Padura, Guerriero, Vásquez and the artwork of writing columns: “We must find the universal in the bowels of the local” | fiftieth Anniversary | EUROtoday

EL PAÍS was born 50 years in the past as a Spanish newspaper however right this moment it’s rather more Latin American. Javier Moreno, director of the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism, highlighted it a number of instances this Friday when he interviewed three of the newspaper’s most acknowledged columnists on the Hay Festival in Cartagena: the Cuban Leonardo Padura, the Argentine Leila Guerriero, and the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez. This is the primary of a number of occasions within the Caribbean capital to commemorate the 5 a long time of the newspaper which, as Moreno recalled, already has greater than 80 journalists in Latin America, from Santiago de Chile to Mexico City. “Some of the main columnists are from here,” he recalled.

Padura, Guerriero and Vásquez, learn all through the area, first talked about what the newspaper represented to them within the eighties and nineties, once they started to learn it often. “One day I am going to write here,” the Argentine journalist mentioned to herself in 1993, after in Buenos Aires she discovered an previous copy of The Weekly Country and he learn there with a profile of the plastic artist Miquel Barceló. In the identical decade, Padura learn the printed version with out fail when he acquired on a aircraft to or from Madrid. “EL PAÍS is where any journalist would like to have their name signed,” he mentioned.

Vásquez additionally started to learn it day by day when he moved to Barcelona on the finish of the last decade. “Since ’99 I wanted a review of one of my books,” he mentioned, a dream fulfilled in 2004 after the publication of his novel. The Informants. The newspaper gave them an area, all of them say, generally very lengthy, generally excessively quick: solely 350 phrases Guerriero requested for. “They give him 50 more words than me,” Padura mentioned laughing concerning the 950 that Vásquez publishes.

“You do not write for your countries,” Moreno repeated, for the reason that three authors write about subjects past their nationalities: Trump, the struggle in Ukraine or the threats to Greenland. “I believe we are living in a historical moment where nothing happens anymore only where it happens. Any political incident in our interconnected world has an effect elsewhere,” mentioned Vásquez. Guerreiro added that, earlier than becoming a member of EL PAÍS, he labored for a number of international media from Argentina, which allowed him to clarify the problems with a transparent context for readers anyplace on this planet. “You understand that you are not writing to your aunt, you are writing for a larger universe,” he mentioned.

But for the Argentine, her goal has been not solely to speak concerning the geopolitics that impacts us all, but in addition about human experiences which can be additionally common: “The column I write is somewhat strange, because I talk about private worlds, which does not mean that it is my private world. I talk about loss, grief, love, heartbreak. That is a drop of universal experience.”

Leonardo Padura mentioned that he explicitly requested the newspaper, when he started writing as a columnist, that they not take into account him a correspondent from Cuba. “And when I talk about Cuba, I try to always keep in mind something that I have also applied in my literature, a phrase that I have repeated a lot: we must find the universal in the bowels of the local,” he mentioned. “I do not write for Spanish readers, nor for Cuban readers, I write for the newspaper EL PAÍS.”

Moreno recalled that when EL PAÍS was born 50 years in the past, democracy “was a promise,” and right this moment, with the varied political crises as a result of rise of authoritarianism and populism, it appears to be a phrase “to defend.” Crises that inevitably have an effect on the columnist, he prompt to the three writers.

Without a doubt, they answered him. “The relationship between the word and the reality it tries to describe has deteriorated,” mentioned Vásquez. He then made a reference to 1984George Orwell’s iconic novel about totalitarianism (revealed in 1949), during which the primary order of the political occasion is “do not believe what your eyes see and what your ears hear.” Vásquez sees a direct parallel with “what we are experiencing,” and made reference to the current second when a journalist corrected the president of the United States, Donald Trump, saying that he confused Greenland with Iceland in Davos. The White House press officer replied that she was not fallacious, as a result of she was referring to ice (Ice) and to not the nation (Iceland). “When that can be said, when there is a machinery to say that President Trump was not wrong, the party’s order is very clear,” Vásquez mentioned. “You have to play seriously with freedom of expression, and something tells you that in a country where the press is official,” Padura added.

Guerriero requested for extra duty in order that newspapers, and the media typically, don’t fall into the binary logic of social networks and don’t increase “a flag From Polaristhat we know the truth, when this is a more collective construction than the signature of an author.”

“What would you demand from the newspaper in the coming years?” Moreno requested, trying to the longer term. “I am not asking that a fault be repaired, but that we become aware of the value of journalism as a place of resistance in the face of an explosion of common reality,” Vásquez requested, since networks and synthetic intelligence appear to have divided residents within the face of the fact they acknowledge.

Guerriero requested journalists to proceed engaged on complicated subjects, “on challenging texts that fill the reader with doubts and questions.” “The best way to be a citizen is to doubt, doubt, doubt,” he mentioned. Padura joined Argentina. He requested the newspaper to not enter into the logic of social networks and to not restrict journalists of their time or area to jot down. “And if it doesn’t have the whole truth, at least it shouldn’t lie. The truth is relative, the lie is absolute. The newspaper must cling to the possible truths,” he concluded.