Juanita León: "The armed conflict has everything to do with Colombian politics"

Juanita León, in the new headquarters of 'La Silla Vacía' in Bogotá.Camilo Rozo

As soon as the intense and polarized 2018 presidential campaign that brought Iván Duque to power ended, Juanita León, director of

, the digital media of reference in Colombia when it comes to political issues, took a year and a half sabbatical in Oxford, England.

He left with the idea of ​​writing a novel, but with time to read and reflect, he ended up publishing

(Aguilar), a story from the medium that he founded more than a decade ago, a reflection on journalism in the era digital and a history of recent political transformations in the country.

A lawyer with a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, León (Bogotá, 1970), she covered the Colombian armed conflict for the newspaper

and the magazine

.

Before being an entrepreneur, she was a war reporter, as her first two books attest:

(2004) and

(2005).

“From the beginning I wanted

be transparent.

That it resembles the kitchens of modern restaurants, built in the eyes of all, without fear that diners will see how their dishes are prepared, "he writes in

.

“In these 11 years,

has never stopped telling something that it knows,” he says in this interview with El PAÍS, defending the independence that he has cultivated so much.

Question.

He tells in the book that the attacks by militants from the left and right in the last presidential campaign caused him an intense reflection on what a medium should be in the XXI century in Colombia.

Reply.

My reflection revolved around two points.

One, how to be a medium that is committed to giving people inputs to have a better judgment on how to participate in their country in the midst of an emotional informational ecosystem.

has always tried to make rational arguments, to base all its reporting on data, and moving in a polarized environment where people seek to reaffirm their opinions and emotions poses a very difficult challenge.

The second challenge was more of a narrative format.

In a medium where the meme is the narrative format par excellence, which condenses very strong emotions by greatly simplifying the concepts, how do you compete with a narrative text?

What we are betting on is not to abandon the networks, as many media are doing, but to bring in-depth journalism to the networks.

Do not abandon the audience that begins and ends your informational networking experience.

I think it is serious that journalism becomes like feeding the emotions, it must try to rationalize the emotions.

Q.

You were emerging as a war reporter.

How do you end up turning to a medium that is synonymous with politics?

R.

My career

for many years he was covering the conflict.

After I became a

at Harvard I took a class on Colombian history, and realized that I had not really covered or understood how power worked in Colombia.

It seemed to me that it was very important to understand that map of economic and political power that somehow coexisted, many times benefited, other times interacted with the armed conflict.

Then I became more interested in politics.

I felt that I could cover it in a more sincere way, from the inside and starting from the base of how it really was and not how it was officially presented.

Q.

Are politics and the armed conflict indivisible in Colombia?

R.

It is not that they are indivisible, but they have many more communicating vessels than journalists

of war we are aware and we are ready to cover.

As the conflict evolved, there came a time when I felt that by covering the confrontations, the skirmishes, I almost ended up repeating myself and had to understand the other side.

Obviously, solving the armed conflict has everything to do with politics, and in fact the entire post-conflict is crossed by political and economic interests.

We have tried to continue to cover that transition through the filter of power and politics.

Q.

You argue that, although it seems that many things happen in Colombia, in reality almost everything that happens is mere episodes of three or five great stories.

What are those great stories right now?

R.

A great story that has been going on for more than a decade is the tension or struggle between Uribismo and anti-Uribismo.

Many of the political stories we cover are inscribed in that pulse of power.

There is a great process in the search for legitimacy of the State in a country that has not yet been conquered by law.

Another very big story is the expansion of drug trafficking and all its ramifications.

That's a process where there are other outlets like

that do so much better, but it has all kinds of political ramifications that we try to cover.

Obviously there are other processes that derive from that, such as polarization and the struggle over whether the peace agreement is going to be the roadmap for Colombia's development or is it simply going to be a marginal story.

Q. You

seem to have been recently turned to police abuse and social protest.

R.

This issue is part of the fight for the legitimacy of the State.

We interpret social discontent as a response to the lack of legitimacy of the State.

Q.

