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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)
* 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.
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The Latin-Canadian Organization of Human Rights and Freedom of Expression / Organización Latino-Canadiense de Derechos Humanos y Libertad de Expresión
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Seinforma
Specialized Journalistic Sevices (SJS)
Servicios Especializados de Información
Servicios Especializados de Información
English
Español
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Videos
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Contest
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The history of domination in Latin America. MONROE: Let's reformulate!
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English
Español
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SpecialSeries
War correspondents reporting feelings from the front line
(Photo Truthout.org/Seinforma)
FRAN SEVILLA, RADIO NACIONAL DE ESPAÑA (RNE) CORRESPONDENT
Sevilla, the recipient of the 2008 Rey de España Award of Journalism, has covered armed conflicts in Central-America, Middle East, the Balkans, Peru, Iraq and Afghanistan. He lived several years in Jerusalem and is currently a correspondent for Radio Nacional España (RNE) in Latin America.
A well informed optimist
When seen in detail, Fran Sevilla’s physical context, not only his nose, seems to belong to an aquiline world. And not an eagle in hunting position, but in a sighting one, like the bird alighting on a branch, with his wings wound up, and which moves its head toward that precise place that needs to be scrutinized with the sight.
After talking to him, another peculiarity arises: he has not got used to death yet. He probably never will. He feels guilt for knowing that he counts on a “safeguard” to get out of the horror, unless death crosses his path.
“I am very hobbesian. As the XVI century philosopher used to say, I think ‘men are a luxury to men’. I think the human being condition is terrible. In the world, the way our societies are planned, they are an invitation to despise, to hate the other; and that generates violence. In that sense I am not very optimistic. Thinking a sophism in journalistic terms: It is not that I am a pessimist, but an optimistic well-informed, because I think the world is doing badly and I do not think it will get any better. I have seen so much cruelty, so much despise. But on the other hand, I stick as much as I can to life, and I would like to continue betting on life, not just my life, but everyone else’s life as well. If it were not like this I would have already quitted this profession”.
“I consider things can be done. I do not have that youth dream in which we are all very nice and we all love each other anymore, but I do believe in the small times, in the capacity one may have to share, to help, to contribute with happiness in our midst somehow; and as a journalist, in the capacity of reporting concrete realities that may be useful to make that reality better. That is what I do. I am aware that changing the world is very difficult and I think it is going to be more and more difficult as time goes by”.
In the whirlpool
On May the 21st, 2004, Sevilla was kidnapped in Iraq by militias of the Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. That was probably the occasion in which he perceived death more closely. Through his opened satellite mobile phone, he transmitted his kidnap live through Radio Nacional España. That same day he got to be imprisoned two times, and was released both times through a spokesperson of Al Sadr to whom Sevilla had interviewed a few weeks before. The second time, his interpreter was hit and a bag was put in his head. They remained imprisoned for three hours and a half.
A lot of eastern people tell Sevilla that he has got “Baraka”. Luck seems to be on his side. “Evidently there is some luck, and if it does not come with you, as it happened to Julio Fuentes in Afghanistan, then there is nothing to do”.
With these he particularly refers to an afternoon in which having changed his habits saved his life. When he returned to Madrid after the invasion of Afghanistan, he had an asthmatic crisis that forced him to quit smoking. In Iraq, not to devolve on the habit, he adopted another one: smoking narghile (water smoking pipe), generally done in the Paraiso square, the same place where the statues of Sadam Hussein that had been knocked down during the invasion were found. He did that every day, during sunset, when the sky changed its color and people were called for the prayer of the Magreb. At that same time, during those days, there were some bombards going on. The narghile became a way of dealing with the anguish. One afternoon, when he was at the square, the hotel where he was staying, called Palestine, was attacked by a car bomb.
Baraka.
“I do not know if the toughest situation I have had has been the one of the kidnap in Iraq, but it was the most dangerous, because they were going to kill Samir, my interpreter, and me. That is when I really felt I was going to be murdered”.
“I have lived dangerous situations, but feat is free and each one directs it in a different way. In that moment I would not think of anything. Evidently, I knew my life was in danger, but I have had worst experiences in situations in which other people have been in danger and I can see another’s suffering. That happened a lot to me with the Palestinians in Gaza. Talking to people, seeing how their houses, their crop fields, had been destroyed, and that such thing was done by somebody that has suffered so much, the self-proclaimed representatives of the Jewish people which is Israel, and seeing that insensitivity, that savageness, it is then that I get upset and I concentrate rage”.
One of the stories that shook him the most was when the Israeli troop entered Ramala and destroyed the cultural centre and the library, which had been donated by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. “They destroyed the books and peed. Everything with an incredible savageness. It is said that Israel is a civilized country, but it is so in its behavior toward the foreign. Of course, Israel is a democracy, but just for Jewish people. There is a respect for the internal law and there is what could be called a civilized state, with all the objections, as any other civilized country; however, facing the Palestinians they are quite the opposite, there torturing is legal, but only if it is aimed at the Palestinians. Of course, it is not legal to torture a Jewish, but it is to a Palestinian. That is sustained by the Supreme Court of Israel in one of those decisions that disgraces the concept of justice. Of course, they do not call it torture, but “moderated physical pressure”. The same that the United States of America does in Guantanamo, according to the United States, or what was done by any dictatorship. And that is legal”.
Two tragic goodbyes
Sevilla experienced closely the death of two Spanish correspondents. In November of 2001, Julio Fuentes, correspondent for El Mundo, died in Afghanistan, and in April of 2003, Jose Causo, cameramen of Telecinco, in Iraq.
“It is very difficult to describe your rage, sadness, pain, the feeling that nothing is worth. I always say this profession is worthy, except for that case. I think there is nothing that justifies losing one’s life for these type of conflicts, for this crazy scandal race. I was in Kabul with Alfonso Rojo, another workmate of El Mundo, and Julio (Fuentes) was coming to Kabul from Pakistan. The previous night we spoke to him and booked a room for him because almost all of them were taken. He was murdered the following morning by some muggers that had converted to Taliban, who killed them all just to mug them”.
