Journalist Paulo Totti died this Friday (26) in Salvador at the age of 85. The information was confirmed to Brazil Agency by his son Iuri Totti. Paulo had been hospitalized in the capital of Bahia for ten days, due to lung problems. His body is being laid to rest in Jardim da Saudade, where he will be cremated at 5pm. Totti would have turned 86 on the 10th. He leaves three children, six grandchildren and his wife, also journalist Ana Maria Mandim.
Paulo Totti worked at Brazil Agency in 2015 and 2016, when he held the position of executive branch manager at Brazilian Communication Company (EBC). The position was part of the then newly created Executive Superintendence of Agencies and Digital Content, which aimed to integrate the work of teams from text, radio and photography agencies and teams from web and social networks.
Paulo Totti was executive manager of Agencies at EBC – Personal archive
Unlike most managers, he didn’t like to stay in his office – he preferred to be in the newsroom, always with good prose, taking a look at the texts being edited and suggesting changes. It was during Totti’s management that the Brazil Agency It featured a correspondent program, with reporters in Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and Recife, in addition to the three current cities – Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasília.
Depositions
Editing coordinator for Brazil Agency, journalist Lílian Beraldo fondly remembers several moments spent with Paulo Totti in the Brasília newsroom. “Totti was a happy, fun person, kind to deal with and strict with the text. An admirable journalist.”
Journalist Lana Cristina, who worked with Totti as manager of Brazil Agency at the time, he describes his friend as the sweetest and most affable person he knew.
“With a refined and acidic humor, when it had to be. He taught me so much without being professorial, he taught with love, patience, humanity. He told so many interesting stories that, if I were to tell them, I would give many pages, just to use a term from his times and mine too.”
“Stories about how he had to do irrelevant interviews when he was on a Yellow Pages-type interview project and had to, at the behest of his boss, talk to some magazine-type celebrity Faces. There was also one from when he was arrested during the dictatorship and, in prison, he found a rather shy girl in a corner. The girl was Dilma Rousseff. And so many other rich stories and exchanges. He was an encyclopedia, without the boringness of an encyclopedia. This is a painful loss!”
On social media, friend and journalist Marcelo Beraba posted a tribute to Totti, whom he refers to as a good-humored and full of life gaucho. “He was a great friend. Real friend. And immense. Throughout my 50 years in newsrooms, I have interacted with few journalists as complete as him. Research, text, editing, ethics, intellectual honesty – a journalist like few others.”
“He helped train generations of great professionals,” he wrote. “His entire life – from the student movement in Porto Alegre, during the military dictatorship, until the last few days, spent in Salvador with his great companion on this journey, Ana Maria Mandim – he was unhappy with this unequal country, with this political elite and insensitive economic. He would be 86 years old now, on May 10th. A sadness, an immense sadness. Rest in peace, friend.”
Former president Dilma Rousseff also spoke out and said that Brazilian journalism “has lost one of its greatest talents and one of the most exquisite reporters in the country’s history over the last 50 years.” “A correct professional and a man deeply committed to democracy and the ideals of social justice,” she wrote on a social network.
Biography
Born in Veranópolis (RS), Paulo Totti began his career at the age of 14 as a news writer for the municipal radio station in Passo Fundo (RS). At the age of 19 and a law student, he was elected vice-president of the National Union of Students (UNE) and went to Rio de Janeiro, where he began his career as a reporter for the Last hour. From there, he transferred to the newspaper’s editorial office in Porto Alegre.
Paulo Totti visited the main newspaper offices in the country – Personal archive
He also worked at Rádio Guaíba in Porto Alegre and, in 1968, participated in Mino Carta’s team that founded the magazine Look. He was head of the Editora Abril branch in Porto Alegre until 1973, when he transferred to the Brazil editorship in the editorial office of Look in Sao Paulo. Still in Porto Alegre, before transferring to São Paulo, he was arrested for activity considered subversive at the time. In 1976 he worked at the newspaper The globe from Rio de Janeiro, where he was political and national editor.
In 1978, he took over the management of the branch of Mercantil Gazette in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for ten years, until being transferred to Buenos Aires, as the newspaper’s correspondent in Latin America. There, he covered the Falklands war in 1982 and the creation of Mercosur in 1990. In 1992, he was sent to Washington, where he remained for two and a half years. At the time, he covered the renegotiation of Brazilian debt.
In 1995, he returned to Brazil and, after a brief spell working at the Mercantil Gazette in São Paulo, went to the Brazilian newspaper, in Rio de Janeiro, as executive editor. In 1999, he returned to Gazette, this time, as a correspondent in Mexico City. In 2000, already in São Paulo, he took over editing the front page of Mercantil Gazette and, in 2003, he was press advisor to the presidency of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES).
He then served as a special reporter for Economic value, in São Paulo, where he participated in the coverage of the presidential elections. After his passage through EBCTotti also worked at the National Council of Justice (CNJ).
*With information from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji).
