, For this reason, “he did not consider that a geographical delimitation was necessary.” However, he understood this doubt about what some call “Spanish Micronesia” and insisted that, in 1949, this “hypothetical right” had already been renounced.
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