Algeria refuses to grant approval to diplomat José Maria Ridao proposed last April by the Rajoy government to be the Spanish consul in Algiers, El Pais reports. The online version of El Pais believes that the Algerian authorities have not appreciated Riado's essay «El vacío elocuente» on the writer Albert Camus. His friendship with the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who died and was buried last June in Marrakech, would have allegedly negatively affected his candidacy, the source added. However, José Maria Riado, also an editorialist, took over in 2010 a group of Spanish intellectuals who asked José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, then Spanish head of government, to stop aligning himself with the Moroccan positions on the Western Sahara issue. The appeal would have been launched in reaction to the dismantling of the Gdim Izik camp by the Moroccan security forces. Riado also followed the «hunger strike» observed by Aminatou Haidar at the Las Palmas airport in December 2009.
