Silencing the critics: the untold story of press censorship during the Second Republic

Terrible days. On July 12, Lieutenant José Castillo was murdered by a group of Falangist gunmen. On the 13th, Joaquín Calvo Sotelo suffered the same fate, this time at the hands of several Assault Guards and members of the Socialist militia.The newspapers reported only the former because the Minister of the Interior ordered that the word "murder" be omitted in the Calvo Sotelo case.

The opening could easily be an entry from Manuel Azaña 's diaries, given its characteristic tone, if it were not for the details of government censorship of the press, which he himself promoted and which is conveniently omitted from the account of the Second Republic , like many other issues.

It's now exactly 89 years since that last week of the Second Republic, when no one remembers that, by order of the Popular Front government, the afternoon newspapers were banned from using the word "murder" to report on the death of Calvo Sotelo, as well as from carrying more than one article on the matter. These prerogatives had crept into the order of the Second Republic by the Republican left in 1931, when they were sure that the right would never govern, because at no point was alternation part of their plans . The idea predates the coup d'état.

Press control during the Second Republic is one of those aspects of the period conveniently erased from history for the simple reason that it contradicts the narrative of the current left and because it instead reveals the purest germ of its founding, which was none other than to prevent the right from thwarting its plans to transform Spain at all costs . This is the inconvenience of reality, which leaves its mark. Why were regulations included that allowed the government to exercise, for example, press control? Because they simply wanted to impose and preserve the republican model achieved with the 1931 Constitution, drafted by a parliament in which the right had been somewhat underrepresented.

According to veteran journalist Justino Sinova, who has just republished the article, The Press in the Second Spanish Republic: A History of Frustrated Freedom "There was a frequent attack on the right to freedom of expression, which is a fundamental right in democracy. They persecuted critics of the Republic, although they weren't generally anti-republican newspapers; they simply wanted to report on what was happening."

This is the story of El Debate , directed by Ángel Herrera Oria , or ABC , which was monarchist but not anti-establishment, among many others. It was about ensuring that the idea of republican purity, as they understood it, wasn't altered . A closed project. Nothing could be criticized . "There are two fundamental measures on which this control will be based: in the Legal Statute of the Republic, where individual rights are recognized; there is an article that states that the recognized rights are subject to political decisions, which is key. The second measure was the Law of Defense of the Republic, a personal attempt by Azaña to empower the government in power to do whatever it wanted , to defend the Republic," says Justino.

It's important because from the beginning, there was a sense of distrust, despite the fact that there was a Catholic right-wing majority that had accepted the republican system and was integrated. The major blow, however, came in the 1933 elections : the victory of the CEDA, the majority right-wing party, which was not anti-republican, demonstrated the country's diversity. At the same time, the rules that had enabled the republican left to censor newspapers fell into the hands of its enemies.

“ Lerroux 's government acted the same way. What was the Republic's main problem? That decisions were made by politicians. Imagine if the Spanish government now suspended ten newspapers. Well, that's what they did. During the Sanjurjo coup d'état, which occurred in the summer of '32, and Azaña was the prime minister, the government suspended 127 newspapers . What was their argument? Well, that they had collaborated in the coup. Something that hadn't been proven, not at all.”

When the Sanjurjo coup d'état took place in the summer of 1932, the Government suspended 127 newspapers.

One of the characteristics of that period is that there were many newspapers that were partisan, purely pamphleteering . Nowadays, there's still a tendency to romanticize the past, for example , during the Transition period when more newspapers were sold: "When the Transition began in 1975, there were very decent newspapers that reported on what was happening and published very interesting editorials and opinion pieces with a great sense of freedom and service to the public ." But of course, those newspapers had a much smaller reach than all the media now disseminated on the Internet. Whether they were printed later or not. The Internet has turned people's ability to stay informed upside down. And I think there are many very respectable newspapers and there are also some rubbish ones, but that's how it's always been. When the Transition began or the year after the Transition, they were born." "El País and Diario 16 remained, ABC and such, and there was one called El Alcázar, which was a far-right newspaper. Well, that's always been the case," Justino explains.

The point is that the history of press control during the Second Republic now has a special significance, because it is not widely known and is the period that the government often invokes to draw the line betweendemocracy and fascism , even though it does not correspond to that simplification. One might even think there's a parallel between the PSOE of that time and the PSOE of today: "Of course. All the things they're saying about the pseudo-media , about the hoaxes... All of that tends to put a barrier to a number of newspapers. It's not up to the government to decide whether they've gone too far or not. If they're slandering you, go to court and file a complaint against that newspaper. In Spain, there are newspapers that report things the government doesn't want known . Just like you. You report things the government would like to ban. We're at the point where they're tempted, but they won't take the step . When they do, they'll have violated freedom of expression. Well, they've already taken some steps, like controlling Televisión Española . It's not going very well, but oh well... Televisión Española, which belongs to everyone because it's a public medium, has become theirs."

The latest controversy after the accusations from the mud machine , of the alleged hoaxes by the Government, has been preventing Vito Quiles from attending Congress for not practicing journalism strictly according to his criteria : "If there is someone who is going to provoke, there are methods to prevent it or to convince him that it should not be done. But that of prohibiting entry to someone who turns out to be inconvenient according to I don't know what criteria, I do not like at all. During the Francoist courts I lived through an episode in which a journalist, one of those who went there, had his credentials to enter the courts taken away. And it seemed to me an aggression of such magnitude that we journalists joined in protesting and saying, but what is this? No, it's that he tells lies. In the end they returned his credentials. We protested and the victim of that was not a guy that we all liked and who was a friend of ours. No, but he was a professional and therefore, we must respect him like everyone else.