Brushes with the media elite in Latin America, a battle against a smear campaign, and a quick chat with Gabriel García Márquez at the Casa de las Américas awards in Cuba: Orlando Pérez has had a colourful career in journalism. The only reporter in Ecuador to publish all the WikiLeaks cables, he exposed powerful people who have been after him ever since.
Zac Liew
In the 1960s came the Latin American Boom and with it the making of literary giants. But this decade and this continent also delivered a baby who would grow to find his own success as a writer years later. That baby’s name was Orlando Pérez Sánchez.
Born in Quito, Ecuador he was surrounded by writers from the very start.
“My uncles and cousins were already in journalism and had their own media outlet. I was too young to work with them, so at the age of 14 or 15 I started a newspaper at school,” he says.
It was called ‘La chispa del Mejía (The Spark of Mejia)’. Pérez named it after Vladimir Lenin’s socialist newspaper ‘Iskra’ (The Spark), and Mejia was the place in Quito where he went to school.
A precocious interest in writing and politics led him to Havana, Cuba where he studied journalism at university and put his nose to the grindstone as a correspondent.
“While I was working as a journalist in Cuba, I wrote a book about the situation there at the time. This allowed me to really progress as a journalist, because there was almost no access to first-hand information in Cuba. It was tough.”
After a while Pérez was taken in by the allure of Mexico which was a cultural capital of Latin America at the time. He says he was attracted by the level of journalistic competition and by the challenge this presented.
“Mexico is a very large country with many media outlets and prestigious journalists. In Ecuador, journalism is very focused on the events of the day, but these are usually forgotten about by the time the next Sun comes up. This worried me”. “But in Mexico, if an event is important enough several books will be written about it, delving deeper than the news and adding context.”
It was in Cuba that Pérez met Gabriel García Márquez. The Colombian writer was an intermediary between Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. Pérez quizzed him on this fascinating role and the interview was published in almost every corner of Mexico the next day.
A moment that Pérez is even prouder of is becoming the director of the first publicly owned media company in Ecuador. He had been producing a column for “Hoy” (Today) newspaper where he would criticise some of the journalism being published in his native country.
“Some people really didn’t like that,” he says.
But this brought him closer to former President Rafael Correa, who also had a habit of taking chunks out the media establishment in Ecuador.
“Correa had started to turn private newspapers public. We both agreed it could fix a lot of problems.”
Pérez became director of “El Telégrafo”, which had been established in 1884 as a private newspaper but became government-owned in 2007, the very year Correa came to power.
“This also coincided with Tony Blair saying that journalists had become ‘feral beasts’. Correa and I agreed with this. Journalists should not behave like pop stars or movie stars, they should be humble and relatively simple people,” Pérez explains. It is mainly as an investigative journalist that Pérez has plied his trade and over the years his instinct to dig deeper into matters of politics has only made him more steadfast in his progressive views.
Part of the reason why is the negative response he has got from the media elite- often controlled by the right- when he has uncovered important injustices.
Something that has not left him even to this day, is the response he received to publishing all the WikiLeaks cables in Ecuador.
“WikiLeaks released to ‘El Comercio’ and ‘El Universo’ all of the cables in 2010 but these two newspapers chose not to publish everything. They were very selective about what they brought to light,” he says.
Pérez adds that they were particularly embarrassed about publishing any of the cables that linked some journalists and politicians to the US Embassy in Ecuador.
“I wrote an article saying that everything should be published, that in the interest of transparency the people of Ecuador should have access to all the cables.”
Someone from WikiLeaks saw Pérez’s article and sent him a direct message on Twitter. The message contained all of the cables.
“I got the message at about 10PM. I was up until the early hours of the morning taking it all in. I knew I had a huge story on my hands,” he says.
“I began to create anticipation about the reveal and then I published everything, including the names of the journalists recruited by the US Embassy.”
Then began the smear campaign. Pérez was thereafter accused of almost every wrongdoing under the Sun, including rape and murder. It is something he has to live with even today. But the bravery and the resilience that he carried through in this endeavour has cemented Pérez’s place as a historical figure in the fight for true and fair journalism, in the fight for a media landscape that keeps the public informed and not just shocked or distracted.
He wrote a book titled “WikyLeaks en la mitad del mundo” (2014), in response to the allegations made against him. Five thousand copies of the book were printed. All of them were sold.
Another book about the investigation into Chevron’s pollution of parts of the Amazon in Ecuador sold 10,000 copies. In “Chevrón: la verdad no contamina”, published in 2015, Pérez explored the rights of indigenous people and the precedent set by a US court that alleged corruption in Ecuador’s judicial process.
Pérez has become more disillusioned over time at how journalists can be bought out and lose their integrity.
“It is a problem that journalists can be bought by millionaires like Guillermo Lasso and Daniel Noboa, but that could never happen with me. I don’t care if I earn lots or a little, it would hurt me to stop doing my work as a journalist”, he explains.
“In Latin America there are big issues that need to be addressed: drug trafficking, money laundering, pollution, the list goes on.”
He suspects there may be a link between journalists shifting tothe right on the political spectrum and taking financial incentives from powerful people. “People like John Carlin from the Guardian and Jorge Lanata from the Argentine paper Página12, have swung to the right. It’s sad and it’s ugly.”
“These people are motivated by money. They prefer to change apartments every two years than to fight to reveal the truth. The day that I lie as a journalist, I die as one.”
Even though he is compelled to fight for justice through journalism, Pérez is very passionate about literature. He has written novels and is looking forward to writing more fiction in the future.
He is proud of the oral tradition in Latin American literature and says that this nourished much of the important work written in countries like Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela during the Latin American Boom.
He is excited about how the landscape has changed recently with more women writers coming to the fore. “I read a lot of Latin American poetry by women. It is fascinating to take in their perspective of the world, which is very different to a man’s.” Pérez is also moved by the prospect of doing more investigative journalism in Ecuador. “In many countries in Latin America publishers pay a journalist to write long research articles, but this doesn’t really happen in Ecuador, and I would like that to change”, he says
“I want to work with a publisher to write long reports on issues such as drug trafficking, money laundering and persecution, because long investigations like this force me to think, to read, to travel, and talk to many people.”
(Photos provided by the interviewed person and authorised for free publication)
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