Like most people in Equatorial Guinea, a country with an average age of 20, Delfin Mocache Massoko has known only one leader in power: Teodoro Obiang, the world’s longest-lasting dictator.
The journalist’s family saw the history of the small country on the west coast of Africa up close. His grandfather, from whom he received the surname Mocache, was murdered in a public square during the regime of Francisco MacÃas, Obiang’s uncle who would later be overthrown in a coup by his own nephew in 1979.
“To prevent us from being persecuted, my grandmother took the surname Mocache from her children”, he says. It was up to him, then, to rescue it, as a form of reverence for a part of the family with which she identifies.
But Mocache, 39, was forced to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps from exile. Since 2004, he has lived as a refugee in Valencia, Spain, where he studied law. Founder of the Diário Rombe website, he investigated and denounced cases of corruption in the oil sector, the engine of the local economy. And the threats were not long in coming.
The investigations have Obiang’s sons as main characters: TeodorÃn, number two in the regime and quoted to replace his father as head of the dictatorship, and Gabriel Mbaga Obiang, Minister of Mines.
Mocache says he managed to structure a network of sources within the government after discovering, on one of his last trips to his homeland, in the first half of the 2010s, that part of the friends who were in clandestine dissidence movements by his side now integrate the tentacles of power.
Something inevitable, he says. “Youth organizations linked to the regime teach them to denounce any relative who opposes Obiang. The Guinean does not trust anyone. We are in a dictatorship in which killing is normal. Any protest is immediately silenced.”
The results of the investigations made Mocache the main source of the trial that convicted TeodorÃn of embezzlement in France in 2020, a process that gave the Ecuadorean vice-president a sentence of three years in prison and a fine of €30 million (about R$164 million). ).
Obiang’s son sued Mocache for slander and asked for damages of €200,000, but lost the case. “Right now, the main way to harass journalists is through prosecution,” he says. But not only. Mocache reports having received threats from police officers in Spain who, for him, would receive money from Malabo.
Mocache is one of the only independent reporters in his country. If journalism faces dilemmas all over the world, in Equatorial Guinea the challenge is to point out a truly free vehicle. “The media are muzzled, and prior censorship is the rule”, says the NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
In RSF’s annual ranking on freedom of the press, the African country appears in 141st position among 180 countries — Brazil is 110th. The main source of information, public television, was co-opted by the regime. The only private channel, Asonga, belongs to TeodorÃn.
Mocache came to Brazil for the Piauà Journalism Festival, in São Paulo, on Sunday (30th), and spoke on the panel “The Journalist and the Dictator”. His presence was only announced minutes before the debate, for security reasons.
He reports not feeling safe even in Spain. “Journalists in Equatorial Guinea are not safe anywhere; Obiang leads a terrorist regime that detains people in any country.”
This is his first time in Brazil — leaving Europe is not easy, either for money or security. It didn’t take long for the name of the president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), to come up in the conversation with the Sheeton Mocache’s initiative: “Lula empowered Obiang”.
He is referring, among other things, to the fact that the PT member visited Equatorial Guinea in the last year of his second term and posed for photos alongside the dictator. “Brazil’s main construction companies in Guinea directly financed the regime,” he says. “Lula talks so much about human rights, about recovering democracy in Brazil. Is one democracy better than another?”
Connivance with the regime is not exclusive to Brasilia, of course. Mocache recounts conversations with European Union figures in the capital Malabo, in which he questioned the silence around Obiang. He heard that the bloc would not meddle in domestic matters. “Africa still lives a neocolonialism in which Western governments support dictators knowing that they violate human rights.”
Pointing out a way to end the dictatorship is difficult. Neighborhood experiences where mass movements forced the leader’s downfall do not cheer him up. “They are always later politicized and supported by a Western government interested in maintaining its interests.”
He sees a loophole the moment Obiang, now 80, dies. “It created a lot of anger, enmity and disputes in the family in power; we may have an anarchic state after his death”, which would open a window of opportunity for change, he says. In November, however, Obiang consolidated another seven years in power in sham elections, in which he would have won 95% of the vote, according to the regime.
The Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, which Equatorial Guinea is part of — only 1% of the local population speaks Portuguese, however — congratulated the government for the “civic manner” with which the election was conducted.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
