The name of Raquel Coronell was, until a week ago, an unknown name in the world of the media, despite the fact that this young reporter was born in the epicenter of these. “A good part of my childhood was spent in a newsroom,” she says. A 23-year-old from Bogotá, she is the daughter of one of the most important journalists in Colombia and was named this week president of the Harvard Crimson, one of the oldest and most prestigious college newspapers in the United States. Coronell is the first Latina to run this place at Harvard University, in her 148 years of history. Its pages were edited or directed by former presidents John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as countless journalists who today hold important positions in the North American media. But the president’s chair was, for decades, exclusively for elite white men who played golf. Not for a woman like Raquel Coronell.
“I am very aware of my responsibility, I know that I am now in the chair they have occupied,” he confesses to EL PAÍS from Cambridge. “They built what is today the Crimson but, like all media, this one has to evolve, and I am going to work to rise to the challenge ”.
Although Latinos in the United States represent about 20% of the population, in the media industry their participation has always remained residual. A government report published in September estimates that the participation of Hispanics in newspapers as analysts or reporters is around 11%. And as editor-in-chief or section chief, what in English is called editor, is even lower: 7%. In fact, the report states, the percentage of Latinos in the media industry is the lowest in the country when compared to the percentage in other industries in the economy. “At New York Times, the newspaper with the largest reach, only 7% of the staff is Latino ”, explains the Democratic representative Joaquín Castro after reading the report. “At Washington Post, which is in our nation’s capital, only 5% of employees are Latino. Even in Los Angeles TimesIn a city that is 50% Latino, only 17% of reporters are. Some of the most respected institutions in the media in this country are largely responsible for cultural exclusion ”.
Raquel Coronell, who is now the visible face of one of those respected institutions, repeated during dozens of interviews to compete for the position that she would make of the Crimson “An open door to Hispanics.” Journalism, he added to the selection committee, must be “a counterweight to power on behalf of the common citizen.”
A vision of journalism, but one that Coronell cultivated in the years she spent in the most complicated newsrooms of Colombian journalism as a child, and later in her teens, as a Latina in Miami. “Journalism, when it is genuine, must be a counter-power”, wrote his father, Daniel Coronell, in a column in 2016. An echo of that journalistic seed that reached Harvard.
A family commitment
“Young children often tell lies to their parents, right? Well, that couldn’t be done in my house because my parents were always going to discover the truth, ”recalls the new president of the Harvard Crimson.
Raquel Coronell did not learn to be a reporter at the Crimson, but in the cradle: she is the eldest daughter of the television presenter Maria Cristina Uribe and the most influential journalist in Colombia, Daniel Coronell, who until recently was news director of Univision. When he was four years old, his parents threw News One, as director and presenter, an independent newscast that made courageous denunciations of corruption or human rights violations during the government of former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). “The newsroom was like a second family,” recalls Raquel, eating cookies with cameramen and investigative reporters discussing headlines that would make headlines all week. “I was the most informed girl in kindergarten,” she says.
Coronell understood little of what was happening behind the headlines, but he perceived when the team became tense, not only because of breaking news, but because his parents began to receive death threats since 2004, when Daniel Coronell was investigating whether the Colombian Presidency he had bought a vote in Congress to allow Uribe to be reelected in 2006 (he found he did). The following year, the one who began to receive the threats was Raquel. “The first thing we are going to send to pieces is the daughter”, yelled a man on the phone to her husband, after describing how the little girl was dressed when her mother left her in kindergarten that day.
Raquel did not quite understand what was happening nor does she remember her parents’ panic, but she was surprised when they had to start moving around the city with escorts. “I remember one day some funeral wreaths arrived at my dad’s office, with our names,” he says about one of the threats. With the help of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the family decided to leave the country and take temporary refuge in California. “From one day to the next we put all our belongings in a couple of suitcases and we left,” remembers Raquel, who then thought she was going on vacation. She was an eight-year-old girl living the consequences of censorship.
The Coronells lived for two years in California, where Raquel’s younger brother was born, but when they returned to Bogotá the persecution did not stop. “President Uribe was very upset by the reports he was releasing [Daniel Coronell] against him and his family ”, cAn intelligence director was announced years later when she revealed that the journalist’s communications were being intervened by the government. Even so, the family stayed and the couple continued their work with News One. The little girl continued to watch them with the cameras.
“I think my parents have always encouraged me not to be a journalist precisely because of everything we live,” she says about the trauma of that time. “But instead of slowing me down, what this did was push me further, because I saw that despite these costs, they continued to prioritize the truth and inform people above all else. I have always admired that and I want to be like that, as a journalist and as a person: prioritizing the truth and the mission of doing a public service for citizens ”.
But Raquel Coronell did doubt at one point whether she wanted to be a journalist. In 2016, when the family lived in Miami because the father ran the news unit of Univision, she was diagnosed with leukemia. After two and a half years of treatment, he thought that his thing was to study medicine and help heal others with the same disease. But the momentum was short-lived. When she signed up to be a reporter at the Harvard Crimson, in February 2020, he found “the power of journalism.”
His articles in the last year and a half are reports on labor disputes of Harvard with a student union graduates, or a open letter to stop the rich boys from Cambridge who insist on traveling at the beginning of the pandemic, or a couple on the Harvard Kennedy School, the famous school of Government through which presidents from all over the world, such as Álvaro Uribe and his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, have passed.
“The most challenging thing so far was when Saeb Erekat, who was chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, was invited to the Kennedy School, and it was very difficult to get an interview, but the most impressive thing was that a month later he died of guilt. of the covid ”, says Coronell about his work, in which Erekat criticized a negotiated solution to the conflict with Israel without the presence of Palestine, as proposed by Trump. “This was perhaps one of the last interviews he gave in life,” says the reporter.
Coronell is now investigating the Harvard police – and the racism in this– as he prepares for his new position, which he will assume in January 2022. He is also considering entering Harvard Law School and turning his career around. “For me the rights of journalists and their safety are very important,” he says. “So, in one way or another, journalism is going to be part of my professional life, but I still don’t know if it’s going to be practicing it or defending its professionals.” As the director of a newspaper, or as a member of a committee that saves journalists like her father, Raquel Coronell is clear that there is no other place in the world for more than surrounded by journalists.
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