“In the case of Jose Couso it is twice as sad because they were not uncontrolled bandits, but controlled: The US army. The Pentagon admitted the authorship of the attack claiming that the soldiers that shot toward the hotel Palestine, in charge of the sergeant Thomas Gibson, were replying to enemy fire, when actually it was known that there were journalists there and not mercenaries.
According to the research issued by the Central Command of the United States (Centcom), the North-American army was on the other side of the Tigris River, and had received fire from a mortar and propelled grenades, which came from the same riverbank where the hotel Palestine is. So they decided to shoot a 120 mm cannon toward the hotel. The projectile got to the 15th floor, where the journalists of Reuters agency were (it was there where the Ukrainian journalist Taras Protsyuk died). Jose Couso was shooting downstairs. However, the version of Cousos’ camera, which had been taping until his death, shows those 15 minutes before that attack in which it registered just one shot.
“That death was definitely inevitable, pointless and it demonstrates the total insensitivity and the complete despise for life that the North-American army and all its leaders have”.
“I remember that day in a dramatic way. We took him to hospital and left in the middle of the firing of guns in Bagdad to a blood bank to donate blood for him. Curiously there was enough blood, but it could not be delivered to hospitals because the city was in the middle of the combats. We were given the blood and we took it. In the end he could not survive, and the feeling of pain and sadness that remained in me is something I still have not overcome”. Fran’s angry voice breaks and his eyes moisten. He wipes his eye lids rapidly and sits down properly in his seat. “I wince when I recall it”.
Civilize the war
For Sevilla, the requirements to be a good correspondent are the same that the ones to be a good journalist or any other professional: to study. The essential subjects: History and Geography. “Students are surprised when they think I am going to talk about courage or about the boldness a journalist needs, and I do not. A war correspondent must be informed on the subject to be informed, and in order to be informed, studying is necessary. That lets you understand the reality because everything happens for a reason”.
“When somebody has to be sent to an armed conflict, youth is taken into account, but youth is good for somebody that wants to practice sports. What experience gives you is wisdom, knowledge. The problems of these youngsters they send to armed conflicts is not being young, but not having any interest on learning, because merit, for them, is being in the war, not doing well at war. That is the problem of fame in television.”
“Sometimes I feel as if we were fouls that nourish from the pain of others and I think that is terrible, that is why I have always tried not to give a first macabre or sensationalist impression of that pain, and on the other hand, to always respect the people if they do not want to talk. It is very difficult to approach somebody who is in extreme pain. Many times I decided not to do an interview. I did them when there was no other choice, but I try to be as respectful as I can; I have never tried to force anything. However, sometimes they themselves want to talk, as a way of catharsis, and that is very normal”.
“Being a foreign journalist helps. It is absurd, but the truth is that they treat you better immediately. People are willing to talk to you, to talk about their pain, because it is a way of getting rid of it.”
“In war conflicts there is much more information, another type of information, there is much more adrenaline as well, I am very fond of adrenaline and give the best of myself in circumstances with a lot of adrenaline. It is not as if it had been a conscious decision, as if I had said: I am going to be a war correspondent. I think that somebody who might have said that is actually not one, or else it is a bad war correspondent. I think it is the profession itself, life itself that shows you the way.”
“I am very aware of my limitations as a journalist. I will never get an exclusive. I was never going to be received by the Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein, or George Bush, or the chief of the Pentagon, or the Commander in Chief. I am a Spanish journalist. Nobody will trust me the big exclusive. They would give it to the New York Times, to CNN, but not me, evidently. So I do not drive crazy for those things, because I know somebody else is going to receive it. I am interested in telling what others do not tell, or that do tell as well, but from other media, not like mine, with less globalizing aims. What Bush says is going to be known one or another way. The big combats, who the winner of the battle was, will be also known. Everything I can contribute with is my talking to the people to explain how they are doing”.
“In Afghanistan, for example, I did an interview I considered to be curious and I think nobody else did it. When the invasion begun, North-American soldiers begun to what they called “humanitarian assistance”. They were yellow little bags, written in perfect English. Inside there was a small package with food, with the calories information, the Nutrition Facts. It was an absolute absurdity. There were also some little packets that said Iron, don’t eat, to keep food from humidity. One day, when I was with a family that was in a terrible condition, as everyone else in there, in a house made of adobe, with mud floor as well, and just that room with four straw mats, I was doing an interview of how they started the day, how they lived. That package stayed in the hands of the Alliance of the North, who were like the Talibans, but this time they were the good ones from the movie. They had been the evil ones not long ago, but they had become the good ones for the Occident. They would take it away from people when they lost and would sell it in the black market. That family had gotten one of those packages and offered it to me. They just took the bread cake. I would refuse, tell them I would get my own food, but they would insist as a tribute. Well, I did not deny it not to slight. One time, the man of the family grabs one of the little packets of iron and sprinkles it all over the bread cake, and then offers it to me, and through the interpreter I answer: no, no, that is poisonous. They would not understand, they thought it was like pepper, like salt. You tell me if that was absurd or not. These type of things, much more anecdotic, are the ones I look for”.
“To Arrive and get close to a conflict actually depends a lot on the circumstances. For mostly all of them I take a lot of time to know them. For example, the one of Afghanistan was a conflict I had covered long before 9/11, but where I had never been. There was no chance I would choose how to get close to that conflict from inside. The Talibans would not let me in so I had to do it through the mountains, in the North, through the area controlled by the opposition. From there I could get close the border of Kabul, and when Kabul was defeated I could get in. There was no other way of doing it but the one the circumstances enforced. As I had already covered other conflicts, I knew the importance of carrying a power unit to be able to charge the batteries of the satellite mobile phone; I knew I was not going to be able to reload electric energy in the place where I was going. Normally petrol might always be found, even for an extremely high cost. You may have the best device in the world, but if you cannot reload it, you have nothing. So I went through the mountains of Afghanistan carrying more than one hundred kilos with me: a power unit, the equipment, drinking water (because I knew it was going to be a long time until I saw drinking water again) and also potability pills. I suffered of diarrhea every day. Those are circumstances that make a mark on you.
