Buying the Night Flight Read online

  In trying to figure out why Americans did not care all that much about reading about Latin America, I realized that in part we correspondents were acronyming Americans to death in the area. Every story was about the PRD defeating the MNL, which had just merged with the GDU and the splinter HYU for the first time in history. Many of the stories were simply unreadable. At the same time, the really great movements of history were hardly being observed or interpreted -- like the Indian land rebellions in the mountains; or the descendants of the Incas sweeping down from the Andes and becoming citified cholos; like the new priest-guerrillas; or spectacular movements to develop the interior.

  I thus determined to cover trends, to try to pull together the great social movements and to explain them in their entirety and cross-nationally. Whether covering the new populist military or the Cuban-Russian split over guerrilla warfare in the sixties, I tried to go across national lines and trace the changes in all the countries. By writing in terms of real people, in terms of history, and in terms of tales and legends and adventures, I began to be published widely -- people would read about Latin America!

  And there were tales and legends -- and even present-day legendary kingdoms -- everywhere in Latin America. One year, for in stance, while visiting Colombia, I went out to see the military about going to Marquetalia. Marquetalia was one of five "Communist republics" that the Moscow-line Communist Party in Colombia had established during the terrible years of "La Violencia" in the fifties and sixties, when 200,000 persons were killed. That awful and pathological violence was the exact predecessor to the Central American violence of the '80s. Marquetalia could survive, in a kind of peasant agrarian socialism, because it was so very, very isolated in the great black mountains of southern Colombia. It was "autonomous" and it was ruled by the infamous Tiro Fijo ("Sure Shot"). A brutal bandit boss, with a flat face and slit eyes, Tiro Fijo ruled Marquetalia, the hidden republic of three thousand persons, with a mailed fist that was only very secondarily "Communist."

  By the time I went to Marquetalia in 1966, the army had pretty much taken over all the republics. We flew in a helicopter over the massive, barren mountains, which then gave way to lower, greener ones that flowed into precipitous valleys, which in turn seemed themselves always to fall off at some point into still lower, hidden valleys.

  The copter whirred down on the even ground amidst a number of small wooden houses that later, much later, reminded me of another doomed colony: Jonestown in Guyana. We got out. We were going to stay the night there with the small contingent of Colombian soldiers. Already the Marquetalians, whatever was left of them, had fled into the mountains. Soon darkness came. We sat around on the floor of Tiro Fijo's simple wooden house and talked for some reason in whispers.

  "The farmers raised oranges, avocados, papaya, sugar, coffee, bananas a ... oh, yes, yucca," the colonel explained. "There were some cows. There were also thirty to forty tax collectors who collected six pesos a month and a share of the harvest from surrounding farmers on pain of death for failure to pay."

  The "ideal" society ended up as such societies always end: with force and intimidation.

  A male nurse whom I also spoke to, Pedro Antonio Ardino, had lived there. He related to me how, after he had been there for a while, "suddenly the mood changed and they thought I was a spy. One night they came after me and shot eighteen or twenty times. I ran away into the forest and finally made my way out."

  By 1964 the Marquetalians had grown in pugnacity and were even shooting down planes--and that was too much for the Colombians. Three battalions were deployed and Colombian soldiers spent two months struggling up the nearly impassable canyons, cutting new paths painfully as they went. The "agrarian Communists" were finished in those final campaigns.

  That night was one of the stranger ones I spent, a harbinger of things to come. As the guest in the hut I was given the "bed" of Tiro Fijo to sleep in. It consisted of four boards jammed together and a piece of leather tied across it. It was freezing cold and even the rough army blanket didn't keep me warm. I didn't sleep, but at least I didn't dream.

  My little trip to Marquetalia showed me the very beginnings of guerrilla warfare, albeit in an odd form, and the wellsprings of Marxism ideology and banditry in Latin America, which I was later to see a lot of and understand much better.

  "This violence is the outcome of a frustrated revolution," Fals Borda, Colombia's greatest sociologist, told me afterward, in Bogota. "You can't compare it to anything else. It's a new type of violence. It became respectable to use violence. But this went out of bounds. It became something new, amorphous, much more dangerous." These were prophetic words. I was to think of them later, in Santo Domingo, in Cyprus, in Beirut, in Teheran, in El Salvador. I didn't know it then, but I was to live and work through most of the post-World War II new cycles of violence of the twentieth century and often in the most disturbing and incredible firsthand manner-- and my own revolution, the revolution within me as a woman, was to parallel that in strange ways. But everything was not ideological.

  While living in Peru, I decided at one point to go up the coast to Chimbote, a wild and woolly frontier-style town where the poor cholos or mixed-bloods were making fortunes in the anchovy trade that rode in with the cooling Humboldt Current. Actually I was going up there only to "look around" (that old simple secret of journalism, looking around) when the Associated Press chief in Lima asked me to do a piece for him on the less-than-thrilling subject of the "sister city program" between Pensacola, Florida, and Chimbote.

