Luis García Montero and José Miguel Monzón, El Gran Wyoming, discussed Narratives, democracy and civil rights on February 8 in Taro de Tahíche. The television showman has just published his memoirs, La furia y los colores and the poet introduced the conversation from Wyoming's origins as a young man in Franco's Spain who looked to Europe as an alternative. García Montero believes that we are at a time when we need to rethink certain things in depth, supposedly consolidated, "because there are outbreaks of intolerance and authoritarianism". "We democrats must reflect to ensure the defense of endangered rights", he said. He asked Wyoming how the "cruel dictatorship" of Franco has influenced his way of being.
Wyoming commented that he did not experience the physical cruelty directly, but that this cruelty was detected through other windows. "One was not aware of what was happening until one saw other realities." In the Madrid in which he grew up, there was control and supervision over the population "that was seen as normal", with figures such as the night watchman or the building doorman, who informed about the customs of the neighbors. "One could not have a life of one's own without it being public." However, this propaganda of the regime as a spiritual reserve of the West against the rest of Europe turned against the propagandist. "It led us to go abroad where there was freedom everywhere."
To illustrate how easily "fear and repression are internalized", according to García Montero, Wyoming told an anecdote that comes from the filming of a movie in which he played a policeman. He went out on the street in uniform and realized the fear that people had of authority. "Nobody looked you in the face." García Montero asked him about the sense of freedom that music gave him "as a school of individual conscience"? "and collective", added Wyoming, who pointed out that in the late sixties in Europe and the United States musicians began to appear who became different references to those that existed until then, with other ways of behaving "that expanded the margins of freedom". In Spain, this desire for openness came from politics. He recalled that at that time there was much insistence on the idea that Spaniards were not prepared for freedom because they confused it with licentiousness. Wyoming assured that the Fraga Law of 1966 further complicated the situation of the press because it went from a prior censorship, in which it was known what could not be published, to a subsequent censorship. "What it did was expand the margins of repression."
Regarding the Movida Madrileña, Wyoming stated that it is not that he has a bittersweet feeling, but that "it was what it was" because it was starred by middle-upper class people who were still teenagers when Franco died and for whom "politics was a pain in the ass." He said that his contact with politics was at the University, in the Faculty of Medicine, where there were many left-wing parties ("the ease of the left to create a movement from the nuances"), but there were also the guerrillas of Christ the King, who were supported by the one who was Minister of Culture, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo. According to Wyoming, there were not so many followers "or addicts" to the Regime, just as there were few pockets of resistance "because you risked your life." Most of the population considered themselves apolitical.
Regarding corruption, the poet raised whether justice can end the feeling of impunity that power has. "It could", Wyoming pointed out, who recalled the large number of people with privileged jurisdiction in Spain and the case of Carlos Fabra, through whose instruction nine judges passed and the ninth gave a press conference to denounce pressure from his superiors. Montero pointed out that, however, important people have entered prison and Wyoming, with sarcasm, pointed out that "Urdangarín has not yet come out of his astonishment." "If they were used against corruption as they have been used against the independentists, there would be no corruption", he said.
They ended up talking about the media because "a democratic press is needed." Before they had already talked about fake news because Wyoming said that now, even, it is denied that Franco gave a coup d'état, "with how proud Franco was of the coup." According to García Montero, "people are being invited to illiteracy through fake news." For Wyoming, the problem is that fake news is profitable, and that there are people willing to pay for the lie knowing that it is a lie.
García Montero argues that there is a well-calculated strategy of the extreme right that includes the language that is used, and pointed out that banks have a specific office for political parties, football teams and media. "The real debate -he pointed out- is the danger that virtual reality will replace historical reality and that is why I am so in favor of memoir books, as a vaccine against that reality." Wyoming wanted to end with a reflection, because Spain is the only country in Europe where you still cannot speak clearly about the past, specifically about the Civil War. "When will it be possible?", he asked: "It's unheard of."