Juan Pablo Cárdenas

Juan Pablo Cárdenas Squella was born in Santiago, Chile, on 1 December 1949. He studied journalism at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. At the university he wrote for the magazine Debate Universitario and served as its director from 1971 to 1973, the year of the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende.

In 1977 Cárdenas was among the journalists who founded Análisis, a publication that began under the Academy of Christian Humanism established by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez. He directed it until 1991. Análisis gave a platform to opposition leaders, documented the social mobilisation that grew from 1980, and reported on the poverty that followed the 1982 economic crisis.

His work brought direct persecution. He was imprisoned five times and faced many cases before military courts. In August 1986 the magazine was suspended and he was detained, and the magazine answered with a poster reading "If they tell you we were silenced, don't believe them". That year its contributor José Carrasco Tapia was murdered by agents of the dictatorship. In October 1990, under the elected government of Patricio Aylwin, military justice prosecuted him again over a reader's letter published in the magazine.

After Análisis he founded and directed the magazine Los Tiempos (1992 to 1993) and the online newspaper Primera Línea. He was press attaché at the Chilean embassy in Mexico from 1994 to 1999, then a professor at the University of Chile's Institute of Communication and Image, and director of Radio Universidad de Chile and its online newspaper from 2001 to 2018. His books include Por un Chile libre, NO a Pinochet, América Latina: democracias en penumbra, El periodismo comprometido, Contigo en la distancia, Bajo el agua, Crónicas para incomodar and La democracia traicionada.

Juan Pablo Cárdenas died on Sunday 11 October 2026, aged 76. El País reported that he had been ill with cancer, which had weakened his health over several years. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Cárdenas is remembered as one of the journalists who kept independent reporting alive in Chile during the dictatorship, and as a teacher of later generations of journalists. His honours included Chile's National Journalism Prize in 2005, the Golden Pen of Freedom, the Latin American Journalism Prize, the Vladimir Herzog Human Rights Prize, the Monsignor Leonidas Proaño Prize and the Valencian Journalism Prize, and he was named one of the World Press Freedom Heroes.