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The history of domination in Latin America. MONROE: Let's reformulate!
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SpecialSeries
War correspondents reporting feelings from the front line
(Photo Truthout.org/Seinforma)
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Special REPORTS
Even though human trafficking has been included as a crime in legislations, half of the countries do not have an action plan against this crime, condemned by all but punished by few around the world. Central America and the Caribbean: the most permissible.
Even though human trafficking has been included as a crime in legislations, half of the countries do not have an action plan against this crime, condemned by all but punished by few around the world. Central America and the Caribbean: the most permissible.
Exclusive Interview
JON LEE ANDERSON
"All the possible human perversion is in the war"
JON LEE ANDERSON
"All the possible human perversion is in the war"
Journalist at The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson is one of the best war reporters of these days. His books are complete and documented testimonies of different war conflicts around the world, some of them in Latin America: Inside the League (1986), War Zones: Voices from the World's Killing Grounds (1987); Guerrillas (1992); The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan (2002) and The Fall of Bagdad (2004).
(Photos Courtesy Jon Lee Anderson/ Seinforma Canada)
“There were corpses everywhere and there were elderly and disabled people on the houses. They all (the journalists) carried the ones who could not walk and took them to the ambulances. “We all felt a little strange, because we ‘intervened’ in the History; but I told some of them who doubted: Look, this is a human emergency, you have to do this, there is no option here”.
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas, Venezuela.- Jon Lee Anderson was 27 years old when his hands started to bleed without reason. The drops went out from tiny and painful cracks which opened on his palms and the tip of his fingers. It was 1984 and he was living in El Salvador, a country that was broken in two. In the middle of the civil war, it was usual to move among killings and bombs. He had lived with people from the guerrilla on the rainforest, under the heavy rain and with mud attached to his body. “That experience made me to become more interested in the guerrilla world, in these irregular warriors that climb mountains and choose to live a different life, besides the conventional army”. He had survived miraculously to some ambushes and other clashes with the army, which tried to kill him and another photographer on the river.
The blood trace over his hands’ skin appeared intermittently. Apart from these strange stigmas, and certain pain on the chest, he felt well, as always more or less.
After a thorough evaluation, doctors established what they already suspected: he had nothing serious. The slow bleeding was only a physical manifestation of overlapped stress, of which he was not conscious of. It seemed that the points of his nerves were perforating his epidermis, trying to go out and expel the excess of adrenaline.
Anderson landed in Venezuela on October 8th 2007. He planned to stay there for a week, in order to present the Spanish edition, revised and extended, of his documented biography on Che Guevara (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life). I was able to have an interview with him on the penultimate day of his visit, on the open lobby of the Continental Hotel, a building dating from the fifties located on the center of Caracas.
As reporters speak slowly and mixing accents, it was difficult for me to identify the origin of his Spanish. His eyes were focused on the conversation and he made an effort to recreate every event with all details coming to his mind.
He extended his hand to me so that I can see the tiny scars left by the stigmas. When I got close to them, I was able to see that the dry wounds slightly crossed his fingerprints; almost perceptible at 10 cm distance, they were very thin lines that might be confused with the hand lines. “One gets accustomed to it. My fingers are not bleeding anymore, but from time to time they became reddish and with spots”.
ALL EXPERIENCES IN FLESH AND BLOOD
Jon Lee has always been a nomad, an immigrant. On very few occasions he stayed in one place for more than three consecutive years. “To live in so many cultures made me a very adaptable person. I think I can live anywhere, without trauma. I have lived in many places and I can continue doing it. Any place where I go I will always be a foreigner, the one who comes from another place, but I am also the one that can be accepted after some time. That is the story of my life”.
Son of an ambassador father, expert in agriculture and assistance plans (“many people say that he worked for the CIA but I am not aware of it”), and a mother writer of children’s books, when he was a kid he followed the pilgrim itinerary of his family. He was born in California on January 15th 1957, but when he was two years old his parents moved to Korea; when he was four, they moved to Colombia; when he was five, to Taiwan... “When I was ten, I wrote a small journal in the neighborhood. My mother helped me type it. My friends and siblings were the reporters. I wrote poetry, but I was kind of dispersed. My mother was always telling me: Jon, you are a writer, you are a writer. But anyway, I was a small kid and I was looking for adventures also. I only achieved some balance in my life when I was twentysomething and I got my first job in Lima”.
When he was eleven, he returned to his native country. It was the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King died. “My parents were very anti-racist and progresists, very anti-Vietnam. They supported Luther King and were very fond of Kennedy. The following year we went to Indonesia, but we had to be evacuated due to a sanitary emergency. My siblings and I almost die from a disease. I didn’t want to go back to the United States. That year had been full of national tragedies and I didn’t like it. I found myself with neighbors full of racial prejudice and I had many fights at school”.
His parents moved to Washington. When he was twelve, he escaped from home, looking for adventures and independence. “I was going to the mountain; I wanted to live a savage life, hunting animals”. The police found him and brought him back to Washington. He escaped three or four times more, until his parents finally proposed him to travel to Africa, to live with an uncle who lived in Liberia. He escaped once again and ended living with the tribe of his uncle's cook “inside the forest”. “It is incredible to think of it nowadays, but I wandered alone in Africa for two months when I was 13 years old”.
When he was 15 years old, he went out of Miami and traveled again to Africa to meet his sister Michelle (she was in a tribe in Togo), but he shipwrecked in the Canary Islands. I spent five months living in the street and sleeping among the fishing nets in the port. “I even tried to be a thief. Some Maghribians I knew taught me to steal wallets, but I didn’t do it well. From that experience, I ended up with scurvy. In that moment I was proud of it, since nobody had had it since the sailors of Columbus”.
