New Image for the Caudillo
ALAN, RAY
'LIBERALIZATION' IN SPAIN New Image for the Caudillo By Ray Alan Madrid Only six months ago General Francisco Franco boasted, in a public speech delivered at Palencia in northern Spain,...
...The industrialist complained that the traffic police—"whom one meets so often in fine weather"— were conspicuously absent when, for once, travelers needed them for information about highway conditions and, all too frequently, assistance...
...The Falange's new "theoretical" review, Es Asi, has even advocated a bicameral legislature and criticized financial and other "pressure groups," such as Opus Dei, which are represented within the administration...
...But editorial brows creased when the full implications of "liberalization" became clear: when it was realized that editors, rather than Government officials, must henceforth take responsibility for deciding what to stress and what to suppress, and were to be held personally responsible for their decisions...
...Even taped commercials which are repeated daily for several weeks must be submitted to the censors each morning...
...A few months ago it was announced that this course had been discontinued...
...The authorities seem to agree, for they do their best to keep precise circulation figures secret...
...Some foreign commentators, overstressing his "liberalism," have suggested that he has links with HOAC, the Catholic Workers' Brotherhood that made common cause with the Left-wing underground during last year's strikes in Asturias and the Basque country...
...Liberalization has indeed asserted itself in one vital field— economic affairs—and become a subject of serious, anguished or cynical conversation in several others...
...It began last summer with the dismissal of Don Gabriel Arias-Salgado...
...And, breathing lustily, another religious weekly, Vida Nueva, complained in a recent issue of "the excessive political uniformity of the Spanish press, its failure to give adequate news of Spain's internal affairs, and its utter lack of spontaneity...
...Now I'm on my own: I feel like a Roman emperor whose foodtaster has died...
...Now, though, a new compulsory course has been introduced: "Civic and Political Education...
...In reality, he is associated with the conformist Right-wing Catholic Action, one of the pillars of the regime...
...General Franco is known, however, to be impressed by General de Gaulle's cunning blend of demagogy and urbane authoritarianism and to be toying with the idea of adding the referendum to his armory and allowing the Cortes, his nominated "parliament," to hold longer sessions...
...Today, Franco again needs the free world's good will...
...Fraga's assignment was to refashion the Spanish press, to make it less suspect to Spaniards and less offensive to the tastes of the men who will ultimately decide whether Spain may be admitted to the European Community...
...A few Falangist papers are allowed to let off steam and test the reactions of the regime's only doctrinaire supporters by attacking abuses and proposing superficial reforms...
...Liberalization of broadcasting has so far achieved little beyond the suppression, early this year, of the Falangist slogans that used to be recited after every news bulletin...
...They knew that the risks Fraga was running were slight...
...Rejection of his bid for associate membership in the European Economic Community (at the moment he is sure only of French support and fairly certain that Belgium and Holland will vote against him) would harm Spain's export trade and might well set his most influential Catholic and military supporters—a majority of whom are EEC enthusiasts—searching for a constitutional formula more congenial to the European democracies...
...Franco is just a misunderstood democrat...
...In March of this year he urged Spanish youth to join the Falange...
...Failure to secure the renewal of his 1953 "Pact of Madrid" with the United States would reduce his international status and dash his hopes of securing acceptance by NATO...
...This development left Spanish newspapermen either unmoved or cynical...
...Arias-Salgado had believed himself all these years to be serving the Church as loyally as he was serving Franco, and this double rejection was too much for him...
...Despite its sensationalist "popular" style, the leading Falangist paper, Arriba, sells only 30,000 copies, and every one of the Falange's 37 provincial dailies loses money...
...Only supporters of the regime may publish newspapers or periodicals in Spain, and all editorial appointments are subject to Government approval...
...The Catholic-Royalist ABC, next in the field, sells fewer than 180,000 copies a day, and the Catholic-Action daily, Ya, which comes third, about 140,000...
...Liberalization in the sphere of religion is under discussion, too, though the idea is meeting stiff opposition at the episcopal level...
...Any journalist may be removed from his post and deprived of his carnet de periodistu—without which he cannot earn a living—at a few hours' notice if he displeases the Government...
...A devout Catholic...
...With their tiny circulations, they are in no danger of influencing the masses...
...From 1939 to 1959—when nearbankruptcy, provoked by the incompetence and corruption of his administration, forced him to seek American and West European aid— his propaganda machine did everything in its power to discredit democracy and the democratic nations in Spanish eyes...
...But the Falange, the regime's only legal party, also has a finger in it, and until last year no one could graduate from high school without mastering a corpus of Falangist rigmarole labeled "Formation of the National Spirit...
...A third was called before the civil governor and admonished for reporting public criticism of a local monopoly owned by a wealthy Falangist: "I want no controversy in my province," said the governor...
...His battle cry is "Liberalization...
...On February 19 of this year, Don Felipe Albeniz, editor of the Vitoria daily El Pensamento Alavés, published a letter from a local industrialist, a supporter of the regime, describing a journey he had made by car between Madrid and Barcelona during the worst of the winter...
...It's the coming thing—have not France and more Asian, African and Hispano-American states than one cares to count adopted variations on this Spanish theme...
...He suspended pre-censorship of all papers published outside Madrid...
...Some editors ran into trouble...
...Pre-censorship of all radio and TV scripts is still in force...
...The circulation of Marca is about 300,000...
...For good measure, all news of political significance must be taken from the official news agency EFE (an agency so official that its stories are sometimes prefaced "insertion obligatory"), though general news is also supplied by CIFRA, a Government-controlled Catholic agency...