“This thing of humanizing war is curious, because war is human. There is nothing as human as war. Amongst the way human beings have related with each other, there has always been war. War should be dehumanized to get it to be something else (laughter)”.
Two worlds
Sevilla was born in a neoghbourhood of Madrid, with certain economical shortage. He recalls a happy childhood, in which he was not aware of limitations: “My mother always says it was obvious this would be my profession because as a kid I was very anxious, always going to the external borders of the neighbourhood. Afterwards, the reality on that neighbourhood became harder, a reality of juvenile gangs, of drugs. Many of my childhood friends stayed under that reality, and at a given moment I had to live that place because I was drowning, I needed air, breath”. And he has never returned, but to visit his mother. That is why, he says, he is attached to those small things that conform happiness, which have nothing to do with the material possession.
“The only way I have put together all of these s as being a bit schizophrenic: having a double life, double personality. I tell my wife I have a ‘parallel life’. One of the last times I went to Iraq, she told me: ‘Fran, why do you still go to Iraq? It is not contributing with anything new, nor humanely, nor professionally, there is nothing new you still have not told, why do you still go to Iraq?’ And me, a bit joking, told her: ‘I swear I do not have any lovers in Bagdad’. And she stared at me and told me: ‘If you had a lover, I would understand, and would tell you to go; but if you do not even have a lover, why do you go? (Laughter)”
“But well, it is true, I have a parallel life. One thing is my reality when I am in those places and another one id that other reality. They are watertight compartments, worlds that do not blend, they are water and oil. And it is impossible, there is no incursion from one world into the other one other than what I take inside myself, other than when I come back from these conflicts and the people that is around me, my family and friends tell me my gaze seemed lost until I adapt myself, or viceversa. When I go to these places I remember my children, the people I love; but they are not present all the time, they could not be because if they were I would not be able to do my job”.
“I have an advantage that is innate because it is not my merit, and it is that I have a big capacity of adapting to circumstances, of not sleeping and not eating. I had not realized I had that capacity before. Although I also have the capacity of sleeping as much as I want and of eating until I am full, but I can spend days without eating. The last time in Pisco, in Peru, in the earthquake, I was 48 hours without eating anything, because there was nothing. I continue working and feel a bit hungry but, but it is nothing. In Iraq, during the invasion, for a month I slept an average of two hours, and I can handle it perfectly. That never led me to say I have to get out of here or to ask me why I go on doing it. Because I love what I do, it is my job, I want to tell those stories and also because I have my ego. Any journalist that tells you he or she is in those subhuman conditions and does not say he or she does it because of the ego is lying. For me, my ego is like saying I am here, I am living this, I an telling it, nobody is telling it to me, I live it, I am a part of the story with small letters”.
“The time of adjustment depends on the place. What I do seek when I return is to enjoy what I have, which is not always easy. One even learns to appreciate more the things one has, to make everything more relative, the problems compared or the problems other people have. My wife, for example, sometimes, when I am in the middle of the bombards in Beirut, writes me an email telling me if the boy has fever and then she tells me: ‘I do not know why I tell you these things, which have no importance for you compared to what you are living’. Well, they are, because things are important depending on what surrounds us. When I come back, sometimes I get upset fot stupid things, and when I stop to look at myself and try to get away from myself, I say: How can I get upset for this? How can I have such a bad temper? Well, because we are human beings, and it is like that”.
I do try to enjoy what I have. I love life and I am becoming more and more hedonist. I love living and consider that the great pleasures have nothing to do with the economy, although economy might help. Besides, it is also a way of paying tribute somehow to people that do not have that. It would be absurd if I, who have the possibility of enjoying that, would not do so. It would be as if I despised it. Many times, when I think of my dead friends, I enjoy for them. It is a way of paying tribute to them and to the people I have met all over the world that are having a bad time”.
The smell of death
In the summary of a conference that Fran Sevilla gave in Malaga in the year 2006, I run into some words that thrilled me. It said: “I have had the smell of horror with me for a long time, the smell of decomposed bodies, the smell of death and it will never leave you alone again. It will come through your mouth and stay between the nose and the pit of the stomach. You arrive to the hotel, get into the shower and rub strongly but it will still be there”. I therefore asked him what that smell to death meant.
“The smell of death is something terrible. After so many years one has the feeling of being a survivor, with so many partners having died, so much people having died. And I guess a bit for the Jewish-Christian culture I am a son of I feel a bit of guilt. It is not that I want to die, on the contrary. But if there is a sort of guilt, because in the end one survives and does not die. In the case of the colleagues it feels much closer, in the case of people, one knows many of them, who remain there, are going to die. We always have a return ticket. And it is real. You can stay more time in Afghanistan, in Iraq, but unless death crosses my path, I always have my safe-guard to return to paradise. The people that surrounds me does not have that possibility and that privilege generates in me a feeling of guilt”.
We had been talking for more than two hours when Fran realized that it was late for his broadcast to Spain. He stood up like discharged by an elastic off the couch, he said goodbye really quickly and left running to the elevators to get to his room. Two days afterwards he was going back to Costa Rica, his “headquarters” those days.
When seen in detail, Fran Sevilla’s physical context, not only his nose, seems to belong to an aquiline world. And not an eagle in hunting position, but in a sighting one, like the bird alighting on a branch, with his wings wound up, and which moves its head toward that precise place that needs to be scrutinized with the sight.
After talking to him, another peculiarity arises: he has not got used to death yet. He probably never will. He feels guilt for knowing that he counts on a “safeguard” to get out of the horror, unless death crosses his path.
