The Gabo Festival celebrates journalism in the time of Trump

Two ghosts haunted this year's Gabo Festival: the end of aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which funded many Latin American journalism projects, and the challenge posed to the profession by the new tools and logic of artificial intelligence. In contrast to Trump and the darker dimension of technology, the motto of the international journalism gathering—now in its 13th year—was clear: "Seeing ourselves up close to tell our stories better." In a megalopolis of eight million inhabitants, over three days, more than one hundred bubbles of exchange and proximity emerged.

These hundred activities took place in a network of spaces. The central ones were complementary: the classic facilities of the Gimnasio Moderno de Bogotá, founded in 1914 under the influence of Maria Montessori, and the hypermodern facilities of the Felicidad Chapinero Center, a symbol of the urban transformation of this decade. These were also joined by universities, BiblioRed, the Colombia cinema, and the Santa Clara Museum.

A hundred activities have taken place in a network of spaces where more than 15,000 people have received microdoses of training.

At all these venues, more than 15,000 people have received microdoses of training and pedagogy, exchange of ideas, discussion, reading, and experimentation, with leading Ibero-American figures such as Juanita León, José Guarnizo, and Agus Morales (directors, respectively, of the independent media outlets La Silla Vacía , Vorágine , and 5W ), and international figures such as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, and war correspondent Jon Lee Anderson. At no other festival in the world are so many young people taking notes in the auditoriums: such thirst.

The goal, in the words of Jaime Abello Banfi, president of the Gabo Foundation, is to communicate "inspiration and hope for possible futures for journalism and new ways of telling stories." In other words, to revive the spirit of Gabriel García Márquez, whose foundation is now celebrating its 30th anniversary. A large exhibition at the National Library commemorates, with the original pages of El Espectador entitled "The Odyssey of the Surviving Shipwreck of the ARC Caldas" (the text that gave rise to "Relato de un náufrago ") and with movie posters and photographs of encounters with Arturo Ripstein and Luis Buñuel, that in addition to being an extraordinary writer of short stories and novels, he was a journalist, columnist, and film scriptwriter. A true transmedia creator.

That's why, as Daniel Marquínez, the foundation's director of special projects, says, "our programming reminds us that many other narrative expressions also draw on journalistic investigations." Fiction and nonfiction flow in both directions. All artistic languages influence each other. This promiscuous creativity has periodically reinvented strategies for informing, critiquing, and narrating. And now it must do so, once again.

We have to accept that journalism is no longer mainstream; the desire for mainstream is the carrot they've put in front of us, but we are not, nor will we ever be, Netflix or Bad Bunny. Cristian Alarcón, director of the magazine 'Anfibia'

“We have to accept that journalism is no longer mainstream. The desire for mainstream media is the carrot they've dangled in front of us, but we are not and will not be Netflix or Bad Bunny,” said Cristian Alarcón, director of the magazine Anfibia and author of the documentary Testosterona , in his talk. The divorce between journalism and social media is taking shape, while Google is no longer the main source of online information, as more and more people are turning to artificial intelligence for their information. In this context, high-quality journalism continues to influence a vast minority, while remaining a dam against fake news, both through traditional media and thanks to the penetration of podcasts, newsletters , and all forms of documentaries.

The eloquent presence at the festival of Dima Khatib, executive director of AJ+ (Al Jazeera's multimedia platform in Arabic, English, French and Spanish), of Palestinian origin, the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, and the Catalan researcher Júlia Nueno Guitart (of Forensic Architecture) made the attention of many attendees turn, also through various formats, towards the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza by the State of Israel.

Following Khatib's intervention on Friday night, a collective message from the Gabo Foundation's Board of Directors was read on stage in support of the journalists covering the violence in Gaza. Two hundred and thirty-one have been killed during the past 20 months of horror. Sepideh Farsi spoke about her documentary, "Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk," which premiered at Cannes. It depicts her audiovisual correspondence with Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, who was attacked by Jewish soldiers the day after the French festival announced it had selected the film.

Researcher Júlia Nueno demonstrated that the Israeli army has become a veritable target factory with the help of artificial intelligence systems.

And Júlia Nueno filled the masterclass "Patterns of Destruction: Digital Methods and Tools for Investigating War Crimes in Gaza," in which she demonstrated, using innovative methodologies, that the Israeli army has become a veritable target factory with the help of artificial intelligence systems.

It's no surprise that the extermination has Trump's support. Nor is it surprising that Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, and Palantir appear in the report on accomplices signed by UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Contrary to the ghosts of these distant and opaque names, the Gabo Festival has once again proposed a broad spectrum of critical, relatable, and transparent online proposals.