Francisco Macías, the “monster” of Guinea that was born from Francoism

Sitting in a vulgar plastic chair, when the president of the court declared the session open, tried to revolt before his imminent final: he took the floor with despair, gestured exaggeratedly, denied his crimes, he distributed guilt and, finally, asked for clemency. Tells it Antonio Caño (Martos, Jaén, 1957), who was there as a correspondent for the EFE agency, covering the detention, the judgment and execution of Macías after the coup d’etat of his nephew, Teodoro Obiang.

Five hundred spectators had achieved armchair in that ancient jewel of colonial architecture to witness the historical moment. Macías appeared with a bandage on the left arm. He had no more wounds or appeared to be sick, but that bandage was the first show of weakness that the leader had shown in his life. Although he could not avoid admonishing the members of the Court once again, as if they were still at their service, he finally admitted: “I know that I no longer have power, I assume that.”

Five days later, after the afternoon, he was shot to bullets and his buried body, during the early morning, in an anonymous grave of the Cemetery of Santa Cruz, in that same city that was renamed as Malabo. The president executed, the first of Equatorial Guinea after the independence of 1968, is the protagonist of ‘The Spanish monster’ (The sphere of books), the essay in which Caño narrates the rise of this obedient employee of the Spanish colonial administration that became one of the worst tyrants in the history of Africa.

A psychopath

«It was a psychopath with an excessive ambition of power and a complete absence of moral limits. If you ask me for a definition of the tyrants with whom I have had to deal with throughout my career, most respond to those characteristics. The title includes the two most determining aspects for me of his figure, which was a monster and was Spanish, ”explains the author to ABC, in reference to the responsibility of Spain in which Macías came to power and the important role that Antonio García-Trevijano played.

‘The man who knew too much’, as ABC defined in his obituary to this anti -Franco lawyer seven years ago, participated in a process that was born in the middle of a strong confrontation within the Franco regime, among the supporters of the vice president, Luis Carrero Blanc Friendly form to improve the international image of Spain. When the celebration of a Constitutional Conference was finally approved in Madrid between October 1967 and July 1968, Macías, a little relevant character at that time, presented himself as a candidate to direct the country with the guarantee and advice of García-Trevijano.

For the journalist, the most serious thing was the indifference that the metropolis showed towards the person who had to put in charge of the new state born on October 12, 1968. No one took the time necessary to search and train the best president. That Macías won the elections “promising the paradise with which the Guineans dreamed” was the result of that improvisation and disinterest. His arrival to power is, in the words of Caño, “partial responsibility of Spain, no matter how appointment was the result of unusually clean elections.”

Democratic elections

“It is very striking that Franco was able to organize a clean referendum, a perfectly assimilable constitution by any democratic country, with his freedoms, rights and political parties, and elections that received the endorsement of the international community, while in Spain he was still plunged into a dictatorship,” he explains.

As for the motivations of García-Trevijano, Caño points out that, as an anti-Franco declared that he was, he intended to impose his candidate to discredit the regime: «He was a very ambitious and intelligent conspirator. An unscrupulous person who dominated the world of spells, something he demonstrated in all his political activity. It is impossible for Macías to have only been able to get what he got. He had the great ability to raise the person who counted least, although he later closed his eyes to the result of his work. He never apologized ».

Franco’s government also disinhibited all responsibility as the situation was complicated. Since in May 1969 the Spaniards were expelled from Guinea to a gunpoint, leaving the free terrain for the tyrannical excesses, never again, neither in dictatorship nor in democracy, Spain once again occupied their former colony again. “I have read several reports of humanitarian organizations that speak of 40,000 or 50,000 dead and more than 100,000 exiles in a decade, although in reality there was never a commission that investigated it,” says Caño.

John Bennett, one of the most critical ambassadors that the United States had in Malabo, commented in 2009: «By 1978, the most common method of execution was to crush the skull with an iron bar. The convicted person had to lie with his face looking at the ground. His head was beaten until he was converted into pulp ». Among those who enjoyed that “show” was the head of security of the regime, Obiang, who in his “freedom coup” of 1979 overthrew him. The execution of his uncle opened the doors to a new dictatorship.