“I am very hobbesian. As the XVI century philosopher used to say, I think ‘men are a luxury to men’. I think the human being condition is terrible. In the world, the way our societies are planned, they are an invitation to despise, to hate the other; and that generates violence. In that sense I am not very optimistic. Thinking a sophism in journalistic terms: It is not that I am a pessimist, but an optimistic well-informed, because I think the world is doing badly and I do not think it will get any better. I have seen so much cruelty, so much despise. But on the other hand, I stick as much as I can to life, and I would like to continue betting on life, not just my life, but everyone else’s life as well. If it were not like this I would have already quitted this profession”.
“I consider things can be done. I do not have that youth dream in which we are all very nice and we all love each other anymore, but I do believe in the small times, in the capacity one may have to share, to help, to contribute with happiness in our midst somehow; and as a journalist, in the capacity of reporting concrete realities that may be useful to make that reality better. That is what I do. I am aware that changing the world is very difficult and I think it is going to be more and more difficult as time goes by”.
In the whirlpool
On May the 21st, 2004, Sevilla was kidnapped in Iraq by militias of the Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. That was probably the occasion in which he perceived death more closely. Through his opened satellite mobile phone, he transmitted his kidnap live through Radio Nacional España. That same day he got to be imprisoned two times, and was released both times through a spokesperson of Al Sadr to whom Sevilla had interviewed a few weeks before. The second time, his interpreter was hit and a bag was put in his head. They remained imprisoned for three hours and a half.
A lot of eastern people tell Sevilla that he has got “Baraka”. Luck seems to be on his side. “Evidently there is some luck, and if it does not come with you, as it happened to Julio Fuentes in Afghanistan, then there is nothing to do”.
With these he particularly refers to an afternoon in which having changed his habits saved his life. When he returned to Madrid after the invasion of Afghanistan, he had an asthmatic crisis that forced him to quit smoking. In Iraq, not to devolve on the habit, he adopted another one: smoking narghile (water smoking pipe), generally done in the Paraiso square, the same place where the statues of Sadam Hussein that had been knocked down during the invasion were found. He did that every day, during sunset, when the sky changed its color and people were called for the prayer of the Magreb. At that same time, during those days, there were some bombards going on. The narghile became a way of dealing with the anguish. One afternoon, when he was at the square, the hotel where he was staying, called Palestine, was attacked by a car bomb.
Baraka.
“I do not know if the toughest situation I have had has been the one of the kidnap in Iraq, but it was the most dangerous, because they were going to kill Samir, my interpreter, and me. That is when I really felt I was going to be murdered”.
“I have lived dangerous situations, but feat is free and each one directs it in a different way. In that moment I would not think of anything. Evidently, I knew my life was in danger, but I have had worst experiences in situations in which other people have been in danger and I can see another’s suffering. That happened a lot to me with the Palestinians in Gaza. Talking to people, seeing how their houses, their crop fields, had been destroyed, and that such thing was done by somebody that has suffered so much, the self-proclaimed representatives of the Jewish people which is Israel, and seeing that insensitivity, that savageness, it is then that I get upset and I concentrate rage”.
One of the stories that shook him the most was when the Israeli troop entered Ramala and destroyed the cultural centre and the library, which had been donated by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. “They destroyed the books and peed. Everything with an incredible savageness. It is said that Israel is a civilized country, but it is so in its behavior toward the foreign. Of course, Israel is a democracy, but just for Jewish people. There is a respect for the internal law and there is what could be called a civilized state, with all the objections, as any other civilized country; however, facing the Palestinians they are quite the opposite, there torturing is legal, but only if it is aimed at the Palestinians. Of course, it is not legal to torture a Jewish, but it is to a Palestinian. That is sustained by the Supreme Court of Israel in one of those decisions that disgraces the concept of justice. Of course, they do not call it torture, but “moderated physical pressure”. The same that the United States of America does in Guantanamo, according to the United States, or what was done by any dictatorship. And that is legal”.
Two tragic goodbyes
Sevilla experienced closely the death of two Spanish correspondents. In November of 2001, Julio Fuentes, correspondent for El Mundo, died in Afghanistan, and in April of 2003, Jose Causo, cameramen of Telecinco, in Iraq.
“It is very difficult to describe your rage, sadness, pain, the feeling that nothing is worth. I always say this profession is worthy, except for that case. I think there is nothing that justifies losing one’s life for these type of conflicts, for this crazy scandal race. I was in Kabul with Alfonso Rojo, another workmate of El Mundo, and Julio (Fuentes) was coming to Kabul from Pakistan. The previous night we spoke to him and booked a room for him because almost all of them were taken. He was murdered the following morning by some muggers that had converted to Taliban, who killed them all just to mug them”.
“In the case of Jose Couso it is twice as sad because they were not uncontrolled bandits, but controlled: The US army. The Pentagon admitted the authorship of the attack claiming that the soldiers that shot toward the hotel Palestine, in charge of the sergeant Thomas Gibson, were replying to enemy fire, when actually it was known that there were journalists there and not mercenaries.
According to the research issued by the Central Command of the United States (Centcom), the North-American army was on the other side of the Tigris River, and had received fire from a mortar and propelled grenades, which came from the same riverbank where the hotel Palestine is. So they decided to shoot a 120 mm cannon toward the hotel. The projectile got to the 15th floor, where the journalists of Reuters agency were (it was there where the Ukrainian journalist Taras Protsyuk died). Jose Couso was shooting downstairs. However, the version of Cousos’ camera, which had been taping until his death, shows those 15 minutes before that attack in which it registered just one shot.
“That death was definitely inevitable, pointless and it demonstrates the total insensitivity and the complete despise for life that the North-American army and all its leaders have”.
“I remember that day in a dramatic way. We took him to hospital and left in the middle of the firing of guns in Bagdad to a blood bank to donate blood for him. Curiously there was enough blood, but it could not be delivered to hospitals because the city was in the middle of the combats. We were given the blood and we took it. In the end he could not survive, and the feeling of pain and sadness that remained in me is something I still have not overcome”. Fran’s angry voice breaks and his eyes moisten. He wipes his eye lids rapidly and sits down properly in his seat. “I wince when I recall it”.
