“The truth stopped being important”

On the landing of the stairs there is a pennant from Rosario Central and another from Roberto Fontanarrosa. It is the first thing you see when entering Reynaldo Sietecase’s house. These two things not only reveal the football club he is a fan of and his literary taste, but also his belonging to the city of the Flag Monument.

The books – it has three libraries organized by genre -, vinyl records, an armchair and a reading space where natural light enters through the windows complete one of the rooms’ environments. this home in Colegiales where he came when the pandemic began. Before starting to chat, she checks whether mate or coffee and apologizes for the intrusion of the cat that wanders and meows in search of affection.

Sietecase is a journalist and writer. She has just released her fourth novel, La Rey, and her desire is to dedicate more time to literature, or at least match it with the time she dedicates to her lifelong profession.

“I don’t take any more jobs. I left the first morning of the radio because it implied an effort towards journalism that I no longer want to give. They offer me to do television programs and I don’t want to either. I keep the little column on Telefé because it is comfortable and I am very convinced that I have to leave room for what I like most, which is writing literature.”, dice a Viva.

Before diving into the world of media, he worked in a bank and a printing company. He studied Economic Sciences and, in parallel, journalism, but he never had the idea of ​​making a living from these professions. The “chip fell” when he won the Clarín scholarship in 1989.

“I got to the newspaper and saw that people wrote a note and went home. It was revealing. That’s when I realized that I wanted to be a journalist. It was writing a note and you go home, to the movies, to the bar. It was the time when work was done on one side only. That was decisive. I returned to Rosario determined not to do anything other than journalism,” she recalls with enthusiasm, although he clarifies: “I am a writer before I am a journalist”.

At the age of 16 he began to write poetry and turned towards narrative when he grew up, after taking a narrative journalism workshop with Tomás Eloy Martínez.

The brief was to tell a story and he chose to take the case of a lawyer who planned the extortionate kidnapping of a businessman in Rosario in the ’80s. In the last class you had to read the text and, when Sietecase finished, before receiving a return, the author’s words of Santa Evita were: “You have a novel there”.

From that comment, added to a long-term writing process, was born An Argentine crime (2002), which in 2022 went to the big screen and featured the performances of Nicolás Francella, Luis Luque and Darío Grandinetti, among others. “She pushed me into a world that I had not thought of traveling through. My world was poetry and journalism, but he – in reference to Martínez – excited me with narrative and from there, since I am a good reader of crime novels, of crime novels, I write the genre that I like to read,” says

Since then, Sietecase published several books, including poetry and journalistic chronicles. In his last job he remains within the police force, but breaks some contracts. Starting from Blanca Rosa González, the Paraguayan protagonist, she builds the story of a woman who suffers homelessness and sexual abuse in Ciudad del Este and then has a kind of redemption.

She goes from victim to victimizer: she comes to Buenos Aires and She becomes the drug boss of a gang in Villa 31has bloody disputes over territories, must take refuge in Madrid and ends up in jail for a trafficking network.

“I chose these locations (Ciudad del Este, Buenos Aires and Madrid) to tell situations from those three places and give movement to La Rey in its transformation process. It is an adventure novel”, says Sietecase.

“The protagonist is, at the same time, victim and victimizer. She is not a good person, however, you empathize with her. That was the great objective.”

And he adds: “I loved getting into that world. It is a story of transformation, of a lot of resilience, of a person who is very humiliated, very beaten, and who suddenly begins to respond. I liked that it was hardening, that it generated its process.”

The drug world, violence and human uprooting are postcards of a fiction that borders on several central aspects that continue to strengthen ties with the reality that is read in the newspapers. “The police allows you to understand a society. If you want to understand a society, read a crime story that happens in that country and it helps you,” explains Sietecase.

-Retail drug sales are part of the plot of your novel. How do you analyze the drama of drug trafficking in Rosario?

