Messages of condolences arrived on the chronicler’s phone as if someone in his family had died. The stations called him to ask for his testimony as if a historical event had occurred. And both situations were partially true. The chronicler did not have any family ties with Victoria Prego, but he did have a relationship of respect and professional admiration as long as the political transition. The death of Victoria – “or passage” they will say in the Ourense of her roots – is not that of a historical figure, but of someone who worked on the history of her time to communicate it to current and future generations with care, with narrative passion. of someone who has lived through each of the events of the last half century and with the neutrality required of a journalist who put intensity and length into his task.
For all these reasons, plus the emotional ones that each one can contribute, yesterday was a sad day for the journalistic profession and it should have been for all of Spanish society. The reason for this national mourning? One of the great witnesses has disappeared, one of the great witnesses, of how the transition from dictatorship to democracy was made, of how that democracy was established, of how the new State was built, of how what was called excited us. the period of greatest freedom and prosperity in our turbulent history and, said in Unamuno’s terms, the agony, the struggle of that democracy to survive and to overcome the problems that President Sánchez hinted at with words and silences during the last week.
Victoria Prego carried out this work with all possible communication resources: in books, in newspapers, on the radio, on television and lately in the digital press. In all of them she was, at the same time, chronicler and analyst, if both functions can be separated. As a chronicler, she will remain in the anthologies as a reliable source, whose writings historians will turn to, because everything is in them. As an analyst, I wish to highlight his independence: a political independence that he defended against a multitude of pressures, the distance sought to avoid being contaminated by party interests and, as a result of these qualities, a rigorous autonomy that characterized his style.
A third characteristic completes her personality: the woman who knew how to command; that is, she knew how to inspire and direct. She belonged to that small group that, without putting the word “feminist” in front of it, opened paths for women and managed to preside over the Madrid Press Association when the women’s revolution had not yet been consolidated nor did any government dream of defining itself. as a feminist.
And something else: Victoria Prego has directed and presented a radio program, had management responsibility in at least two newspapers and was a popular face on public and private television, when public and private television told and interpreted what was happening in the country without the obsession of the audience or the benefit derived from the impact. In addition to being a witness and protagonist, we could say that Prego has been, in the good sense of the word, the great influencer of half a century, but without doing nonsense in front of a camera or charging for doing a handstand to add “likes”. In the days when she wrote and spoke, we called figures like this “complete journalists.”
On a personal note, I regret the death of a person who knew how to be exemplary in this profession. And I add his name to the list of witnesses of how democracy was built in Spain. It is the law of life that every day there are – or we remain – less. But the moment in which we lose Victoria suggests a tragedy: it is as if that law of life had become associated with those who want to ignore or disqualify the great pact for freedom and harmony that made possible the first half century of democracy in all of history. . Therefore, next to the classic “Rest in peace”, I would like to put these seven words: “They are not going to get it, dear Prego.”
