Airports are at their peak in August. Millions of travelers pass through controls every day and board a plane heading to a dream place. A very different scene from those experienced by Manuel Chaves Nogales (Seville, 1897 - London, 1944) in the twenties, when flying was not popular and it was an adventure that could be dangerous. That did not stop the reporter from traveling more than 14,000 kilometers across Europe. "Walking and counting is my job," he used to say. And flying through the air allowed him to go further, even if there were accidents involved that, far from scaring him away, he took advantage of to make his most varied chronicles. “The plane gives a jolt that throws us out of our seats. The engine growls a bit and we barely have time to notice that the earth is rising, ”he wrote in El Heraldo de Madrid about his journey to the Russian city of Vladikavkaz, which left him missing for twenty-two days.
“He was an innovative, dynamic and courageous journalist who did everything possible to go to the places where the news happened. I wanted to tell readers what I saw first-hand and provide them with information tools”, Francisco Cánovas Sánchez, who was deputy director general at the Ministry of Culture and National History Award winner, explains to La Vanguardia, who rescues the figure of the Sevillian reporter, in Chaves Nogales. Barbarism and civilization in the twentieth century.
On this day, 126 years ago, one of the most recognized journalists of his time was born, a forerunner not only in traveling through the sky but also in the way of telling stories, anticipating the new journalism that then they would champion firms like Tom Wolfe or Truman Capote. It's surprising that a character of his caliber fell into oblivion for so long. "In the race they didn't even mention it," laments Cánovas.
Its fall in popularity dates back to the Franco regime and the Civil War, when it was questioned by both the national and republican sides. "They placed him on the target and he was forced to go into exile, first to Paris, and then, escaping from the Gestapo, to London, where he did not stop practicing his profession, despite everything," recalls the historian.
Chaves Nogales himself was aware of this: “He had earned enough merits to have been shot by both sides. My desertion was weighed as heavily by the blood shed by the gangs of assassins who practiced red terror in Madrid as the blood shed by Franco's planes, murdering innocent women and children. I have wanted to allow myself the luxury of not having any solidarity with the murderers. For a Spaniard, this may be an excessive luxury, ”he declared in the prologue to A sangre y fuego, one of his masterpieces, made up of eleven stories that tell stories of the Spanish war and that he wrote outside the country.
In London, his last destination and where his body lies, without a tombstone to indicate so, they did value their desire to defend the truth, regardless of who weighed. After all, he had shown integrity in covering different events that marked the future of the 20th century. In Russia, for example, he searched for the traces of the revolution and its undersides and anticipated Trotsky's death: "He is the kind of man who can only be rendered useless by death."
Hitler's Germany also appeared just as he came to power. “He wanted to tell how people lived in a fascist regime so that the Spaniards who were then living through the experience of the Second Republic would not make the mistakes of Nazism. For this, he interviewed Goebbels, of whom he gives a devastating description, ”says the author.
Chaves Nogales took all these risks because “he considered that information was a necessary public service so that citizens could be aware and complete. A commitment that he adopted from Benito Pérez Galdós and Mariano José de Larra, two of his greatest references ”, and that he had previously seen in his father and his uncle, two other journalists of race who allowed him to grow up in a newsroom environment. and printers.
His desire to be didactic and for the people to understand everything that was happening at all times also led him to interview the main leaders of the Second Republic, such as Manuel Azaña or Fernando de los Ríos, whom he mostly admired, but " he feared that his projects were going too fast.” It also led him to take an interest in what was happening in Catalonia, where he spoke with personalities such as Lluís Companys, who assured him that "we are not a troop of inexperienced revolutionaries"; or Francesc Macià, whom he considered "the embodiment of Catalan aspirations".
Despite his exile, it must be said that the reporter achieved almost all the professional goals he had set for himself since he began his profession in Seville at just 15 years of age. The only thing that weighed on him was not seeing Hitler's defeat. The triumph of civilization against barbarism. Something that he hoped, out of common sense, would end up happening. “After making a series of reports to the US army, he verified that they were superior and more prepared than the Nazis. That gave him hope, since he believed that with this defeat the Franco regime would also end. He died thinking that it would be like that, ”says the expert, who often wonders how the Sevillian journalist would act if he were alive today.
Cánovas is clear about it: “I would draw attention to the rise of populism and fanaticism and would call for good sense. It would remember that you don't have to travel anywhere, as happened with fascism, and it would accentuate the values of democracy and concord. He did it then and I'm sure he would do it now. It is imperative that voices like yours remain in the newsroom. If not, who knows what it will bring us”, concludes Cánovas.
