MediaObituary

Eduardo Haro

Leftwing journalist and columnist, he set up the anti-Franco paper Triunfo in 1964

It is rare that a journalist becomes representative of an approach to life, but this happened with Eduardo Haro Tecglen, who has died aged 81 of a heart attack in his native Madrid. For the last decade he wrote a daily column, Visto/ Oído (Seen/Heard), in Spain's biggest circulation daily, El País. It was the sort of column that liberal papers all over the world include to attract the most leftwing section of their readership.

Haro was a "red", in his own words. A one-time adulator of Spain's rightwing dictator Francisco Franco, later a supporter of the Soviet Union's dictator Joseph Stalin, Haro turned himself into the most influential journalist of the last years of the Franco dictatorship and, in this last decade, the lack of an "and" in the title of his column signalled the extraordinary compression of his style. He forced his readers to think in order to follow his logic. Thousands read him for his ethical and political probity. For the same reasons, and for his undisguised disdain for the right, he was widely hated.

Haro's point of reference was the Spanish second republic of 1931-39. As a child in the north Madrid area of Chamberí, he experienced the explosion of joy that the declaration of the republic brought, the lay education he received and the liberal attitudes of those years. He entitled the first book of his memoirs El Niño Republicano (The Republican Kid, 1996). Haro's maternal grandfather was a freethinking civil guard and his father was deputy editor of the daily La Libertad (Liberty) in the 1930s.

It was from his father, condemned to 30 years' imprisonment by the Franco regime in 1939, that Haro learned the need for independence in a journalist. However, he took 15 years to begin to exercise that independence. Aged 15 at the end of the civil war, he joined the newspaper Informaciones. Starting as a sports reporter, he rose rapidly to senior editorial positions. He was a clear, prolific and able journalist; also, sine qua non to thrive in postwar Spain's press, he joined the Falange - the country's ruling party - and wrote eulogies of its founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

But by the mid-1950s, he was a member of the proscribed Communist party and housed party leaders on clandestine visits to Madrid. From 1957 to 1960 he was Paris correspondent for Informaciones. After a brief sojourn running a paper in Málaga, he went to Tangier to edit the paper España. He met there William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, who were making the city famous as a louche, bohemian paradise.

Paris and Tangier gave Haro a cosmopolitan view of the world. He returned to Franco's Spain for his most fecund period: he co-founded with José Ángel Ezcurra the paper, Triunfo (Triumph) in 1964. With Haro and the novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Triunfo rapidly became the main opposition weekly. It brought new cultural and political airs to Spain and became a mark of identity. To buy Triunfo showed you were anti-Franco; to carry it down the street was to support the opposition.

Haro wrote at times half the paper, using at least five pseudonyms. His writing on culture and politics was ruthlessly lucid. Despite the pessimism that accompanies clarity, he believed in the ability of the press to influence people and shape a society. He liked to call himself a newspaper writer rather than journalist, because of this vision of the importance of a free press. When Triunfo closed in 1982, he went to El País as theatre critic.

In later years, Haro became more anarchist than communist. He voted only once, on March 14 2004 to help oust the rightwing government of José María Aznar, whose father had been a colleague of his in both the Falange and journalism.

Haro was tall and strong-looking with a square head and melancholy eyes. Self-controlled, always polite though often sarcastic, he could seem arrogant and was not especially popular.

Four of Haro's six children died before him. A daughter, Marina, committed suicide and his eldest child, Eduardo, a poet in 1980s Madrid during the "movida", died of Aids in 1988. Haro had not accepted his son's gayness: famously, he wrote he was not a good father.

Haro was divorced from Pilar Ibars, mother of his six children, and is survived by her and his second wife, Concha Barral.

· Eduardo Haro Tecglen, newspaper writer, born June 30 1924; died October 19 2005

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