When the prolific Argentine journalist and writer Martín Caparrós was diagnosed with the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS, he did what he’s been doing nearly his entire life: write. But not about little-known places or revolutionary movements—this time, he wrote about a new topic for him: his own life.
The result is the memoir “Antes que nada” (“Before anything”), published last October. In over 664 pages, Caparrós narrates his own life and reflects on existence, intertwining many of the remarkable experiences he lived through with the social, cultural and political history of Argentina and the world.
Caparrós, 67, is one of the greatest representatives of the genre that has become known as crónica, the cousin of New Journalism in Spanish-speaking Latin America, with long, stylistically polished reports and the authoritative presence of a narrator.
He began working in journalism at the age of 16 and, although he has had breaks and has not worked in newsrooms since the 1980s, he has never completely abandoned the genre. He’s lived in Spain for 12 years, and continues to write columns for the El País newspaper, as well as serving on awards juries and giving annual workshops on reportage books for the Gabo Foundation.
He also continues to publish one book after another. At the beginning of May, "The True Life of José Hernández (Told by Martín Fierro)" was published. It fictionalizes the life of the Argentine writer based on his character, and the essay "Sindiós” (“Godlessness") is scheduled to be released in June.
Cover of Antes que nada, Martín Caparrós’s memoir released in October 2024. (Cover image courtesy Random House)
In an interview with LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), Caparrós addresses how he sees journalism today, the process of narrating one's own life, and the virtue of being stubborn.
The interview was edited for clarity and conciseness.
LJR: Memory is a living, dynamic thing, and memories change all the time. Are there memories you thought were lost that you were surprised to rediscover, as if you were finding precious things?
MC: Yes, it definitely happened during the writing process. In fact, that was the purpose of writing those memoirs, to piece together a journey through my life to see what it was like and what I'd done.
In fact, I didn't plan on publishing it at first; I decided to publish it much later. I mean, it was more so I could get an overview.
And indeed, I found things I simply hadn't thought about, and they kept coming back to me as I thought and wrote. What I like less is that I've also continued to remember things after publishing.
LJR: Stylistically, who did you have in mind when you wrote this? Did you have any references to memoirists?
MC: The style I had in mind was my own. Over the last, I don't know, 45 years, I've been developing a style that, well, I think has its own characteristics, right?
For example, the use of fragments written in verse, the back and forth between forms and languages. What I did in this book, like most of the ones I write, is try to go a step further in that quest to find my own style.
LJR: You have between eight and 10 completed but unpublished books. Are any of them about journalism, and what are you going to do with them?
MC: Well, I'm publishing them. I don't know if there's any that could be called journalism. In my current circumstances, journalism is more difficult.
I have one, which I generally don't include on that list, which is like a compilation of my interviews, the interviews I think are worth revisiting. But before that, there are several other books I prefer to publish because they're unpublished.
A book has just been published in Argentina that is a biography of José Hernández, the great national writer of the late 19th century. He wrote a gaucho poem called Martín Fierro, which features the emblematic Argentine character. I wrote about the life of José Hernández written by Martín Fierro—that is, his character—in gaucho verse. It's a kind of fictionalized biography, but in verse.
In June, this little book called "Sindiós" (“Godlessness”) is coming out; "Without God" all at once, which here in Spain means chaos, a mess.
And then in October, I think, a very fragmentary novel about Buenos Aires, the city, its people, will be released. And so we continue. I'm going to try to publish as soon as possible, but you can't publish three books a year every year.
LJR: And are you writing every day or not?
MC: Yes, well, a week ago I finished proofreading this novel. Afterwards, I spent a few days in Barcelona because I had work there, and now I'm actually writing two or three articles I had pending. Aside from that, I have to decide which book to get started on, because when I'm not writing a book, I have a hard time.
LJR: All reporters write a lot. But the incredible thing about your output is that it also includes novels and literature. You've published more than 40 books. How do you manage to work so much? Have the routines of journalism helped you?
MC: I don't think so because I started working as a journalist when I was very young, 16, but it sort of stopped when I was 18 because I had to leave Argentina after the coup, and I wasn't able to return to real journalism until seven years later. And in that time, I'd already written three novels. So, in a way, I was a novelist before I was a journalist.
Perhaps it would be the opposite; it was my work as a novelist that taught me to do journalism in a slightly different way, looking for forms and methods.
LJR: Do you have different routines depending on whether you write crónicas, reports or fiction?
MC: What's different is the work. If I have to write a crónica, I have to spend a certain amount of time in a specific geographical or social space, talk to a lot of people, find out things, take a lot of notes. What I do when writing is a kind of final touch, so to speak, to give it all a bit of structure.
