In southern Chile, Araceli López González is almost 108 years old and one of the last living voices of Spain’s Republican exile. Her memories include a death sentence, years in prison, and a life rebuilt in Temuco, where she still warns against fascism.

A Vine Trellis, a Shout, and the Start of Everything

The memory comes suddenly, clear and sharp, not faded by time. Araceli López González still remembers her father cutting leaves from the grapevine trellis, a simple task that fills a village afternoon. Then came the boots, shouting, and orders that allowed no questions. “I remember it like it was today. We were in the house, and my father was cutting the grapevine’s leaves. They arrived, ordered us down from the roof, and shouted: Come with us,” she told EFE.

She was 18 in October 1937 when Franco’s military detained her and her father, Tomás. At that moment, a vine and a command became the turning point of her life. Repression rarely explains itself to those it crushes. It just arrives.

Now living in a residence for older adults in Temuco, southern Chile, she can still read the sentence issued against her by a military council on December 18, 1937: condemned to death for adherence to military rebellion. The words sit calmly on paper, even though they describe the harshest punishment a state can give.

At nearly 108 years old, Araceli is one of the last voices of the Spanish Republican exile in Chile and worldwide. She is living proof that this era, often seen as distant, is still very close. It lives in her hands, her documents, and the silence that kept her story hidden for decades.

A Republic, a Death Sentence, and the Theft That Followed

Araceli was born on March 26, 1918, in Vegacervera, a village in León she describes as “white mountain ranges with pastureland around,” close to the border with Asturias, where the fighting between the rebel forces and the Republic was especially harsh, she told EFE. She was the second-youngest of 15 siblings. Her father was a miner and a tailor. Her mother was a homemaker.

When asked why she was arrested, she returned to the same blunt truth. “They never told me anything at all,” she told EFE.

That lack of explanation is a punishment in itself. It forces you to create your own story or live without one. For her, it created silence but also a firm understanding of what happened around her, one that doesn’t rely on ideology.

She says she doesn’t identify as right-wing or left-wing but does see herself as a Republican. She often repeats a moral refrain: what they did was very bad. “What they did was very bad,” she told EFE.

Her memories of the war are vivid and physical, not abstract. She recalls bodies in the streets and the theft. “The corpses were in the streets,” she told EFE. “They took everything, they destroyed it all: anything made of silver. They left us with nothing.” The book she keeps, her father wrote down the family’s key events. The entries read like a ledger of loss. In 1936, he noted that Falangists took his 3 cows. Later that month, he wrote that they took 32 heads of smaller livestock. Left with nothing.

These are not grand historical claims but everyday facts. Animals taken. The means to live are taken away. War in its most personal form.

Araceli recalls being taken by train with other women to San Marcos, an old prison and Francoist concentration camp that is now one of León’s most exclusive places. It’s painful to think how a place of captivity can become a place of comfort. Buildings may change, but memories don’t.

Her father was freed in exchange for her death sentence. She never saw him again.

Four months later, she was transferred to Saturrarán, a women’s prison in Guipúzcoa, where she spent nearly 6 years. Her description of prison life is not adorned. It is labor and routine, the slow grinding normality of confinement. “We planted potatoes, we sewed, and we made denim for the soldiers. With time, one got used to living like that,” she told EFE.

She was released at 24 after several commutations and a pardon.

Courage doesn’t always show as defiance right away. Sometimes it means enduring a system meant to erase you, then leaving when it finally lets go, still holding on to your own name.

Chile as Refuge and the Second Silence of Another Coup

After prison, Araceli followed the path her siblings had already taken. 4 had emigrated to Chile before the war. She married a train engineer, had 2 children, and buried her mother, the last family member still with her in the village.

In the notebook her father started, the departure is recorded with the precision of someone trying to hold on to control through dates and times. On June 15, 1953, they left Vegacervera at 8 in the morning. At 6 in the afternoon, they left León for Vigo. On July 6, they arrived in Buenos Aires.

From there, they crossed the Andes to reach Santiago and then settled in the south, in the Temuco region. She was 35. Her children were 7 and 5. Starting over was hard. “Everything felt strange, upside down,” she told EFE.

That phrase encapsulates the whole of immigrant education: new streets, new rhythms, new accents, the daily effort of translating yourself. Chile offered distance from Francoism, but it did not offer a guarantee against fear. Nearly 20 years later, Chile’s own coup arrived, Augusto Pinochet overthrowing Salvador Allende’s socialist government. Araceli and her family felt the familiar tightening. “Each one went into their house and fixed themselves however they could,” she told EFE, describing the 17 years of dictatorship.

This shows that exile is not a single escape but a lifelong struggle with uncertainty. You leave one authoritarian moment only to face another years later. In a different language, under different flags, but with the same cold fear.

For 30 years in Chile, no one knew about her detention, death sentence by a military court, years in prison, or the wartime looting her family endured. The silence lasted.

Her son Arturo says he learned the truth during a trip to Spain they took together in 1990, when they visited San Marcos, by then a hotel. They went down for coffee in the basement, he said, and she pointed to a window. “Through there I looked outside when I was imprisoned,” she told him, Arturo recalled to EFE.

That kind of courage comes late, not because the story didn’t matter, but because telling it came with a cost. Silence was a shield, but it was also a burden.

Now Araceli has 5 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. She says she doesn’t like looking back but is critical of young people who defend Francoism. Her conclusion is clear and sharp: fascism exists in this world only to make war.

In Temuco, in a residence for older adults, a woman nearing 108 keeps that warning alive. Not with slogans. With a life that kept going anyway.