Darío Lopérfido, a prominent figure in Argentine cultural management, has died at the age of 61 in Madrid after a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. His death marks the conclude of a career that spanned politics, theater, and media, and often sparked debate.
Just two months before his death, Lopérfido described the reality of living with ALS in stark terms, writing in the cultural and political magazine Seúl, “The Darío from before the illness is already dead.” He detailed the physical challenges he faced, stating, “You walk terribly, your voice becomes slurred, and you risk dropping food as you eat.” Despite the disease’s progression, he continued to write and contribute to public discourse.
Lopérfido’s passing comes as a loss for those who knew him and followed his often-provocative career. He was known for his strong opinions and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, even as his physical abilities declined. The disease had taken his voice, his gait, and his social life, but not his passion for debate.
Lopérfido wasn’t a social media polemicist, a style he considered outdated. His irony aimed for the structure of an argument. He recently described discussions among Argentinians about the text of a law, saying, “The slogan always comes first. Reading is optional. Understanding is directly suspect.”
He wasn’t always right. In 2016, he questioned the figure of 30,000 disappeared people during the last dictatorship, a position that contradicted the consensus of human rights organizations and caused pain to many families with missing loved ones. However, consistent with his character, he did not retract his statement. Years later, he explained, “I could have retracted and remained quiet or maintained my position. I did the latter and I am proud of my attitude.”
Writer Jorge Asís, another prominent debater, praised Lopérfido, calling him “one of the most intelligent opponents I ever had.” They shared a mutual respect despite occupying opposing political positions. Asís recalled that when Lopérfido took office as Secretary of Culture and Communication during the government of Fernando de la Rúa, he joked that he had searched for Lopérfido’s books in bookstores but couldn’t find them. The joke continued, suggesting he might be a painter or dancer, but to no avail. “He was very amused, he laughed and intelligently said, ‘It’s just that Asís and I aren’t contemporaries.’”
That lucid rivalry was shared with common friends. “Of course, Ms. Esmeralda Mitre, who is an absolutely remarkable and fascinating character,” Asís said. Over the years, Asís came to have “an intense image” of Lopérfido: “An infinitely cultured kid, with academic erudition, and, as I said, intelligent.”
Lopérfido was politically liberal, a distinction that is important to note in current times. He said in an interview that the defense of freedom was the central tenet of his life. He emphasized this when he took over as director of the Vargas Llosa Chair, an international literary initiative, speaking of the French intellectual Albert Camus as “a guide: it helps to think that any form of authoritarianism is questionable, that no ideology or dogma can be superimposed on the human being.”
He reflected on republican institutions around the world, which uphold that freedom: “The fact that Europe didn’t send troops to Ukraine showed that it is abandoning its citizens to autocrats like Putin,” he said. When Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the Popular Party of the Community of Madrid won elections against Podemos, he celebrated it as a victory for democracy, noting she had debated in the campaign and won at the polls. “That’s how it’s done,” he wrote.
Notably, Lopérfido did not finish secondary school. He was self-taught, starting as a messenger at an advertising agency, then working in cultural magazines and on the FM Rock & Pop radio station. In 1992, at age 28, he became director of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center at the University of Buenos Aires, where he noted “the vigor of a Buenos Aires cultural scene,” that of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which he never forgot.
During his tenure as Secretary of Culture for the City of Buenos Aires, two institutions emerged that outlived his administration. The Buenos Aires International Festival was founded in 1997, and BAFICI, the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, in 1999. The independent film festival became the most important in Latin America and an international reference under artistic directors such as Quintín, Sergio Wolf, and Marcelo Panozzo.
In February 2015, he became general and artistic director of the Teatro Colón, the historic opera house in Buenos Aires and the most important in Latin America. During his tenure, he increased the presence of international and Argentine figures with careers abroad, initiated streaming broadcasts, and opened rehearsals to the public. In December of that year, Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta also appointed him Minister of Culture for the city. Both positions were short-lived; statements about the disappeared led to his removal as minister in July 2016 and his artistic direction of the Colón in February 2017. “I feel quite recognized after my time at the Teatro Colón where I met very engaging people,” he would later say.
