José M. Siles
José María Siles (Almería, 1951) is a Spanish journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Bonn, Rabat, Berlin, New York and Brussels.
He directed fringe theater and produced documentary films suffering censorship under the Franco's rule in Spain before receiving a postgraduate Master's degree in Communication sciences and Journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. After Franco's death, he worked in Paris for the News Desk of Radio France Internationale and as a correspondent for Spanish media.
TVE, the National Television of Spain, sent him to Germany where he covered the last years of the cold war in a still divided country. In the night of November, 9 1989, he was one of the first journalists reporting live on the fall of the Berlin Wall from the Checkpoint Charlie.
With Germany being reunified, he opened a new TVE office in Rabat covering the rise of Islamic extremism in North Africa and the beginning of the decolonization process in the West Sahara with the arrival of the first blue helmets of the MINURSO. Since 1992 he witnessed the dramatic siege of Sarajevo and the reunification of the city after the Dayton Agreement as a war correspondent in Bosnia. Later on he followed the Slobodan Milošević trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
In 1994 he was named director of Canal Sur Televisión, the Public Broadcaster of Andalusia. After this experience in Seville, uplifting the image of the channel and reorganising the news department, he served two years as TVE US correspondent based in New York and opened a new bureau in Washington before being sent back to Europe. As European Affaires correspondent he covered from Brussels the arrival of the euro, the enlargement of the Union and the new peacemaker and peace builder role of NATO under the umbrella of the United Nations.
Among others assignments around the world he covered the last Lebanon war with Israel, the people uprisings in Haiti and the struggle for power in Congo-Kinshasa where a fragile democracy was stablished after years of war and millions of deaths.
José María Siles is member of the Team Europe: the European Commission's panel of independent conference speakers.
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