Interview with Juan Restrepo -
Juan Restrepo -- «Journalism cannot be a job for
fanatics and partisans»
https://cualia.es/juan-restrepo-el-periodismo-no-puede-ser-un-oficio-de-fanaticos-y-partisanos/
Guzman Urrero: Although lately we seem to forget it, the center of journalism does not lie in the business of opinions, but in facts and their balanced description. This commitment to the truth is what drives the admirable career of Juan Restrepo, RTVE correspondent for more than three decades and a direct witness to some of the decisive events in our recent history. Among other experiences full of meaning, Restrepo headed the only television team present in Tiananmen Square during that tragic night of June 3-4, 1989. Talking with him is equivalent to recovering the essential principles of this profession that allows us to put reality between quotation marks. And, as Ciryl Connolly said, "the best journalism is to talk with a great conversationalist."
…… ..
EXCERPT OF THE INTERVIEW TO Juan Restrepo journalist
of RTVE mentioning Tiananmen
Juan Restrepo: From Manila I began to cover the Far East until in
1989, a series of circumstances made me to witness, precisely in the country
that most interested me, an event that was a milestone in the contemporary
history of China.
Guzman Urrero: That's what I was going to refer to now ... In the
early morning of June 3-4, 1989, you were in Tiananmen Square with cameraman
José Luis Márquez and assistant Fermín Rodríguez. You were the only journalists
who witnessed that eviction. That day you got a world exclusive, one of those
that go down in the history of the profession. Before the Army acted, did you
ever think that the student movement was going to end the communist regime?
Juan Restrepo: Yes, I did. And not only me, and so did many
colleagues who were there for more than two months of crisis, as well as many
foreign ministries in the world. What was happening in the countries of Soviet
influence and in the Soviet Union itself made us believe that China would also
open up, that the communist regime was living its last days. We do not consider that in China the
parameters are always different from those with which we measure things in the
West.
Guzman Urrero: The issue that brought so many Western journalists to
China at that time was the meeting between the two great leaders of world
communism. What happens when a great event is transformed, when you have to
improvise, when circumstances change? Are
working conditions also changing?
Juan Restrepo: As I already said, I was then based in Manila as a
correspondent in the Far East. From there I would travel around the region with
a team made up of a North American camera operator and her Filipino assistant.
We worked in great harmony and, as always happened when there was a foreseeable
event, we had applied for a visa to travel the three of us to Beijing, on the
occasion of Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to China on May 15 of
that year.
