Buying the Night Flight (10 page)

In the early sixties I repaid Hull House in small manner by saving its buildings. Although I am not at all an organizer myself and hate the very idea of "mobilizing" people, preferring to sit in corners and on the edges watching others, or else singing at a piano bar, I became so angry when the city was going to raze Hull House, along with the entire Near South Side neighborhood, that I organized a "Save Hull House" committee that utterly tormented City Hall. And we won: we saved Hull House. It was during that experience that I had the enormous pleasure of knowing Jessie Binford, a little sparrow of a woman who became, with her myriad social causes, the "conscience of Chicago." She told me of her first meeting with Chicago, straight out of the Iowa cornfields, and of her first meeting with Jane Ad dams: "I arrived in Chicago on an awfully hot July day. Every other place was a saloon, the streets were dirty. The air was heavy. I had left the beautiful Iowa countryside and I wondered if I hadn't made a mistake. And no one paid much attention to me. The next morning, I said to Miss Addams, 'I want you to tell me what I am to do.' And then she said what seemed to be the most wonderful introduction for a young person, 'I wouldn't do anything if I were you for a while. Just look around and get acquainted and perhaps you'll think of something to do that none of the rest of us have ever thought of before.' I don't know, it gave me a kind of freedom. Of not having to conform to an organization right away."

It was exactly the way we reporters in Chicago started--by just "looking around."

From the Streets of Chicago to the Whorehouses of Peru

"When you see a country in chaos where 200,000 people are trying to get out and 12 people are trying to get in, those 12 are foreign correspondents."
--A foreign correspondent

At the
Chicago Daily News,
in the early sixties, we would sit in the city room overlooking the muddy, churning Chicago River and watch the foreign correspondent "greats" as they came home, sometimes battered by the fray, having waged their battle against ignorance and evil and having at least so far survived. From Istanbul and Seoul and out there east of Suez, they came. The gallant, cultured Paul Ghali, an Egyptian Copt who smuggled the famous diaries of Count Ciano out of Italy during World War II. Bluff, literary George Weller, who was always swimming the Bosporus or virtually any other waterway that had the misfortune of crossing his path. And lean, mean Keyes Beech, with his bedroom eyes and his taut thinking. They were all tough, but Keyes was especially tough -- he had covered every war and had been in a large number of battles since World War II.

Watching them stride across the city room as I imagined they strode across the world, I would groan inside with yearning. But there seemed, in those first years, not the faintest indication that I could or would ever be a foreign correspondent. I was twenty-seven. And I was clearly a woman. All the correspondents were men in their fifties and sixties.

But in 1964 I "escaped" the Chicago city desk through a ruse -- I applied successfully for a small grant, the Seymour Berkson Foreign Assignment Grant, which allowed me to work in Latin America for six months. The paper would perhaps never have sent me, and so it was the grant that broke the professional logjam. Larry Fanning, our editor, said simply, "Fine, you can just continue to work for us down there." They fully expected I would then come home, and there seemed no need to burden them with the fact that I knew clearly I never would.

Why did I without question choose to go to Latin America, thus unwittingly putting in motion for the years of the '70s an impulse, which would bring an entire group of women correspondents to the South? Was it because there were so few correspondents there? Because it was so relatively uncovered? Not at all. I went to Latin America because I loved it; because in my blood and soul I had some deep subterranean affinity for it. Perhaps it was the old, old pull of the South to the Byronesque men and women of the North. I only know I followed my love--and that is the only thing without question I would tell young people for them to be happy: Follow your love. There is no other happiness.

So it was that I traveled south--south across the Caribbean, down the Andes and the gray sea coastline to Peru. I found myself a little third-floor apartment in an elegant colonial building at 440 Avenida Arequipa, right in the middle of Lima, and I began to learn how to be a foreign correspondent.

While tutoring two hours a day in Spanish, I was trying to make elementary contacts and interviews, and one of my first subjects-- and lessons as a correspondent--was Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, the great old man of the Aprista Party. In the thirties, when reform and democracy were basically still unknown in Latin America, it was the brilliant Haya who sparked the call for democratic revolution on the entire continent. I had long admired him. I
had
to meet him.

Although I was now an experienced reporter at home, I did not know--and there was nobody to tell me -- how to work in a foreign country. So instead of psyching it out and adapting to my new culture, I tried to work as I always had. And it was a mistake. With Haya, for instance, I felt very clever indeed when I got his private phone number from a friend at the American embassy and began systematically phoning him there, day after day and week after week and sometimes hour after hour. Every time I called, a male servant's voice would tell me politely,
"Víctor Raúl no esta.
"Víctor Raúl is not at home.

I knew very well he was in the country. I knew very well he had to be home sometime. After five weeks of compulsive calling I found myself breaking into tears of frustration. It was not only Victor Raul --I had been in Peru for a full month and had not had one single major interview.

Then, by chance, I was introduced to two Peruvian journalists. We were drinking pisco sours in the wood-paneled corner bar of the lovely old Hotel Bolivar when I poured out my tale of frustration. "But it is so easy," one said, shaking his head in wonder and confusion at the innocent
gringuita.
"We will take you to the Aprista Party newspaper. It is through the editor of the party newspaper that you arrange interviews with Víctor Raúl."

The other seemed properly embarrassed when he mumbled, "In Latin America, we never call a man at home. It is ... not quite polite. He would never answer professional calls at home." I was appropriately chagrined.

That very afternoon we went to the
Aprista
newspaper and were ushered immediately into the editor's office. He was a charming young man, and within half an hour he picked up the telephone to arrange the interview. The next day I met Haya.

I learned more than one thing that day. Besides the American embassies, one of the best sources in any foreign country is the local journalists. They
know
their country. What's more, they often have information that they cannot use in their countries, particularly when they are under dictatorships or in countries with censorship. They are glad to get certain information out, which then often comes back to them in a way that they can use. Of course, this is an exchange, both of information and of help and protection.

As I worked, I became aggravated by such accepted journalistic "truths" as James Reston's "Americans will do everything for Latin America except read about it." I became as defensive about Latin America as a mother cat about her favorite kitten, and later when a Chicago woman told me at a party, "You were always angry about your little countries ... because other people didn't love them as much as you did," I had to admit she was right. In this I was different from many of the sixties and seventies generation of journalists -- I didn't want to "be" something, I wanted to "do" something very particular, in line with my beliefs and my temperament -- I wanted to interpret Latin America because I loved it so. Too, my countries were "people" to me; I loved them, I hated them, but I always interacted with them.

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.