His family thought he was dead. His sister went to look for him. She found him wandering in the street and sent him back to the United States, with his mother. “From that experience, I became a little antisocial. I was always saying that I didn’t need money and that I didn’t like cities. I got cured when I went to Honduras and lived in the forest for eight months, with a kind of uncle who invited me to live with him like a countryman. I earned one dollar a day working. I learned to use the machete, to row Cayucos (canoes) on the sea and to climb coconut palms. I did it well and I liked it; I needed that. It was what I had been looking for when I shipwrecked in the Canary Islands”.
“I had a conception of life in which I had to experience everything, in flesh and blood. All emotions, all experiences. And I made up lists. I performed some of the things in the list and some others I did not. I couldn‘t do obvious things such as to climb the Everest before 18 years old or to go down to the Amazonas -rowing, of course-, to cross the Sahara from West to East on camel, to go to prison or to be a coal miner in Gales. I wanted to be in prison since it was a universal experience. Moreover, according to the influential men I had read (I loved biographies), those were very important aspects on their education. I thought that I needed to experience certain things in order to become a man. It was a need to live the History”.
Then he made a trip on a raft along Central America with his brother Scott and, after that, a trip to Peru, where the journal Lima Times hired him to write chronicles of his adventures.
FIRE IN THE HEAD
The first time I have been on a war was on Nicaragua. I had about 25 years old. I entered the Contra from Honduras, marching during the night and hiding during the day. They were among ravines and woods near villages occupied by the Sandinistas. “They made meetings with spy countrymen who collected information about possible targets in the villages. They were a little ill-fated group. Then I realized that they were making only a vulgar list of killings”. After a long journey of walk under the never-ending rain, after falling in ravines many times, on a curved path he experienced his first ambush.
“I was shocked. I was changing my boots, most exactly the socks. In the moment they opened fire I was barefooted. Under the half-light I couldn’t see well what was happening. I looked around and there was nobody there, but I had fire under my head… I realized that they were all hidden on a near ravine and they were all telling me: ¡Come oooon! And I answered them: ¿But my boots? I was with an old photographer who was shouting something I couldn’t hear due to the sound of the machine guns. ¿Whaaaat? …To the … brbrbrrrrrr, ¿Whaaat? To the brrrrrrrrrr…. I don’t know how much time it lasted. Finally I heard a pause: ¡Fuck the socks! In that moment I realized: Fuck Jon, you are standing on a fire camp because you didn’t put your socks on… ¡Ruuuun! And I ran to where they were, leaving my boots and my socks. After a while someone rescued them, I put them on the ravine and when we had the chance we ran… for almost five hours to escape”.
LUGAGGE ON THE BACK
“When you witness certain things in war, you pay a high price. Sometimes you have only ten seconds to react. You do it well or you do it wrong, but you have to live with it for the rest of your life. Imagine the ones who were on Rwanda, witnessing the manslaughter and did nothing for fear. You have to learn to live with that since it will never make you feel well”.
The thing Jon Lee Anderson regrets the most happened on a small village of Uganda. It was the beginning of 1986. The regime had fallen recently and the National Resistance Movement had taken the power. The cruel civil war that would strike the country for more than two decades was beginning. The guerrilla of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has its bases on the North. Jon Lee went with a friend, photographer, to the Northeast, and they entered a recently massacred village: the survivors were coming out from their hiding places to find their fathers, mothers and siblings hacked to death with machetes. But before all that, they remained unexpectedly in front of a bloodcurdling scenario: the totally naked body of an old woman, of more than eighty years old, visibly bitten, maybe raped and dying of thirst.
“It was about 10 am, under a strong African sun. The old woman was obviously dying. It was not our first reaction to run to the river and bring her some water. We stayed there, stunned. I did not react as a human being, maybe due to the shock or whatever. I have that regret and I will always have it, not to react fast. Three minutes passed since the other women form the village arrived and assisted her. Rex was trying to take some photos, but he didn’t take good pictures, he didn’t even dare to get close enough or to look for water. He never took photographs again. It was too much for him, although he had been a war photographer for about twelve years. Nowadays he is an architect. We have never talked about that incident anymore, but I know that he was deeply affected by it. It affected me too but I understand it”.
Since then, Jon believes that he acted properly in other circumstances. Recently, on the Lebanon, he experienced a similar situation: he entered, with a group of journalists, into a village attacked with bombs some weeks ago by the Israelis. There were corpses everywhere and there were elderly and disabled people on the houses. They all carried the ones who could not walk and took them to the ambulances. “We all felt a little strange, because we ‘intervened’ in History; but I told some of them who doubted: Look, this is a human emergency, you have to do this, there is no option here”.
DEATH SENTENCE
“I have never killed anybody, but I am willing to kill if it is necessary”
His brother Scott is the one who joined him on the adventure through the river along Central America, and wrote two books with Jon: Inside the League and War Zones. For the first one, they divided the work, but for the second one they experienced the war together: They traveled from one conflict to another, looking for testimonies from civilians and politicians of both factions.
On those moments of great danger, he realized that he didn’t like to be in the same place with a relative. They were on a camp from the Tamil Tigers (movement for the Tamil ethnic minority that has fought against the Sri Lanka government for the independence of the Northeast of Sri Lanka). Although they had done all the necessary arrangements and contacts, after arriving they realized that the commander of the guerrilla was mad.