Civilize the war
For Sevilla, the requirements to be a good correspondent are the same that the ones to be a good journalist or any other professional: to study. The essential subjects: History and Geography. “Students are surprised when they think I am going to talk about courage or about the boldness a journalist needs, and I do not. A war correspondent must be informed on the subject to be informed, and in order to be informed, studying is necessary. That lets you understand the reality because everything happens for a reason”.
“When somebody has to be sent to an armed conflict, youth is taken into account, but youth is good for somebody that wants to practice sports. What experience gives you is wisdom, knowledge. The problems of these youngsters they send to armed conflicts is not being young, but not having any interest on learning, because merit, for them, is being in the war, not doing well at war. That is the problem of fame in television.”
“Sometimes I feel as if we were fouls that nourish from the pain of others and I think that is terrible, that is why I have always tried not to give a first macabre or sensationalist impression of that pain, and on the other hand, to always respect the people if they do not want to talk. It is very difficult to approach somebody who is in extreme pain. Many times I decided not to do an interview. I did them when there was no other choice, but I try to be as respectful as I can; I have never tried to force anything. However, sometimes they themselves want to talk, as a way of catharsis, and that is very normal”.
“Being a foreign journalist helps. It is absurd, but the truth is that they treat you better immediately. People are willing to talk to you, to talk about their pain, because it is a way of getting rid of it.”
“In war conflicts there is much more information, another type of information, there is much more adrenaline as well, I am very fond of adrenaline and give the best of myself in circumstances with a lot of adrenaline. It is not as if it had been a conscious decision, as if I had said: I am going to be a war correspondent. I think that somebody who might have said that is actually not one, or else it is a bad war correspondent. I think it is the profession itself, life itself that shows you the way.”
“I am very aware of my limitations as a journalist. I will never get an exclusive. I was never going to be received by the Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein, or George Bush, or the chief of the Pentagon, or the Commander in Chief. I am a Spanish journalist. Nobody will trust me the big exclusive. They would give it to the New York Times, to CNN, but not me, evidently. So I do not drive crazy for those things, because I know somebody else is going to receive it. I am interested in telling what others do not tell, or that do tell as well, but from other media, not like mine, with less globalizing aims. What Bush says is going to be known one or another way. The big combats, who the winner of the battle was, will be also known. Everything I can contribute with is my talking to the people to explain how they are doing”.
“In Afghanistan, for example, I did an interview I considered to be curious and I think nobody else did it. When the invasion begun, North-American soldiers begun to what they called “humanitarian assistance”. They were yellow little bags, written in perfect English. Inside there was a small package with food, with the calories information, the Nutrition Facts. It was an absolute absurdity. There were also some little packets that said Iron, don’t eat, to keep food from humidity. One day, when I was with a family that was in a terrible condition, as everyone else in there, in a house made of adobe, with mud floor as well, and just that room with four straw mats, I was doing an interview of how they started the day, how they lived. That package stayed in the hands of the Alliance of the North, who were like the Talibans, but this time they were the good ones from the movie. They had been the evil ones not long ago, but they had become the good ones for the Occident. They would take it away from people when they lost and would sell it in the black market. That family had gotten one of those packages and offered it to me. They just took the bread cake. I would refuse, tell them I would get my own food, but they would insist as a tribute. Well, I did not deny it not to slight. One time, the man of the family grabs one of the little packets of iron and sprinkles it all over the bread cake, and then offers it to me, and through the interpreter I answer: no, no, that is poisonous. They would not understand, they thought it was like pepper, like salt. You tell me if that was absurd or not. These type of things, much more anecdotic, are the ones I look for”.
“To Arrive and get close to a conflict actually depends a lot on the circumstances. For mostly all of them I take a lot of time to know them. For example, the one of Afghanistan was a conflict I had covered long before 9/11, but where I had never been. There was no chance I would choose how to get close to that conflict from inside. The Talibans would not let me in so I had to do it through the mountains, in the North, through the area controlled by the opposition. From there I could get close the border of Kabul, and when Kabul was defeated I could get in. There was no other way of doing it but the one the circumstances enforced. As I had already covered other conflicts, I knew the importance of carrying a power unit to be able to charge the batteries of the satellite mobile phone; I knew I was not going to be able to reload electric energy in the place where I was going. Normally petrol might always be found, even for an extremely high cost. You may have the best device in the world, but if you cannot reload it, you have nothing. So I went through the mountains of Afghanistan carrying more than one hundred kilos with me: a power unit, the equipment, drinking water (because I knew it was going to be a long time until I saw drinking water again) and also potability pills. I suffered of diarrhea every day. Those are circumstances that make a mark on you.
“This thing of humanizing war is curious, because war is human. There is nothing as human as war. Amongst the way human beings have related with each other, there has always been war. War should be dehumanized to get it to be something else (laughter)”.
Two worlds
Sevilla was born in a neoghbourhood of Madrid, with certain economical shortage. He recalls a happy childhood, in which he was not aware of limitations: “My mother always says it was obvious this would be my profession because as a kid I was very anxious, always going to the external borders of the neighbourhood. Afterwards, the reality on that neighbourhood became harder, a reality of juvenile gangs, of drugs. Many of my childhood friends stayed under that reality, and at a given moment I had to live that place because I was drowning, I needed air, breath”. And he has never returned, but to visit his mother. That is why, he says, he is attached to those small things that conform happiness, which have nothing to do with the material possession.
“The only way I have put together all of these s as being a bit schizophrenic: having a double life, double personality. I tell my wife I have a ‘parallel life’. One of the last times I went to Iraq, she told me: ‘Fran, why do you still go to Iraq? It is not contributing with anything new, nor humanely, nor professionally, there is nothing new you still have not told, why do you still go to Iraq?’ And me, a bit joking, told her: ‘I swear I do not have any lovers in Bagdad’. And she stared at me and told me: ‘If you had a lover, I would understand, and would tell you to go; but if you do not even have a lover, why do you go? (Laughter)”
“But well, it is true, I have a parallel life. One thing is my reality when I am in those places and another one id that other reality. They are watertight compartments, worlds that do not blend, they are water and oil. And it is impossible, there is no incursion from one world into the other one other than what I take inside myself, other than when I come back from these conflicts and the people that is around me, my family and friends tell me my gaze seemed lost until I adapt myself, or viceversa. When I go to these places I remember my children, the people I love; but they are not present all the time, they could not be because if they were I would not be able to do my job”.
