When Generalisimo Francisco Franco executed five revolutionaries in Spain in September, the fiercest reaction came from Mexico. That reaction surprised many outsiders and made some veteran diplomats at the United Nations shake their heads at what seemed like naiveté. But in fact Mexico was behaving consistently. It is the only country in the world that still harbors an embassy of the old Spanish Republic, and perhaps 20,000 aging Spanish Republicans still live in Mexican exile. In his reaction to Franco, President Luis Echeverria Alvarez was powered by his sense of Mexican history.

That Mexico still recognizes the Spanish Republic in exile is to some Mexicans diplomacy based on fiction. Journalist José Natividad Rosales once called the policy “a romantic absurdity.” For many other Mexicans, however, the recognition affirms their country’s political ideals. “I do not want to assume dramatic or declamatory tones,” wrote journalist Pedro Gringoire recently, “but some day it will be universally recognized that, in giving aid to the Republic and then taking the defeated to its breast, Mexico lived through one of the purest and most glorious hours of its history.’’

In a sense, by his reaction to the September executions, President Echeverria was trying to recall that hour. First, he ordered all contact with Spain suspended. That meant dismantling the steps that had been taken by the two countries in the last decade to normalize relations, short of diplomatic recognition. The President closed the offices of the unofficial representative of the Spanish Government, the Spanish Tourist Agency and the EFE, the Spanish News Agency. Spaniards in charge of those offices were expelled. All flights between Mexico and Spain were suspended, and the offices of Iberia Airlines were shut down. Trade, which had increased eight times in a decade and reached $114 million in 1974, was suspended. The President also ordered Mexican embassies and consulates to refuse visas to Spanish citizens - unless they were refugees from Franco. And he ordered airlines in Mexico to refuse passage to Mexican citizens intent on visiting Spain. When news of these acts reached them, Mexican singers and bullfighters ended their tours of Spain and headed home.

Echeverria went one further step. Describing the Spanish dictatorship as one propelled by “Nazi-fascism,” the President asked U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to call a meeting of the Security Council to expel Spain from the United Nations and to require all U.N. members to break diplomatic and trade relations with Spain and sever all rail, sea, air, postal, telegraph, radio, television and other communications links with Spain. Echeverria’s letter was received by the Security Council with a good deal of frigidity. Except on the issue of South Africa, most U.N. members dislike proposals that might establish a precedent for the U.N. to look into their own internal affairs. The Security Council passed the letter on to a powerless committee.

The letter probably shattered Echeverria’s campaign to succeed Waldheim as Secretary-General in 1976. Under Mexican law, the energetic, 53-year-old President cannot succeed himself, and his term of office comes to an end on December 1, 1976, exactly a month before Waldheim’s term ends. For months, Mexican officials have campaigned, relatively openly and successfully, to make Echeverria the Third World’s candidate for the U.N. position. But Echeverria’s call for the expulsion of Spain undermined their efforts. Pierro Vinci, the Italian ambassador to the U.N., told a correspondent, “He has disqualified himself before the election.” Echeverria’s energy offended the membership. The Soviet Union, ever since the days of the late Dag Hammarskjöld, has made it clear that it will vote only for an inactive Secretary-General. The State Department has been annoyed in the last few years by what it sees as Echeverria’s tendency to go off on rhetorical binges. Third World countries, which have their own despotisms to hide, do not look on what happens inside Spain as a major issue for them. The Arab countries, in fact, have had friendly relations with Franco.

Why then did Echeverria react so strongly to Franco's executions? It is possible, as some cynics believe, that he simply miscalculated, believing that a strong stand on a controversial issue would enhance his campaign. It is more likely, however, that he was carried away by the emotion of Mexican tradition. It was a chance for Echeverria to demonstrate to Mexicans that he was a worthy heir to one of their national heroes, President Lazaro Cardenas.

Cardenas was President of Mexico during the Spanish Civil War, and, according to Mexican historian José Fuentes Mares, he identified the Spanish Republic with the goals of the Mexican Revolution. He believed that the Republicans had adopted for Spain the anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic policies of Mexico. It must, thus, have been emotionally satisfying for Mexicans to feel that their country, once the great colony of Spain, had become the guide and mentor of the old mother country.

During the Civil War, only Mexico and the Soviet Union gave open and official support and military aid to the Republic. Mexico, of course, gave the Republic far less military aid than did the USSR, but Mexico’s position was more steadfast, allied to the Republic to the end. It was, in many ways, a more honorable position than that of Léon Blum’s French Government, which sympathized with the Republic and gave it some surreptitious military aid through Mexico but remained officially neutral, like Britain and the United States. When Franco defeated the Republican army, half a million Republican refugees fled across the border to southern France. France did not really want them and most other countries agreed to accept only a few. Eventually, 200,000 returned to Spain. The rest either found work within a reluctant France or headed elsewhere.

Only Mexico made an open and generous offer to accept many. President Cardenas offered asylum to 60,000. Because of transportation problems during World War II, fewer than that showed up. There are no official statistics, but Martin Martinez Feduchy, the chargé d’affaires of the Republican embassy in Mexico City, estimated that 30,000 Republicans finally settled in Mexico. Some sources raise that to 50,000. In a complete break with Mexico’s restrictive immigration policy, President Cardenas offered, and most Spaniards accepted, Mexican citizenship.

The refugees who came to Mexico were the intellectual elite of Republican Spain. More than half of Spain’s university professors went into exile, mostly to Mexico. Five hundred physicians arrived, doubling the number of Mexican doctors. The refugees included historian Salvador de Madariaga, poet Leon Felipe, composer Rudolfo Halfter and movie director Luis Bunuel. Although more exiles remained in France, Mexico, according to American historian Patricia Fagen, became “the major center of Spanish exile life and culture.” In fact, the Spaniards helped enormously to expand Mexican cultural activity and academic institutions.

