When Julio Scherer García interviewed “Barbarella”

MEXICO CITY (apro).- At the end of the sixties, science fiction cinema captured world attention with the personification of Barbarella, the heroine of a comic strip created by Claude Brulé and Jean-Claude Forest. Jane Fonda was in charge of playing the special heroine. A decade after its premiere, Julio Scherer García managed to interview the actress and during that meeting he spoke about “North American superiority.”

The journalistic legacy of the founder of Process can be consulted in the book Journalism for history which has just been published by the Grijalbo publishing house. In the work the reader will be able to find the reporter’s first and last notes. A privileged witness, throughout his career he documented the return of Nazi generals to post-war Germany, the life of Hiroshima years after the atomic bomb and the profiles of the men close to John F. Kennedy among many other moments of global geopolitics.

Power and its scrutiny were themes that obsessed Scherer García throughout his life and this is reflected in the more than 500 pages that Rogelio Flores, in charge of the Proceso documentation center, had the mission of searching and finding in the notes written during 67 years of journalistic work.

The man who was expelled from the management of the newspaper Excélsior by a coup orchestrated by then-president Luis Echeverría developed as a writer, but never far from his journalistic vein. He was always questioning the interviewer, always asking beyond what was possible, always looking for the revealing document.

In 1979 he interviewed Jane Fonda, the one who was Barbarella and which he described as “amazing in its nudity, the posters in the world eternalizing her whole and modest, her arms over her breasts; another era obscured her jet-setting biography; “She later declared herself a sworn enemy of the establishment.”

The meeting with the American was captured in the 143rd edition of the weekly under the headline: “The silent majority will change history”. Although she first delved into the roots of the actress with the death of her mother when she was 13 years old. “Lady owner of a palace and a famous husband, alienated, just a body without volume, committed suicide. The end was silent”.

The interview took place at the residence of the United States ambassador in Mexico and they also talked about the politics of Richard Nixon, the way of operating of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the power of multinational companies, as well as a criticism of his film Inglourious Return tells the story of a woman who works at a veterans hospital, where she falls in love with a paraplegic sergeant while her husband is away in the Vietnam War.

The core of the interview occurred in a dialogue that painted the reporter’s obsessions:

-If I understand your struggle correctly, I would say that it questions the abuse of all forms of power over the weak and the marginalized. Does he question with the same energy her own origin, daughter of a famous and millionaire father, owner of influence and power in the society of which he is the prototype?

-There is a tremendous difference between being a person dedicated to acting, who is assumed to make a lot of money and is famous and belongs to a privileged family, and the people who protect the interests of corporations, who can determine, for example, For example, the number of jobs in the United States, prices and social welfare. So in my case I do face the problems of a person who belongs to a higher class and who for that reason is separated from the common people. But I don’t think this necessarily makes one an oppressor.

In this edition, the reader will also find the chronicles he made in China, his meetings with the painters Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, the interview with María Félix or the dialogue with the orchestra conductor Igor Stravinsky. As well as the final texts dedicated to his partner Vicente Leñero when he announced to her about the cancer he had and the last text he prepared titled “Die in time.”

Regarding that meeting with Fonda, Scherer García would point out one of the greatest lessons of the press: “History, and journalism is, deals with the characters. He follows them more than a bloodhound. “Trace, sniff, dust, poke, always scan, day and night, years and centuries.”