Juan Pablo, you tell us...

Juan Pablo, today I can't start with the result of your Atleti against Manchester United, a 1-1 draw, although you deserved to win. I start by exclaiming: Unbelievable... what an injustice! The blow to your brain has left a huge void in our guts. It has taken your life in a few hours. All my love and encouragement to your family who were everything to you. How proudly you talked about your things. 

A good, hard-working person, a doctor in journalism, with deep-rooted principles that caused several upsets, with real radio in your veins, always taking care of the sound. Nobody like you manages well, pampers the chords, gets the most out of the tunes, arranges the news, relates them and tells them with serenity and conviction, with rigour and credibility, with a point of humour and magical closeness to enter without knocking every day into the lives of the Spanish people, telling them how their lives are going. 

You make the difficult easy, as they say in football, that the difficult thing is to make it easy. Working for the listener, with respect and dedication like the bullfighter with the Miura of the day. Aware of the journalist's commitment and obligations to society, as a public service, regardless of whether the medium is private, to tell what happens with the most direct testimonies possible, wherever it happens and with all the essential elements of the story so that the listener knows, knows, is as well informed as possible and can form his or her own opinion. Of course, citizens are capable of having their own opinion, and also of being manipulated, but they always show that they are not stupid, or at least not as stupid as some unscrupulous gurus claim. Then they will vote for what they think is best or what they like best. For this reason, and because of your ethical and professional convictions, there was room in your talk shows for all opinions expressed with arguments and reasons, without shouting or fuss, you guaranteed that listeners are adults and the essence of radio.

And all of this with the right and precise protagonism to lead the debate, the exchange of analysis, always thinking that the listener will have heard. Avoiding the absurd protagonism. If the journalist is in the news, bad thing, it is because of something out of the ordinary. A terrible misfortune like now. With a humility and discretion very rare in the profession, but with more than enough firmness and determination to defend the kind of radio you believed in, which so many listeners had supported on one channel or another and which led you to lose your job. For a short time, but you went home with one hand in front of you and the other writing some extraordinary contributions for ABC. Your political articles were always precise and direct. You always found the right approach and wrote them with the fluency of your radio commentaries. 

But the articles about your Atleti deserve a special mention. You knew about football, you liked good football and you suffered being from such a peculiar team, with a coach, Simeone, who has instilled identity and personality not only in his team but in all of them. Now the idea of match by match has been imposed in all sectors. Programme by programme, that's how you win the confidence and loyalty of the listeners. We examine ourselves every morning and we could not disappoint those who believe in us because we are not going to lie to them and they need to be as well informed as possible as the basis of a truly democratic society. 

Radio is losing one of its fundamental professionals because of your way of understanding it, of doing it every day and defending it. Those of us who worked with you are feeling a great sense of helplessness and unease. Your guiding light has gone and the radio will no longer be the same, but we will have to continue to tell what is happening from all points of view. A huge challenge now lies ahead of us, which we will face with what we have learned from you every day. 

Once again I have to write on a plane coming back from I don't know where about the loss of a colleague, a great professional and, above all, a good person. Unbelievable, what an injustice. Such is this life.