Mexico and Japan during the Spanish Civil War: The case of the Ship Florida Maru

Abstract

When the Spanish civil war broke out, the government of Mexico, led by president Lázaro Cárdenas, undertook from humanitarian actions to direct and indirect support for the shipment of arms and ammunition to confront Franco’s forces. In this con-text, the “Florida Maru incident” takes place, a ship with a Japanese flag, which was transporting a shipment of military equipment bound for the port of Manzanillo, produced a complex diplomatic dispute between Mexico and Japan that could be addressed through dialogue and the negotiation. In this sense, this article seeks, through a descriptive-historical analysis, to identify the context of Spanish-Mexican relations in the framework of the civil war; and then focus on the analysis of the Florida Maru through the analysis of the documents consulted in the historical archives of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, which allow us to identify two important findings: In the first place , the priority of the Lázaro Cárdenas government to support the Second Republic in supplying arms using all the logistical and diplomatic means available to the embargo policies of the United States and other European countries; second, the deployment of dialogue and lobbying as instruments to resolve diplomatic tensions with Japan, which were resolved without compromising the traditional ties of friendship that both countries had cultivated since the formal beginning of their political and diplomatic contacts at the end of the century XIX.