“He suggested that we were spies. He recruited teenage boys. One of them seemed to be only 11 or 12 years old. I immediately felt paranoia, as if we mustn’t be there. I felt guilty. I had the big brother syndrome. In order to put pressure on us and show what they did to spies, the man brought a woman which has obviously been brutally hit. In front of the woman, he announced that she was going to be killed the following day for helping the army; she was going to be blown alive using a kind of explosive fuse. In those years, the squealers or collaborators were tied to lamp posts and blown alive. She started to beg for her life, and we both felt on a very difficult situation, it was our lives or hers. I tried to convince him not to kill the woman, but he was categorical. On a certain moment, when she was in front of me, on her knees and weeping, I remember that I slammed the door and didn’t look at her anymore. I sentenced her to death. I couldn’t do anything for her. Then I made all efforts to escape from that place. I was very worried about my little brother. It was a very hard and shocking situation for Scott. He had visited that moment many times on his fiction book and on his mind. Finally, the woman was killed the following day”.
“We didn't go together to a war zone again, until the penultimate summer, when the Lebanon was under attack. My brother told me that he was coming to Beirut soon after I arrived. Although I thought it was not a good idea, I couldn’t tell him not to come. In fact, the Israelis almost killed us with a missile. I spent many days trying to get him out of that area. That’s why I prefer to avoid being in war with relatives”.
Despite the difficult situations experienced on Sri Lanka and the Lebanon, Jon revealed that the moment he was closest to death was on Gaza, Palestine, when he was confused with an Israeli and was kidnapped on a refugee camp. They first left him behind a mosque. They were going to kill him by throwing stones, but someone recognized him. As they were in doubt, they all put the stones down and took him out of the place, but they didn’t release him. He was given to another group of refugees who took him to the roof of that same mosque to use his body as a human shield on a cross fire with the Israelis. “Happily, no bullets reached me”. When they got him down, he was given to two other groups. When he saw the eyes of the people from the last group, he understood that they were his executioners. “They were going to kill me. In a moment, one had a slip and left me free for some seconds. I took advantage and started running to an alley with an intersection where there were Israelis. It was like twenty meters. I walked by leaps and bounds. On the other side, the Israelis started to attack me since they thought I was a Palestinian. Finally, a Norwegian colonel from the UN helped me. That was the moment I felt closer to death during several hours”.
SHAPED IN CENTRAL AMERICA
During the eighties, Jon wanted to go to all conflicts, starting by Latin America. Then he became interested in insurgences around the world and he wrote the book Guerrillas, an exploration of guerrilla fronts on different parts of the world. The first time he had a professional work which didn’t imply bullets was in Cuba, where he wrote the biography of Che Guevara. “After September 11 everything changed and I felt that it was necessary for me to go back to war because I knew those places and I could contribute in some way. If I can be on those conflicts, where my fellow citizens are fighting and affecting all those countries, I think I can make my contribution”.
“Nowadays I am a more calculating man in order to choose conflicts. I don’t go to Sri Lanka only because there is a war there. I am very aware of the risks and I consider the public interest involved in each conflict. I have to balance my adventure spirit and my other responsibilities. I have decided to go to Afghanistan and Iraq these recent years because they are very important conflicts in the world”.
“Each war leaves its toll. I think the first one marks you deeply, since it is like the first love. During the conflicts on El Salvador and Nicaragua, which were simultaneous, I was hardened; ‘cooked’ like a clay dish on a stove. Then you don't change much. I gained enough experience there to understand my moral compass, which was the line I didn’t have to cross and what was acceptable on war. Foe example, I think that massacres cannot be committed, no matter the military, political or logical motive they may have on a certain moment”.
“I experienced some wars as a visitant and some others like a resident because I lived there or I spent many months in those places. I lived in El Salvador and in Iraq too. When you live on a place where there is a conflict, you get swept by the drama of the common people and you feel twinned with them. It is inevitable. Those experiences made me a very sensitive person, taught me to take civilians into account and to bear in mind that war is the worst of all fates since it is the perversion of the normal”.
Peace, however, is not easy to find for someone like Jon Lee Anderson. In order to write The Fall of Bagdad he stayed away from the agitation of his home in Great Britain, from her wife and his three children, from his dog Simba, his Egyptian rabbit and his three Andalusian cats. Ironically, in order to find concentration and finish the book, he found peace in Bagdad.
BETWEEN CHANCE AND INTUITION
When Jon Lee lived in El Salvador, he joined for some days colonel Domingo Monterrosa, who commanded the Atlacatl, the first battalion of the Salvadorian army, trained in contra-insurgence by the US army. Considered a “hero” by many people, three years before the colonel had been the commander in charge of the massacre of El Mozote, in which more than 800 people, most of them elderly, women and children.
It was October of the year 1984. Determined to know the colonel and the motives for such massacre thoroughly, Jon joined him during the Rescue Operation, which was meant to expel the guerrilla from the North of Morazán and to eliminate the clandestine Radio “Venceremos”.
“He was a very nice guy, but he dragged the highest toll of killings of all militaries in El Salvador. I couldn’t understand how I could like this guy who, at the same time, was a war criminal. My fascination for him was about this dilemma. He liked journalists, but there was a kind of agreement not to ask him about the massacre. I wanted to find a moment to talk about it”.
