The journalist Fernando López Agudín died on September 18 at Las Navas de Riofrío, province of Segovia, as a result of colon cancer, after three years of fighting the disease. His life began in a home in Melilla on September 2, 1943. His mother, Oliva Agudín, a politicized woman, who belonged to a republican family, had four children. Her husband, named Antonio, Malaga of peasant origin, would owe a bus company that was traveling in North Africa. On one of those trips to Nador, with just eight years, López Agudín, heard several Algerians from the Liberation Front that struggled clandestinely against French colonialism in Algeria, whose independence advocated. One of those guerrillas gave the book the book, of Lenin, added reading whose daily listening of – communist emission known as The Pyrenean— By family induction, he politicized him with unusual political precocity, as he referred to his relatives. “At that age, the Korea War on radio was still interesting,” they said.
Since then, his passion for politics became a constant of his life and very early age developed a unique anticolonialist sensitivity. Years later, the Law career at the University of Madrid began, in the clandestine direction of whose student movement he participated with, aka Federico Sánchez y Birdie. In the fourth course of the race, Agudín had abandoned the studies to integrate into the Communist Party of Spain as a clandestine team, that is, released, professionalized and with salary. That is when Francisco Romero Marín knows, aka The tank, Responsible for the communist organization in the interior of Spain, with which, despite its youth, it will collaborate in advice, information and direction tasks from the so -called device.
For six months, in Moscow, it was formed in the Political Section of the Frunze Academy of the Soviet Union, dedicated to the instruction of communist cadres from all over the world. He would complete his political formation in the German Democratic Republic, to which at the time, communist leaders and paintings clandestinely agreed from rural areas of the Western German territory intentionally unconpired by border guards. Sometimes, he led and collected communist political and union personalities to and from different steps between states of capitalist and socialist economy, respectively.
After, pursued by the political-social brigade, the Francoist regime’s political police directed by the Saturnino Yagüe police, López Agudín fled from his home in Madrid where he met with the secret communist direction. He went into exile through the Pyrenean border. In 1970, he settled in Paris and comes into contact with intellectuals of the world left as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (Ixelles, Belgium, 1914-París, 1984) or the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, 1902-Paris, 1982), in whose house he will stay. It remains in the French capital until 1974 and there published, in the editorial Ruedo Ibérico, under the pseudonym of Miguel Martínhis first book Spanish colonialism in Moroccovery praised by Juan Goytisolo and the result of his knowledge acquired from his very highness on the field of his hometown and in Moroccan enclaves and Alledo years.
In 1974, López Agudín clandestinely returns to Madrid as a communist picture released and assigned to the so -called leftist opposition, OPI, an internal current of the PCE condemned by Santiago Carrillo, which he then blamed for Marxist heterodox, revisionism and pragmatism. After a tense discussion with the Asturian communist leader, Carrillo snapped “Go to reflect to the balaton”, Lake nestled in Hungary. He distances himself after the direction of the PCE and his friend, Armando López Salinas, also a clandestine leader of the interior, then responsible for the organization of communist intellectuals, puts him in touch with José Antonio Gabriel and Galán, at the time director of the progressive weekly weekly The European. López Agudín will exercise as a columnist.
From the property of Joaquín Valdés he went to direct the Political supplement of the newspaper Information, Until 1984, when he enters Spanish Television to direct the program Debate And later, Weekly reportnext to Victoria Prego. He also worked as a magazine columnist Triumph, in whose last issue he published his article “The assault on reason”, a title taken from the Hungarian intellectual Gyorgy Luckàcs, and his judgment concerning the concomitance of agonized Francoism with the ideopolitical irrationality that led to the emergence of Nazism.
After a stage of different journalistic collaborations, the former Foreign Minister José María de Areilza offers him in 1984 the correspondent of the Council of Europe in Madrid, commission that López Agudín accepts. Subsequently, he will collaborate with the Colpisa news agency and will be integrated into the newspaper ABC, as editor-chief of Culture Two years, to move later to the newspaper The world, where he will remain attached to his editorial board. His stay in the newspaper of Pedro J. Ramírez lasts until 2004 in which, after criticizing and denouncing the editorial and informative treatment, he leaves the publication.
With the arrival in the portfolio of Justice and Interior of Juan Alberto Belloch, Fernando López Agudín is appointed General Director of Information Relations, where he collaborates closely with Margarita Robles, today Minister of Defense and then Undersecretary of that Department and Secretary of State for Security. They are committed to the task of exposing the Ministry of Franco’s repressive agents. When his stay in Justice and Interior, López Agudín will write his book The labyrinthwhere he accounts for the way in which he ended, from the socialist government, to the presence of police officers and some cadres of the Civil Guard who starred in repressive, illegal exactions, during the dictatorship and the first years of democracy.
Newspaper collaborator Public, The relatives of Fernando López Agudín point out that he received with enthusiasm the emergence of Podemos, in whose foundational act he asked Pablo Iglesias if he did not fear “thus atomize the left”, whose unity the journalist would be fervent supporter.
Together with his wife Mara Malibrán, he wrote the book The last aristocrata biography of Mariano Fortuny, Venetian intellectual son of the renowned painter, who ran an art center and creation of tapestries in a palazzo of the city see. From his marriage to the journalist Mara Malibrán, he had a son, Marco, and two children, Arantxa and Fernando, of a previous marriage to the poet Pilar Romero Burgos. He was a carnal uncle of the Socialist Minister of Digital Transformation, Óscar López, currently general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid, son of a moderate and grandson militant of a civil guard for Riaza, Segovia.
Unfatigable national and foreign press reader, of literature and essay, López Agudín maintained his political passion until the end of his life. Reserved, reflective and friend of his friends, he was part of the latest generation of professional revolutionaries, in his case marked by transit to political journalism, where he shone with his own light given his experience in clandestine praxis and in the ideological confrontation. “I have lived with discretion and I would like to die in the same way,” he revealed to his friends months before he died.
