Name Jose-Maria Sr | Role Journalist | |
Jose-Maria Siles (born November 1, 1951) is a Spanish journalist, expert on European and international affairs. He has been a foreign correspondent in Paris, Bonn, Rabat, Berlin, New York and Brussels. Among others assignments around the world, Jose-Maria Siles covered the last Lebanon war with Israel, the people uprisings in Haiti and the arrival of democracy to Democratic Republic of Congo.
As a university student, he produced documentary films suffering censorship under Franco's rule in Spain before receiving a postgraduate Master's degree in Communication 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 National Television of Spain, TVE, sent him as Bureau Chief to Germany in 1986 where he covered the last years of the cold war in a still divided country. In the night of November 9, 1989, he was one of the first journalists reporting live on the fall of the Berlin Wall from the Checkpoint Charlie on both sides of the wall. 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.
As a war correspondent he witnessed since 1992 the dramatic siege of Sarajevo and the reunification of the city after the Dayton Agreement. He followed the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. In 1994 he was named director of Canal Sur Television, the Public Broadcaster of Andalusia (Spain). After this experience in Seville, he served two years as TVE's US correspondent based in New York and Washington, D.C.
Nominated European Affairs correspondent in Brussels later on, he covered the implementation of the European single currency, the enlargement of the European Union and the NATO new military operations. He is now a keynote speaker, an independent producer and the director of aNews, a correspondent agency based in Brussels.