Louis Johamovitz reprints his police reports: ‘I’ve never felt very comfortable as a journalist’

On the other side of the video call, covered in backlight and cigarette smoke, Louis Johamovitz admitted that “Ripper of the Comercio Hotel”, the chronicle giving the title to the book, which has just been re-released by Planeta and presented a few days ago at FIL Lima 2022, is his least favorite. “But it’s the loudest, the loudest,” he said. RPP News.

However, despite its modesty, this journalistic article, along with more than twenty collected in the volume, eventually became the main chronicle for journalism students. Because a lot can be learned by reading Johamowitz’s texts, as well as listening to his conversations between smoke breaks about the police as a genre or about the struggle against time for quality journalism.

Police Chronicles”Ripper of the Comercio Hotel“they were written at a time when their author had not yet left the newspaper library to chance, but when he often visited it in order to find stories worth saving. had some hints. In Caretas there was a complete collection of Variety, where there were crimes, and there was already a date, at least a week, ”he explained.

After all, part of his job was to refute a phrase that Jorge Luis Borges once uttered in a conversation with Ernesto Sabato: a newspaper is written to be forgotten.

In El cuartizador del Hotel Comercio, the chronicle that gave the title to your book, there is a passage that worries me: a female attraction to a murderer. They write letters to Genaro Ortiz, defending him. How strong is the crime magnet for us?

That level of attraction to the criminal, which is different from the crime, is somewhat psychiatric in nature, or has more individual explanations in each case. Joran van der Sloot had something similar. So it must be a phenomenon that is not so strange. But the truth is, I don’t know. Moreover, I would not take at face value everything that was written by the then newspapers, because I suspect that they filled up when things were attractive. They also wrote huge sheets. There is a description of the conversation, and this is a reconstruction from memory, because at that time there was no tape recorder. The Ripper was considered a very handsome man at the time, he was tall Spaniard, wore cologne, and everything that was attractive in a very provincial town was very racist… as we were, so were we.

“Disasters of the Heart” tells about some crimes of passion. There you say: “The reporter has entered the genre of news, seeking to sadden and move, if possible, to tears.” But the image of femicide annulled this romanticization. What else do you think has changed in our modern criminal history?

Surely a lot. But the genre was a couple’s suicide, that’s how they presented themselves. Maybe it was the man who killed the woman and then committed suicide, but the fact is that they found two bodies. The word femicide didn’t even exist. Other changes? There are no more robbers from the main road, I think, even in the mountains: they no longer attack those who go with their cattle. There may also be car thieves… Later, what was new at that time was the escape by car. Franco and Maldonado, two port criminals, are clearly “modern” characters, they love cars. Other bandits follow on horseback or even on foot. They are very poor. It’s not that they are great criminals, they are very simple people who have very few things, very little money, they can rob you for a few items. There was one that specialized in attacks on travel agents, who were often Arabs selling clothes or medicine.

And as for the tone, that is, the prospects for how to talk about the crime? Perhaps we are keeping commonplaces in the language. Terms like “fatal outcome”…

Yes, it’s possible. It was journalism, as it is now: also elementary. Why great journalism with very primitive criminals? This is unreasonable. For a primitive criminal, a primitive police journalist, this is quite expected. In addition, the police genre had no prestige. It’s true that gangster movies were made in Hollywood and cowboys, that is, the figure of a bandit-villain has already taken place, but in Peru it was exotic. The journalist who wrote to the police was not at all a lover of literature or was going to later publish a book with his experiments. It was an assignment that touched you, and nothing else. So when the journalist was covering many of these stories, he was already specializing. Sentimentally motivated suicides were presented with some recurring features.

Digging through archives can be a fun form of research. But at what point do you feel like you’ve found something worth saving and describing? When does this intuition arise?

