Most of my news stories, features, and dispatches have slipped into oblivion, so I will try here to rescue some texts from the increasingly dystopian digital universe. Many of them are in this section of 5W, but I will go deliberately against the algorithm and, instead of making a list of the “best” stories —what does best even mean?—, I will present a selection of them with a narrative thread, with the intention of telling something about myself.
My journalistic work with EFE in India and Pakistan was frenetic, but I don’t have that many pieces worth highlighting from those days. Osama bin Laden: holograma muerto en acción captures the spirit of that era. It is the hidden story —published four years later— of the most important piece of news I ever had to cover. It is full of details about the political and military context, but also of doubts. Because that moment was a personal turning point, one that pushed me toward writing longer, in-depth stories.
The nostalgia of those years as a correspondent has always stayed with me, and for a long time I was obsessed with the story of Octavio Paz, who was Mexico’s ambassador to India in the 1960s and married his last wife, Marie-José Tramini, in Delhi. I digged into the story and published it in the Spanish edition of The New York Times.
Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz in India. Sham Lal Archive.
Many of my stories explore this world of increasingly fortified borders. One of the stories I will always remember was aboard a rescue ship, with a title that speaks for itself: The Orphan of the Mediterranean. I published it, once again, in the Spanish edition of The New York Times.
A child’s shoe hanging in the Museum of the Memory of the Sea in Zarzis (Tunisia).
But almost everything I’ve published on refugees and migration is in 5W, the place where I feel most at home and where I have the most room to write. Los muertos que me habitan is a hybrid of reportage and profile about a Red Crescent volunteer who buries the bodies appearing in the shores of Tunisia. In neighboring Algeria, I wrote Historias de los nuevos cautivos, an investigation into the system of migrant deportations, most of them from West Africa. I also looked at what was happening closer to home: I rechristened Spain’s Southern Border as Frontera Norte in this story on migration that seeks to shift the dominant perspective.
(A brief aside. I write alone, but I often work with someone else: their photographs appear in these stories. Many times I work with my partner in travel and in life, Anna Surinyach. But I’ve also worked with other photojournalists such as Núria López Torres, Edu Ponces, Bruna Casas, Samuel Nacar, Santi Palacios, Pau Coll, Guillem Trius, and Toni Arnau. Writing is sometimes solitary, but journalism is increasingly a team job.)
On the road between the Pakistani border and Kabul, Anna Surinyach took this photo.
In recent years, I’ve specialized in doing slow journalism in the midst of breaking news. It sounds like an oxymoron. Maybe it is. In Afghanistan, after the Taliban returned to power, I spent two weeks without publishing anything, despite the intense news pressure, until we released this long story in 5W. I did something similar in Ukraine, focusing on the welcome exodus arriving in Europe. And in Syria: when Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, I became obsessed with telling, in a longform format, the stories of survivors of the regime’s prisons. This is one of the stories that has left me the most wounded.
I like to experiment. In Jóvenes y mayores bien acompañados I use poetry, theater, automatic writing, and more classical journalistic tools to tell stories of young migrants taken in by families in Catalonia. My poetry teacher, Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann, suggested the title of this long story I published after weeks of covering the pandemic: Con las puras manos.
I’ve sometimes ventured into topics in which I’m not so specialized, such as the environment: I learned a great deal while writing this story on blue crabs. I’ve also done literary criticism: I’d highlight this piece on Tagore and this one on Caparrós. Columns: in 5W on Walter Benjamin or on a Syrian doctor; in The New York Times on a Pakistani Covid-19 patient in Barcelona. To name just a few.
But the best, as always, is still to be written.
My shoes after work.