“I have an advantage that is innate because it is not my merit, and it is that I have a big capacity of adapting to circumstances, of not sleeping and not eating. I had not realized I had that capacity before. Although I also have the capacity of sleeping as much as I want and of eating until I am full, but I can spend days without eating. The last time in Pisco, in Peru, in the earthquake, I was 48 hours without eating anything, because there was nothing. I continue working and feel a bit hungry but, but it is nothing. In Iraq, during the invasion, for a month I slept an average of two hours, and I can handle it perfectly. That never led me to say I have to get out of here or to ask me why I go on doing it. Because I love what I do, it is my job, I want to tell those stories and also because I have my ego. Any journalist that tells you he or she is in those subhuman conditions and does not say he or she does it because of the ego is lying. For me, my ego is like saying I am here, I am living this, I an telling it, nobody is telling it to me, I live it, I am a part of the story with small letters”.
“The time of adjustment depends on the place. What I do seek when I return is to enjoy what I have, which is not always easy. One even learns to appreciate more the things one has, to make everything more relative, the problems compared or the problems other people have. My wife, for example, sometimes, when I am in the middle of the bombards in Beirut, writes me an email telling me if the boy has fever and then she tells me: ‘I do not know why I tell you these things, which have no importance for you compared to what you are living’. Well, they are, because things are important depending on what surrounds us. When I come back, sometimes I get upset fot stupid things, and when I stop to look at myself and try to get away from myself, I say: How can I get upset for this? How can I have such a bad temper? Well, because we are human beings, and it is like that”.
I do try to enjoy what I have. I love life and I am becoming more and more hedonist. I love living and consider that the great pleasures have nothing to do with the economy, although economy might help. Besides, it is also a way of paying tribute somehow to people that do not have that. It would be absurd if I, who have the possibility of enjoying that, would not do so. It would be as if I despised it. Many times, when I think of my dead friends, I enjoy for them. It is a way of paying tribute to them and to the people I have met all over the world that are having a bad time”.
The smell of death
In the summary of a conference that Fran Sevilla gave in Malaga in the year 2006, I run into some words that thrilled me. It said: “I have had the smell of horror with me for a long time, the smell of decomposed bodies, the smell of death and it will never leave you alone again. It will come through your mouth and stay between the nose and the pit of the stomach. You arrive to the hotel, get into the shower and rub strongly but it will still be there”. I therefore asked him what that smell to death meant.
“The smell of death is something terrible. After so many years one has the feeling of being a survivor, with so many partners having died, so much people having died. And I guess a bit for the Jewish-Christian culture I am a son of I feel a bit of guilt. It is not that I want to die, on the contrary. But if there is a sort of guilt, because in the end one survives and does not die. In the case of the colleagues it feels much closer, in the case of people, one knows many of them, who remain there, are going to die. We always have a return ticket. And it is real. You can stay more time in Afghanistan, in Iraq, but unless death crosses my path, I always have my safe-guard to return to paradise. The people that surrounds me does not have that possibility and that privilege generates in me a feeling of guilt”.
We had been talking for more than two hours when Fran realized that it was late for his broadcast to Spain. He stood up like discharged by an elastic off the couch, he said goodbye really quickly and left running to the elevators to get to his room. Two days afterwards he was going back to Costa Rica, his “headquarters” those days.
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“Every war has something in common: there is always an innocent victim who nobody ever recalls”: Fran Sevilla. (Photos Courtesy Fran Sevilla/Seinforma Canada)
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“To be a good journalist -I am not saying war correspondent, because I do not like those words too much- there has to be an unavoidable commitment with the victims”. (Photos Courtesy Fran Sevilla/Seinforma Canada)
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Afghanistan
SPECIAL SERIES
MIGRATIONS
Migrations: Routes, Dreams and Reality
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Cuban emigration is not the highest
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The Tamil Protests:
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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.
05/20/09
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas.- In December of 2007, Fran Sevilla visited Caracas for a couple of days to cover, as a correspondent of Radio Nacional de España, the approbatory referendum of the changes proposed by the National Assembly to the Venezuelan Constitution. The indefinite reelection, one of the bigest bets of President Hugo Chavez, was at stake. A strong tension could be breathed in the country and, from the perspective of many international journalists, Venezuela could be facing an armed conflict: an electoral process and two bands which did not seem to be willing to accept the other’s victory.
The story was different: Chavez’ band recognized having been beaten and the country went on almost without changes.
Some days before that election, I approached the hotel Altamira Suites, where Fran Sevilla was staying at. We spoke for a long time, close to the restaurant. Despite being a radio correspondent (RNE) Sevilla has achieved great importance in his country. His work has been recognized in various occasions: he received the 2001 Victor de la Serna Award to the Best Journalist; the 2001 Annual Award of Human Rights in Journalism awarded by the Association for the Human Rights from Spain; the 2001 Chirlillo Rodriguez Award to the Best Correspondent; the 2002 Luis del Olmo First Prize to Freedom for the defense of the values of freedom and tolerance; and the 2002 Cooperation Award, awarded by the Association of Arab Journalists of the International Press Club. The most recent one he has received was the 2008 Rey de España Award on Radio Journalism for a research made in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
A Craftsman’s profession
For Sevilla, every war has something in common: there is always an innocent victim who nobody ever recalls. “To be a good journalist -I am not saying war correspondent, because I do not like that word very much- there has to be an unavoidable commitment with the victims. If that commitment is not clear, then the job is not being properly done. Or else you are doing another type of job in which I am not interested. I am not interested in grandiosity, or bombings, or big geostrategic military decisions. They are important, I attempt to know them and tell them as well, but all that means nothing if the coverage of an armed conflict does not fulfill its commitment toward the victim.”
