My academic life began with philosophy, continued with journalism, and landed in rhetoric.Philosophy unleashed in me a love for the quest for truth. A quest that was oriented toward language and the difficulty of naming evil. In Augustine, I found the reason for my first writings. If evil is the tendency toward nothingness, the tendency to move away from being, and language is the reference to something, how is it possible to speak of evil? In this exploration, I was accompanied by De Dialectica. It was thanks to this text that I began to think about how absolute evil could be inconceivable and why the linguistic “nothing” should be understood more as a metaphorical sign than as an ethical definition with figurative connotations.I did not exhaust the question in Augustine. Since philosophy was not giving me satisfying answers, I decided to look for them in “real life.” That’s how I got to journalism. My plan was to approach evil from the facts, hard and pure. My success was limited. However, I landed on the war chronicles of the Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero. Guerriero convinced me of the limits of nonfiction and helped me see how truth does not spring spontaneously from facts. A chronicle that intensely influenced my journey was her essay “The Trace in the Bones.” This chronicle recounts the efforts of Argentina’s forensic anthropology team to identify the remains of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship. There is a very particular truth that is revealed when you read the following: “Patricia removes dirt with a bucket and bones appear, entwined in the roots of the trees. ‘Lying face up and wearing socks.’ The socks are valuable: perfect bags for the loose foot bones.”The forensic anthropologist not only identifies skeletal remains but, as Guerriero says, reads the traces of life and death. This reading is comparable to the experience of going to the archive to investigate the stories of who we are. In the spring of 2016, I was taking a class with Professor Angela Ray when she shared with us the draft of her article “Rhetoric and the Archive.” I had spent a few months as a doctoral student in rhetoric trying to understand what fascinated me about this “evil” discipline so condemned by Plato and my former philosophy professors. Ray’s text, with the clarity, eloquence, and elegance that characterize a good rhetorician, used the archive as a bridge to understand rhetorical research from the multiplicity of its manifestations. Those pure facts of “the real life” that dragged me to journalism were complemented with a discipline that studies objects and arguments within a context of meaning. Persuaded by this article of the multifaceted nature of truth, I scrutinized my previous intellectual quest from a new rhetorical perspective. And this is how I ended up in the newspaper archives reviewing how the print media constructed the public persona of the evil criminal Pablo Escobar.