The last day of the operation, after landing in Joateca, the colonel visited the cemetery and he went back, excited, with a transmitter from Radio Venceremos, the clandestine radio station of the guerilla. “I saw he was so euphoric that I thought: This is the moment to ask him about the massacre. And I did it. The colonel, with a “no need for words” look, told me: Look, things were different from what they say. That was a tacit acceptance that it did happen and that he did it, but that there were extenuating circumstances for him. I thought I have gained certain closeness with him and that I would be able to know his secret”. Soon after that, the photographer convinced him, with some objections, to go back to the capital city to send his article. So I wouldn‘t have the chance to continue talking with the colonel.
A few hours later, I heard that Monterrosa and thirteen persons died when the helicopter exploded in the air; that was the same helicopter in which Jon had traveled. “The radio transmitter he had found was a trap with explosives, remote controlled. I think that survival in war depends much on luck and intuition. In this story, I don’t know if it was luck, chance or intuition, but I have undergone many experiences in which my life changed for not taking a plane or helicopter”.
VICTIM AND VICTIMIZER
In Central America he also learned that he must tear the surface of things and that he must not take things at first sight. Such relativity was evident when he joined commander “Tigrillo”, from the Contra, “a though guy, renegade, very aggressive and charismatic”.
It was a rain season in the forest. “The commander was with his wife, Marta, a thirty-year-old woman, smart and pretty, who followed him like a slave. I remember that he was on a mule and she followed him by foot. When we went through streams, she washed his socks. After several days, when the man was out of the camp, she told me her life story. This man, ‘Tigrillo’, has kidnapped her from a village where she was a teacher. She had a husband and two little children. She had seen how they cut the throats of her workmates, since they were teachers paid by the Sandinist government and, therefore, ‘ideological enemies’. She had two options: to stay with him or to die as the others. During the more-than-a-year period she had been with ‘Tigrillo', she had also become his woman, of course. She burst into tears. She told me all these in front of another guerrilla man who was ‘trustworthy’. That is to say, I understood that there were guerrilla men in the force who, at first sight, agreed to their actions but they were actually obliged, coerced”.
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas, Venezuela.- Jon Lee Anderson was 27 years old when his hands started to bleed without reason. The drops went out from tiny and painful cracks which opened on his palms and the tip of his fingers. It was 1984 and he was living in El Salvador, a country that was broken in two. In the middle of the civil war, it was usual to move among killings and bombs. He had lived with people from the guerrilla on the rainforest, under the heavy rain and with mud attached to his body. “That experience made me to become more interested in the guerrilla world, in these irregular warriors that climb mountains and choose to live a different life, besides the conventional army”. He had survived miraculously to some ambushes and other clashes with the army, which tried to kill him and another photographer on the river.
The blood trace over his hands’ skin appeared intermittently. Apart from these strange stigmas, and certain pain on the chest, he felt well, as always more or less.
After a thorough evaluation, doctors established what they already suspected: he had nothing serious. The slow bleeding was only a physical manifestation of overlapped stress, of which he was not conscious of. It seemed that the points of his nerves were perforating his epidermis, trying to go out and expel the excess of adrenaline.
Anderson landed in Venezuela on October 8th 2007. He planned to stay there for a week, in order to present the Spanish edition, revised and extended, of his documented biography on Che Guevara (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life). I was able to have an interview with him on the penultimate day of his visit, on the open lobby of the Continental Hotel, a building dating from the fifties located on the center of Caracas.
As reporters speak slowly and mixing accents, it was difficult for me to identify the origin of his Spanish. His eyes were focused on the conversation and he made an effort to recreate every event with all details coming to his mind.
He extended his hand to me so that I can see the tiny scars left by the stigmas. When I got close to them, I was able to see that the dry wounds slightly crossed his fingerprints; almost perceptible at 10 cm distance, they were very thin lines that might be confused with the hand lines. “One gets accustomed to it. My fingers are not bleeding anymore, but from time to time they became reddish and with spots”.
ALL EXPERIENCES IN FLESH AND BLOOD
Jon Lee has always been a nomad, an immigrant. On very few occasions he stayed in one place for more than three consecutive years. “To live in so many cultures made me a very adaptable person. I think I can live anywhere, without trauma. I have lived in many places and I can continue doing it. Any place where I go I will always be a foreigner, the one who comes from another place, but I am also the one that can be accepted after some time. That is the story of my life”.
Son of an ambassador father, expert in agriculture and assistance plans (“many people say that he worked for the CIA but I am not aware of it”), and a mother writer of children’s books, when he was a kid he followed the pilgrim itinerary of his family. He was born in California on January 15th 1957, but when he was two years old his parents moved to Korea; when he was four, they moved to Colombia; when he was five, to Taiwan... “When I was ten, I wrote a small journal in the neighborhood. My mother helped me type it. My friends and siblings were the reporters. I wrote poetry, but I was kind of dispersed. My mother was always telling me: Jon, you are a writer, you are a writer. But anyway, I was a small kid and I was looking for adventures also. I only achieved some balance in my life when I was twentysomething and I got my first job in Lima”.
When he was eleven, he returned to his native country. It was the year when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King died. “My parents were very anti-racist and progresists, very anti-Vietnam. They supported Luther King and were very fond of Kennedy. The following year we went to Indonesia, but we had to be evacuated due to a sanitary emergency. My siblings and I almost die from a disease. I didn’t want to go back to the United States. That year had been full of national tragedies and I didn’t like it. I found myself with neighbors full of racial prejudice and I had many fights at school”.
