caparrós

Last week, Argentine journalist Martín Caparrós received the Ortega y Gasset award for lifetime achievement.

He gave his acceptance speech in verse, using the gaucho tone and meter of

.

Many of us who know him are tough guys.

After listening to it, we exchanged

of tearful faces

The speech was a potion in which love for the trade and strong criticism of those who allow themselves to be “captivated / by the illusion of winning / more customers for the store” were mixed.

It was a whip, a pat on the back, a reminder of why we do what we do, a call to be people of our time and not recoil in fear from the future that is already here.

When I started in this profession, he was everything I wanted to be: a force of nature, owner of an x-ray gaze and prose that sang.

Like many, I copied it, I stole it, I imitated it.

He never said: "No, sir, that way is mine, invent your own", perhaps because when some of us laboriously approached the place where he was, he had already gone elsewhere.

Over the years he changed themes and formats,

), recounting world hunger (

), recounting a continent (

)―, without stopping attacking political correctness or defending things that mattered to him like a quarrelsome ox.

Much of everything I learned about journalism I learned reading ―and watching Caparrós live, contemplating his way of looking for discomfort and risk.

Circumstances made us close.

Now, in addition to being a colleague I admire, he is a friend, a man I care about.

At the end of his speech, with a cracked tenderness that I know but rarely uses, he said: "Thank you very much, comrades, thank you very much, my dears."

I thought about it then, I say it now: thanks to you, dear.

Therefore.

For all.

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