On the Trail of Che Guevara, Continued Further
At the beginning of 1970, without moving from behind his desk in Mexico City, Kapuściński writes a piece of quasi-reportage, little remembered years later, about the kidnap and killing of the West German ambassador to Guatemala. This is a key text for understanding Kapuściński’s world outlook, which was shaped by the years he spent in Africa as the continent was casting off colonial hegemony, and perhaps even more by the years he spent in Latin America while it was seething with revolutionary fervour. The story first appears in the PAP Special Bulletin, followed by an abridged version in the press, and is then published as a slim volume entitled Why Karl von Spreti Died.
The text stirs controversy, though there is no solid criticism of Kapuściński in Poland. The exception is an essay written by a friend of his, Wiktor Osiatyński, who puts forward a thesis as polemical as the story about the ambassador’s murder: Kapuściński has justified political crime.
Is this what he has done?
During those years, in some Latin American countries, foreign diplomats are being kidnapped by left-wing guerrillas fighting against anti-communist civilian and military dictatorships. The kidnappings are designed to draw the world’s attention to the persecution of the political opposition. In Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and also in Guatemala as described by Kapuściński, the murders and ‘disappearances’ of oppositionists number in the thousands.
Abducting diplomats serves, above all, to publicize political crimes. The guerrillas choose diplomats as their target, because, as they see it, the world never hears about the kidnap or killing of a local expert at pulling out fingernails or applying electric currents to the genitals. Whereas international opinion finds out the very same day about the kidnappings of representatives of governments that co-operate with dictatorships. All the information services and other mass media issue the news. As an additional motive, the guerrillas exchange the abducted diplomats for their comrades-in-arms who have been imprisoned by the regime. For those who are being tortured and are destined to ‘disappear’, this is usually their last chance at salvation.
One of the people kidnapped in these circumstances is the West German ambassador to Guatemala, Karl von Spreti.
In the early 1950s the social reformer Jacobo Árbenz comes to power in Guatemala. He is not a communist or an ally of Moscow; the communists are barely a part of his hinterland, and not fundamental. Árbenz’s policies are aimed at emancipation of the poorest groups; he conducts agricultural reform, with a degree of compensation for the dispossessed American concern United Fruit Company. In response to these reforms, under the slogan of ‘war against communism’, Washington organizes a coup d’état which is really about protecting the interests of the American firm. The military coup initiates a series of bloody dictatorships and repressive measures, whose victims number some two hundred thousand people, murdered or ‘disappeared’.
During the Cold War years, the US promotes the doctrine of ‘internal war’, which it implants in most countries in the region. It decrees that ‘war against communism’ is being waged not just on the global stage – between democracy and Red totalitarianism, between America and the USSR – but also on the internal front. The enemy never sleeps. So the military in Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina and other countries in the region cannot sit quietly in their barracks – there’s a war going on, and in the name of combating the Red plague, democracy must be suspended. According to this doctrine, all sorts of methods can be applied in the fight against the adherents of Moscow and Havana. At the notorious School of the Americas in Panama, later transferred to the US state of Georgia, American specialists train Latin American officers to fight guerrilla groups. Among the topics covered by lectures and seminars at this school is how to inflict refined forms of torture. The Latino military become experts in the art of cruelty.
The brutal tortures which they apply turn carefree young dreamers into sworn warriors, ready to pull the trigger in extreme situations such as the one described by Kapuściński in his short book about Guatemala. The rebels believe they must shake the conscience of international opinion, force the Western powers to cease co-operating with the tyrants, and stop the criminal generals. And quite often their armed actions achieve the intended aim. In a report dating to that time – after an operation to abduct a diplomat – Kapuściński discusses the following facts, presented in an article in the Sunday Times:
Some political prisoners have been released and given the opportunity to inform the public about police brutality in the prisons and about military operations by ‘death squads’ on the streets. The Latin American governments have been embarrassed and humiliated. The ‘gringo’ has been totally thrown off balance. The revolutionary movements have increased in number and have also gained moral strength as a result of their renown. The climate is being set for revolution – or at least for essential reforms – within societies that are already unstable in any case.1
When the Guatemalan guerrillas kidnap Ambassador Karl von Spreti, Kapuściński is sitting in his office in Mexico City, reading the local – and not just the local – press, and is infuriated by what he reads. ‘Hordes of United States security service agents are pouring into the cities of Latin America, attempting to seize the kidnappers of diplomats,’ reports one of the British newspapers. Instead of a wave of interest in the situation in Guatemala, instead of questions about why it has come to the kidnapping of diplomats, there is a wave of one-sided condemnation of the guerrillas.