There are two ways to read from a file. Basically a newspaper library, because it’s another thing to read letters, documents, well, let’s say old magazines and newspapers, which I did. There is one that I have used in this book, and it is to look for something specific: criminal, police cases. Sometimes you have a date, you more or less know where to look. This is difficult because newspaper archives are very large, and if you do not have more or less established coordinates, you can get lost. That’s one way: look for something intentionally. This is what a historian and any researcher would do. But I think that over time I have come to a higher form of research, which is to read old newspapers without looking for anything specific. Read them as if they were today’s newspapers. Not even because at the same time you have some expectations: who will win the parliamentary elections, how the war is going on in Ukraine… and if you suddenly open a newspaper for August 1933, you don’t know anything… .. and you start reading. And suddenly you are attacked by a topic, news, comment, paragraph, sometimes not even that, but just a phrase, certain words. At this moment I am aware of it, but I do not perceive it very clearly. Note. Before the pandemic, I had already stopped going to the newspaper library. I went in the afternoon. And at night I looked through my notes, and that’s when I realized where I have a story.

Georges Bataille said that freedom is identified with transgression, and saw in literature a scenario for liberation from this “damned part”. In addition to this book, you wrote a biography of Vladimiro Montesinos and Fujimori. Do you think there are cloudy passions in a person who deals with these issues? Do you consider literature a means of transportation?

Well, but not only from the author, but also from the reader. Why are you reading this? Because he likes this argument. Why do newspapers still have police pages? No doubt, because they are attractive to the reader. Santiago Roncagliolo, in his presentation, said interesting things about this: if you are a football fan, you check the information about the match in the newspaper. There is a more bilateral relationship with the news. But the pages of the police, what attracts them? In general, the entire mass culture: cinema, television, literature and journalism pay a lot of attention to the villain. He is an antihero. What is it that attracts us? I dont know. Besides, I don’t think I have a particularly criminological streak. For example, the crimes of the real me do not attract at all, they seem dirty to me. I remember someone asked me to write about Climaco Basombrio or even about Caligula. He didn’t have the slightest desire. The crimes of the present are vulgar. On the other hand, a crime over which a lot of time has passed is no longer just a crime, it is a portrait of the time, because the crime effectively depicts, fixes, absorbs many historical features that will subsequently be erased.

Single comment: the police page is very cool. If you are poor, you will never figure in a big deal, unless you kill a millionaire, as was the case with Banquero. But if Wilka killed the gardener from Hoshika, no one would remember him. News has such a characteristic. In Peru, rarely, but it happened: a count, a millionaire, an actress … which attracts the public much more. There is another feature that can also be explained, which I found and later realized that everyone thought so, namely that reading about other people’s misfortunes provides a kind of consolation, because this did not happen to you.

Reading you and reading today’s press, I got the impression that at some tragic moment we journalists forgot to develop a style. Does this happen to you when you look through newspapers and magazines? Or does the scenario seem more optimistic to you?

There are several things there. My personal experience is this: for many years I felt divided. On the one hand, there was what I wrote as a journalist when I worked in masksand I felt it was part of my writing. And the other part I wrote at home, at night, out of order, and these were stories or short texts. It was a knot that I couldn’t avoid. This was my limitation. I think over the years I’ve gotten over that and found a sort of confluence point. The problem is that a journalist has to write every day and quickly. No time. Then the quality may seem like a delicacy that no one will tolerate with you. Thus, a number of practical problems arise, which it would be unfair to attribute not to the literary qualities of a journalist, but rather to a number of material conditions. It is also true that there are some rules in journalism: it must convey information, and this is not literature. Information is a nuisance: you have to synthesize, be clear, not repeat what I know, a series of general rules that do not help good writing, but rather narrow the panorama, because you have to communicate information to a reader who does not have it. There is an air of freedom in literature, talk about what you want or make peculiar remarks, sui generishumorous, dramatic, whatever, but they are not tied to transcription or information transfer.

It’s funny you say that when we’re talking about a journalism book.

But journalism is a lot. Imagine: what do me and Philip Butters have in common? We do not have anything in common. It’s like saying to an entrepreneur: you can be anything from Zamir Villaverde to a private company martyr. These are too big signs and it’s a mixed bag. I never felt comfortable as a journalist. It was my way of life and it’s very good, because it’s not a routine job and it allows you to look at different things every day.

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