How are they different from other Colombian media?

R.

The main difference is that we do not organize our newsroom based on covering buildings - we do not have one person in the Prosecutor's Office and another in Congress - but we try to see these processes more transversal, which allows us to connect things that in the media sometimes get disconnected.

P.

Data journalism and

also distinguished them

R.

We began to do the lie detector in 2014. It was not something too original, media such as

were already beginning to do it in the United States

, and in Argentina it was

.

We decided to ride that wave long before Trump and it became a big issue internationally.

Now that we are the third official Facebook verifiers in Colombia, with

, we have taken this to another level.

Verifying the speeches of the powerful is in

DNA

, and it becomes very useful, especially in the campaign.

P.

Can independent journalism be done in Colombia?

R.

I feel that

has been able to do it, understanding independent journalism as having the possibility of telling everything

what you know.

In these 11 years,

has never stopped telling something it knows.

We have been able to find a business model that is compatible with that independence.

Q.

They tend to seduce readers who are in the center of the ideological spectrum, has it cost them not to have decided affiliations?

R.

It has cost us especially in the sense that, especially in the campaign, we are very attacked from bloggers or tweeters or small media from the most radical right and from the most radical left.

does not work for those who are militants and only want to confirm their previous ideas, because it is essentially a means of reporting and verifying data that does interpretive journalism based on that reporting.

Q.

As the director of the reference digital medium, you are very present in the public debate, why do you have such a low profile on social networks?

R.

It is a paradox.

For years the newsroom insisted that I had to be on Twitter and I resisted.

On the one hand, because I already work too many hours and it was hard for me to be giving my opinion on Twitter, asking me questions and not answering them.

I knew that the only thing I was going to do was take a lot of my time, which really is the most scarce good at this moment in my life.

It was a decision very much from the personal style of life that I want to protect.

And on the other hand, I felt that having a medium was enough space for expression, and all the opinions that I expressed in networks were going to end up contaminating the perception that people had of the information we were giving.

P.

The life of

has been marked by three presidential elections, but also by a peace process, and the plebiscite on the agreements.

He says that the night he triumphed he

not gain a reputation for being cold.

R.

We were prepared to cover the peace agreement, not only from what was negotiated at the table, which was very difficult because unlike other processes in this one, the negotiators were completely hermetic.

They were in Havana, where communications were very difficult.

But they were also such committed people that they were not willing to leak anything.

We made the decision that we were going to cover what was happening at the table, but above all we were going to cover all the other power factors that were going to influence whether this negotiation would succeed or fail.

All of us at

believed and believe a lot in that agreement, and we were very excited to cover it.

That's why it was so hard, because the journalists had put their soul into it.

When the plebiscite was lost, they began to cry and I said we cannot start crying, we have to cover this.

They cry tomorrow, let's cover this.

Because I feel that when you allow yourself to be seized in such key moments by emotions, you cannot do your job.

And there the work of journalists is almost like firefighters in a fire or doctors in an emergency.

It touches that professionalism prevails.

Q. You

wrote an in-depth profile of Iván Duque in elections.

After more than two years in government, what other clues do we have to decipher his mandate?

A.

The profiles are perhaps the format that best allows us to anticipate what a government is going to be like.

Duque's was very difficult to write because it did not have any cracks, it was like a perfectly designed and packaged product that did not allow access to its blind sides.

I defined him as a good son, which was the trait that had put him in the presidency and that in some way was his central motivation for the close relationship he had with his father.

But also as a competitive person, excessively conventional and as a conservative.

I believe that these traits have defined his government - conservative, conventional - and that his desire to please his dead father is a driving force behind him, but also his fear of discomforting his political father, who is Uribe, has defined several of those traits .

He wants to avoid conflict, with his party, with the international community.

A transformation in Colombia is only achieved if a person is absolutely obsessed with an idea and is willing to go against the world in order to move it forward, which was what happened with the peace agreement.

And I feel that this lack of ambition, not of having power but of ambition of ideas, of having a project in mind, is quite latent in these two years.