Mauro Albarracin He is 25 years old and is a native of San Justo, part of La Matanza, in the heart of the Buenos Aires suburbs. In 2017 he created his channel with the name of “Les Amateurs”, making a joke about how unprofessional his first videos were and how simple they were. The first video was published on May 1 of that year: a tour of the Bus Line 88, a line that connects Cañuelas with the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once. Hundreds of publications, changes in methodology and even a nickname that gave the channel its name, “lesa”before finally arriving Ukraine to cover a war.
The war in its own flesh.
This year, Lesa decided to go one step further: many neighborhoods classified as dangerous were toured and visited by him, but curiosity about danger made him break barriers. He crossed borders, took planes, and came to kensington in philadelphia, city that in recent times became famous for being the fentanyl capital and the opioid crisis in the United States. The video quickly went viral, with more than half a million views to date, and the rawness of the images and the stories told speak for themselves.
After several months and videos recorded in the country, left for Ukraine. He toured its capital, kyiv, documenting how life is lived where war does not seem so present. It is that it is far from the conflict zone and there are only a few bomb alarms, compared to other cities. The objective was to document as much as possible about the conflict, which had been going on for a long time and of which she had already made a video; an interview with an Argentine who participated in the war at the beginning of it. A journey that was just beginning.
His second video of the country, now yes, had a content based entirely on the war and the damage caused by it; in said recording tours several cities in eastern Ukraine, close to the Donbass area, where the conflict is a reality. In just over half an hour the data, images and things narrated are moving and sad.
Lesa toured Russian torture rooms and mass graves. It also showed the desolation of these towns and the destruction that many homes have suffered, even Orthodox churches on the brink of collapse. In this kind of YouTube documentary chapter, she interviewed several Ukrainian soldiers. In another of the videos of him he was in a trench, 700 meters from the Russian troops.
A few days ago, the young youtuber from the Conurbano published a new video in the country, but this time far from the war field, with a threat that was the same or even more complicated than the previous one, because it was invisible: radiation. Mauro visited Chernobyl, which was looted by the Russians a month before their escape, showing the necessary procedures to enter the area, as well as the abandoned Russian trenches and the famous exclusion zone, where the entire area is radioactive and dangerous to health.
First steps.
the channel of Lesa had slow growth. The idea of going through the bus lines did not go viral and forced him to change his mind. He began to tell what neighborhoods there were between his stops and above all, what stories he found on the street inside and not on top of the “bondi”. He focused his content on visiting neighborhoods with an addition: how Mauro is a big soccer fan, He filled his videos with curiosities of that sport: fields, fans and locations classified as “dangerous”, such as the famous stadium of San Telmo on Maciel Island.
The first video to reach one million views was uploaded in 2019 and is a tour of a fair Jose C. Paz Known for having a large presence of cartoneros. It lasts twelve minutes and shows both food and items and the purchases you have made. 2019 was undoubtedly the great year of Lesa: many videos reached thousands of views and forged a very solid and faithful community of followers, in addition to getting many contacts for his next trips, mainly telling stories and touring places in the interior of the country.
2020 arrived, and with it, the pandemic. Channels that based their content on browsing and exploring found themselves in intense dilemmas, many even decided to step aside and leave YouTube. Mauro continued the first months making videos at his house, where he told his anecdotes, but on June 17 he published a video where he announced his indefinite retirement from YouTube. A month and a half later, its content would return to normal.
2021 was all growth. More trips and videos. His followers remember an interview with the late singer El Noba and a trip to Europe to show the marginal side of the Old Continent.
By dint of work and original contentLesa settled on the Youtube scene. From those tours of cities and neighboring suburbs, he came to cross continents to tell of the danger in other places. The documentary videos of the war in Ukraine are yet another testimony in his search to show the alternative face of the world.
Image gallery