With a novel, however, I do everything here, in front of the computer. So the process is very different. But the prose and the stylistic forms I try to use are similar.
LJR: Your stories have a style that clearly reflects your subjectivity and lived experience. Now, on the other hand, there's a lot of talk about artificial intelligence. What do you think about it?
MC: I have a complicated but distinct relationship with artificial intelligence. I use it to do things I couldn't do myself. That is, not to write a text, an article, or anything. For that, I still believe my diminished natural intelligence is better.
On the other hand, there is something I don't know how to do and I am doing very intensively with artificial intelligence: composing songs.
A few months ago, a friend told me about a program called Suno, where you can add any lyrics you want, choose the genre you want, and it will create a song for you in 30 seconds.
I got really hooked on that, so much so that on Saturday or Sunday I started playing these songs on a radio show that's widely heard here in Spain, like a kind of sound column, let's say, like an opinion column, but in the form of a song.
I'm really entertained by it. It's a completely new language that I couldn't use, because I don't know music, I don't sing, and I don't have any instruments.
LJR: And how do you see writers of that genre you call "crónica" in Latin America today? Do you follow the current production?
MC: As much as I can, I follow it in two basic ways.
One is that I often serve on judging panels for journalism awards, both for articles with the Gabo Foundation and for books with the Anagrama publishing house. This allows me, or forces me, to stay up-to-date, because I have to read a large number of texts every year.
And on the other hand, because every year I do a book workshop with the Gabo Foundation, which consists of eight nonfiction writers who meet with me for a week and we discuss their advanced book projects.
And yes, I think there are people doing very interesting things.
I still believe we're somewhat trapped in a certain theme, which has to do primarily with violence and the effects of violence and poverty in its various forms. Well, it's necessary to talk about it, but there are many other things that should also be talked about.
We often put them aside, because ultimately, in many ways, it's almost easier to bravely recount an act of violence than to try to understand how we live and recount it. That's what interests me most and what I find most difficult.
LJR: Journalism in Latin America changed a bit about 10 years ago, with a more important role of philanthropy and the growth of media supported by international foundations. Do you think this distances journalism from those social experiences that aren't linked to very clear problems?
MC: No, I don't think that's the reason. I mean, it might be in a small way, because it's perhaps easier to get a grant if you say you're following those displaced by violence in this or that place or something like that. Those causes that automatically seem noble and seem worthwhile.
But I don't think that's the main reason, because I'm sure subsidies can be obtained with other proposals as well.
What has changed a lot in the last 10 or 15 years with new techniques and the emergence of media that operate primarily with subsidies is something that was very classic for most of my life: journalists were more like lone wolves, working alone or almost alone, and now it's the other way around, they work much more in groups.
This has to do with technological changes. Many journalistic jobs now require different skills: someone who writes, someone who makes videos, someone who creates infographics. And the connectivity we have allows us to work in groups spread across multiple countries, something that was almost unthinkable just a few years ago.
I think it's changed more in that sense. A lot of the good work is no longer individual, it's group work, and that's very interesting. I don't think it's necessarily good or bad that NGOs are somehow supporting this work. I don't see why an ad for a Ford pickup truck is better than, say, funding from the Ford Foundation.
LJR: I said it's different, not better. Actually, I think the more a media outlet depends on its readers, the better, but that's very difficult here in Latin America.
MC: Yes, that's true. But it seems to me there's a certain amount of willpower, energy, and enthusiasm coming into play in each medium, trying to break out of these sort of golden handcuffs, where it's easy to keep doing the same thing. Meaningful things are being done, but in reality, one never stops doing the same thing over and over again.
LJR: You've always had plenty of room for formal experimentation. Do you think there are equivalent spaces for that in Argentina today?
MC: I never had the space for formal experimentation provided to me. I created it, and the space appeared or disappeared depending on the moment; sometimes we managed to keep it going, and sometimes we didn't.
I was remembering something silly from when I returned to Argentina in '83. At the beginning of '84, we started a radio show with a very dear friend, Jorge Dori. We worked together on many things. We started a nightly program called "Belgrano's Midsummer Night's Dream," because the radio station was called Belgrano. The time slot was from midnight to two.
The first night, when the program ended, we said, "Well, bye, see you tomorrow." The next morning, they sent us a memo saying that we couldn't say goodbye that way, that we had to say, "Dear listeners, we bid you farewell until tomorrow," and so on and so forth.
It was the radio station's chief of operations who told us that in a very serious way. Of course, we ignored him, and people still remember that program. It's in the radio history books.
Generally, either you create that space for yourself, or you don't, and you just decide to move forward with what seems easiest.
LJR: Do you think a single professional can make a big difference for a media outlet? Do you think the structures are very strong and one professional doesn't make a difference?
