There is no consensus on the date the press ban on Equatorial Guinea was imposed. According to Ramón García Domínguez, Spanish journalist and author of the first book published on Macías in 1977, the ban was declared on the 14th February 197269. He remembers it well because he was already in Malabo working as a teacher and gathering information secretly. However, the Guinean journalist Donato Ndongo, in the other book published that same year on Equatorial Guinea in Spain said that the press ban was declared on the 30th January 1971, right after the large coverage the European media gave to an affair of a German woman arrested in Malabo70. As this declaration was not made in the form of a law or decree, there is no official publication in the Spanish National Bulletin. Moreover, newspapers only refer to it when this is lifted but not when it is imposed. In the interview held with Luis María Ansón, director of ABC during the period of the research, he explained that this type of impositions arrived from one day to another through a phone call from the Ministry of Information to the chief editor. No further explanations were made just the threat of seizing the newspaper was enough to stop writing about a certain issue71. Looking at the frequency of news published on the former colony in 1971 and 1972, even though it does decrease drastically in both cases (see graph below), there are still a few articles in La Vanguardia, while in 1973 the number drops down to zero.
Although the reasons behind this decision of the Spanish government will be addressed in the following chapters, it is important to point out that imposing specific press bans on certain issues was a common feature of Franco´s regime. The other African colony, Morocco, was also subject to a two years press ban, in order to keep silence about the diplomatic crisis around the last remaining territory under Spanish rule, the so called Spanish Sahara72. However, the press ban on Equatorial Guinea became the longest one, lasting until October 1977 and renewed every six months. In order to better understand how the press was controlled, Emilio Cassinello recalled that, “under Franco´s regime decisions were taken like this. It was in the heart of the system. Drastic action, out, nobody talks about Guinea, we don´t want to have any more problems with Macías73”.
Journalists were used to follow the directives of the State, to work under a propaganda model that turned them into mere information senders. Miguel Angel Aguilar, well known Spanish journalist who was at that time working for the Diario Madrid, the most progressive newspaper under Franco, whose offices were closed down and demolished in an act of demonstration of State power, described it as follows:
68 Interview with Emilio Cassinello held in Madrid, Spain, on the 26th October, 2011.
69 García Domínguez, R. (1977) Guinea: Macías, la ley del silencio. Plaza y Janés. Madrid. p.11
70 Ndongo Bidyogo, D. (1977) Historia y tragedia de Guinea Ecuatorial. Ed.Cambio 16. Madrid. p.196. 71 Interview with Luis María Ansón held in Madrid, Spain on the 26th October, 2011.
72 The ban was imposed on the 20th July, 1972 and lasted until the 14th October 1974. Algueró Cuervo, J.I. (2006) El
Sahara y España: Claves de una descolonización pendiente. Ediciones Idea. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. pp. 138 &
147.
“Most of the journalists were professionals educated in slave methods. The question was not how to inform about a certain matter but what and how the Ministry wanted us to do it. We were used to do “anti-journalism”: when we wanted an issue to be published we would give it in a short article so it could pass the censorship. If it was still seen as a threat to the regime, we would ask our colleagues from foreign newspapers to publish it. But they also had to deal with the consequences of censorship. If Le Monde, the most influential foreign newspaper here, published any subversive article, the State prohibited its selling in Spain for a certain time. But sometimes it was worth for them to take the risk. Seizing a newspaper, like the case of the Spanish press, was another matter”74.
Their work was regulated according to the 1966 press law75. Although it suppressed the previous censorship of the State, it ended up executing a much harder control over the information ready to be published. If before 1966 the news editor had to consult the Ministry of Information for its approval before writing anything for the next issue, after this date they were obliged to send first copies of the next day’s newspaper to the Ministry and wait for their approval before printing the whole run. Therefore, it was the same type of control but imposed in a different way.
In such a difficult scenario, we can affirm that whereas the State censorship could somehow be skipped through an alternative way of treating the information, a specific press ban like Equatorial Guinea´s was a direct attack impossible to avoid. As a consequence, the graph below shows how ABC and The Guardian follow the same descending trend on the frequency of articles published year by year. The two or three articles registered in 1974 and 1975 for each of them are however different: while The Guardian started to inform from Geneva about the first denouncing reports of the ANRD, the ones from ABC refer to brief notes on commercial and educational agreements between the two governments. La Vanguardia´s coverage is by all means the one that best shows the effect of the ban. If by 1970, this newspaper paid a large interest on Guinean issues, in 1971, the trend is already negative and by 1972 it drops down drastically to almost zero.
74 Interview with Miguel Angel Aguilar held in Madrid on the 28th October 2012.
75 According to article no. 12, “Newspapers and magazines have to deposit ten copies of the publication half an hour prior to its circulation, signed by the Director or the person in charge”. Ley 14/1966, B.O.E. Jefatura del Estado, no.67, March 19th 1966, pp. 3310-3315
FREQUENCY OF ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON EQUATORIAL GUINEA 12/10/1968 - 12/12/1975
Looking at these results, a question easily turns out: if by 1971 the Spanish press was already informing less and less on Equatorial Guinea, why the need of a specific press ban?. As pointed out before in the BBC interview with Macías, even in 1975, when absolutely nothing appeared on his country in the Spanish press, the president still criticised the Spanish government for implementing a media campaign against him. It seems that no matter what Franco´s regime did to calm Macías anger, his reaction would still be the same, that of an anti-colonialist attitude towards anything that symbolized the ex-metropolis power. Therefore, the following chapters focus on the three main arguments to explain the reason behind the press ban declaration, a sub question directly linked to the impossibility of the Spanish media to address Macías violent regime.