His parents moved to Washington. When he was twelve, he escaped from home, looking for adventures and independence. “I was going to the mountain; I wanted to live a savage life, hunting animals”. The police found him and brought him back to Washington. He escaped three or four times more, until his parents finally proposed him to travel to Africa, to live with an uncle who lived in Liberia. He escaped once again and ended living with the tribe of his uncle's cook “inside the forest”. “It is incredible to think of it nowadays, but I wandered alone in Africa for two months when I was 13 years old”.
When he was 15 years old, he went out of Miami and traveled again to Africa to meet his sister Michelle (she was in a tribe in Togo), but he shipwrecked in the Canary Islands. I spent five months living in the street and sleeping among the fishing nets in the port. “I even tried to be a thief. Some Maghribians I knew taught me to steal wallets, but I didn’t do it well. From that experience, I ended up with scurvy. In that moment I was proud of it, since nobody had had it since the sailors of Columbus”.
His family thought he was dead. His sister went to look for him. She found him wandering in the street and sent him back to the United States, with his mother. “From that experience, I became a little antisocial. I was always saying that I didn’t need money and that I didn’t like cities. I got cured when I went to Honduras and lived in the forest for eight months, with a kind of uncle who invited me to live with him like a countryman. I earned one dollar a day working. I learned to use the machete, to row Cayucos (canoes) on the sea and to climb coconut palms. I did it well and I liked it; I needed that. It was what I had been looking for when I shipwrecked in the Canary Islands”.
“I had a conception of life in which I had to experience everything, in flesh and blood. All emotions, all experiences. And I made up lists. I performed some of the things in the list and some others I did not. I couldn‘t do obvious things such as to climb the Everest before 18 years old or to go down to the Amazonas -rowing, of course-, to cross the Sahara from West to East on camel, to go to prison or to be a coal miner in Gales. I wanted to be in prison since it was a universal experience. Moreover, according to the influential men I had read (I loved biographies), those were very important aspects on their education. I thought that I needed to experience certain things in order to become a man. It was a need to live the History”.
Then he made a trip on a raft along Central America with his brother Scott and, after that, a trip to Peru, where the journal Lima Times hired him to write chronicles of his adventures.
FIRE IN THE HEAD
The first time I have been on a war was on Nicaragua. I had about 25 years old. I entered the Contra from Honduras, marching during the night and hiding during the day. They were among ravines and woods near villages occupied by the Sandinistas. “They made meetings with spy countrymen who collected information about possible targets in the villages. They were a little ill-fated group. Then I realized that they were making only a vulgar list of killings”. After a long journey of walk under the never-ending rain, after falling in ravines many times, on a curved path he experienced his first ambush.
“I was shocked. I was changing my boots, most exactly the socks. In the moment they opened fire I was barefooted. Under the half-light I couldn’t see well what was happening. I looked around and there was nobody there, but I had fire under my head… I realized that they were all hidden on a near ravine and they were all telling me: ¡Come oooon! And I answered them: ¿But my boots? I was with an old photographer who was shouting something I couldn’t hear due to the sound of the machine guns. ¿Whaaaat? …To the … brbrbrrrrrr, ¿Whaaat? To the brrrrrrrrrr…. I don’t know how much time it lasted. Finally I heard a pause: ¡Fuck the socks! In that moment I realized: Fuck Jon, you are standing on a fire camp because you didn’t put your socks on… ¡Ruuuun! And I ran to where they were, leaving my boots and my socks. After a while someone rescued them, I put them on the ravine and when we had the chance we ran… for almost five hours to escape”.
LUGAGGE ON THE BACK
“When you witness certain things in war, you pay a high price. Sometimes you have only ten seconds to react. You do it well or you do it wrong, but you have to live with it for the rest of your life. Imagine the ones who were on Rwanda, witnessing the manslaughter and did nothing for fear. You have to learn to live with that since it will never make you feel well”.
The thing Jon Lee Anderson regrets the most happened on a small village of Uganda. It was the beginning of 1986. The regime had fallen recently and the National Resistance Movement had taken the power. The cruel civil war that would strike the country for more than two decades was beginning. The guerrilla of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has its bases on the North. Jon Lee went with a friend, photographer, to the Northeast, and they entered a recently massacred village: the survivors were coming out from their hiding places to find their fathers, mothers and siblings hacked to death with machetes. But before all that, they remained unexpectedly in front of a bloodcurdling scenario: the totally naked body of an old woman, of more than eighty years old, visibly bitten, maybe raped and dying of thirst.
“It was about 10 am, under a strong African sun. The old woman was obviously dying. It was not our first reaction to run to the river and bring her some water. We stayed there, stunned. I did not react as a human being, maybe due to the shock or whatever. I have that regret and I will always have it, not to react fast. Three minutes passed since the other women form the village arrived and assisted her. Rex was trying to take some photos, but he didn’t take good pictures, he didn’t even dare to get close enough or to look for water. He never took photographs again. It was too much for him, although he had been a war photographer for about twelve years. Nowadays he is an architect. We have never talked about that incident anymore, but I know that he was deeply affected by it. It affected me too but I understand it”.
Since then, Jon believes that he acted properly in other circumstances. Recently, on the Lebanon, he experienced a similar situation: he entered, with a group of journalists, into a village attacked with bombs some weeks ago by the Israelis. There were corpses everywhere and there were elderly and disabled people on the houses. They all carried the ones who could not walk and took them to the ambulances. “We all felt a little strange, because we ‘intervened’ in History; but I told some of them who doubted: Look, this is a human emergency, you have to do this, there is no option here”.