...Only 55 daily newspapers are sold per thousand inhabitants in Spain, compared with 250 per thousand in France, 327 in the U.S., and 573 in Britain—and this despite the fact that Spanish newspapers are cheap, even in terms of local purchasing power, and that over 80 per cent of Spaniards are literate...
...and it could hardly be embarked upon without undermining the regime...
...for more than a decade controller of the Spanish press and radio...
...Censorship, severely battered by last year's Asturian and Basque gales, had succeeded only in recruiting a mass audience for the Communist "Free Spain" radio...
...Editorial writers, sub-editors and reporters have been drilled in conformist attitudes in official or ecclesiastical schools of journalism and taught to despise Anglo-American "libertinage of the press...
...With or without formal censorship, the regime's safeguards are powerful...
...Its content is precisely the same as that of the old course...
...Addressing Portuguese journalists, however, he echoes General Franco's subordination of liberty to "order" and associates freedom of the press with "anarchist Utopias...
...That way, he would go to jail, not me, if we did the wrong thing...
...The estate Fraga inherited was perilously ramshackle...
...Thus Ecclesia, organ of the hierarchy, last spring defended the right of underpaid workers to strike...
...With an appropriate flourish of trumpets, he set to work vigorously...
...Arias-Salgado despised the growing "European" lobby: he hated American-style capitalism...
...The Caudillo had no more loyal servant than his Minister of Information, but one had to keep up with the times...
...But radio men fear that Fraga may have an embarrassing gift for them, in their turn, when his new press law is finally published...
...Censors remained on his payroll, however, to study all papers minutely after their publication...
...but fresh breezes were blowing through the Vatican, too, and Madrid was asked to nominate someone else...
...It was not an unreasonable boast, and his use of the word "hypocritical" in this context was in line with his previously expressed views on democracy...
...One anxious provincial editor confesses that when he heard the news he cut his vacation short to return home and inquire of the civil governor of his province where the new demarcation lines lay...
...he mistrusted Opus Dei...
...Shortly afterward, Don Felipe was removed from his editorial chair and had his professional card withdrawn...
...By contrast, the new Minister of Information, Don Manuel Fraga Iribarne, was bound to look something like a liberal...
...He reduced the flow of governmental directives to editors to a discriminating trickle...
...Within three weeks he was dead...
...To journalists from the U.S...
...Political liberalization, clearly, has too low a yield to attract sponsors of this caliber...
...Liberalization of education is not even under discussion...
...as this article is being written, in April 1963, it has yet to appear...
...LIBERALIZATION' IN SPAIN New Image for the Caudillo By Ray Alan Madrid Only six months ago General Francisco Franco boasted, in a public speech delivered at Palencia in northern Spain, that his dictatorship is based not on "hypocritical" elections and votes but on bayonets and blood...
...Accordingly, his Ministry of Information, aided in many countries by the kind of innocents and hirelings who run his lavishly financed lobby in the U.S., is busily exporting a bright new image of the Caudillo...
...As a further precaution, some dailies have discontinued publishing editorials except on special occasions...
...The press was mistrusted or simply ignored by most of the nation...
...Liberalization of the press has been the regime's most successful image-building exercise...
...Even more eloquent of the condition of the Spanish press is the fact that the total sales of Spanish newspapers are lower than in 1936, though since that time the population has increased by over 20 per cent...
...It is known, however, that Spain's best-selling daily is Marca, a newsless sport-and-gossip paper modelled on the equally newsless Paris daily L'Equipe...
...To console him...
...The low sales of the Spanish press amount to a daily plebiscite against the regime...
...A few days later the paper was obliged to publish an abject apology for having printed "these incorrect, disgraceful and false comments on the efficient and admirable highway service of the meritorious Guardia Civil...
...Another says: "When the Russians launched their first Sputnik I even asked the censor what page I should put the story on...
...Economic liberalization, superseding a corrupt, collapsing autarchism, was imposed as a condition of aid by the American and West European governments and agencies which rescued the dictatorship from bankruptcy in 1959...
...More than one editor has informed his staff that anyone responsible for earning him a reprimand will be fired, and editorial taboo-lists are said by responsible journalists to have lengthened since liberalization set in...
...The director of one important commercial radio station has already approached a senior censorship official with a view to employing him as "special adviser" to his news and features editors in the event of further liberalization...
...He is an intellectual and has at times expressed vaguely "European" sentiments...
...One was fined for publishing a headline on army coups in South America which was deemed derogatory to military dignity...
...Innocent observers assumed that compulsory Falangist thoughtprocessing had gone the way of the compulsory fascist salute, abolished soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany...
...Despite (it might have added) Senor Fraga and liberalization...
...Protestant pastors, who lead a strange semi-clandestine existence, say that many Government officials, including some provincial governors, are by now resigned to the prospect of allowing them to hold marriage and burial ceremonies but are under heavy pressure from the bishops to delay reform and smother it with administrative complications...
...Franco proposed him as ambassador to the Vatican...
...He promised the new law for December 1962...
...Education is still equated with indoctrination, and responsibility for the indoctrination lies primarily with the Church...
...A Basque priest recently told me...
...Another was fined for criticizing his city's fire brigade...
...His regime is a new kind of "organic" democracy...
...and Britain, Fraga extolls freedom of expression and the values of the free world...
...He lost no time in promising a new press law to replace the 1938 decree which had governed Spanish information media since the last months of the Civil War...
...Admittedly, the regime had one or two unattractive features a few years back, but liberalization has taken care of that...
...Ray Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...
...At heart, one is now assured...
...In present circumstances, however, generally only the editors of ecclesiastical papers, who enjoy the support of an influential member of the hierarchy, can breathe freely...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