Sevilla has been close to the big conflicts of the last years: Iraq and Afghanistan. Two wars that, according to him, have been closer to scandal and propaganda than to human drama. “Mediatic conflicts”, he points out. “I think both places are inadmissible within journalistic terms. Those conflicts are terrible, brutal, but their impact in the mass media tends to point toward scandal and remain with no content. They are also mediatic conflicts in the sense that the mass media have turned into propaganda media. In the mass media there is a type of pyramid with the North-American chains placed at the cups and from that point down follow the rest of the media in the world; but it is them who impose the tendency, either we want it or not. That is what happens in a world communicatively globalised. So of course, those types of wars don’t seem to have that dramatic load. In the United States of America, violence is not seen, nor is death, or blood.”
“I was very surprised when in the year 2003 the important media withdrew all their people from Iraq two days before the invasion, quitting to tell what would be the most important: being in Bagdad describing how everything was seen from the inside, what the bombards were going to be like. Afterwards they returned, but with the North-American troops. I remember a very well known character from CNN that arrived in a military car and a soldier carrying his luggage. It was then that I realized how the mass media quit the possibility of becoming narrators of the reality, to become propagandists of what is going on.”
“I am not against journalists becoming famous; I am against the journalist becoming the main character. The television is a media that points toward the leadership of the journalists. With the influence of television the roles switch over. Some time ago, if you were a famous person you would appear on television. But nowadays it is the other way round: you are famous because you appear on television.”
Other than defending the journalistic occupation, what Sevilla defends is the profession: “An almost crafty conception of journalism in which oneself, through small stories or big stories, goes shaping a reality which seems as close as reality as it may be. The television networks make a virtual reality which has nothing to do with the reality of the streets.”
“War journalism is useful depending on the journalism done. The one I am used to doing is used to inform against an unfair world, cruel and brutal. Things do not happen just because, they are nor spontaneous generation. There is always a reason, which is normally related to injustice, exclusion and misery. War journalism is useful to, through the stories of the people that suffer, make the people that listen to us, that read and see us, understand that war is good for nothing, that it normally has an unfair origin and almost always an unfair outcome.”
Giddy Learning
The first armed conflict Sevilla had t olive was the Nicaraguan, between Sandinistas and the Counterpart, in the year 83. Short after that he continued to Guatemala: “That touched me forever. I was a long time with the guerrilla in the mountains. I was very young those days. I was 24 years old and that war touched me both professionally and humanely. I came from a Spain that had come out from the dictatorship, that was consolidating in democracy and had learnt to respect the others, the values; I came from a Europe, let’s call it ‘civilized’ in conflicts - at least for that moment, as it was afterwards demonstrated with Yugoslavia that it was not like that-. When I was in Central-America I saw for the first time a country in which that was worth nothing. In Guatemala there was an absolute contempt for the life of the other people. It was then that I realized that my commitment had to do with the victims, with those that have no name and that then become a constant in every war”.
In 1984 Sevilla got to Guatemala from Mexico. He was 24 years old and worked as a free-lance journalist. He had just finished interviewing Guatemalan leaders from the exile. For that moment, diplomatic relations between Guatemala and Spain had just been recovered, after the assault in 1980 to the Spanish Embassy, where the Priest Rigoberta Menchu died burnt, together with other peasants that had locked themselves up in the embassy as an action of protest. Due to the delicate situation they still had with Spain, his passport, which also showed his passage through Nicaragua and Cuba, caused him a 24 hour hold back in the border.
An officer offered himself to take him to the capital city. “As we were arriving, that officer showed me the chain of volcanoes. In one of them he told me: ‘Look, there is where we throw the opponents from helicopters’. That’s how he said it, and he continued: ‘Because this thing of the Human Rights is worthless. It is better if they do not appear’. From that moment on, everything I lived, the contact with the guerrilla, going with them to a place in the centre of the country for a week, was a very revealing experience, and a very tough one; it was like feeling the journalist was that, being there and not in the big and luxurious hotels”.
“In that first trip I started being aware of the reality Latin-America. It was a giddy learning, realizing in such a short time all that terrible reality existed. Guatemala was called The Laboratory of Horror, because many of the techniques of counter-insurgency, which were afterwards put into practice in a big part of the dictatorships of Latin-America, were rehearsed there first. Guatemala is not known for its disappeared inhabitants; however, it has much less population than Argentina, and more disappeared people”.
“I caught the last years of that conflict. I simply realized of a model which is similar in the rest of the Central-American countries, which are conflicts of ‘unite zero’. There was a violence that had a reason for being, as it rose from a marginalization, from an exclusion, from a social misery. So the end of the armed conflicts has not been the end of the injustice and as the situation of injustice generates violence, now that violence is seen as a type of juvenile delinquency and it keeps on generating the number of deaths than the armed conflicts. The social reality is still more or less the same: a part of the population is marginalized, condemned to misery, and a minority, an elite, controls the country and the wealth”.
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas.- In December of 2007, Fran Sevilla visited Caracas for a couple of days to cover, as a correspondent of Radio Nacional de España, the approbatory referendum of the changes proposed by the National Assembly to the Venezuelan Constitution. The indefinite reelection, one of the bigest bets of President Hugo Chavez, was at stake. A strong tension could be breathed in the country and, from the perspective of many international journalists, Venezuela could be facing an armed conflict: an electoral process and two bands which did not seem to be willing to accept the other’s victory.
The story was different: Chavez’ band recognized having been beaten and the country went on almost without changes.
