The sources of Juan Goytisolo’s Cuaderno de Sarajevo: an example of documentation in war journalism

Abstract

The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017) traveled to Sarajevo in 1993 as a correspondent for the newspaper El País to denounce the siege that its population was suffering during the Bosnian war. The reportage Cuaderno de Sarajevo, the most widespread work of the Cervantes Prize’s winner, was illustrated with photos by Gervasio Sánchez, who said about the novelist that “he acted like a pure reporter”, adding that he never saw “anyone, not even leading journalists, documenting a crisis with so much obsession”. This article aims to identify Goytisolo’s documentary sources, in order to verify whether, as Sánchez pointed out, he met the accepted criteria of journalistic quality. We prove that the variety and relevance of the more than 20 written sources and 35 oral interviews that he collected and the rigor with which he used them, together with his descriptions and his own testimony, justify the teaching of Cuaderno de Sarajevo in the schools of Journalism as a professional example.