After World War II, Mexican officials and Spanish Republicans expected the victorious allies to remove Franco and restore the Republic in Spain. Meanwhile, Mexico recognized a Spanish Republican government-in-exile and allowed its representatives to take over the old Spanish Embassy in Mexico City. The new United Nations refused to admit Franco Spain as a member, and it seemed for a while that the policy might be working.

But, as the cold war intensified, the anti-communism of Franco seemed more important to the United States and Western Europe than his pro-fascism during the Civil War and World War II. In 1955, the U.N. admitted Franco Spain, and the cause of the Republican government-in-exile was abandoned.

Yet Mexico decided to keep to its tradition. Today, only Mexico and Yugoslavia still recognize the Republican government-in-exile, and only Mexico has a Republican embassy. The Republicans keep their headquarters in Paris because of its nearness to Spain, but France, while tolerating the exile government, does not recognize it. According to Martinez Feduchy, fourteen or fifteen countries, like the Soviet Union and Poland, refuse to recognize Franco Spain but do not recognize the Republican government either.

The presence of the Spanish Republican exiles has contributed to the shaping of Mexican policy toward Franco Spain. They are an aging and romantic yet vital reminder of the past. Their numbers have dwindled to perhaps 20,000 now; their cause is choked with the futility of lost hopes. “We have a saying,” joked Claudio Gomez recently, an engineer who arrived in Mexico as a child in 1942, “that you can always tell a Republican because his middle finger is worn off. Every year he taps his glass and says, ‘next year, the Republic in Spain.’ ”

There actually are few illusions now. Most elderly Spanish Republicans in exile know that they will never see the old Republic restored in the same way again. Their time has passed, even if the regime of Franco is overthrown soon. They are only a symbol now of an old resistance to fascism.

Every April 14th, the Spanish Republican embassy holds a reception to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the Republic in 1931. “I have been coming to these receptions for twenty-one years,” said 70-year-old Lan Adomian, a naturalized Mexican composer who, as an American, fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, “and I can see how their hair has become white and the light has gone out of their eyes.”

Just as time has closed in on Franco in Spain, it is closing in on the exiles in Mexico. Juan Rejano, a 66-year-old Spanish poet and literary critic, agreed to talk with me recently about the Spanish Republican community in Mexico. “But,” he said, “you have come too late. You should have interviewed me years ago. Now, most of us are dead. We are a community going extinct.”

The Republicans in Mexico are a dying community because a good many of their children and almost all of their grandchildren have become Mexican, not only in citizenship but in culture. “The children,” said Rejano, “are more Mexican than Spanish. That is only natural.“ Not only do the Republican ideals seem dim to them but so does Spain.

An outsider can sense the seeping away by visiting the Spanish Antheneum of Mexico, the most important Republican cultural club, founded in 1949 and named for the old club of intellectuals in Madrid before the Civil War. It takes up the top floor of a decaying mansion in downtown Mexico City. The floors and stairway are of solid oak. The walls are painted in Wedgwood blue and white, the blue fading, the white dusky. Most of the rooms are Iibraries, their glass bookcases crammed with dusty books, many about Spain and the war. The corridors have old, framed photographs of Spanish writers, among them Federico Garcia Lorca, executed by Franco’s followers at the beginning of the war. The dimly lit auditorium features a reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica.”

Dr. José Puche, the 79-year-old president of the Atheneum, said that it now has 700 members, but many pay dues and never attend its few lectures and other cultural events. “We are a cultural organization,” he said. “We do not serve coffee. We do not play cards. So few come.” Those who do come are aging Republicans, not their children, not their grandchildren.

The Spanish Republicans are realistic about their weakness and do not try to lobby the Mexican Government on Spanish policy. But their symbolic presence alone insures that Mexican officials cannot forget and neglect their romantic past. In the last decade, the Spanish Republicans have resigned themselves to the growing contact between their adopted country and Franco. These ties grew out of the affinity between the two cultures. Spanish goods, Spanish bullfighters, Spanish flights all came to Mexico. Mexico even allowed unofficial representatives of the Spanish Government to operate an office for issuing visas. Officially, the Mexican Government insisted that it would never recognize Spain until it had a government that represented the people, but many Republicans and Mexicans believed that Mexico was waiting only for the death or fall of Franco.

“My government does not agree with me,” said a high official of the Mexican Government several months ago, “but I feel that the whole idea of the Spanish Republican embassy here is romantic and emotional. I suspect, that some day we will have to recognize the Spanish Government. Of course, our recognition may not come until there is a change of government in Spain.” A year ago, President Echeverria told a news conference, “I believe that we will soon be able to normalize relations with Spain.” Then he added for emphasis, “soon, soon, soon.” Although some Mexicans thought this meant a change in policy, most Republicans interpreted Echeverria’s comment to mean only that he expected Franco to fall soon.

The latest events have cleared away any confusion. The Western European governments, which withdrew their ambassadors in protest over the executions in Spain, have sent them back. But there has been no renewal of contact by Mexico. When Franco dies, Mexico might embrace the new government if it were obviously anti-Franco. But Mexico would keep its cautious distance if the new government were in the Franco mold. Eventual recognition might come, but the broken contact would have to be rebuilt first. This may be an unrealistic policy for Mexico, but it is deeply based in the romance of Mexican history.

Stanley Meisler is a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, now stationed in Mexico.