Some days before that election, I approached the hotel Altamira Suites, where Fran Sevilla was staying at. We spoke for a long time, close to the restaurant. Despite being a radio correspondent (RNE) Sevilla has achieved great importance in his country. His work has been recognized in various occasions: he received the 2001 Victor de la Serna Award to the Best Journalist; the 2001 Annual Award of Human Rights in Journalism awarded by the Association for the Human Rights from Spain; the 2001 Chirlillo Rodriguez Award to the Best Correspondent; the 2002 Luis del Olmo First Prize to Freedom for the defense of the values of freedom and tolerance; and the 2002 Cooperation Award, awarded by the Association of Arab Journalists of the International Press Club. The most recent one he has received was the 2008 Rey de España Award on Radio Journalism for a research made in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
A Craftsman’s profession
For Sevilla, every war has something in common: there is always an innocent victim who nobody ever recalls. “To be a good journalist -I am not saying war correspondent, because I do not like that word very much- there has to be an unavoidable commitment with the victims. If that commitment is not clear, then the job is not being properly done. Or else you are doing another type of job in which I am not interested. I am not interested in grandiosity, or bombings, or big geostrategic military decisions. They are important, I attempt to know them and tell them as well, but all that means nothing if the coverage of an armed conflict does not fulfill its commitment toward the victim.”
Sevilla has been close to the big conflicts of the last years: Iraq and Afghanistan. Two wars that, according to him, have been closer to scandal and propaganda than to human drama. “Mediatic conflicts”, he points out. “I think both places are inadmissible within journalistic terms. Those conflicts are terrible, brutal, but their impact in the mass media tends to point toward scandal and remain with no content. They are also mediatic conflicts in the sense that the mass media have turned into propaganda media. In the mass media there is a type of pyramid with the North-American chains placed at the cups and from that point down follow the rest of the media in the world; but it is them who impose the tendency, either we want it or not. That is what happens in a world communicatively globalised. So of course, those types of wars don’t seem to have that dramatic load. In the United States of America, violence is not seen, nor is death, or blood.”
“I was very surprised when in the year 2003 the important media withdrew all their people from Iraq two days before the invasion, quitting to tell what would be the most important: being in Bagdad describing how everything was seen from the inside, what the bombards were going to be like. Afterwards they returned, but with the North-American troops. I remember a very well known character from CNN that arrived in a military car and a soldier carrying his luggage. It was then that I realized how the mass media quit the possibility of becoming narrators of the reality, to become propagandists of what is going on.”
“I am not against journalists becoming famous; I am against the journalist becoming the main character. The television is a media that points toward the leadership of the journalists. With the influence of television the roles switch over. Some time ago, if you were a famous person you would appear on television. But nowadays it is the other way round: you are famous because you appear on television.”
Other than defending the journalistic occupation, what Sevilla defends is the profession: “An almost crafty conception of journalism in which oneself, through small stories or big stories, goes shaping a reality which seems as close as reality as it may be. The television networks make a virtual reality which has nothing to do with the reality of the streets.”
“War journalism is useful depending on the journalism done. The one I am used to doing is used to inform against an unfair world, cruel and brutal. Things do not happen just because, they are nor spontaneous generation. There is always a reason, which is normally related to injustice, exclusion and misery. War journalism is useful to, through the stories of the people that suffer, make the people that listen to us, that read and see us, understand that war is good for nothing, that it normally has an unfair origin and almost always an unfair outcome.”
Giddy Learning
The first armed conflict Sevilla had t olive was the Nicaraguan, between Sandinistas and the Counterpart, in the year 83. Short after that he continued to Guatemala: “That touched me forever. I was a long time with the guerrilla in the mountains. I was very young those days. I was 24 years old and that war touched me both professionally and humanely. I came from a Spain that had come out from the dictatorship, that was consolidating in democracy and had learnt to respect the others, the values; I came from a Europe, let’s call it ‘civilized’ in conflicts - at least for that moment, as it was afterwards demonstrated with Yugoslavia that it was not like that-. When I was in Central-America I saw for the first time a country in which that was worth nothing. In Guatemala there was an absolute contempt for the life of the other people. It was then that I realized that my commitment had to do with the victims, with those that have no name and that then become a constant in every war”.
In 1984 Sevilla got to Guatemala from Mexico. He was 24 years old and worked as a free-lance journalist. He had just finished interviewing Guatemalan leaders from the exile. For that moment, diplomatic relations between Guatemala and Spain had just been recovered, after the assault in 1980 to the Spanish Embassy, where the Priest Rigoberta Menchu died burnt, together with other peasants that had locked themselves up in the embassy as an action of protest. Due to the delicate situation they still had with Spain, his passport, which also showed his passage through Nicaragua and Cuba, caused him a 24 hour hold back in the border.
An officer offered himself to take him to the capital city. “As we were arriving, that officer showed me the chain of volcanoes. In one of them he told me: ‘Look, there is where we throw the opponents from helicopters’. That’s how he said it, and he continued: ‘Because this thing of the Human Rights is worthless. It is better if they do not appear’. From that moment on, everything I lived, the contact with the guerrilla, going with them to a place in the centre of the country for a week, was a very revealing experience, and a very tough one; it was like feeling the journalist was that, being there and not in the big and luxurious hotels”.
“In that first trip I started being aware of the reality Latin-America. It was a giddy learning, realizing in such a short time all that terrible reality existed. Guatemala was called The Laboratory of Horror, because many of the techniques of counter-insurgency, which were afterwards put into practice in a big part of the dictatorships of Latin-America, were rehearsed there first. Guatemala is not known for its disappeared inhabitants; however, it has much less population than Argentina, and more disappeared people”.
“I caught the last years of that conflict. I simply realized of a model which is similar in the rest of the Central-American countries, which are conflicts of ‘unite zero’. There was a violence that had a reason for being, as it rose from a marginalization, from an exclusion, from a social misery. So the end of the armed conflicts has not been the end of the injustice and as the situation of injustice generates violence, now that violence is seen as a type of juvenile delinquency and it keeps on generating the number of deaths than the armed conflicts. The social reality is still more or less the same: a part of the population is marginalized, condemned to misery, and a minority, an elite, controls the country and the wealth”.