Dateline the 1980s: In the Midst of Confusion and Fear in Central America

To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013

 


 

The back alleys of Washington led me to the wars of Central America. We’re talking 1978. I was 27 years old, and I had absolutely no experience with combat or with killing. Then, all that changed.

The Washington Post metro desk had assigned me to cover immigrant communities in and around the nation’s capital, and I soon discovered among the busboys and dishwashers of the city that a lot of them came from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Many had no papers. Many went to the Centro Catolico in Mount Pleasant for help. They depended on its director, a Capuchin priest named Sean O’Malley, for support. And as I got to know them through him, at first, I started to get to know something about their wars.

In those long and bloody struggles, priests and nuns were advocates for the poor, sources for the press, and, all too often, victims of the murderous dictatorships. The battles raging when I started my reporting in Washington were in Nicaragua. I watched from a safe distance, covering protest demonstrations in D.C., as the Sandinista rebels fought their way toward Managua. And suddenly Central America, so long forgotten by North America, seemed to be all over the news all the time.

In 1979, I took my first trip to the region, accompanying a group of Salvadoran indocumentados deported by the American authorities. I followed some of them to their villages, and was just writing up my story at the Camino Real hotel in San Salvador when a group of demonstrators allied to the guerrillas occupied the French embassy there.

Suddenly, this forgotten backwater — a Washington Post columnist called it “a Twinkie-shaped country” — became a front page story, and I was there on the ground. I called the embassy and got some of the occupiers on the phone. I went to the scene. Thus far it all felt like metro reporting. Then a Salvadoran officer saw me taking a picture, rushed toward me, and stuck a submachine gun in my gut. I put down the camera. Another, more experienced reporter nearby stepped in to mediate. The officer calmed down.

For several days I stayed in San Salvador talking to representatives of the group holding the embassy, and then, finally, I boarded a plane for New York. When I landed, I called the desk in D.C.

“Boy, you sure missed it,” said the news aide who handled logistics.

“What do you mean? What happened?”

“Looks like 20 or 30 people were killed on the steps of the cathedral.”

Eventually I saw the massacre on television, filmed by an incredibly brave Mexican cameraman with a wonderful name, Domingo Rex, who held his position between security forces and demonstrators as the security forces mowed down the people on the cathedral steps.

This was the first time I felt guilty for missing an event that was dangerous to attend and horrible to behold. But after a few years in the region, I accepted that I could not always be in the middle of the action, and the action that I was in was awful enough.

When I moved from Washington to Mexico City in February 1980, the Nicaragua war was over, or so we thought. And the Salvadoran war was just about to begin in earnest. Veteran correspondents now flooded into the Camino Real. The hotel became a dorm for the wayward press corps. Several set up offices. Some of the older men brought in women while some of the younger men and women in the corps had affairs. There is, in any war zone, a tremendous sense of personal license — lives out of control in a world out of control — which may be why a fair number of correspondents who don’t get shot or blown up, die young nonetheless.

To kill time we watched pirated movies in the offices of the TV networks: “The Year of Living Dangerously” was set in Indonesia but felt like it was about us; Woody Allen’s “Bananas” caught the craziness of the politics we covered every day. To raise our spirits, we wore t-shirts with targets on them and the number we’d been given by the death squads on their death lists. In El Salvador, corpses were used as messages, left, in various states of mutilation, on roadsides and at least once on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

Over the next four years, a lot of my friends were killed and wounded — more than I can write about here. I remember the first was Ian Mates, a soundman for ITN, back when TV crews were two-person teams. He had helped guide me out of the madness in the San Salvador cathedral when the murdered archbishop was being buried. Amid gunshots, firebombs and panic, at least 35 people died there that day. A few months later on a back road on the way to meet guerrillas, Ian tripped a makeshift mine that killed him. During the guerrillas’ “final offensive” in January 1981, after a night of fatalistic partying in the Camino Real, Olivier Rebbot went out to cover the fighting and came back with a bullet in his chest. He died several weeks later.

My friend John Hoagland was a photographer who lived by the Robert Capa maxim that if your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough. And one day near the town of Suchitoto, having covered the guerrillas in a confused firefight, he waited for the government forces to advance, to get close enough, which they did. And one of them shot him.

Dial Torgerson of the Los Angeles Times had been a wonderful colleague at our home base in Mexico and in the field. He was in his fifties, a man of the world, and you could not meet him without thinking he defined the word “gentleman.” He and photographer Richard Cross were trying to cover a story about the U.S. backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua operating out of Honduras in 1983 when their car hit a mine, and both Dial and Richard died.

A little before that, and three short and bloody years after I’d first arrived in Central America, I had traveled with the Contras myself in the wilds of Nicaragua. I’d nearly died of dehydration and exhaustion, and James LeMoyne, who was with Newsweek then, and afterward moved to The New York Times — saved my life.

One learns over the years that wars are begun by people sure that they are on the side of good against evil, but they are waged by people in the midst of confusion and fear. We journalists are spectators, voyeurs, observers, witnesses — all of those labels are valid — just trying to make sense of it all. And while I have covered many other wars over the last 30 years, the basic truism I learned in Central America has stayed with me: there may be righteous wars and cynical ones, there may be wars of choice and wars of necessity. But there are no good wars. None at all.