Roberto Vivo Chaneton – Biography
From the time we’re small, the circumstances that we live through prepare us, to a certain extent, for what our great quests will be.
I was born on July 4, 1953, in Montevideo, Uruguay, and what first influenced me was my family. The example that my parents set for me is present in everything I do. At age three, I moved with my family to Philadelphia because of my father’s work, and there I went to kindergarten. The two years we spent there left their mark on me.
When we returned to Montevideo, I continued my studies at Instituto Stella Maris, run by the Irish Christian Brothers. These were strict but noble men who taught us by their own example. There are anecdotes from those times that still bring a smile to my face. For instance, I recall how in Brother Kelly’s classes, while he was busy writing on the blackboard, we would advance a few inches at a time with our desks. Within a few minutes, we would have him corralled against the board and he would turn and start telling us off in English or in his broken Spanish. Those types of innocent stunts filled us with glee and they still remind me of the freshness with which we lived life at that age.
In secondary school, I got around on a bicycle and always carried a box of tools around with me. One day the music class was interrupted because the teacher’s tape recorder broke down. Since I had my tools with me, I offered to fix it. But the attempt was disastrous and the recorder ended up worse off than before. Fortunately, the Christian Brothers had a sense of humor and were capable of understanding the logic of a curious schoolboy. The image of Brother Kelly beseeching God to get us to stop our antics is still fresh in my mind.
I’m fortunate to still have great friends from those school days. I’ve always felt that the way in which such ties of friendship are forged is well portrayed—with exception made for such singular circumstances—in the Andean air tragedy of 1972 (documented in Piers Paul Read’s book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors). The final outcome of that tragedy, in which my brother Abel would have been involved had my parents not decided not to let him go on the trip, was providential.
The heritage I gained from the Irish Christian Brothers has had no little impact on me. From them I have received unforgettable teachings about the value of comradeship, humility and friendship.
As I said earlier, nothing happens to us by chance, and I became aware of that, like never before, at age eleven. That age, which for many is a time of little importance, was a revelation for me, since it was not only when I entered the world of music by learning to play the drums, but also when I met Soledad, who was destined to become my wife.
The best memories of my adolescence are of the Uruguayan countryside. My father was very wise to sell our house in the resort city of Punta del Este, so that we wouldn’t end up passing the summer months doing nothing. That was how I started working as just another ranch hand—although treatment was often even tougher on the owner’s son than on the rest of the men. On that job, I learned a little of everything: riding, butchering, curing sick animals, rounding up livestock…all activities that teach one to overcome fear, to be steadfast and to work hard, even when the results aren’t immediately apparent.
When I finished high school, I enrolled in college prep and then went on to my first year in Architecture in Montevideo. I continued to play the drums and sing, but I also painted.
In 1973, driven by that artistic spirit that had always accompanied me, I realized that I wanted to get into cinema, so I went to Buenos Aires to study. I was aware too of how important it was to have a head for business, so I also enrolled in Business Administration. So it was that I alternated between classrooms at the National Institute of Cinematography (INC) during the day and the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE—a private business university) at night. Later, I would leave the INC to enroll in an avant garde film center. Toward the end of 1976, I returned to Montevideo with a Business Administration diploma under my arm.
I started working with my father, but got to feeling that there was something missing in my life, and decided to return to movie-making. In 1978, together with Diego Abal and some other friends, I produced El lugar del humo, a movie directed by Eva Landek. The making of that picture was a real event in Uruguay, where no one had made a feature film in twenty-one years. It was a daring enterprise considering the budget, and that has had something to do with the fact that, for the time being, I have never returned to film-making. I say “for the time being,” because, as soon as I can, I’ll be back, but this time as a director. It’s a vow I’ve made to myself.
Clearly, I’ve never been able to remain still: business, movies, country life…and to that, politics was added. My family has always belonged to Uruguay’s Colorado Party, and there I found a channel for my concerns. I have been active in politics, then, since 1971. Early on, I worked with Lista 17, a movement headed by Senator Manuel Flores Mora, a man of deep convictions and great charisma, who left his mark on an entire generation of Batllista activists (followers of the philosophy of former Colorado Party leader José Batlle y Ordóñez). We would later form the Corriente Batllista Independiente and eventually lend our support to Enrique Tarigo, who was to become the country’s vice president.
In a 1980 plebiscite, in which the military regime sought to institutionalize its permanent control over the country, Tarigo became an independent journalist, taking a critical stance against the regime, while we in the Corriente Batllista Independiente, as a group of youths with no traditional politicians within our ranks, were strongly and militantly active. Indeed, it was our group that organized the first public demonstrations calling for the recovery of democratic government and promoting a “no” vote against the constitutional reform that the Armed Forces were seeking to impose.
In 1983, I organized the First River Plate Democratic Conference, which, for the first time in history, brought together four major political movements of the River Plate region: the Blancos and Colorados of Uruguay and the Peronists and Radicals of Argentina. The idea of the meeting was to bring pressure to bear on the Uruguayan Armed Forces, which were at that moment in the midst of a running dialogue with local politicians. And the conference ended up fully complying with its objective.
My political activity took on a very particular twist in 1980, when I moved to the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, where I acted as a representative for Uruguay’s Colorado Party, in which I have remained active up to the present day. Back then, in Buenos Aires, I was playing several different roles in management and business, until, in 1986, the company I was working for found itself in an ever more complicated situation. I was advised that it might be a good time to think about going to Harvard and getting my doctorate. I even gained admission to Harvard and was planning my trip there. But the trip never took place. Instead, I was presented with an opportunity to enter into an enterprise that appeared to me to be both interesting and feasible. And that was how Impsat, the first company to make use of satellite technology, came into being. In August of 1990, we inaugurated the first teleport. I started this company on the premise that “there are no more frontiers, the new economy is global.” Impsat recorded really impressive growth, and it was the platform from which Roberto Cibrián Campoy and I founded the Internet portal El Sitio. Both companies brought me great personal success, and the privilege of being the first businessman in the world to launch two successful IPOs on the Nasdaq in under sixty days of each other: December 10, 1999 for El Sitio, and January 31, 2000 for Impsat. From then on, telecommunications just sort of became my specialty.
Later on, Claxson was created through the merger of El Sitio Inc. and Iberoamérica Media Partners. It has been listed on the Nasdaq from the outset.
I have been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Claxson since 2001. In that role, I have taken full charge of Claxson’s performance and of the implementation of the growth strategy for this media company, which is a provider and distributor of high-quality entertainment contents for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking audiences around the world.
