Ambivalence in Spain

"The great and tremendous silence of fear and the most bitter and resigned conformism threaten to spread through all our organs of opinion which will now have to busy themselves with innocuous affairs or fall back on systematic hypocrisy." The editorial in the Spanish daily El Norte de Castilla had two meanings.

One was that freedom of the press in Spain is still a sometime thing, despite the passage last year of a law abolishing a considerable amount of censorship.

The other is that freedom of the press has progressed to the point that the paper was able to print the editorial without reprisal.

Since last year's press law was passed, some publications have ventured bold criticism of the Franco regime. The regime, in turn, has reacted with fitful ambivalence, lenient in one case, stern in another. Sometimes it has done nothing. Leniency means that a representative of the Information Ministry politely informs an offending editor that he is endangering his access to government-subsidized newsprint.

Truncheons for U.P.I. In recent months, the government has been using the stern approach. It confiscated part of the press run of the Madrid newspaper ABC because it extolled the virtues of liberal constitutional monarchies abroad. Three times the government seized the Catholic magazine Juventud Obrera because of its habit of criticizing state institutions. Last month the entire board of the Catholic weekly Signo was summarily sacked for printing an interview with an exiled Spanish Communist. To date, only the editor has complied and resigned; the rest of the staff have refused to budge.

Nor has the foreign press escaped. After banning the French daily Le Figaro on dozens of occasions during the past twelve months, the government barred its correspondent Jacques Guilleme-Brulon after he had attacked Information Minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who administers the press law, for "totalitarian" practices. Life has also been hard for the reporters covering student and worker demonstrations. Earlier this year, Aldo Trippini, U.P.I, bureau chief in Spain, was badly beaten by police armed with truncheons at the Uni versity of Madrid. Two U.S. TV reporters--NBC's Al Rosenfeld and ABC's Har ry Debelius--were picked up by the police while they were trying to cover demonstrations at the University of Barcelona; Debelius' press-accreditation card has not been renewed.

Fifty Months for Insults. Even more sternly, the government has increased the penalties for violation of the press law. In addition to being fined and suspended from his job, a journalist can now get a six-month prison sentence on several grounds, including lack of "respect due institutions and persons when criticizing political and administrative action." In particularly serious cases the sentence can go up to six years. Yet Spanish courts, displaying staunch independence, have not sent any writer to jail.

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