Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Jun 11, 2007 - 10:02 AM HumanInterest

Last week's issue of Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves was seized and its web site censored because of a cartoon mocking heir to the throne Prince Felipe and his wife Leticia. National Court judge Luis Del Olmo ordered that the magazine be removed from newsstands and also issued an injunction to have the cartoon taken off El Jueves' website (http://eljueves.es, for the moment closed except for a single page about the judicial process). The cartoon was carried on the magazine cover and refers to the recent introduction of a moderately generous child allowance (€2,500 a year). The cartoon shows the royal couple (who have been a hopeful grandparents' dream in terms of dutifully producing offspring) are depicted in the act of sex, and he is saying "You know something?... If you get pregnant, this will be the nearest thing to work I've done in my life!" Read more.

This act of censorship has been a surprise, not least because El Jueves has been caricaturing the royal family in much the same way for years and has even published an anthology of its royalty-inspired vignettes. The royal family is known to be unhappy with the magazine's treatment of them, but apparently had no part in the seizure order, which came as a result of a complaint from Cándido Conde-Pumpido, the ministerio fiscal, attorney general. Judges in Spain do not have the discrimination of their British or American equivalents and are obliged to investigate such complaints and decide on the course of action to take on purely legal grounds, at least in theory. So the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of Conde-Pumpido rather than Del Olmo who, like his colleague Baltasar Garzón, is better known for persecuting terrorists, drug smugglers and war criminals. But it transpires that, effectively, the image of the royal family is protected by law.

The debate is open, though little actual repression has taken place and the cartoon has actually been seen by thousands more people than if the comic had been published as usual (it's easy to find on the Internet, for example, by running a search on flickr.com with the terms "El Jueves" "principe felipe"). The royal family is undeniably popular, but many people in this country have strong underlying Republican feelings, and far from everyone is convinced that Juan Carlos I has really moved away from his fascist upbringing (he was Franco's chosen heir) - in other words, there is a legitimate, widely held opinion that however much service Juan Carlos may have paid to the cause of Spanish democracy, it has always been with his own and his family's interests at heart. The royal family should not be immune from criticism, not even as rude (in both senses) and irreverent as that of El Jueves. And it is difficult to see what exactly has been gained in terms of justice, democracy or anything else.