  Chimbote was sand and millionaires in shabby little huts and brawling bars and raucous women and mysterious ships sailing illegally to sea and ... a half-finished stadium, which "the children of Pensacola are building for the children of Chimbote." I started out doing a freshness-and-light story on this sisterly exchange, thinking it would take a couple of hours.

  I paid a visit to the American bishop in charge of the committee. Tall and austere, the bishop assured me the program was "just fine." I paid a visit to the more voluble American-educated mayor. He assured me that the Chimbotans just loved the Pensacolans. I paid visits to local journalists. They hemmed and hawed and hesitated and indicated that there were strange things going on--but none of them knew exactly what they were.

  Was something wrong with this project? I talked with Ralph Guzman, the Peace Corps chief; yes, he agreed, something was wrong. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the local man who had given the land for the stadium was the vice king not only of Chimbote but of the entire coast. Moreover, his biggest whorehouse, "Acapulco," was right across the road from the stadium.

  Three, four, five days went by. I was due back in Lima -- what the hell was I doing still in Chimbote? Chicago wanted to know. Finally, with a Peruvian journalist who was helping me, I decided to go directly to the man himself. The journalist kindly arranged it and we found ourselves at one o'clock one desperately hot afternoon drinking a bottle of red wine in the vice king's house.

  "García" was one of those typical short, squat cholo types: half Indian, half Spanish, and filled with the special guile of each side. He was tough and cunning and I soon saw that he was also notably vain.

  "I am giving this land to the children of Chimbote," he was telling us, with a sticky benevolence. "These poor children without a place to go, in this city of sin, in this ..." He looked at us, sipped another glass of wine, and went on.

  This went on for two hours and still we had learned nothing. Impatience led me to try another totally instinctive approach. First I found myself smiling and saying, "You say that you are getting nothing from the stadium." He smiled and nodded.

  "But I can see that you are an intelligent man."

  He smiled self-effacingly and nodded again.

  "In fact," I went on, "you are extremely smart." He looked appropriately humble. "I just cannot imagine," I went on, critical now, "that a man as smart as you would give up something without getting something for himself. After all you are smart ...."

&
nbsp; He had had just enough wine. His eyes blazed and his nostrils flared. He would show this gringuita that he was not dumb. "Wait." He jumped up and rushed into the other room. Within moments he was back. Breathlessly, for the red wine had taken its toll in the heat, he unrolled a very large roll of paper that held the entire design for the stadium on it. "There, you see whether I am smart or not!" he proclaimed.

  We went over it, studying it. First we saw nothing unusual. There was indeed the regular part of the stadium--a large, round circle. But then I saw that carefully drawn in all around it were little, tiny, individual squares. Rooms. I looked at my journalist friend and he at me. García, meanwhile, was standing upright, all five feet four inches of him. How could we think for one moment that he was dumb. Never, never, never!

  "The rooms," he said, pointing to the rooms lining the outer wall of the stadium. "Those are mine. And I also get the concessions for all sales inside the stadium. Muy vivo, no púes?"

  I congratulated him. He was, I told him, indeed the man I had thought he was.

  The journalist and I wandered back in a kind of comic daze. García had given the land so he could locate his girls right in the stadium. What's more, he had signed a contract with the city council. Knowing this, it was easy to get the contract from the mayor, even to make him bring it over to me at the hotel.

  The bishop of Chimbote waxed ashen when he got the full story -- then he was enraged.

  Pensacola, once knowing "the truth," withdrew the project. No more Girl Scouts went door to door to collect for the boys (and girls, we now knew) of Chimbote.

  ***

  Alistair Cooke once described best the special work and opportunities of the foreign correspondent. "It is the stimulating duty of a foreign correspondent to cover everything," he wrote. "Whereas a domestic reporter, even at his best, graduates from general reporting and hops up the ladder to success towards a single specialty, a foreign correspondent is required to act on the preposterous but exhilarating assumption that he takes all knowledge for his province." Cooke also answers well the nagging -- and utterly incorrect -- claim that no one can ever really know another society in a short span of time, as an outsider. "The best stuff ever written on the Constitution was by Bryce, a Scotsman," he pointed out, "and the best thing on Peru is by a Bostonian. But, of course, you start from scratch. You don't take things for granted. You don't think you know. That's an important thing. The resident of a country thinks he knows. The foreign correspondent has to go back to the origins of things every day. You can't write about a violation of interstate commerce without explaining to the British where the whole concept started. So you teach yourself."

  Although some newspaper editors maintain that regular street reporters are the same as--and can be exchangeable for--foreign correspondents, they are really two very different types of people. To be a foreign correspondent means being of a particular, somewhat manic temperament, always seeking to conceptualize and bring things down to their roots. To be a foreign correspondent is to love the entire process, in fact, to love the life.

