Media : A Muckraking Editor Shakes Spain’s Leader : ‘I am only a journalist,’ insists El Mundo’s Pedro J. Ramirez. But his newspaper’s exposes of corruption make him a powerful force in politics--and a threat to the career of the prime minister.

Pedro J. Ramirez bobs at the vortex of the political storm in Spain. He is the prodigal son of a young democracy--and the father of the crisis that is shaking it.

With exposes disclosing government sleaze and corruption, El Mundo, the Madrid newspaper he edits, has undermined the public standing and effectiveness of one of the longest-ruling leaders in Europe today.

Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, once the wunderkind of European politics, approaches key elections and the presidency of the European Community with his reputation in shreds. Ramirez, known across Spain as Pedro Jota, Peter Jay, is the proximate cause.

“I am only a journalist. But I am a journalist,” Ramirez said in an interview. “No more, but no less.”

No way. At 43, Ramirez is a towering national figure: a muckraking hero to some; an unprincipled scandalmonger to others.

That an upstart newspaper should be setting the political agenda in this vibrant, politically charged country is testament to how far democratic Spain has come 20 years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

But there is delicious irony, too: The man ultimately most responsible for Spain’s modernizing economic and political growth since Franco is Felipe Gonzalez, who now suffers most from the slings of a free press.

At 52, Gonzalez has been in power for almost 13 years, two-thirds of Spain’s lifetime as a modern democracy. He was elected to a fourth four-year term in 1993, but his nominally Socialist party lost its majority and must now rely on support from Catalan nationalists in Parliament.

Gonzalez brought Spain into Europe and into NATO, and he brought millions of Spaniards into the 20th Century after decades of isolationist repression under Franco.

“Spanish society is more homogeneous, richer, and better educated than ever in history. There is great stability in the nature of the state,” University of Madrid historian Juan Pablo Fusi said.

“Troubling corruption is not seen as a result of Parliament. It is not institutions that are being discredited, but people.”

Scandal after sorry scandal involving government officials, party colleagues and friends have bruised Gonzalez and marred his record.

There is no evidence of his own involvement, but the list of prominent Spaniards who played fast and loose with public money and public trust under his government in the go-go ‘80s is long and devastating.

“After so many years in government I have lost credibility,” Gonzalez admitted to Parliament earlier this year.

Gonzalez had been in power for seven years when El Mundo was born, but the newspaper quickly became disagreeable to him, Editor Ramirez said, “because he had committed so many abuses and there was a sort of tacit complicity on the part of the press not to denounce the corruption. El Mundo broke this sort of Pax Romana, this kind of silent complicity.”

With reporters from El Mundo, other newspapers and investigating magistrates laying bare details of his vast overnight fortune, the former head of the 75,000-member Civil guard, or paramilitary national police, Luis Roldan, fled the country. Recently returned in handcuffs by Spanish police, magistrates say he accumulated about $50 million during seven years in office, and they accuse him of bribery, fraud and misappropriation of public funds.

The Spanish press’s anti-corruption crusade has spurred magistrates and police. They have accused the former governor of the Bank of Spain of tax evasion. A regional governor is serving six years for embezzlement. A dynamic Barcelona financier has been accused of fraud.

El Mundo has forced the pace in the potentially most damning scandal for the Gonzalez era--accusations that the prime minister at least tacitly countenanced government-sanctioned death squads that murdered about two dozen Basque separatists in southern France.

No smoking gun points at Gonzalez, and he denies any knowledge of crimes. Nevertheless, Spanish commentators frequently harken to Richard Nixon and Watergate in their political analysis of Spain today.

Gonzalez’s party faces probable massacre in May’s regional and municipal elections. But he said he is anxious for the challenges of the European presidency that Spain, and he, inherit July 1, and he insisted that he has no thought of resigning. If not forced into early elections, Gonzalez can stay in power until 1997.

“I think that before leaving, Felipe wants to show that he can clean up the corruption mess,” said Jose Luis Martinez, a media company executive who is close to Gonzalez.

A bad idea, said Ramirez: The longer Gonzalez stays, said his most trenchant foe, the more damage is done to Spain. “The government has neutralized constitutional checks and balances. After nearly 13 years, it is inefficient and corrupt. The state of Spanish democracy today reminds me of an old rhyme: ‘Polly has a dolly who is sick, sick, sick,’ ” Ramirez said.

With Ramirez as the leading example, Spanish newspapers are today once again assuming major political influence of the sort they first enjoyed in the 19th Century, historian Fusi said.

“We believe we are what in the Anglo-Saxon world is known as a quality newspaper, a paper aimed at the most dynamic and educated sectors of society,” Ramirez said.

“We want to be a newspaper that will provide an open forum for debate of the most diverse ideas. We want to be a critical voice, but at the same time a constant source of constructive proposals.”

But by both tradition and inclination, Spanish newspapers are not identified by their foreign news, comic strips, bullfight coverage or open forums, but by their politics.

Ramirez founded El Mundo in 1989 after being sacked in a political dispute as editor of the opposition daily Diario 16, which first linked the anti-Basque death squads to the Interior Ministry.

He said El Mundo, which is making money and regularly wins international awards for design, is majority-owned by its employees, with the remainder divided among Italy’s Rizzoli publishing empire (45%) and Britain’s The Guardian (4%).

Selling 209,000 copies daily, anti-Establishment El Mundo was third in paid circulation in 1994. It trailed El Pais (401,000 circulation) and the conservative ABC (334,000 circulation).

One day before Spanish Princess Elena was married in Seville last month, ABC’s front page coverage focused on the royal family’s warm reception in the city. El Pais published a front page picture of Queen Sofia slipping as she got off a high-speed train from Madrid.

El Mundo’s coverage that day featured complaints from Seville’s archbishop that his cathedral was being turned into a gaudy TV stage for a ceremony in which religion was being sacrificed to show biz. ABC denied that the archbishop was miffed, citing unnamed sources in the royal household.

“El Mundo is helping to hold the politicians in check. At its very best it is very innovative; at its worst, a place to air garbage that sells newspapers,” said Miguel Angel Lamet, a Jesuit priest and part-time columnist for Diario 16.

Ramirez, who briefly taught Spanish literature at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania in the mid-’70s before turning to newspapers, is the sort of editor who spends more time patrolling his city room than at his computer terminal.

As a free-lance writer, he said he interviewed then-Managing Editor Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post during the height of Watergate. The visit left its mark on his vision of the role newspapers should play, Ramirez said. “Newspapers must give most important news and informed judgments. Most of our competitors don’t fulfill this role. They have been co-opted by Gonzalez and the system. . . .”

Fiercely combative, lightning rod Ramirez is by now accustomed to being bombarded by critics in and out of government. They variously denounce him as vain, ambitious, opportunistic, ruthless. In the small, highly politicized world of Spanish journalism, Ramirez is honored for his muckraking--and widely distrusted.

“Pedro Jota is good at selling newspapers, but he has also sold his soul,” Gonzalez supporter Martinez said.

Don’t bother reading my lips, read my newspaper, Ramirez countered.

“Most cases of corruption in Spain today come to public attention not from the police, Parliament or the justice system, but through the press,” he said.