One of the most prominent chroniclers of recent generations, writer, columnist, Juan Manuel Roblesresident in New York, arrived in the country to present his book Tragedy on Collins Avenue (Planeta, 2024) about the disaster in Surfside, Miami, on June 24, 2021. That day the east wing of Champlain South, a 13-story building, collapsed. In just seconds, 98 people died, more than 80 apartments were destroyed and many stories and testimonies remained that the journalist recorded in exciting non-fiction pages.
You say about your book that it is not a work about death, but about life, about stories that deserve to be told. Is that why you use the chronicle to tell those stories?
This is a book that only uses what is true and verifiable. Which involves methodology, involves tracking, involves interviewing people who have met the people whose stories I want to tell. It is a long job of obtaining material to tell something like that.
The US is usually seen as the symbol of large constructions, suddenly we see this disaster. Like something collides there.
Completely. Well, a building falling is already a very unlikely event, right?…
In the US and everywhere else.
…Anywhere. A plane is more likely to fall than a building to fall, and a plane to fall is quite unlikely. The structural ABC of constructing a building is that it is made precisely to support; So, if this basic ABC is followed in its construction, it must be a resistant building, right? In addition to what the regulations require, etc. But there are a series of circumstances that weaken this building and I tell about it in the book. There I mention this phrase “buildings don’t fall in the United States”…
From the first chapter you already highlight that phrase: “These things don’t happen in the US.”
Yes, it’s interesting. This is said by the mayor of Surfside who is moved and also very upset and tells the press that an investigation must be done because in the US buildings do not fall. It’s like a pride and arrogance thing, right? And in the US, and in the world in general, buildings do not fall, but what does happen in the US and elsewhere are failures.
We will talk about the failures (see box), but, in addition to being a columnist, you are a columnist and I ask you: how do you see the election of Donald Trump?
I think that, as in many elections, there is a very important emotional component. donald trump He is such a contradictory guy and so cynical, too, that it is impossible for his constituents not to notice. But in the US they are disappointed and tired of the Democrats. And Trump is a guy that his people like very much because he does what he says without a filter. He is a television fiction character. And it doesn’t matter so much that he doesn’t carry out… Trump says things like he’s going to end wars. That’s a lie. It is impossible for a US president to end US wars. It is a country defined by its wars. That’s why I think the symbolic weight is going to be strong. The symbolic weight, in addition, allows ordinary people the freedom to be aggressive, hostile, discriminatory, as was not the case a few years ago…
And in immigration policy?
There probably are effects. But we must remember that US immigration policy is defined by numbers. I mean, for example, during the Trump era, people talked about cages, but then you realize that those cages appeared with Obama. Because it is not a government policy, it is an immigration policy. It is a policy that has to do with numerical control. It does not depend on one person, but there are always executive orders, like in the time of Trump one, who made executive orders that arbitrarily did not allow people from the Middle East to enter, which at that time was the cuckoo… In In reality, nothing is statistically relevant, the US was the most violent country in the developed world before the migrants.
It was before and it is today.
That’s how it is. And yes, I think there will be an effect. But we must remember that the workforce in the US is migrant. So, there’s going to be a show. I think that in general terms the policy of the United States becomes more restrictive towards migrants due to other factors that have their own logic.
You reside in New York, in the USA. How do you see Peru from there?
No, no, Peru does not matter to the United States… Not even at the time when it mattered most, does it matter… The countries of Latin America They matter when someone steps outside the geopolitical line that the US has controlled for many years.
For a Peruvian in the US, the image of the president looking for photos with presidents at an international meeting must be painful.
Completely. But I also want to tell you something, that there is everything among Peruvians in the US. And it is something that the Trump phenomenon teaches us, and sometimes we forget that the majority of Peruvians, and Latin Americans, arrive in survival, escaping from Peru, and that is why it is already too great a luxury to rationalize Peru. That is to say, Peru is a country from which we must leave, that is the only premise. And the premise that is fulfilled no matter who the president is… But, yes, what is being done is horrible.
