José-María Siles is a Spanish correspondent and senior news analyst for international media. He has been assigned to Germany, Morocco, United States, France and the European Union. He covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the siege of Sarajevo, the last Lebanon war and people uprisings in Haiti and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Siles produced documentary films suffering censorship under general Franco's rule in Spain. He was co-author of the 'Manifiesto de Cine Alternativo de Almería', a high point of the underground film movement in defence of freedom and democracy in Spain, dodging the lack of freedom.
He made two contributions to the movement: 'Good morning, Portugal' (1975), a road-documentary on the first year of the military carnation revolution, 'revolução dos cravos', ending a long dictatorship in Lisbon; and 'Topares' (1974-1975), a cult documentary film about the live in rural Spain on the last year of Franco dictatorship.
'Topares' shows the everyday live in a rural remote village in Andalusia, where José-María was the schoolteacher, without drinking water, no access road, no phone and no health services. The story of 'doña' María Serrano, the oldest lady living in Topares who wrote to Franco for help, was the inspiration of this medium-short film forbidden by the Franco censorship-system. A super-8 format of the documentary, filmed in the deep South of Spain and revealing the lies of the state television propaganda, was watched by thousands in alternative and underground circuits just before and after the death of Franco.
After his film-maker experience, he received a postgraduate Master's degree in Information Sciences and Journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His experience as an international journalist began working for the News Desk of Radio France Internationale and as a correspondent in Paris for Spanish newspapers.
In 1986, the public television of Spain, TVE, sent him as bureau chief to Germany, where he covered the last years of the cold war in a still divided Europe. In the night of November 9, 1989, he was one of the first journalists reporting live on the fall of the Berlin Wall at the Checkpoint Charlie from the East and the West side of the city. After the German reunification, he opened a new TVE office in Rabat, covering the rise of Islamic extremism in North Africa and the beginning of the decolonization process in the West Sahara. He has also been CEO of Canal Sur Televisión, the public broadcaster of Andalusia and TVE bureau chief in New York, Washington DC and Brussels.
He is now the aNews TV director and a foreign correspondent, in Paris.