sanctions for publishing articles defending democracy and civil liberties, and criticizing Francoist Spain. Between January 1967 and May 1968 alone, proceedings were initiated against the paper on 12 separate occasions. Madrid was shut down for four months on May 30, 1968, inflicting heavy financial losses on the paper. The paper continued to pay the salaries of its staff during this time. After Madrids reappearance on September 30, 1968, judicial proceedings against the paper continued on a regular basis. Finally, in October 1971, the Minister of Information, Sanchez Belle, demanded the replacement of Fontán with a journalist close to the Falange party and the appointment of a director to represent the Ministry. In the case of refusal, Belle warned that the newspaper would be temporarily suspended and an investigation started to consider its permanent closure. However, Madrids publisher and principal owner, Rafael Calvo Serer, refused to agree to these conditions. The paper's editorial staff formed a journalists' association, the first of its kind in Spain, to defend the independence and dignity of the profession and to fight for the retention in office of the present editor. At the end of October, 1971, the Spanish Information Ministry issued an order informing the newspaper that an investigation had been launched to examine "irregularities" in the original listing of its stockholders. The newspaper had 10 days to answer the inquiry. The government was empowered to cancel the paper's registration, thus closing it, if the paper could not "clarify" or explain the irregularities. On November 25, 1971, after the paper published an article critical of General Franco's right-hand man, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the Ministry of Information removed Madrid from the register of press publishers, allegedly because of irregularities in the paper's ownership. The Ministry also told the paper to cease publishing. The banning of Madrid affected public opinion and was widely criticized by the Spanish press. "To close an economically sound and well-read paper is murder," commented the Catholic paper Ecclesia. Madrids journalists and workers agreed to support the management and not surrender the newspaper to the official trade unions, which had offered to take charge of the newspaper under a new editor and with its own editorial line. "We are ready to sell the presses to pay the staff rather than agree that the paper should lose its independence," the journalists said. Madrid stayed closed. Calvo Serer, who went into exile in France