Peru’s first ‘visionary’ editor
Doris Gibson, who 58 years ago founded Peru’s leading news magazine, has died at the age of 98. Her strength of character and determination helped the magazine withstand military dictatorships and repressive governments, as Dan Collyns reports.
Caretas magazine is famous for its mocking of the authorities
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She began with 10,000 soles (£2,066), which her uncle had given her, and a typewriter in a single room.
The magazine was going to be called Caras y Caretas – faces and masks – but as Peru was under a military dictatorship at the time they decided to call it just Caretas to symbolize the repression they were living under.
They planned to revert to the original title after the dictatorship but it never happened.
Soon afterwards, the magazine was shut down for the first time. It was to be the first of eight closures, most of them during another military dictatorship in the 1970s of General Juan Velasco.
“She would be very creative in how she overcame the closures,” says her granddaughter Diana. “With her everything was possible.”
Genteel poverty
She was born in Lima, by accident, in 1910.
In those days, people travelled by boat between the capital and Arequipa, Peru’s upmarket second city nestled in the Andes to the south.
Her mother was aboard ship and about to head home to Arequipa when her waters broke and she had to go ashore to give birth.
She was the daughter of Percy Gibson, a poet who rebelled from his wealthy merchant family of British descent to live a literary life.
Doris’ younger sister Charo says he never worked a day in his life and she and her many sisters grew up in genteel poverty.
Bohemian life
Doris’ son described her as an instinctive fighter
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At a young age Doris married an Argentine diplomat, Manlio Zileri, and bore an only son, Enrique, who went on to become the longest-standing editor of Caretas, earning a reputation as Peru’s best journalist.
Just a few years later she was granted one of staunchly-Catholic Peru’s first divorces and she began an intensely bohemian life surrounding herself with artists, intellectuals and politicians.
Doris was a very beautiful young woman and famous for her long, shapely legs. She had a relationship with the artist Servulo Gutierrez to whom she was both a lover and a muse.
He famously painted a life-size nude portrait of her which – following an argument – he sold to a wealthy businessman.
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 She was independent at a time when women were dependent on their husbands  |
Her granddaughter Diana says she went to the man’s house with a photographer from the magazine.
They said they needed to photograph the painting in the sunlight, so they put it outside on the car and promptly drove away with it.
“I don’t want to be nude in your house,” she told the man when he called to ask for it back.
Defiance
Despite her upper-class background her friends say she had an old-world warmth for all the people she knew from the shopkeeper down the road to her domestic servants.
Having money, or not, was a question of luck, she was fond of saying.
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The magazine is famous for its front covers. Always visually audacious, ironic and mocking authority |
Her warmth was also volcanic, says her son Enrique, like the famous Misti volcano which overlooks her home town of Arequipa. Their arguments were legendary.
But she also aimed that fire at successive repressive governments which tried to silence the most important political magazine in Peru.
She confronted soldiers when they raided the office and had photographers poised to record the break-ins.
“Mala hierba nunca muere” – Bad weeds never die – exclaimed the leaflets she had scattered throughout Lima as if freedom of speech would grow up through the cracks in the pavement.
Caretas could not be silenced.
The magazine is famous for its front covers. Always visually audacious, ironic and mocking authority.
When Alberto Fujimori’s birthplace – and thus eligibility to be president – was called into question in 1997, his head was superimposed on the rising sun of the Japanese flag with the words: Once again: Where was he born?
“She was instinctively a fighter,” says her son Enrique, “and a natural businesswoman.”
Visionary
For years she lived on the eighth floor in the same building as the magazine. It survived for all its years due to her intense presence which inspired fierce loyalty in her journalists.
Doris’ determination helped Caretas withstand Peru’s military regimes
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She was independent at a time when women were dependent on their husbands.
A feminist before the movement had begun, and according to many, a visionary who influenced the course of Peru’s recent history through the brave and defiant reporting of the magazine she created.
For some time we shared the top floor of a block of flats.
Her carer, Chela, invited me across the hall to meet her. The flat she shared with her younger sister Charo was like a museum. Full of copper pans, paintings and artefacts.
She had just celebrated her 97th birthday. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes had sunken into her skull, but she looked straight at me.
She held my hand in her tight grip, pulling me forward slightly as she tried to utter some words. I told her who I was and Chela repeated what I had said at volume.
As I walked out of the room I saw a black and white photograph portrait of a beautiful, bright eyed young woman. She had dark flowing hair, porcelain skin and rosebud lips. It was Doris, aged 16.
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