DEATH SENTENCE
“I have never killed anybody, but I am willing to kill if it is necessary”
His brother Scott is the one who joined him on the adventure through the river along Central America, and wrote two books with Jon: Inside the League and War Zones. For the first one, they divided the work, but for the second one they experienced the war together: They traveled from one conflict to another, looking for testimonies from civilians and politicians of both factions.
On those moments of great danger, he realized that he didn’t like to be in the same place with a relative. They were on a camp from the Tamil Tigers (movement for the Tamil ethnic minority that has fought against the Sri Lanka government for the independence of the Northeast of Sri Lanka). Although they had done all the necessary arrangements and contacts, after arriving they realized that the commander of the guerrilla was mad.
“He suggested that we were spies. He recruited teenage boys. One of them seemed to be only 11 or 12 years old. I immediately felt paranoia, as if we mustn’t be there. I felt guilty. I had the big brother syndrome. In order to put pressure on us and show what they did to spies, the man brought a woman which has obviously been brutally hit. In front of the woman, he announced that she was going to be killed the following day for helping the army; she was going to be blown alive using a kind of explosive fuse. In those years, the squealers or collaborators were tied to lamp posts and blown alive. She started to beg for her life, and we both felt on a very difficult situation, it was our lives or hers. I tried to convince him not to kill the woman, but he was categorical. On a certain moment, when she was in front of me, on her knees and weeping, I remember that I slammed the door and didn’t look at her anymore. I sentenced her to death. I couldn’t do anything for her. Then I made all efforts to escape from that place. I was very worried about my little brother. It was a very hard and shocking situation for Scott. He had visited that moment many times on his fiction book and on his mind. Finally, the woman was killed the following day”.
“We didn't go together to a war zone again, until the penultimate summer, when the Lebanon was under attack. My brother told me that he was coming to Beirut soon after I arrived. Although I thought it was not a good idea, I couldn’t tell him not to come. In fact, the Israelis almost killed us with a missile. I spent many days trying to get him out of that area. That’s why I prefer to avoid being in war with relatives”.
Despite the difficult situations experienced on Sri Lanka and the Lebanon, Jon revealed that the moment he was closest to death was on Gaza, Palestine, when he was confused with an Israeli and was kidnapped on a refugee camp. They first left him behind a mosque. They were going to kill him by throwing stones, but someone recognized him. As they were in doubt, they all put the stones down and took him out of the place, but they didn’t release him. He was given to another group of refugees who took him to the roof of that same mosque to use his body as a human shield on a cross fire with the Israelis. “Happily, no bullets reached me”. When they got him down, he was given to two other groups. When he saw the eyes of the people from the last group, he understood that they were his executioners. “They were going to kill me. In a moment, one had a slip and left me free for some seconds. I took advantage and started running to an alley with an intersection where there were Israelis. It was like twenty meters. I walked by leaps and bounds. On the other side, the Israelis started to attack me since they thought I was a Palestinian. Finally, a Norwegian colonel from the UN helped me. That was the moment I felt closer to death during several hours”.
SHAPED IN CENTRAL AMERICA
During the eighties, Jon wanted to go to all conflicts, starting by Latin America. Then he became interested in insurgences around the world and he wrote the book Guerrillas, an exploration of guerrilla fronts on different parts of the world. The first time he had a professional work which didn’t imply bullets was in Cuba, where he wrote the biography of Che Guevara. “After September 11 everything changed and I felt that it was necessary for me to go back to war because I knew those places and I could contribute in some way. If I can be on those conflicts, where my fellow citizens are fighting and affecting all those countries, I think I can make my contribution”.
“Nowadays I am a more calculating man in order to choose conflicts. I don’t go to Sri Lanka only because there is a war there. I am very aware of the risks and I consider the public interest involved in each conflict. I have to balance my adventure spirit and my other responsibilities. I have decided to go to Afghanistan and Iraq these recent years because they are very important conflicts in the world”.
“Each war leaves its toll. I think the first one marks you deeply, since it is like the first love. During the conflicts on El Salvador and Nicaragua, which were simultaneous, I was hardened; ‘cooked’ like a clay dish on a stove. Then you don't change much. I gained enough experience there to understand my moral compass, which was the line I didn’t have to cross and what was acceptable on war. Foe example, I think that massacres cannot be committed, no matter the military, political or logical motive they may have on a certain moment”.
“I experienced some wars as a visitant and some others like a resident because I lived there or I spent many months in those places. I lived in El Salvador and in Iraq too. When you live on a place where there is a conflict, you get swept by the drama of the common people and you feel twinned with them. It is inevitable. Those experiences made me a very sensitive person, taught me to take civilians into account and to bear in mind that war is the worst of all fates since it is the perversion of the normal”.
Peace, however, is not easy to find for someone like Jon Lee Anderson. In order to write The Fall of Bagdad he stayed away from the agitation of his home in Great Britain, from her wife and his three children, from his dog Simba, his Egyptian rabbit and his three Andalusian cats. Ironically, in order to find concentration and finish the book, he found peace in Bagdad.
BETWEEN CHANCE AND INTUITION
When Jon Lee lived in El Salvador, he joined for some days colonel Domingo Monterrosa, who commanded the Atlacatl, the first battalion of the Salvadorian army, trained in contra-insurgence by the US army. Considered a “hero” by many people, three years before the colonel had been the commander in charge of the massacre of El Mozote, in which more than 800 people, most of them elderly, women and children.
