More than half a million citizens loyal to the democratic republican government that lost the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War went into exile in various European and American countries, among them there were school, high school and university teachers. I will refer to a small sector, that of university professors of mathematics, who went into exile in smaller numbers than those of humanities, medicine and other sciences. Much of this academic exile spread throughout Latin America, mainly in Mexico and Argentina. In addition, there were reprisals inside, as well as professors who lived uncomfortably during the Franco Dictatorship. Some mathematicians with this profile had an opportunity for temporary emigration to an expanding Venezuela during the late 1950s and 1960s, precisely when the exiles in 1939 they began to have opportunities to return to their country. For the sake of brevity I will focus on Argentina, exiled mathematicians arrived there who had a high impact on Argentine mathematics (Luis A. Santaló, P. Pi Calleja, M. Balanzar, E. Corominas, F. Vera,…). The most important Spanish mathematician of the first half of the 20th century, Julio Rey Pastor (1888-1962), was installed at the University of Buenos Aires since 1921, and under his influence the exiled mathematicians were able to access Argentine universities, in which they lived in certain periods with other Italian, Portuguese and German colleagues, exiled from their respective countries.

The Republican regime which existed in Portugal since 1910 was ended by a military coup in 1926, establishing a dictatorship which would last until 1974. This repressive regime created laws that allowed to arbitrarily expel from public service anybody who the government thought was not supporting it. A very promising generation of Portuguese mathematicians and physicists was crushed, and some of the more brilliant mathematicians of this group were forced to leave the country. António Monteiro emigrated to Brazil in 1945, becoming a teacher at the National Philosophy Faculty of the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, and creating around him a dedicated group of researchers which included future important Brazilian mathematicians Leopoldo Nachbin and Maria Laura Mousinho. Monteiro left for Argentina in December 1949, and first in the National University of Cuyo, and from 1957 in the Universidad del Sur he made extraordinary contributions to the development of mathematics in Argentina. Other Portuguese mathematicians who were expelled from the Portuguese universities in the 1940s left Portugal and went to countries which valued their research work. The University of Recife wanted to create a Mathematics Department, and for that Portuguese mathematicians which has been expelled from the Portuguese universities were employed in 1953: Alfredo Pereira Gomes, Manuel Zaluar Nunes, José Morgado and Ruy Luis Gomes (who had been in Argentina for a couple of years) were the ones who made the Mathematics Department of this University, later called the Federal University of Pernambuco, one of the best in Brazil