“Someone had to say it,” Edi shot mischievously when he put an end to a text. Today it is our turn. Edi is gone and it must be said, even though it hurts.
Very much in his style, working until the end, with projects that he knew in advance could remain unfinished, and posting his battle against cancer on social networks with humor and that irony that was his hallmark.
Edi Zunino was born in Ramos Mejía 60 years ago. In April she celebrated her birthday by blowing out some candles on air in an A24 television studio. His colleagues from that new life of audiovisual journalism in which he was shining, celebrated him with the warmth that he had earned. Because before the scrolls of the trade, Edi was a great guy.
He made his debut in journalism in an “under” magazine at the end of the dictatorship, “Retruco.” A publication made and distributed at will, with the audacity of a handful of bold young people against a savage State that refused to disappear.
The most beautiful thing about the adult Edi is that he never stopped being that provocative kid, somewhat rowdy, firm to the point of stubbornness about what had convinced him.
During the time he directed NOTICIAS, a great stage in his career that we accompanied closely with Silvio Santamarina, the doors of his always open office were a canyon: editors who wanted to exchange information, students with practical work, editors in circles. Edi loved to talk, displaying her ideas with histrionics. That is why these last years on television were an act of justice to her journalistic essence.
But before that, like the plastic artist who before reaching abstraction exercises the effortful line, he built his career in graphics with rigorous research. He worked for the newspapers La Voz, Sur and was General Editorial Secretary of the newspaper Perfil; Tres Puntos and TXT magazines. At NOTICIAS, long before directing it, he led investigations that marked the national political agenda. The most remembered was the unionist Armando Cavalieri, when in 1994 he offered him a financial reward to stop a note. Before rejecting it, Edi organized a new meeting to record the bribery attempt on a recorder.
But, without a doubt, the mission that he put his heart most into was the investigation of the crime of our colleague José Luis Cabezas in those painful years: he was in charge of the magazine team that followed every step of the process.
After his departure from Perfil he reinvented himself in front of the cameras. And he looked happy. He made “In the mud” on YouTube and later established himself on A24, where he hosted a segment with Marcela Pagano.
I had many more plans that cannot be. But he leaves us some very current journalistic books: “Patria o Medios” (2009), “Cerrar la grieta” (2015), “Journalists in the mud” (2013) and the literary adventure of his novel “Locos de amor, odio y failure”.
He also leaves those of us who love him the enormous sadness of his early death. That of a powerful and honest voice of journalism. And that of the friend who, at the end of the closing, played old music on his computer so we could laugh for a while before leaving the newsroom. With which we collected retro phrases like “what a dish” and in bad times he sent you a “goal hug”.