It was October of the year 1984. Determined to know the colonel and the motives for such massacre thoroughly, Jon joined him during the Rescue Operation, which was meant to expel the guerrilla from the North of Morazán and to eliminate the clandestine Radio “Venceremos”.
“He was a very nice guy, but he dragged the highest toll of killings of all militaries in El Salvador. I couldn’t understand how I could like this guy who, at the same time, was a war criminal. My fascination for him was about this dilemma. He liked journalists, but there was a kind of agreement not to ask him about the massacre. I wanted to find a moment to talk about it”.
The last day of the operation, after landing in Joateca, the colonel visited the cemetery and he went back, excited, with a transmitter from Radio Venceremos, the clandestine radio station of the guerilla. “I saw he was so euphoric that I thought: This is the moment to ask him about the massacre. And I did it. The colonel, with a “no need for words” look, told me: Look, things were different from what they say. That was a tacit acceptance that it did happen and that he did it, but that there were extenuating circumstances for him. I thought I have gained certain closeness with him and that I would be able to know his secret”. Soon after that, the photographer convinced him, with some objections, to go back to the capital city to send his article. So I wouldn‘t have the chance to continue talking with the colonel.
A few hours later, I heard that Monterrosa and thirteen persons died when the helicopter exploded in the air; that was the same helicopter in which Jon had traveled. “The radio transmitter he had found was a trap with explosives, remote controlled. I think that survival in war depends much on luck and intuition. In this story, I don’t know if it was luck, chance or intuition, but I have undergone many experiences in which my life changed for not taking a plane or helicopter”.
VICTIM AND VICTIMIZER
In Central America he also learned that he must tear the surface of things and that he must not take things at first sight. Such relativity was evident when he joined commander “Tigrillo”, from the Contra, “a though guy, renegade, very aggressive and charismatic”.
It was a rain season in the forest. “The commander was with his wife, Marta, a thirty-year-old woman, smart and pretty, who followed him like a slave. I remember that he was on a mule and she followed him by foot. When we went through streams, she washed his socks. After several days, when the man was out of the camp, she told me her life story. This man, ‘Tigrillo’, has kidnapped her from a village where she was a teacher. She had a husband and two little children. She had seen how they cut the throats of her workmates, since they were teachers paid by the Sandinist government and, therefore, ‘ideological enemies’. She had two options: to stay with him or to die as the others. During the more-than-a-year period she had been with ‘Tigrillo', she had also become his woman, of course. She burst into tears. She told me all these in front of another guerrilla man who was ‘trustworthy’. That is to say, I understood that there were guerrilla men in the force who, at first sight, agreed to their actions but they were actually obliged, coerced”.
THE WORST IMAGE
Among the many bloodcurdling scenes, he remembers one particular image included on The Fall of Bagdad. He recounted the scene with a constant voice, flowing through deep breathes.
He entered the Bagdad Hospital, the only one in operation that was receiving thousands of victims from bombings. The nurses had been working there for 24 consecutive hours. “Beside me there was a man completely disfigured that seemed dead. In a kind of cubicle with open curtains there was a woman trying to wash the blood of another woman with her breasts open, hurt, terribly hurt. There was a lot of blood. It was as if somebody had entered with packs of blood and had thrown them all over the place. The doctors were trying to assist a ten-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. Suddenly, I heard bloodcurdling screams, cries of deep sadness, and someone hitting the walls. All doctors, all nurses, all people present burst into tears. The mother was helpless because both children died in that same moment. That was the worst scene I had ever seen”.
Among the many bloodcurdling scenes, he remembers one particular image included on The Fall of Bagdad. He recounted the scene with a constant voice, flowing through deep breathes.
He entered the Bagdad Hospital, the only one in operation that was receiving thousands of victims from bombings. The nurses had been working there for 24 consecutive hours. “Beside me there was a man completely disfigured that seemed dead. In a kind of cubicle with open curtains there was a woman trying to wash the blood of another woman with her breasts open, hurt, terribly hurt. There was a lot of blood. It was as if somebody had entered with packs of blood and had thrown them all over the place. The doctors were trying to assist a ten-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. Suddenly, I heard bloodcurdling screams, cries of deep sadness, and someone hitting the walls. All doctors, all nurses, all people present burst into tears. The mother was helpless because both children died in that same moment. That was the worst scene I had ever seen”.
“Although I have been in many wars, I don’t go there because of the war, but because they are part of the History. For that reason, I don’t like the title ‘war correspondent’. I had a naive thought about wars. I thought that, if I were in many conflicts, I may have been able to reach some kind of illumination, to contribute with something that would prevent the need of conflicts. I have reached to the conclusion that we all have violence inside and we are capable of doing anything."
KNOWING THE CONFLICT THROUGH THE PERPETRATORS
“Although I have been in many wars, I don’t go there because of the war, but because they are part of the History. For that reason, I don’t like the title ‘war correspondent’. I had a naïve thought about wars. I thought that, if I were in many conflicts, I may have been able to reach some kind of illumination, to contribute with something that would prevent the need of conflicts. I have reached to the conclusion that we all have violence inside and we are capable of doing anything. Some of us live on a bubble of privileges in which we think we cannot do some things, but under certain circumstances, we are capable of killing. I have never had the opportunity to kill somebody, but I am willing to kill if it is necessary. I don’t know if it is a kind of revelation, but it is not cynicism nor resignation”.
“On a conflict, you cannot understand everything, but you must have a feeling, a desire for understanding, and you must try to find somebody, a group or a phenomenon inside that chaos. You must try to hold a thread and try to understand it, pull it in order to know a part”.
