# La Libertad (Madrid)

La Libertad (Spanish: The Freedom) was a Spanish newspaper with a progressive, workerist, socializing tone, very popular, entertaining, and easy to read, which was founded in 1919 by editors of El Liberal as a result of a newspaper strike. Throughout its existence, it was configured as a left-wing republican publication. It disappeared in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

## History

In December 1919, a significant number of editors and workers from the newspaper El Liberal went on strike, although they would end up leaving this newspaper. In its place they founded a new publication, La Libertad, which published its first issue on 13 December 1919. In its early years it maintained a position close to the politician Santiago de Alba and the Liberal Left group. After the establishment of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, it was one of the newspapers that welcomed the new regime most negatively.
In March 1925 the newspaper was acquired by the businessman and financier Juan March, who also took control of the afternoon newspaper Informaciones [es]. Despite the change in ownership, La Libertad would consolidate itself in these years as Juan March's left-wing newspaper - while Informaciones was the right-wing newspaper. He maintained a position of opposition to the dictatorship and in 1928 he declared himself a republican; At the time of the fall of the dictatorship - 1930 - he was, according to Antonio Checa Godoy, one of the main spokespersons for republicanism in Madrid. The editorial line did not change after the arrival of the Second Spanish Republic. March left the newspaper in May 1934, at which point he began a new stage. In 1935 he gave great media coverage to the " black market " affair, exploiting that political scandal.
The newspaper began to defend the politicians of the first biennium and would extreme its leftist stance, especially after the victory of the Popular Front in the elections of February 1936. The newspaper continued to be published after the outbreak of the Civil War, in July 1936. He disappeared with the end of the war, at the end of March 1939.

## Career

Its success is evidenced by the fact that it printed 250,000 copies on the day the sentence against the convicts of the Andalusia Express Crime was carried out in a city, Madrid, that did not reach 750,000. It published good quality serials (Eckermann, Dickens, Mérimée, Dumas Jr., Goethe, Murger, Verne, Répide, Palacio Valdés, Conan Doyle, etc.) well illustrated by Carlos Sáenz de Tejada first and then by Francisco Rivero Gil, while the caricatures were reserved for Exoristo Salmerón and Ricardo Marín, although the youngest of the Machado brothers, José, also made his first steps as a cartoonist. JM Martínez Bande was in charge of the sports drawings.
He maintained serious competition with El Liberal to gain the credit of readers in addition to a lawsuit for plagiarism, accused of copying the sections, the layout, the distribution of the pages, and trying to take advantage of the distribution channels. 9 However, La Libertad achieved notable news successes:
* Report on the Moroccan War in eight installments carried out by Oteyza and Alfonso.
* Attention, in 1920, to the possible entry of the PSOE into the Third International.

## Escrache

On 26 November 1935, a group of monarchists and right-wingers led by Fernando Cobián, son of former minister Eduardo Cobián, stood in the early hours of the night in front of the newspaper's headquarters "with the purpose of carrying out an attack in protest against a loose publication by said newspaper in the morning issue".

## Editorial

Among the founding editors were Antonio Zozaya, Luis de Oteyza (who was one of its directors), Pedro de Répide, Antonio de Lezama, Luis de Zulueta, Augusto Barcia, Manuel Machado, and Luis Salado, among others. Journalist Teresa de Escoriaza was also a collaborator.
Antonio de Miguel's name for its editors includes, apart from those mentioned, Camilo Barcia Trelles, brother of Augusto; Joaquín Aznar, who would become its director; to Darío Pérez, Luis de Tapia, Manuel Castro Tiedrá, Arturo Pérez Camarero, José Manuel Fernández Gómez (later sentenced to death as an editor by the victors of the civil war along with the also editor and poet Félix Paredes Martín and the deputy director Eduardo Haro Delage), Alfonso R. Kuntz, Antonio de la Villa, his brother Alejandro de la Villa, Ricardo Hernández del Pozo, Rafael Hernández, Antonio García Romero, Ángel Lázaro, Manuel Ortiz de Pinedo, Francisco Rivero Gil, the photographer Alfonso Sánchez García, known simply like "Alfonso", and several more.