  The life. When I would go home, in between, exhausted and needing nurturing for a bit, people would always ask me the very same questions: Don't you get lonely? How do you pack? Isn't it hard being in different countries all the time, and alone? Don't you get tired of hotels?

  It is just the opposite. I love hotels. I love the days. I love the mornings, the breakfasts alone. I love unraveling the mysteries around me. Once unraveled, I hold them for a moment, then pass them on, for if we correspondents are anything, we are couriers between cultures, carrying messages from people to people.

  In later years I discussed my love for hotels with my friend, the great Egyptian writer, Ihsan Abdel Kuddous. Ihsan had a lovely wife, Lula, who liked to visit her grandchildren in California for weeks and weeks. "When my wife and I go to visit our son," he told me, "for three days I am very happy with the grandchildren. Then I need to move to a hotel--I need to--where I can watch people." I under stood so well. For people like us hotels are a microcosm of life. Life there is distilled; it is all there at our fingertips.

  But being a correspondent is also very intricate work. You are called upon every moment and every day to exercise not only your romantic and adventurous propensities but also persistence and judgment. You have to judge constantly -- facts and people and why people are telling you things -- and you'd better be right. You certainly always need a healthy skepticism -- I have never found some one who believed in the perfectibility of mankind or of human systems to be a good journalist -- and you absolutely need a tough-minded reading of history, of political science, of anthropology, and of literature.

  Intuition and training mingle in this work. You have to learn or sense what another person's "thing" is, what his or her interests are, how honest a man he is, why she is telling you things at all. You put things together, month after month and year after year, by going back and back and back to people and seeing how they change -- and then often judging the information by subtleties such as how that person has or has not changed. The whole process becomes narcotic, a little like a tournament in Riga for a chess maniac.

  But actually there are basic journalistic questions that can be applied to and used in any society: "What is the nature of this regime? What is the present stand of the opposition? What is their policy toward national culture? Which are the groups that are trying to carry the country back to the past? How does the present military institution feel about the present as compared with the past? Who holds the real power? What is the position of women compared with the past? Who is the official leak?" I could go on and on.

  One strange and compelling aspect of a correspondent's life is the way everything in life becomes speeded up. Because you are covering, day after day after day, things that other people might see only once in a lifetime or never, you live in a distinctly different "time." Sometimes I have felt as though I had lived five years in five weeks; by the time I was thirty-five, I felt as though I were 150. In a sense it is what the Old Testament scholars sometimes call "biblical time," the time that counts because it is so meaningful and so intense.

  In this life friendships and working relationships -- and loves -- become speeded up, too. Friends and lovers tend to be people in the same floating-crap-game circle -- other correspondents, diplomats, men and women in international finance, missionaries, priests and ministers, and just seeking people who are curious about things. These people whom I like and love and count on were best described by E. M. Forster, when he wrote, "I believe in aristocracy, not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos."

  This kind of life can of course also come to be too much. For some correspondents the price became too high. They retired back to Montana or Oklahoma or Michigan. Others became alcoholics, too many of them. But then some of those became anti-alcoholics. And for all of us there are times when we have just seen too much -- too many riots, too many bloodied heads, too much ugliness -- and couldn't absorb any more. These were times when the only thing that saved us was the black humor that correspondents so often indulge in.

  In these early years I soon confronted the disadvantages, and advantages, of being the only woman most of the time, in this odd and wonderful profession. Male colleagues, much as I loved them, could be counted on eventually to say, "You have all the advantages." This, of course, began only when I began to be successful. (Apparently before that I did not have all the advantages.) What they supposedly meant was that because I was young and blond and female, I could get things from men. Frankly, I never quite under stood the principle at work here. I just couldn't picture waking up at three in the morning with some stranger lying next to me and saying, "Eh, Ch
e, mi amor, tell me where your missiles are?" Men apparently think this is the way it's done.

  Once in Bolivia, when I had been having a good time -- and an awful lot of lunches and dinners--with a bevy of dark-haired, attractive men, my friend David Richardson, of U.S. News & World Report, quipped, "Gee Gee, you should write your first book and call it 'I Always Buy My Own Breakfast.' Then you could call your second book 'Well, Almost Always.'" We seemed to do nothing but laugh in those halcyon days.

  In real life the "advantages" and disadvantages, indeed, turned out to be quite different from what I originally thought. When men had lots of time and were relaxed, no question about it, they would rather be with a woman correspondent. People in "out" positions also preferred women, at least American women. I am convinced that I had success in reaching guerrillas because they, being anti-American and generally pro-Marxist, hated American men. It was American men who were the representatives of the metropole, not American women. Indeed, not only were we just women, but we were the women of the conquerors (how delectable!). What's more, if you were straight and honest, they would be extremely honorable about you to prove themselves as honorable men in contrast to the capitalist libertines. All of this most definitely came into play in Guatemala.