“Usually, I try to be close to someone who has some influence, a person responsible for the war and the people around him, in order to understand how he conceives his actions. We learn a lot in that way about the reason for the conflict, through their perpetrators. I think we don’t learn much from the victims”.
“When I made Pinochet’s profile, I wanted to seat down with him before talking to someone else; I wanted to touch him, to sniff him, to feel him, to smell him by myself; that man was the cause. I always prefer to go to the source, not to the perceiver, if it is possible. Maybe I depart from it in order to see manifestations of power, but I always go back to the psychics and the idiosyncrasy of the individual who is affecting the community”.
“I think I understand the reasons for violence. I think war does not have much more to teach me. I try to communicate things that are not on the movies. Not to see in terms of ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’, ‘the Nazis’ and ‘the allies’. That is another thing. What I try to extract and show is the perversion of human beings that is present on wars. I want to create perplexity, to impact, to make people change their view so that they do not think in black and white, which is the worst thing to do. If you say: I am on this field, the ones there are the bad and I am the good, you are actually saying that they are all eliminable. And, of course, the ones on your side are also eliminable for them. We must try to avoid, at all costs, a polarized society, the black and white view, because at any time it may lead to a civil war”.
“Infuriated people are capable of being very violent. You have to walk on a new land that is not very clear. ¿Are they victims or victimizers? They are both things at the same time. ¿How to judge them or treat them? On normal life, there is nothing that prepares you for that. That is war and that is what I try to communicate to people who haven’t experienced it: all the bewilderment and moral confusion; because I repeat once again: it is the worst thing of all. You cannot leave unharmed from a war. You will always be harmed. And societies suffering a war also get harmed. Therefore, we see the consequences of wars for decades”.
Although the cracks of his fingers definitively seem to have closed, Jon Lee Anderson assures that the best form to learn of the painful situations is leaving the wounds open. "I am not in favor of the scars, because you keep inside those painful moments and that is dangerous".
Shortly after our conversation, Jon returned to his home in England to retake the travelling routine. Already used to face the fear and the possibility of losing his own life in each destiny, Jon went back to Iraq where he stayed for some weeks to keep seing the long fall of Bagdad.
* Ana Maria Carrano, publisher and magazine editor, is our correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela. Her journalistic activity has been always tied to the local cultural environment.
“Although I have been in many wars, I don’t go there because of the war, but because they are part of the History. For that reason, I don’t like the title ‘war correspondent’. I had a naïve thought about wars. I thought that, if I were in many conflicts, I may have been able to reach some kind of illumination, to contribute with something that would prevent the need of conflicts. I have reached to the conclusion that we all have violence inside and we are capable of doing anything. Some of us live on a bubble of privileges in which we think we cannot do some things, but under certain circumstances, we are capable of killing. I have never had the opportunity to kill somebody, but I am willing to kill if it is necessary. I don’t know if it is a kind of revelation, but it is not cynicism nor resignation”.
“On a conflict, you cannot understand everything, but you must have a feeling, a desire for understanding, and you must try to find somebody, a group or a phenomenon inside that chaos. You must try to hold a thread and try to understand it, pull it in order to know a part”.
“Usually, I try to be close to someone who has some influence, a person responsible for the war and the people around him, in order to understand how he conceives his actions. We learn a lot in that way about the reason for the conflict, through their perpetrators. I think we don’t learn much from the victims”.
“When I made Pinochet’s profile, I wanted to seat down with him before talking to someone else; I wanted to touch him, to sniff him, to feel him, to smell him by myself; that man was the cause. I always prefer to go to the source, not to the perceiver, if it is possible. Maybe I depart from it in order to see manifestations of power, but I always go back to the psychics and the idiosyncrasy of the individual who is affecting the community”.
“I think I understand the reasons for violence. I think war does not have much more to teach me. I try to communicate things that are not on the movies. Not to see in terms of ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’, ‘the Nazis’ and ‘the allies’. That is another thing. What I try to extract and show is the perversion of human beings that is present on wars. I want to create perplexity, to impact, to make people change their view so that they do not think in black and white, which is the worst thing to do. If you say: I am on this field, the ones there are the bad and I am the good, you are actually saying that they are all eliminable. And, of course, the ones on your side are also eliminable for them. We must try to avoid, at all costs, a polarized society, the black and white view, because at any time it may lead to a civil war”.
“Infuriated people are capable of being very violent. You have to walk on a new land that is not very clear. ¿Are they victims or victimizers? They are both things at the same time. ¿How to judge them or treat them? On normal life, there is nothing that prepares you for that. That is war and that is what I try to communicate to people who haven’t experienced it: all the bewilderment and moral confusion; because I repeat once again: it is the worst thing of all. You cannot leave unharmed from a war. You will always be harmed. And societies suffering a war also get harmed. Therefore, we see the consequences of wars for decades”.
Although the cracks of his fingers definitively seem to have closed, Jon Lee Anderson assures that the best form to learn of the painful situations is leaving the wounds open. "I am not in favor of the scars, because you keep inside those painful moments and that is dangerous".
Shortly after our conversation, Jon returned to his home in England to retake the travelling routine. Already used to face the fear and the possibility of losing his own life in each destiny, Jon went back to Iraq where he stayed for some weeks to keep seing the long fall of Bagdad.
* Ana Maria Carrano, publisher and magazine editor, is our correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela. Her journalistic activity has been always tied to the local cultural environment.