MC: I think one person can make a huge difference; just one person who goes against the grain, who doesn't just do what they're told, what they're asked, but instead proposes things that are a little different. You were talking about spaces; no one ever told me to write articles of 15,000 or 20,000 words.
I had to fight hard to get that and other things published. And it seems to me that, unfortunately, life in the media for people who want to do something better, something different, is conflictive, made up of fights. But if you have conviction, I think it's worth fighting, because things happen when you don't do the same as everyone else and you don't let yourself be carried away by the general mediocrity.
LJR: You're from a generation of intellectuals strongly identified with the left, and we're now experiencing a rise of the right in many parts of the world. How do you assess the rise of the far right?
MC: When you started the question by talking about a generation of intellectuals identified with the left, the first thing I thought was that, interesting and fortunately, this right wing, which is gaining ground in so many places, has practically no intellectuals.
Those who call themselves right-wing intellectuals in Argentina are two or three young men of extraordinary cultural poverty. That gives me a little hope. But well, it's true that, for now, all those intellectuals who are supposedly on the left—what we're trying to do is understand what the heck happened to us, that is, how it can be that so many millions of people are suddenly voting for these clowns.
So, I think we've exhausted a lot of people by talking about identities and certain details of political correctness, instead of, of course, continuing to talk not just about identities or details, but continuing to fight, above all, for workers and the poor. I mean, not replacing class with identity, but including identity within the class struggle.
That's what we failed to do, and all these thugs showed up. It's very interesting, because they're generally people who are either allied with or are a product of major financial resources: Trump, Milei, all of them. It's interesting that they've managed to convince many millions of people, in many cases very poor, that they're going to be the ones to lift them out of that poverty. But I insist, it has much more to do with the mistakes of the left than with any particular successes of the right.
LJR: There are also changes in communication, aren't there? Milei started on television, and Trump and Bolsonaro have also benefited. How do you view the media's participation in the rise of those considered extremists?
MC: In almost all cases, right-wing figures have been the ones who have taken advantage of these forms of communication offered by television and social media.
Not that I have an answer to this, but the first thing that comes to mind is that the kind of discourse the left brought to those spaces, when they had access—which wasn't always the case, I mean; it was easier for people on the right to get into those shows—what the left could bring was a discourse that didn't seem like a break. I mean, it seemed very worn out and therefore, not very credible.
For better or worse, in most of our countries, parties that called themselves left-wing governed in one way or another. So their rhetoric clashes with the reality of what's happening.
I remember writing, about 15 years ago, that in the long term—in the medium term—the result of this supposedly leftist discourse of Kirchnerism would be a strong return of the right. What I was wrong about was that I thought that the strong return of the right would be Macri. I never imagined it could be something of the right-wing and violent caliber that Milei represents.
LJR: You've built a career and a life that many journalists dream of. What do you think has been the most decisive factor in this? What role have hard work and luck played?
MC: I think if I have any virtue in that regard, beyond my relatively good writing, it's that I'm very stubborn, impatient and intolerant. I don't like doing things I don't like. And I'm always willing to give up money or security in exchange for doing the things I do like.
Think, for starters, the most obvious thing is that this profession is one where, if you prove you know how to do something well—that is, that you write fairly well, or something like that—they quickly give you more money so you stop doing it. In other words, so you can become an editor, or a boss, or who knows what.
I decided not to fall into that trap. My quest, if anything, was to be paid a little more for not doing that, but rather for doing what I love, which is writing or telling stories in different ways. That's a matter of principle, and I think it has to do with being more or less convinced of what you want to do. I mean: not accepting what they offer you. Because, as I said before, no one offers you anything if you don't seek it out.
Well, I went out of my way to try to do it. And I think that's the point: if you really want to, you try. And you fail sometimes, and sometimes you fail badly.
LJR: You thought it would never be worthwhile to write about yourself. What's the response been like since you published the book about eight months ago?
MC: The response was, honestly, positive. I don't know if I expected anything, but what I received was a lot of love, a lot of affection, a lot of people who sent me messages or expressed their affection for me after the book.
A month or so ago, they held an event here at the Ateneo de Madrid, which is a very old cultural institution, a somewhat progressive cultural institution here, which is about a hundred years old.
They held an event at the Ateneo Theater with about 25 people, including journalists, actors, writers, a few painters and other musicians, each reading a fragment from the book. A friend of mine organized this; he came up with the idea, and they did something that lasted, I don't know, an hour and change, where each person read a page from the book, and it started to create a kind of portrait of me. And it was very moving that they went to all that trouble, did that, and so on.
So, the responses have to do with that. And what do I know? I know this is also because I'm screwed and because I don't have much time left, but at the same time, it's better to say goodbye like this than in other ways.