-I have had a concern for years, and as a journalist I have been warning about it since the time of Vorterix, before Rosario appeared as the epicenter of drug trafficking in Argentina. Rosario has a geographical problem: it is the center of the waterway. There are 14 private ports, no controls. That means that the drugs that go to Europe pass through there. And a lot of other things happen. What they tell me is that, at one time, bribes were paid with money, and now they are paid with drugs. Then, suddenly, you have a lot of drugs that have to be sold and that made the small gangs, which are not the big gangs, explode. Then there is the entire washing circuit. There are a lot of businesses.

-Drug trafficking is the greatest challenge to democracy on the continent and it alarms me that they do not register it, that they do not take it into account. Drug trafficking has unlimited resources, it permeates politics, the Police, and Justice, it is a tremendous enemy. What needs to be broken is the business. And breaking the business involves messing with a lot of power factors, and then you have the problem of the Police, which is part of the problem, not the solution, at least in Santa Fe. You have gang wars with police participation in the confrontation, and, in the middle, you do not have confrontations between the Police and the drug traffickers. How long has it been since we heard that there was an injured police officer in Rosario? I don’t want anything to happen to anyone, but it is evident that there is no fight against drug trafficking. In the novel I touch on the fiction side, but I use things that I know.

-In the novel I resort to a phrase, “boludo lever”, which is actually used. This is what they say to the guys who receive a little money for not seeing what is happening. The patrol car passes by and doesn’t see anything, or it’s standing on a corner and the police officers are in front of it and the guy doesn’t do anything. That happens and it speaks of a problem.

Sietecase is host of the program The immense minority on Radio con Vos. And while he seeks to step away from the daily whirlwind of his work to delve deeper into writing and the creative writing mastery he is pursuing, he has several questions about the fate of his profession.

During the pandemic it occurred to him to publish the book Journalism: instructions for usein which through the call of different authors (Leila Guerriero, Martín Caparrós, Hugo Alconada Mon, Ezequiel Fernández Moores, María O’Donnell) He set out to delve into the heart of a profession that is diagnosed as being in crisis.

“We are not prosecutors of the Homeland, nor civil heroes, nor vedettes. We are ordinary people morally obliged to tell what happens, from our subjectivity and in the most precise and complete way possible. Something else: tell why the things that happen happen to generate critical thinking. And, if possible, tell what the power (political or economic) does not want to be known. The latter is the best definition of journalism in its investigative variant. If we do our job well, we can contribute to a better society,” he wrote in part of the prologue, which he titled It can be done well.

-What state is journalism in today?

-I have had a very critical idea for years. I entered journalism thinking that one was going to tell what was happening, the facts, that the truth of the facts was sacred and that, at most, one could have different views on what is happening. But that was violated due to political and ideological interests, as well as technological issues. Before you had four newspapers, ten radio stations, three channels. Now there are 300 information broadcasters, so instead of trying to make a journalistic product that is credible, credible, that works, They are all concerned about maintaining their piece of audience and speak to convince themselves. When you speak only because you are convinced, you run the great risk of starting to use information and opinion based on what they want to hear, not on the truth of the facts, in quotes. It is a global phenomenon.

-Doesn’t the truth matter more?

-The truth is no longer important in our work. A mobilization in Plaza de Mayo was the cover of all the newspapers, now it is the cover of the newspapers depending on what day the mobilization is. Suddenly you post something and it’s false, and it happens. Nobody rectifies anything and I find it worrying. It occurs due to multiple factors, not only because of the ideological fight, which seems legitimate to me and does not make so much noise to me. It starts to make me more upset when a journalist agrees to do a bad interview or lie. You can say no. Obviously someone who has two jobs can say no more freely. I’m not asking a reporter for that gesture, I’m asking it of those who can: what happens is that those who can, in general, say yes.

-Have you ever betrayed yourself?

-With journalism I think not, on the contrary. Let’s go back to the police. Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s wonderful detective, is asked in a novel if he ever sold out and he says: “Yes, I sold out; yes, they bought me. But never for money… for a friend, for a woman, never for money.”