"We failed. I'll take responsibility too": Writer Martín Caparrós received the Honoris Causa award.

Writer and master chronicler Martín Caparrós received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Buenos Aires this Tuesday. He did so in his usual tone—one that blends erudition and irony —but with visible, restrained emotion, perhaps barely breaking at times. At the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters , he expressed his gratitude, laughed, reminisced, and even read a text. “It impresses me and gives me great joy,” he said, “so much so that I wanted to read something. I didn't have much confidence in myself, but I did.”

The ceremony was intimate, even though the classroom was packed . Editors, journalists, teachers, students, and non-teaching staff were present. Also symbolically, the painted faces of detained and disappeared colleagues were displayed on one of the walls, mentioned during the ceremony by the dean, Ricardo Manetti.

During his speech, the audience listened attentively and with smiles. And although his body doesn't respond as easily as it used to—he suffers from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease that affects his mobility— Caparrós hasn't lost his lucidity, his humor, or, most importantly, his ability to speak.

The Latin American writer excitedly celebrated receiving his honorary doctorate. He had made the invitation public on his X account a few days earlier, writing: "This doctorate doesn't give me any less pride and pleasure just because it's undeserved."

His grandfather and father were both doctors . He wasn't. As he recalls, with a mixture of laughter and embarrassment, he was, at best, "the idiot Caparrós." That night, with that diploma in his hand—"a real one, like the ones doctors have"—he fantasized about an imaginary dinner: three Caparrós, three doctors, grandfather, father, and son, finally at the same table.

Caparrós didn't shy away from his story: he recalled his childhood, his time at the Colegio Nacional in Buenos Aires until his exile, and also his history studies in the 1970s. The dictatorship forced him to leave everything behind and leave. Paris disappointed him, but it also enlightened him: there he understood what he had learned in Buenos Aires. He returned, wrote, taught, and never stopped thinking about the country, language, power, and inequality.

When he was a boy, he used to accompany his father to the Independencia campus and watch him go straight to a store where he would exchange the envelope of money he earned for "three or four white or light blue shirts. And I was impressed that this school took care of clothing its teachers ," he said, to roars of laughter from the audience.

“High school was my place in the world. Without it, I would have liked everything much less. It's a lie that I don't know. I know,” he said of the National University of Buenos Aires, where the writer learned that “power was there so there was something to oppose . That knowledge was, in general, a bore… and also a source of pride.”

All this knowledge, in turn, led to other things, such as inequalities in access to knowledge . "Many inequalities were abominable, but it was better to know than not to know."

Caparrós didn't shy away from the present either. In an intense section of his speech, he delivered a diagnosis faithful to his signature literary, political, and sociological approach : "Today, along with the joy of this reunion, it pains me to return to a country that follows this man who hates those who are different and calls for their destruction. Who despises culture and attacks it by every means possible. I always thought we Argentines were something else ."

“We failed. I'm a coward too. I also take responsibility for failure. We thought we could work together to make society better. Now it's clearly worse. Argentina failed with the resounding failure that only a country can. I failed with the discretion of one person,” he said, offering an implacable assessment.

With his characteristic edge, he added: “ We have become a reactionary country . One where each government undoes the previous one. Undone by blows. Undone by blows.”

And then he pointed to the core of the malaise: “ Today it pains me to return to a country where millions elected an unpleasant, primal man who rants, mistreats, and hates those who are different . He hates culture so much that he attacks it by every means possible. I never thought we were such a hateful country. But now it seems that way. It seems we've become a country that preys on the weak. And that's why it's sinking into failure.”

However, from that ruined setting, he rescued something that still lingers: "The UBA hasn't fallen . It governs itself; it remains public and free. It's a space for knowledge. A reminder of what we strive to be and perhaps will one day be."

And he concluded, almost as a message to the future: " This time we failed, but that doesn't justify giving up trying . In this, as in almost everything, I think it's good to be optimistic. After all, history, in its broadest sense, sustains us in optimism. Life will have been much more interesting if we were optimistic. I am a coward, yes, but I try to hide it."

Since making his illness public, Caparrós hasn't retreated into silence. On the contrary. He published Before Anything Else , a memoir driven by this vital urgency. "I feel absolutely alive, and I want people to see me that way," he said in recent interviews.

His voice no longer has the firmness it once had, but it retains its sharpness. During the diploma presentation ceremony, he recounted how he chose his name: when he arrived at the university in 1974, Antonio (his first name) was already taken by his father, who held a recognized professorship at the university. He then adopted his second name: Martín. “At that moment, I found my name. At the University of Buenos Aires. That gesture marked my life.”

He also reviewed his intense and intermittent connection with teaching . He taught at many universities—in Argentina, Europe, and the United States—but he was clear when he stated: “ When I think about what I've learned, I think of this one: the University of Buenos Aires . This Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, which wasn't this one back then and was, in those days, mired in a struggle where teaching and learning were the least important things. I remember the history of the struggles for liberation, and the struggle for the liberation of history, and the liberation of history.”

He also recalled with irony the moment he decided to stop teaching: " I quit one afternoon when I realized my monthly salary was no longer enough to buy a shirt. I didn't want to be an accomplice to that Menemist imprisonment."

When it came to speaking about awards and recognition, he was also emphatic: “ I've received few awards. I thanked them with poems, songs, tambourines... with all the humor I could muster. As if to say: Gentlemen, this isn't for me.” But this time, that wasn't the case. This doctorate, he confessed, had “got tangled up with life.”

The audience was moved and applauded fervently. They even got a glimpse of intimate anecdotes shared, laughingly, by his friend, Daniel Guebel: the time Caparrós cooked him raw meat with egg and he asked for a hamburger, his conversations with Luis Chitarroni and Alan Pauls, his desire to imitate Jorge Luis Borges and write epitaphs. “We weren't even capable of writing an octosyllable,” Caparrós mocked. But it wasn't a complacent nostalgia. It was a sober celebration of what words—and the public university—still can do.

@martin_caparros holds a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). As he pointed out in his speech: we failed. This country is getting worse. But we still have a public university, self-governed and democratic. Despite so many: we failed, but here we are. pic.twitter.com/keHkBcbnoS

— palabarces (@palabarces) July 8, 2025

This distinction, which was previously awarded to Daniel James, an Anglo-Argentine historian specializing in Peronism and the working class, Carlo Ginzburg, a leading figure in Italian history, and Thomas Moro Simpson, an Argentine philosopher, is now awarded to Martín Caparrós, an Argentine journalist and writer.