Then-President Mauricio Macri appointed him special representative for the promotion of Argentine culture in Berlin. “For those of us who love classical music,” Lopérfido said, “it’s like being at Disneyland.” He lasted nine months, leaving public office in 2018 to debut as a régisseur with Alban Berg’s Lulu at the Teatro Avenida. He had chosen that opera, he said, because it was “a masterpiece” and because he was interested in “thinking about the collateral events of great moments of sexual liberation and effervescence, like Berlin in the 20s.”
Jorge Telerman, who was Chief of Government of the City and directed the Teatro Colón, shared that philosophy. They had met, he said, “in our same passions, in relation to culture, to the importance of cultural development, to risky, cutting-edge, innovative activities,” in the conversation about how to include them on the public agenda. “Something we always agreed on, and that he did with excellence in the Secretariat of Culture and at the Colón.” They were very close for years; the distance came “due to issues derived from politics, absolutely minor in relation to what must be considered in life,” Telerman said. And even in those differences, he never stopped recognizing “his honesty and the criterion of truth with which he organized his thinking and his expressions, with himself and with others.”
Lopérfido lived his last years in Europe. He began working at the Vargas Llosa Chair, an international literary initiative of the Peruvian Nobel laureate: he had an old, personal relationship with Mario Vargas Llosa. “Getting to know, talking to, and collaborating with Mario was one of the most important things in my life,” he said. “Being part of the group that accompanied him in Paris on the day he entered the French Academy of Letters was an honor and an unforgettable event.” The Chair organized literary events, awarded the Vargas Llosa Novel Prize, and explicitly focused on freedom of expression. In that context, even with advanced ALS, Lopérfido recorded the El hombre rebelde (The Rebel Man) cycle in Madrid: interviews with—among others—Venezuelan Leopoldo López, exiled Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, and Cuban dissident playwright Yunior García.
Vargas Llosa died in April 2024 without knowing that his collaborator had ALS: the diagnosis was revealed the following month. Lopérfido had started with a mobility problem in one leg; then he noticed it spreading to his left hand. Because he was right-handed, he commented, “Luckily I can still write.”
Álvaro Vargas Llosa, president of the International Foundation for Freedom, created by his father in 2002, writer and speaker, said he had “only words of affection” for Lopérfido. “I have admired and been grateful for the friendship he offered me and for the collaboration he gave to the Vargas Llosa Chair,” he added. “Like all people who say uncomfortable truths, he was a very controversial person in his country, Argentina,” he noted. “His defense of freedom has been tenacious and his courage is worthy of imitation.”
ALS, he wrote in Seúl, is “a disease without epic”: there is no dramatic treatment for others to spot that one “is fighting.” The only thing there was was constant and anecdotal deterioration. “The most heroic thing that can happen to you is to fall,” he wrote. “I’ve fallen quite a bit, but falling makes you look a bit of an idiot.”
He was an atheist—but not “fanatical, like Christopher Hitchens,” he clarified—because he simply couldn’t believe in God. “I live it, rather, as a lack. I would have liked it.” Given the incurable disease, that had practical consequences: “If you have ALS, the only alternative to not becoming a plant in front of the television is to expand brain activity to the limit.”
His last interview was with writer Martín Caparrós, who also suffers from ALS and lives in Madrid. They had known each other for years and respected each other despite disagreeing on almost everything. Lopérfido had read Caparrós’s book about the disease, Before Anything, and decided to tell him about their shared diagnosis a couple of days before recording the interview.
Marcelo Figoli, a businessman and former partner who owned the media outlets where Lopérfido published his columns, defined him as “a reference in our culture, a creative person, a sensitive person with a lot of desire to continue innovating.” He saw him work until the end “with consistency in his political thinking, in the ideas of freedom from a humanist point of view.” He recalled that “he debated with those he had to debate, but in a healthy, open, clear, respectful way.” He said goodbye to him as “a great friend, a person of much code, who lived with austerity and ended his life in the same way.”
For someone like Lopérfido, who had explicitly defended individual freedom against the State, dogmas, and political correctness, assisted suicide—which is legal in Spain—was evidently part of the conversation: the right to choose the path of one’s own body. “You can’t decide to be born, but you can decide to die. Living shouldn’t be mandatory,” he said. He defined it as “the most liberal of deaths” and “humanity’s greatest achievement for those who have no hope and only live with hell.” He hadn’t made that decision, he clarified when speaking about the topic, but knowing it was available comforted him. It was a position he had always held. ALS had only made it personal.
