Next to the enormous oval door of the house built in the 40s where the Chilean journalist Abraham Santibáñez (85 years old, Santiago) lives, in the municipality of San Miguel, in Santiago, there is a small sign that says NO over a rainbow It is a miniature souvenir of the poster of the plebiscite of October 5, 1988, when 54.70% of Chileans voted No to the continuity of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
In 1988, Santibáñez was director of Magazine Today, opponent of the regime. And eight months before he celebrated the triumph of NoIn January, the military dictatorship launched them against them. An interview of yours to Genaro Arriagada, then executive secretary of the command of the NO, and an article by journalist Alejandro Guillier, angered the regime. The military prosecutor's office prosecuted the three for improper sedition, a crime that only a soldier could commit. They spent two days in jail, in the old Capuchin annex, an event that provoked both a national scandal and international solidarity.
Santibáñez, journalist from the University of Chile, National Journalism Award 2015, Full Member of the Chilean Academy of Language and specialist in journalistic ethics, has been both a witness and protagonist of the history of Chile from his first steps as a reporter to the end. of the 60s. In 1978, then as deputy director of Todaywas one of the first two journalists to arrive in Lonquén, a town located in Talagante, in the Metropolitan Region, where they were found inside the furnaces of a mine. the burned bodies of 15 peasants murdered by the dictatorship in 1973. “Pieces of yellowish skulls, with traces of scalp; loose, black hairs; torn clothes in which one recognizes a blue jeans“, a man's vest,” was the description he then made on his typewriter to Today.
45 years have passed since then, and Santibáñez has unscathed memory of the moment. “They were the first missing detainees that appeared. It was a very hard blow, because the Government [militar] He had always denied that there were people arbitrarily detained and tortured. It was the milestone that began the certainty of human rights abuses,” he tells EL PAÍS on a curious cloudy Thursday in the middle of summer in Santiago.
A large part of these and other stories also appear in the dozens of file cabinets with old press clippings with facts, people and obituaries that Santibáñez treasures in his desk. The walls are also full of books that almost hang from the shelves and that are in different positions: vertical, horizontal and diagonal. In the middle, a gift from his daughter appears: an old woman Underwood.
These days, Santibáñez has had good times. On December 22 he was named professor emeritus of the Diego Portales University, one of several universities where he has taught. “Thanks to him, not only does the School of Journalism possess some of the virtues that it exhibits today, but thanks to him and others like him, it was also able to maintain a state of alert in difficult times and, of course, it was able to stay alive. interest in journalism,” said rector Carlos Peña that day. The journalist thanked the appointment: “Today it is clear that the great challenge of journalism and communication is represented by the profound technological change and its crowning creation: artificial intelligence. This is, evidently, something that millennials They can face it with an advantage and I am happy for them, but I also feel the obligation to tell them that older people, even octogenarians like me, also have a valuable contribution: journalism must always be done with passion, with a clear awareness that it is a permanent service. ”.
Ask. The world, and journalism, is surrounded by technologies. You worked in another era, without the internet. What memories do you have?
Answer. We used typewriters and suddenly we started using fax machines. I was also a correspondent for the newspaper The State of São Paulo [en los 70 y 80]. I sent by fax and that was later rewritten. That's kind of romantic, but…
Q. But he doesn't seem to miss it that much. He has a blog (abe.cl) since 1999.
R. Just as I never wrote with a pen, today's students have no idea about the typewriter or the liniotypes, which were a monster and I am fascinated by them. Today the newsroom is much cleaner, not as noisy. All that is changing. We are in a stage of very great transformation, and the influence of social networks is excessive. I believe that we will emerge from that transition at some point, because those things have happened over time. All the millennials They are great at handling this, but that doesn't mean we have assimilated the change. That is why I claim, once again, interpretive journalism, explanations. You have to combine the news of the day with the explanations.
Q. And the millennials They are not so young anymore. They were born between 1981 and 1984.
R. Well we have a president millennial.
Q. By the way, what do you think of President Gabriel Boric?
R. This year I met President Boric at a family event. We talked for a little while, because there were a lot of people. I'm bad at doing interviews; What I did was a lot of compilation work. And I asked him what it was like to be in La Moneda and he answered that he is still happy. Now, that's not a question for a National Journalism Award…but I guess it was to start a conversation that couldn't last much longer. And last night (Wednesday the 28th), I saw him very happy with the lithium thing. [el acuerdo entre Codelco y SQM para explotar en conjunto el Salar de Atacama]. For me SQM is very emblematic: it is the gift that Pinochet gave to his son-in-law [Julio Ponce Lerou]. It seems super extraordinary to me that this Government makes a deal, and doing so meant a turnaround that not even other left-wing or center parties would have made. And not even the right, because some think like Milei.
And he adds: “I have a good impression of the president. But I notice what appears every other day: lack of experience. It seems to me that Kast is responsible for having come to power very easily, very prematurely. [José Antonio, el líder del Partido Republicano]. Because if Kast had not been the candidate, but rather Mayor Evelyn Matthei, I believe she or someone from the traditional right would have won, but not from that extreme right, so Milei.” And he adds: “But we have already talked a lot about Milei and I don't know him.”
Q. What do you think about Boric riding his bike in the mornings and taking photos?
R. Regardless of who the president is, if he is young and likes to ride a bicycle, that is fine with me. What doesn't seem very good to me is that he doesn't answer questions to journalists.
“I'm in no hurry to die”
On April 8, 2020, when the pandemic began, Santibáñez published a letter in the newspaper The Mercury which had a great impact in Chile. He referred to the ethical dilemma that doctors could eventually find themselves in when having to choose which patient to support with intensive treatments. “To help resolve this dilemma, even if it is a small contribution, I now renounce
being connected to an artificial respirator if by doing so I can save another life,” she wrote.
Q. His 2020 letter opened a debate. Did you think about death then?
R. I'm in no hurry to die, but I thought I'd done enough. It seemed appropriate to me that, in that emergency, a young person, with young children or with the prospect of having a family, would be favored. There were letters from people who agreed with me, but there were also others who said that these things should not be published, that they should be dealt with privately. I think that is part of life and, in my case, of journalism: one cannot satisfy everything that people think or want.
Q. Did you talk to your family before writing it?
R. The letter, like all the things I do, I almost never comment on beforehand. Sometimes I do it with my wife, Ana María. But that time we discussed it with my children, María Paz and José Miguel, who was an engineer and died in 2020.
The death of his son – from a heart attack at the age of 53 – has marked Santibáñez. “Those who died were grandparents and old uncles, but for a child to suddenly die…I was very impressed by the suddenness. One realizes that he is not eternal. But I would like to continue living, I have my granddaughter (five years old), and I want to see her grow up. We have talked a lot, including that she wants to be a journalist.
Q. And would you like it to be?
R. One should do what one thinks one has fingers for the piano. I studied pharmacy for a year, because my mother was a pharmaceutical chemist. But my granddaughter, in addition to being a journalist, has also wanted to be an astronaut.
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