2024-01-14 16:29:48
It was April 1982. The trial of those accused of the coup attempt on February 23, 1981 was being held in Madrid. Two young journalists were worried about their professional future, since the newspaper they worked for, El Diario de Valencia had entered an irreversible crisis that later led to its closure. One of them proposed to his colleague to go to Madrid, enter the military facilities where the defendants were being held, pretending to be supporters of the coup plotters, and do an exclusive report that would allow them to open the doors of journalism in the capital. The plan went through wear costumes of ‘facades’: conservative haircut, double-breasted jacket, neatly polished shoes, pin with the Spanish flag…
The author of the crazy idea was Miguel Barroso, and his colleague, with whom he would maintain a solid friendship for the rest of his life, was Javier Valenzuela. The two reporters arrived on April 27 at the Army Geographic Service, in Campamento, and Barroso told the guard officer in a confident voice that they were coming from Valencia and wanted to see Lieutenant General Jaime Milans of Bosch to express his support for his invaluable service to Homeland. The officer contacted the soldier, hung up and said: “Come in.” In this way, the two journalists arrived at a large room where the main protagonists of the coup were at that moment, including Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero and General Alfonso Armada. They invited the visitors to sit with them on comfortable sofas, and Milans asked a waiter to serve them two whiskeys. Barroso improvised a speech in praise of the heroic action of the defendants, and after a while he already had them in his pocket, so it was relatively easy to talk to them about how they were experiencing the trial. Barroso and Valenzuela did not take photos or notes to prevent their setup from going to waste. After a three-hour meeting and many glasses of whiskey, the reporters drove to the newsroom. The country. They asked to speak with the director, Juan Luis Cebrián. The security guard called the management and, looking askance at them, whispered something to the secretary. After a while, the head of Opinion, Javier Pradera, came down and, upon recognizing Barroso, with whom he had worked on the legendary magazine The old mole, exclaimed: “So you are the fascists.” Pradera took them to the office of Augusto Delkáder, then number two at the newspaper, and they were stunned by the story the reporters told them. “Do you know how to use a computer?” Delkáder asked them. They didn’t know, so they brought them a traditional typing machine, locked them in an office and told them to write the story “in a mess.” The next day, on the last page of The country and, with a call on the cover, the report appeared with the title: ‘Yesterday was a quiet day at the ‘posada del 23-F’. Milans and Tejero accept the prosecutor’s request impassively.’ A day later, the two reporters were hired by the newspaper.
The life of Miguel Barroso, who died on Saturday at the age of 70, was a perpetual novel. He managed to write two – ‘Dawn with Ants in the Mouth’ (1999) and ‘A Sensitive Matter (2009)’ – within the ‘noir novel’ genre. Very well narrated and structured, with a skill in handling intrigue that only those who know and enjoy intrigues achieve. I am convinced that Barroso would have occupied a prominent place in ‘black’ literature if he had not allowed himself to be carried away by his incomparable talent for strategic communication and by his attraction – I would dare say, ultimately literary – to the twists and turns of power. Barroso did not last long in active journalism: in Barcelona, where he was transferred by The country, he became friends with the socialist José María Maravall, who signed him on his team at the Ministry of Education during the mandate of Felipe González. His acuity as a strategist, accompanied by great personal magnetism, did not go unnoticed: his opinions were taken into account by González’s team for the 1993 elections and a decade later he played a fundamental role in the construction of the leadership of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. After arriving at Moncloa, he was appointed Secretary of State for Communication, from which he developed some ambitious projects that disrupted the media landscape. He encouraged the opening of new channels within the framework of the nascent digital terrestrial television, which allowed the emergence of La Sexta and the free-to-air transmission of Cuatro. And, very importantly, he established the mechanisms to guarantee the independence of TVE’s news programs, traditionally manipulated by the governments in power.
Barroso had told Zapatero that he would only be in Moncloa for a couple of years, and he kept his word. He was never a friend of public exposure. He always preferred to stay in the background or, as it is commonly said, act from the shadows. After his departure from the Government, he was named director of the Casa de América, to which he managed to give a dynamism that until then it lacked thanks to his extraordinary gift for organizing and modernizing stale institutions. A couple of years ago, so as not to go too far, he thought about turning around the Ateneo de Madrid, because he understood that it had enough historical weight to recover its role as a center of intellectual debate, and he encouraged an operation that It allowed a team of people he trusted, supported by prestigious artists and writers, to win the elections of that institution, which today undeniably presents a much more attractive face.
Barroso worked tirelessly, was always aware of what was happening. cooked in the centers of political and economic power of the country and had an admirable ability to ‘read’ reality and connect with his time. It was the ‘brain’ of one of the iconic images of the Zapatero era, which went around the world: that of the Minister of Defense Carme Chacón, from whom he would later separate, dressed in a tuxedo at the Military Easter of 2009. A Chacón – who died in 2017 – thought the idea was excellent because she considered – rightly or not, is another discussion – that it would help the traditionally sexist Armed Forces in the effort to normalize women. One of the adventures to which Barroso dedicated himself most intensely was Chacón’s candidacy for the PSOE primaries to succeed Zapatero as candidate for the 2011 elections. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba won by a narrow margin, thanks largely to that Felipe González got personally involved and mobilized the socialist apparatus in favor of the former minister. Barroso did not forgive him, and his very old friendship with Rubalcaba was shattered as a result of that political battle.
In recent years, Barroso had been linked to WPP, the world’s largest communications and marketing group, and divided his time between Madrid and Havana, a city that exercised an unstoppable spell over him and which served as the setting for the first of his novels. There he met his last partner, the anesthesiologist Dreydi Monduy. For a couple of years, he had been serving as a member of the board of directors and editorial advisor of Grupo Prisa, which had returned him, with an undoubted capacity for influence, to that world in which he felt at home: communication, politics And power. And maintaining until the end a virtue that those who climb to those heights usually lose: that of being, despite so many wars, conspiracies and tensions, a good person, owner of an overwhelming personality that gave him a kind of natural authority. If anything can be said with complete certainty about him, it is that he lived intensely, a privilege that very few can boast of. And he always did it with the same audacity with which he showed up at the age of 29 at the military installation where the 23F coup plotters remained. In one of our last conversations he told me that he had a project for a new novel. It surely would have been very interesting. But never better than his own life.
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