Juan Carlos Diez

Juan Carlos Diez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 4 February 1955, according to Clarín and his publisher's author page. Little has been published about his family or schooling.

Music was his passion before he became a journalist. Throughout the 1980s he worked at El Agujerito, a celebrated record shop in the Galería del Este in central Buenos Aires. Clarín recalled that the job left him with stories he never forgot, such as the guitarist Skay Beilinson leaving records on consignment and the singer Luca Prodan buying cassettes from him. He later told those stories in an article called "Alta fidelidad".

Diez worked for national and provincial media, cultural reviews and current affairs titles. He wrote features and interviews for the magazines Nueva, La Maga, Noticias, Luna, Anfibia, Cosmopolitan, Espectador, Rumbos, Temas y Fotos and Contrastes, and for the Córdoba daily La Voz del Interior. Clarín wrote that he found in conversation a way of getting close to people and their stories, and that he turned the interview into something like a musical art.

His best known interview was with the Jujuy novelist Héctor Tizón, published in Nueva on 11 June 2000. In 2001 the Academia Nacional de Periodismo, Argentina's National Academy of Journalism, unanimously gave him its First Prize for Creativity for that piece, praising it as a portrait built through questions rather than a search for headlines. He republished the interview in Anfibia after Tizón died.

For more than 15 years, until 2016, Diez was a writer on Clarín's Zonales local supplements, covering the municipalities of Lanús and Avellaneda in the south of Greater Buenos Aires. Former colleagues described his desk as a refuge for talking about music and a natural stop for conversation.

Diez spent years working on what Clarín called his masterpiece, Martropía, conversaciones con Luis Alberto Spinetta. The book distilled five years of conversations with Spinetta, one of the founding figures of Argentine rock, some of them held while the musician cooked. Diez recalled that near the end, when he was worn out by the project, Spinetta put a hand on his shoulder and told him he could do it.

Martropía was published in 2006 with cover art drawn by Spinetta. A new edition followed in 2014 and was presented at the Bar La Perla in Buenos Aires on the day Spinetta would have turned 64. Diez told the news agency Télam that it had been an achievement of his life that Spinetta was so pleased with the book.

In 2007 he published El nacimiento de los peces, a collection of poetry. He also produced and presented the radio programme Pasaje Tupiza, la música que escucho en mi casa on the internet station Lalala Radio, with episodes devoted to artists and writers such as Joe Cocker, India and Haroldo Conti.

Diez kept his private life out of the public eye, and reports of his death did not name surviving relatives. Clarín noted that he was a friend of Rodolfo García, the drummer of the band Almendra, who attended the 2014 relaunch of Martropía, and that García's death in 2021 affected him greatly, as did the death of his mother.

Juan Carlos Diez died on Saturday 17 October 2026, aged 71. His death was announced the same day by Clarín, the newspaper where he had worked for many years, and the report was taken up by other Argentine outlets, including Conexión Catamarca. The place and cause of death were not made public, and no funeral arrangements were reported.

Clarín remembered Diez as a journalist who left his feelings in every story and who looked to literature for his own way of expression, combining daily newsroom work, the recognition of his peers, a book of poetry and radio made from a personal love of music. His legacy rests above all on Martropía, the book length record of his conversations with Luis Alberto Spinetta, and on the Héctor Tizón interview that won him the National Academy of Journalism's prize for creativity.