Last Editions

Before the civil war Madrid had 16 daily newspapers. Last week Madrid had four. Latest of the long list of Spanish papers suppressed by powerful Minister of the Interior Ramon Serrano Suner was the once-great A. B. C., which stayed Monarchist to the end.

Founded by Don Torcuato Luca de Tena, who was made a marques for his work, A. B. C. was long considered Spain's No. 1 newspaper. During the World War A. B. C. built a great new printing establishment and Don Torcuato never bothered to deny rumors that it was paid for by the Central Powers. After the peaceful revolution of 1931 A. B. C.'s was the loudest voice demanding restoration of the monarchy.

During the civil war the paper was in Republican hands, but the founder's son, Don Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, continued to publish a Monarchist A. B. C. in Seville. When Franco took Madrid, Don Juan Ignacio got his paper back and immediately began publishing it in the old way: calling for the restoration of Alfonso. Franco tried to get rid of Luca de Tena by offering him an embassy, but Don Juan Ignacio refused. Last month A. B. C. published a defiant pro-Monarchist editorial. Next thing its readers knew, it had encountered a "shortage of paper" and folded.

Of the four papers remaining in Madrid, the morning Arriba and the evening Madrid are official organs of Serrano Suner's Falangists. The other two, Ya (morning) and Informaciones (evening), are under editors named by the Government, which means by the Minister of the Interior, Franco's strong-man brother-in-law (el Cunadisimo), Ramon Serrano Sufier.

Far less gentle than his treatment of the Rightist press has been Serrano Suner's way of dealing with those journalists who supported the Republic. Last month all Spanish newspapermen got orders to present to the Government copies of what they had written against Franco during the civil war. By last week 35 of these journalists had been shot. Among the 35: Antonio Hermosilla, editor of Madrid's Leftist La Libertad; Modesto Sanchez Monreal, editor of Madrid's Leftish El Sol; Emilio Gabas, onetime editor of Madrid's El Socialista; Federico Moreno, editor of Zaragoza's Heraldo de Aragon; and Javier Bueno, who was editor of Oviedo's Avance and one of Spain's greatest newspapermen.

Tough-minded Javier Bueno was a Socialist who, after the 1934 Republican-Socialist rebellion, was fined 32,000,000 pesetas and sentenced to death for being "ideologically responsible" for the rising. The death sentence was commuted to 30 years' imprisonment, but for good measure some officers of the Foreign Legion hanged Javier Bueno from the wall of his office in a harness of barbed wire and fed him copies of his Avance. Bueno got out of prison in the general amnesty that followed the 1936 elections and refused to join Largo Caballero's revolutionary movement. But when the Right revolted a few months later, Javier Bueno stuck with the Government, and that cost him his life.

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