Gabriela Lopez: You are the Argentine journalist who has interviewed Pope Francis the most times in his 13 years as pope. Which sentences still ring in your mind and what do you personally think of this experience?
Bernarda Llorente: Pope Francis was an extraordinary being and also a being of enormous courage and was very aware that this world, this civilization, because he spoke of a crisis of civilization, had reached its own limits and that something different had to be built. Faced with such an individualistic world in which individual interests prevail, Francisco always fought for collective construction. The pandemic was like a confirmation of all of this.
I think when you talk about the Pope’s legacy today, in a world where sometimes it seems to be going the other way, it’s about fraternity and that we are all brothers. His concern for ecology, concern for the earth in human terms, to make it worth living in, and above all for the world of waste, the world of the discarded, the most dispossessed, the world of arbitrariness.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
Francis has tried to set different criteria and I believe that no matter what happens, in the long term we must return to the Pope’s thinking to build a different world. There are waves that are becoming less and less persistent, and I believe that the most important contribution each of us can make is how we contribute, from where we are and according to our possibilities, to building that different future.
One thing has to do with Francisco: I interviewed him many times beyond the three public interviews, the last one in October last year, and we had with him the project of a book and documentary series that I am working on and which is difficult for me because it represents a great challenge. One thing was that Francisco was alive and someone I could turn to when in doubt, and another thing was Francisco’s legacy, his absence. I still miss him a lot, but I think the world misses him a lot.
Bernarda Llorente: “Francis thinks about how to maintain democracy”
One of the last things Francisco said to me was, “I have great faith in you.” This is very gratifying, because on the one hand you are very strong as a person, but it also brings with you enormous responsibility. It is a word that weighs on me not to disappoint him, in addition to the immense love I have for him and how he has shaped my life. This is one of the most interesting projects, and Francisco’s project is a moral duty and an obligation that I have.
Women in the media and journalism: their beginnings
BLL: When I entered the world of journalism, there were already many women who had paved the way for us, and although it was normal for women to work in journalism, the glass ceiling existed (and still exists, but it is breaking a little).
What you saw was that few women specialized in certain topics: economics and politics, for example, were still a man’s world. Although you didn’t have those prejudices and I overcame them, I never felt those limitations, but if you look objectively at the changes that have taken place in the media, there were a lot of limitations for women. In fact, there are only about 15 women who own media in the world today. I was fortunate to be the first female president of Télam, but at the time I was the only woman leading a news agency in the world.
I think that in recent years women have been the first to occupy certain spaces that until then did not seem forbidden, but in practice were forbidden.
Current television and technology challenges
BLL: Today is a time of transition in which television is very divided. In Argentina it has been left in the corner and there is an increasing decline in quality and resources. And on the other hand, there are global television channels that have invested a lot. There has never been as much television and content production that you often see on the platforms. But they are those who have managed to make television today, those who have invested, the most creative space and the most risky space in the face of the withdrawal of a Hollywood that has done a little of what happened to Argentine television.
Bernarda Llorente: “I saw Pope Francis better than ever, with great enthusiasm and clarity”
When television or fiction goes beyond real life and changes it, it is not very important, on the one hand, but to contribute to society. For example, when we did “Television for Identity” on Telefe, there were three stories about recovered grandchildren that we did together with Abuelas, and from that show and another strip like “Montecristo”, which was a supplement, more than ten grandchildren were recovered. At a presentation I was with a grandmother who told me, “Thanks to you, I got my granddaughter back.”
The crisis of democracy
In general, the separation of powers is not very respected. This seems to me to be a fundamental issue in Argentina today, not only in Congress but also in the judiciary. Today, if one has to analyze how Argentine democracy works, one of the big problems is also justice and its manipulation, justice in the political sense in addition to its structural problems, how long it lasts, its arbitrariness, how poorly it functions in its daily dynamics. It seems to me that the lack of separation of powers, the court we have, etc. tells us of a democratic quality in Argentina that has not grown in 40 years, but has deteriorated.
If you think about what democracy meant 42 years ago, all expectations were placed on a political system that could guarantee, or that we all believed guaranteed, certain qualities of life, or at least guarantee that politics worked and the state worked to improve our lives.
42 years later, democracy as such in the world is in crisis because we often analyze the Argentine reality as if it were unique, even political phenomena as if they were unique like Milei when you see La Libertad Avanza and many of its guidelines are quite instructive for what is happening in other places in the world. There is no discovery, the creation of the extreme right with certain mechanisms and certain struggles is taking place in the world. They say how do we get out of this democracy, and that seems to me to be the question and the challenge: we are able, we will be able, on a global scale, to reinvent democracy with greater participation and greater justice. It has been shown that with democracy you cannot eat, you cannot educate, you cannot heal, but that democracy must be accompanied by a set of guidelines and also a set of agreements and also a set of values.
DCQ