Paola Rojas had interviewed presidents, music stars, and sports figures throughout a career built in front of the cameras of Mexico’s most-watched news programs. But there was one name still missing from her list: Diego Armando Maradona. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil seemed, at last, to be her moment.
Both were staying at the same hotel during the tournament. Encounters were frequent—almost inevitable. Rojas, then an anchor for one of Televisa’s main news programs, seized every opportunity to approach the former Argentine footballer, who was working for Telesur at the time alongside journalist Víctor Hugo Morales on the show *De Zurda*.
The challenge was actually reaching him. Maradona always moved surrounded by his team—shielded and inaccessible. The journalist, now 49, persisted for days without success. Until an elevator changed everything.
“It was very difficult to get close to Diego Armando Maradona, but we were staying in the same place, so we kept running into each other,” Rojas recounted in a recent conversation with sports journalist José Ramón Fernández, published on her YouTube channel.
It was in that elevator, with Maradona’s entourage present, that the anchor saw her last chance. She identified herself as a Mexican journalist, reiterated her interest in interviewing him, and waited. There was a pause—a moment of hesitation—and then Rojas said:
“He told me: ‘I do want to talk to you, but in my room.’ Naturally, I stopped insisting; I was no longer interested in doing that interview,” revealed the ex-wife of Luis Roberto Alves dos Santos Gavranic, known as Zague.
