Conference: “75th anniversary of the Battle of Manila”

They are direct testimonies of several survivors who went from being allies to being massacred, as the alliance between Franco's Spain and imperialist Japan came and went. In February 1945, during the Battle of Manila, 257 Spaniards were stabbed with bayonets by Japanese soldiers, or under American bombs, in an orgy of blood that left more than 100.000 dead in less than a month.

The last of the Philippines is the name given to the heroic feat of 57 Spanish soldiers who in 1898, for eleven months, resisted in the fort of the town of Baler, after the capitulation to the United States troops after more than three centuries of colonization. Spanish. Many Spanish families continued in the Philippines, living without problems with the new situation in which the Philippines became a state associated with the United States. The General Philippine Tobacco Company, founded by the Marquis of Comillas, was the main nucleus of the Spanish presence in Philippines.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) created a first fracture in the Spanish-Filipino colony between supporters of the Republic and those who supported the Francoists. During World War II, in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippine archipelago. The Spanish were protected as allies, due to the alliance pact between Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan, which Francoist Spain secretly joined. But in the end they suffered the pain of the conflict, hundreds of them falling, through blood and fire, in the massacre carried out by the Japanese in the Battle of Manila. They went from being supported to being massacred. Anna María Aguilella, was a six-year-old girl, and was the only survivor when Japanese troops bayoneted 67 people at the Spanish Consulate in Manila.

Presentation by:
Rafael Bueno, director of Politics, Society and Educational Programs

Round table by:
Ramon Vilaro, is a journalist and writer. For more than twenty years he has worked as a correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Tokyo, most of the time for the newspaper El País. The fruit of this experience are the books USA, beyond the hamburger and jeans (1984); Japan, beyond the video and the geishas (1988); New York and Washington (1994); Gringolandia, a portrait of the US and its relationship with Spain (2004), y Rising sun, Spanish-Japanese stories (2011). He is the author of historical novels Dainichi, the epic of Francis Xavier in Japan (2001) Tobacco, the empire of the Marquises of Comillas (2003) and The last conquest (2005). He has written and directed documentaries for television, among others From allies to massacred, the last of the Philippines. He currently alternates the job of notary with chronicles and opinion columns in different media, including Cambio16.