You are critical of the governing coalition.
Yes of course. Of everything that is happening. It seems to me that it is clear that we are going to admit that Castle made a mistake or committed a crime, it was appropriate at that moment to call elections. Not calling elections and staying, like that, was a move by the losers of the election to overturn the citizen will and remain governing without having won, and freezing or dynamiting any previous issue. The plan was to have everything under control until the next elections in a kind of autopilot. But unlike the autopilot that those who governed talked about years ago, which maintained the economy and made some sense, the current autopilot is a very risky one. With a machine with a series of faults, unreliable and that at any moment can cause a catastrophe.
And it can give us one of those characters.
True… I believe that the plan of the ruling coalition of the right to do nothing, to give up governing, to use autopilot, to make laws that suit them, to generate what they themselves cynically call, padlocks, and not get wet so as not to be related until 2026. It seems like a very risky plan to me. One, I don’t know if we will last, because there are still two years left. Two, it can generate deterioration that is very difficult to counteract. A more sensible plan would have been to call elections and maybe they won. Keiko won or a right-wing coalition. And there another story began to be told.
Institutions are being degraded, to a point where it seems difficult to reverse everything that is being done.
Peru is a country that has renounced leadership. Things are taken by that thing that is tolerated because ‘the communists were stopped’, it is an overly simplistic reasoning that, as I say, generates a risky autopilot for the country, which instead of moving forward, goes backwards. And, of course, it is thought that, since the protest is off, politics is off, there are no problems. But there are problems, because deteriorations are being generated, a time bomb is being generated. That’s what I see.
And, meanwhile, Dina Boluarte trying to appear on an international level.
Completely.
“They said ‘that will never happen in the US’ and it did”
In the pages of the book there is the tragedy, the building, testimonies, Miami.
Look, when the building was built, in 1979, it was the moment when Miami began to become the capital of world drug trafficking. Things happen that we have later seen in Medellín, in cities in Mexico, right? Shootings in the street, murders by hitmen, weapons that had not been used… The Miami of deaths that is the context where this building is built, of black money, of corruption…
A very Latin American reality.
Yes… A lot of black money, a lot of investors who want to build as quickly as possible to get the most money; builders who pressure the authority to give them permits and give incentives; and since it is a small municipality that does not even have a construction inspector, it hires the project engineer, that is, he is the one who gives the go-ahead at the same time… In addition, they make one more floor, saying that it is not a floor but the penthouse. And later, already in this century, 30 years after the construction, a building began to be built next door also with these mechanisms of abuse of corporate power. Everything, everything happens there… And there is the phrase, will it never happen in the US? Passed. I remember when I was a kid they said: in the United States, someone with a criminal charge will never be president. And there we have it.
There is an important merit in the publisher choosing you for research.
Yes. We made this book in the US, we published it there and at the same time in Mexico. The publisher makes a significant effort in Miami to place books in Spanish.
Because American journalism is still very good, isn’t it?
Yes, but it is also in crisis. As fake news has taken over, journalism has been thrown into disarray… Look, for example, there was a candidate who lied, and who knew that his voters didn’t care, that they cared about the show, being able to laugh, like when he said that Haitians are eating their pets… It was a lie, but it didn’t matter… The New York Times came out denying it, the Washington Post the same. It didn’t matter… It’s what we talked about a moment ago, the phrase “in the US we never…”. A candidate would never be allowed to blatantly say so much fake news, but there it is… What I want to say is that journalism is also affected by an environment of people who want to listen to what they like, by people who prefer to listen to lies, who prefers cartoons. And something is at work here, which also happens elsewhere: that what you like about a message is not what it can give you, but rather what it can screw with someone else. Today, if the message annoys your opponent, annoys him, unnerves him, that is a good message. What is a lie? That’s irrelevant.
