Jorge Fernández Díaz was distinguished in Rosario with the Freedom award

ROSARIO.-The journalist and writer Jorge Fernández Díaz received on Thursday night in Rosario the “freedom” award granted by the Fundación Libertad, a distinction previously received by personalities from politics, culture and journalism, such as the Nobel Prize winner Álvaro Vargas Llosa, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, Jorge Lanata, Carlos Pagni, Marcelo Longobardi and the newspaper THE NATION, among others.

Fernández Díaz received the distinction during the entity’s annual dinner, which was held in one of the rooms of the City Center casino, where more than 500 people participated. The Fundación Libertad is an institution that has a long history as one of the powerhouses of liberal thought in Latin America. Vargas Llosa has been linked to this entity for a long time, and is currently president of the chapter abroad of the entity, which is called the International Foundation for Freedom.

Gerardo Bongiovanni, president of the Fundación Libertad, presented in front of the guests the arguments for which Fernández Díaz received the distinction. “Today you will become part of that list of prestigious names that received the Freedom award the journalist and writer Jorge Fernández Díaz who writes his opinions in LA NACION every Sunday and gives us his analysis on a daily basis, a work that has an unprecedented depth in Argentine journalism ”.

After receiving the Freedom award, Fernández Díaz reviewed his career and in the origins of his passion for writing and journalism, from his devotion to reading. An anecdote reflected the dimension that Fernández Díaz acquired in journalism in his life, it was when he told that his father, who considered journalism to be “a job for lazy and bohemians,” called him to the newspaper The reason, where the writer published a police serial by chapters. At that moment everything took on another dimension, another relevance. “Because my father, who had never been interested in my work, asked me to anticipate what was going to happen in the next chapter. It was a story about what we knew about the mafias and couldn’t tell. My father wanted to know if the protagonist was going to get the money back. I told him yes. I cut up and went to the bathroom to cry ”.

Fernández Díaz reflected that when he started journalism in 1972, at the age of 12 “I lived in another Argentina.” “It was a country that had three percent poverty and the level of inequality was like Denmark’s. There was a middle class, pardon the word, that was thriving and that came from poverty. What did that middle class believe in? That there were limits, in development, in being able to advance. That’s why I always ask myself the same question: when did Argentina get screwed? Each one will have their theory ”.

The newspaper columnist THE NATION He considered that “Argentina seems to have two souls, one cosmopolitan, which tends towards the market, development and progress. And there is another that goes towards the State, towards the endogamous, to live with what is ours and towards the national. Those are the two souls of Argentina. But one cannot stay with the whole body, sweep the other away. We have to find a place where these two souls coexist. That is called democracy. There is no other system, because the other forms are dictatorial impositions. That is why the word freedom has enormous value. We are not defending an ideology but democracy ”.

Finally, Fernández Díaz dedicated the award “to the values ​​that my parents had, for what that country was like, the good one, as I say. Too I dedicate it to journalists so that they never stop studying. Reality is a hard drug that takes you away from libraries and you have to go back to them ”.