It is 2008. Rain has been falling for two months in the province of Jujuy. The road that leads to Penal Unit Number 3, a women’s prison that shares land with Penal Unit Number 2 for men, is covered in mud.

On both sides of the road there is wire, and a landscape that insists on innocence: eucalyptus, fruit trees. Unit 3 is a small prison: there are 21 women, some with their children. The building is U-shaped....

-Tejerinaaaaaaaaaa!!! –shouts a warden dressed in dark grey.

-Hello.

Romina Tejerina has the manner of a beauty queen: she gives a kiss and arranges her hair behind her ear.

-Oh, look at that lovely little bird (2012: 49).

4. Conclusions

1. The profile is one of the great genres of the New Journalism, and of Anglo-Saxon journalism in general. In the last three decades, there has been a rise in Spanish-language narrative journalism, and Leila Guerriero is among the journalists who have contributed to this movement. Guerriero has been working in journalism since 1992, but it was not until 2001 that she started to specialise in the profile genre. In the two voluminous anthologies dedicated exclusively to her work, which include Frutos Extraños (crónicas reunidas 2001-2008) Strange Results (chronicle collection 2001-2008) (2012, Alfaguara), and Plano Americano (American Portrait) (2013, Universidad Diego Portales). The former includes 16 journalistic texts, of which 13 are profiles and 3 are chronicles. The latter is composed of 21 profile articles. If we add the two profile books published by Leila Guerriero, Una historia sencilla (A simple story) (2013, Anagrama) and Opus Gelber (2019, Anagrama), we realise that most of Guerriero’s journalistic work has been devoted to profiles, in which she has become a master wordsmith.

2. Unlike a significant number of texts of the New Latin American Journalism, Leila Guerriero’s profiles do not include the ‘I’-narrator. They have been written mostly in a dimmed third person style, as she has actually been there but appears only occasionally in the text because the story is built from direct observation. Moreover, on rare occasions, she is a narrator who is present in the story as one of the characters, but she always plays a secondary role as an observer. In terms of perspective or mode, one can speak of internal focalization; the narrator says what such a character knows with long passages of external focalization; the narrator knows only what he or she observes, and rarely with zero focalization; and the narrator knows more than the character, or even by distorting this last concept, there is false non-focalization: Guerriero feigns knowing more than the character, but this is not true. This complexity of mode and voice and the subversion of the traditional canons of journalism are features that gives originality to Guerriero’s work.

3. Leila Guerriero’s style in her profiles is defined by rhythm and musicality. In order to obtain rhythm, she uses temporal distortions of order (analepsis, prolepsis, and anachrony), and those of duration that are related to frequency as ellipsis. In order to obtain musicality, she uses all the literary resources at her disposal, including alliteration, paranomasia, derivation, word games, and in general, all of those related to phonetics. It is also very common for Guerriero to use those related to the sentence elements or to the concordance (anacolouthon, free indirect style) and to the meaning (tropes as a metaphor, oxymoron, antithesis, comparison, or metonymy-synecdoche).