Antonio García Trevijano

Political activism

A republican from his youth, son of a property registar who was a member of the Fernández de los Ríos republican party, he was active in the democratic opposition to Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

In 1967, he was the organizer of a clandestine meeting of the illegal union called Workers' Commissions (Spanish: Comisiones Obreras, CCOO) at the factory Sox Vilma (Plaza de Castilla) held to plan the strike of October 1967.

In March 1968, he was the organizer of a debate on Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s book Le Défi Américain ("The American Challenge", 1968) at the Hotel Melia in Madrid. He gathered two thousand people and made a demonstration of freedom against Franco’s dictatorship two months before the student revolts that broke out in Paris in May 68. That same year, he helped organize and direct the independence of Equatorial Guinea, for which he drafted a democratic constitution. His constitution never came into force because the Francoist government imposed a constitution written by Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón, under which Francisco Macías Nguema was proclaimed president for life.

In 1974 he organized meetings in Paris between Don Juan de Borbón and the republican groups plus the publishing group Ruedo Ibérico, in which the legitimate heir to the Spanish throne expressed his rejection of Franco's decree appointing his son Juan Carlos as his successor. That same year García-Trevijano organised and coordinated the political party Junta Democrática de España ("Democratic Junta of Spain"), writing all their manifestos and founding a hundred local and provincial boards throughout Spain. He gave the keynote address of the Democratic Junta at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In 1976 he organised the merger of the Democratic Junta of Spain and the Convergence Platform, creating the unitary democratic group called Platajunta, of which he was also the coordinator. That year, he also organized a national march under the slogan "Amnesty and Freedom".

In 1977 he founded the magazine "Reporter", in which he publicly denounced the betrayal of the underground parties legalized by Adolfo Suárez González, against the agreement signed with García-Trevijano not to accept any constitution not preceded by a period of constitutional freedom and a referendum that would give the Republic the opportunity to be chosen by the people. This referendum was never scheduled.

In 1994 in Madrid he unveiled his book The Discourse of the Republic at a gathering of more than 2,000 people.

In 1998 he was a founding member of the Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas Independientes (AEPI), and together with other members of the press he coordinated reporting of the corruption of the government of Felipe González Márquez.

He has participated in many debates and conferences, both in Congress and on TV shows about politics. He currently acts as a promoter of political freedom throughout Spain and is the leader of the Citizens' Movement towards the Constitutional Republic of Spain (MCRC)

Repression

For his work on behalf of political freedom during Franco's lifetime, he was the subject of a defamation campaign in the newspaper Pueblo. He was tried for high treason before the Court of Public Order (Marshal of Ghent) because of his intervention in Equatorial Guinea. He has had five passports withdrawn, suffered three arrests and two fines, was the victim of a serious attack for his declarations to the BBC when Franco was dying, and was prosecuted by the Public Order Court (Gomez Chaparro) for an offense against the State and imprisoned for four months by order of Manuel Fraga Iribarne.