2023-08-03 09:01:05
You had to be very stupid to argue with Ramón Lobo. I met him in 1986 or 1987. He had just been appointed head of the International section of the newspaper Expansion, that I had helped bring to the streets only a few months before. At that time he had bright blonde hair and the permanent smile that he has kept until his last days. He spoke the essential, and answered the questions with some ironic phrase, brief as a telegram. Although he caused a sensation among the girls in the newsroom, there is no indication that he betrayed his first wife.
He was a cordial, friendly young man, a good man and a competent and hard-working professional. That can be said by anyone who knew him at the time. We became friends right away. together we went from Expansion a business gazette, and from there to the newspaper Sun. As José Antonio Martínez Soler, founder and ephemeral director of these last two newspapers, said, we went like Saint Teresa, from foundation to foundation.
Ramón seemed condemned to be head of Internacional throughout his life, until he signed him The country. It was a wise decision by the newspaper, as wise as it was absurd to include it, three decades later, among the 140 journalists fired in the ERE that the company made to cover the holes in the management of its CEO at the time, Juan Luis Cebrián. Time puts everyone in his place: Ramón’s kind smile is remembered with affection and admiration by his friends, by his classmates and by readers, listeners and viewers; however, few people under the age of 40 today know who the guy who fired him is.
In The country, Ramón began to travel. His gaze and his way of telling followed the path of Ryszard Kapuściński, that king of correspondents who believed that “bad people cannot be journalists”. Ramón distrusted editorial writers and bosses who urged him to close or demanded that he give them the headline of his Time.news when he was in the middle of a massacre between Tutsis and Hutu in the heart of Rwanda, or driving at all speed down the Avenue of Snipers, in Sarajevo. While others chronicled the rude courage of the combatants, Ramón told the terrible stories of the victims. Life was at stake for them. It was precisely his need to listen to them that, in 2005, caused him to be kidnapped in a refugee camp in Gaza.
I said at the beginning of this Time.news that you had to be a very stupid person to argue with Ramón Lobo, a guy who never raised his voice, spoke with amiable irony, and always gave you a smile. A guy who, when that gentleman what’s-his-name left him on the street, multiplied in various media and earned his place in bookstore windows. He was more of a journalist than ever, more admired than ever.
My friend Ramon Lobo, the little wolf, has died. In a message sent to her friends to warn us of the imminence of the outcome, her widow, María, recounted that the doctors had asked her how she wanted to die. When they left the room, Ramón told him: “In the end I’m not an impostor.” She added in her message: “Consistent to the end.” Indeed, he was a consistent hero.
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