María Belén Ludueña: "I am in the place I always wanted"

You could say it has a “monarchical” past. At the age of 19, María Belén Ludueña became the National Queen of the Sea. She did not suspect it then, but that was the key to discovering her vocation for communication and entering the media. At that time I was in my second year of Law. While she continued studying and graduated as a lawyer, the woman from Mar del Plata was called to be part of the program "El Garage" and later to be a presenter for the newscast on cable Channel 2. “The truth is that I was always a very brave woman because I was 19 years old and I lived with people who had experience, they taught me, they trained me. You had to prove it." She spent five years until she went to Channel 8. But after a year she was fired and a path began that finally brought her to Buenos Aires in 2017. First on Channel 26, in “La lupa” with Paulino Rodríguez, and then on A24, at first with Eduardo Feinmann and now as part of “Buenos días América”.

News: What is it like working alongside Antonio Laje?

María Belén Ludueña: A lot of responsibility. Antonio is a very demanding man and he likes his team to be like him, he takes things very seriously, he is the first to arrive and the last to leave and you have to learn from that and live up to it. They give you the place, but you have to earn it.

News: When did you feel like you had won it?

Ludueña: It is a program that is installed, it had two hosts, Soledad Larghi and Juli Navarro, I am always very respectful and I think I gained confidence after five or six months, then I began to feel that I was contributing my own. It is constant learning, it has tremendous dynamism, sometimes we give news in a minute.

News: Do you feel like it took you a long time to get to where you are?

Ludueña: Yes. Getting to Buenos Aires was a goal but before that I went to other places: from Mar del Plata I went to Mexico, I was on Televisa for a while, I didn't pass the tests; then I went to try my luck in Chile for a few months and then I arrived in Buenos Aires with Paulino Rodríguez, through a mutual friend.

News: Did you think it was more likely to find a place abroad than in Buenos Aires?

Ludueña: It's just that those who are in the Interior always see Buenos Aires as the big leagues and, although I have a career, sometimes people don't know you. Whoever is in Mar del Plata knows who you are, but whoever is in Buenos Aires thinks that you just started and no, I also come from having worked since I was very little. When you have a great vocation, you have to take risks and fight.

News: On his Linkedin he says: “It was a path of obstacles, fears and disappointments”. Where did the disappointments go?

Ludueña: When you are in a place, you enjoy it and you know that you are doing it well and suddenly someone takes you out of the game, you ask yourself a lot of things, but that also motivates you to continue. If I hadn't had a setback or they hadn't fired me from Mar del Plata (from Channel 8), I wouldn't be in Buenos Aires today. From a distance, I see it that way; at that moment I felt that I had been a disappointment.

News: What was it like tolerating the frustrations of going to Mexico and not making it and not making it in Chile either?

Ludueña: Well, I went to Mexico for just ten days, I had a trip and I took advantage of doing some casting, I didn't go to settle in, I'm not going to lie. They were experiences that enriched me greatly, because you have to be in a casting abroad. And I always trusted, I knew that at some point... There were several "no"s, but the issue is to persevere and keep trying. Maybe that has to do with being the middle child, on top of three women, I always had to stand out, I was a standard bearer, I gave the good note. Everything helped me to believe in myself.

News: She has been in a relationship with Jorge Macri for two years and says that she is very careful not to make political statements. Has she gone from seeing herself in the trouble of being professionally asked to give her opinion?

Ludueña: No, one looks for those places, one begins to open the door to express an opinion. From the moment I have a partner who is mayor of Vicente López, I try to be very careful with my opinions and to be as objective as possible.

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News: How difficult is that!

Ludueña: Yes, you have to have a lot of waist. I take care of myself because they will inevitably believe that I have a biased view for being with someone who belongs to a certain political party. I try to go the middle path and so far I've done well that way, and I don't have the need to editorialize, I don't think it's my role. Yes, when I have to accompany him, I do it because he is part of a couple that accompanies each other and because I know he has a great vocation and I like being able to be there.

News: The role of “first lady”, in your case Vicente López, is outdated, don't you think?

Ludueña: In fact, I don't define myself as Vicente López's first lady, but yes, because I work in a media outlet and have some followers on social networks, I found a way around it and I'm giving a hand to the entrepreneurs, we have alive on IG every fortnight. I choose three entrepreneurs who are part of the "López Vicentas", which is a women's center, and I interview them so they can tell what they do. In other words, I use my role as a communicator to help them.

News: She also does live on IG cooking with Jorge Macri.

Ludueña: Yes, every Saturday at 8:00 p.m., we do it as a family, with Jorge's children, he is passionate about cooking, he cooks great and he explains it very well, it is a kind of program and we also take advantage of it to promote to entrepreneurs.

News: Was the idea yours? Weren't you afraid of criticism?

Ludueña: No, it started happening in the quarantine. And there is my objectivity again: in the living we talk about cooking, Jorge is in his role as cook. He is just like what you are seeing there, sometimes he cooks barefoot. The politician today has to get closer and it seems to me that, without looking for it, people began to get hooked and it grew a lot. Jorge tells me that he has 200,000 views on Facebook and people on the street talk to him about the recipes.

News: This is a very good political marketing strategy!

Ludueña: Yes, and we are just as we show ourselves.

News: What worries you the most about Argentina today?

Ludueña: What bothers me is the political rift, the division that exists. I think that more consensus has to be achieved, each one has to have his or her opinions and there shouldn't be so much division. We would have to work as Argentines to be more united. Let's think about getting ahead, not so much in political parties but in the tools to be able to move forward. This government, the one that comes, must work so that the differences are left behind.

News: How do you get along with Mauricio Macri?

Ludueña: I know Mauricio through Jorge's cousins. We have a cordial relationship, Juliana seems charming to me. But I haven't seen it many times either.

News: What do you want to achieve?

Ludueña: In recent times I have become a woman who enjoys doing, I believe that by doing, things are being achieved. I do not have a stipulated goal, the truth is that I am in the place that I always wanted. I'm happy. It seems to me that we have to see the path traveled and start to be happy with what one was getting. Co-driving with Antonio Laje “Good morning, America”, is the place I always wanted to have. I have my medicine magazine, “Junta Médica”, which was a program that appeared due to the pandemic and today we talk about all the topics.

News: In crisis, possibilities arise.

Ludueña: The quarantine made us get closer with Jorge, it brought us very close as a couple. We did not live together and we began to live together. We grew a lot, you get stronger as you share more time. Jorge is a great support for me because I miss my friends, my family that is in Mar del Plata. I love him and I love his family very much. And with work, the same: they were special covid and it stayed, that was also brought by the quarantine. Sometimes one proposes a lot of things and suddenly things appear.