Out of the chorus of condemnation, Kapuściński extracts voices in a different tone – the ones explaining what lies behind Guatemala’s tragedy and also clarifying why the kidnapping of ambassadors has been on the cards for a long while in Latin America:
The issue of kidnapping people and hijacking aeroplanes is the central theme of the press here. Some of the Latino governments declare themselves in favour of Argentina’s initiative, which proposes refusing the right of asylum to political prisoners set free in exchange for the release of kidnapped diplomats. Dr Héctor Cuadra, a member of the Law Institute at a Mexican university who is a leading authority on international law, is now debating this position.
In Dr Cuadra’s opinion, the kidnappings and terrorism will only stop if: ‘the Latino governments respect the right to freedom of expression’, and ‘the Latino governments agree to treat political prisoners legally. These people spend years in the prisons of Latin America without ever being tried, and with none of the guarantees provided by the constitution’.
Cuadra stated that ‘Latin America is the land of political persecution’.
In discussing the case of the death of Karl von Spreti, Dr Cuadra said: ‘It was not a murder. According to martial law this is a case of the capture and execution of a hostage, and we should remember that there is a civil war going on in Guatemala. The government has lost control over the country, and the underground army – Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes – is conducting strictly military activities.’2
Years later, Kapuściński admits that he wrote his book about the killing of Karl von Spreti ‘to counter the misleading of world opinion by us – the journalists’.
What was my motivation in writing about Guatemala, for instance? The main point was to defend those people, to defend the guerrillas, to defend their dignity, their rationale. We hear terrible things about these people, the most disgraceful stories, because the entire information system distributed all over the world is a system of the right. It never utters a single word about what the dictatorships there are like, what the regimes are like, or the reality that forces those militants to fight. It will only keep on endlessly repeating its condemnation of ‘terrorists’. But take note that all national liberation movements, including the Polish resistance movement during the last war, were defined by the official propaganda as terrorism. So my first impulse at the time, when after the killing of Karl von Spreti in Guatemala that whole wave of defamation poured out in a country where several dozen genuinely innocent people are killed on a daily basis, was a reaction of inner protest and moral defence of these people . . .
I can call them freedom fighters or heroes. I cannot pretend that the primary and fundamental, institutionalized terror does not exist, against which they are rising up, going to fight and being killed. That is the whole truth, and if anyone wants to stick at half or a quarter of the truth, then he is surrendering to or serving falsehood and mendacity.3
This forgotten little book includes what to my mind is one of the most brilliant passages in Kapuściński’s entire oeuvre (a shortened version appears in The Soccer War):
The people who write history devote too much attention to the ‘noisy’ moments and do too little research on the quiet times . . . Silence is a sign of unhappiness and often of crime . . . Silence is necessary to tyrants and invaders, who make sure their activity is accompanied by it . . . What silence emanates from countries packed full of prisons . . . Silence requires a vast police apparatus. It requires an army of informers. Silence demands that the enemies of silence should disappear suddenly and without trace . . . It would be interesting if someone were to investigate to what degree world systems of mass media work in the service of information, and to what degree they serve quiet and silence. Which is there more of: what is said, or what is not said? . . . If I put on the local radio station in Guatemala and just listen to songs, beer ads or the only news from the outside world, that some Siamese-twin boys have been born in India, I know this radio station works in the service of silence.4
Writing with empathy for the Guatemalan guerrillas, Kapuściński finds himself in a politically ambiguous position. Of course the story about the murder of the West German ambassador is above all a major indictment of imperialism, despite which it does not suit the political correctness of the socialist camp. At the time, Moscow is opposed to the creation of partisan armies in Latin America modelled on Castro’s and Guevara’s guerrillas from the days of the Cuban revolution. The guerrilla movements are independent of Moscow and they spoil its policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with Washington – because the Americans regard every rebellion in Latin America as Soviet sabotage within their sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Castro is inciting schisms within the communist parties: urging the dissidents to create armed units and fight with guns in their hands against the right-wing, pro-Yankee dictatorships on the continent. Castro declares that the true revolutionary is the one who conducts revolution. Meanwhile, most of the communist parties in the region tend to fight using peaceful methods; from Havana’s point of view, these parties are being eaten away by the virus of reformism.
Why Karl von Spreti Died is a story in the spirit of revolutionary socialism from Havana, not the bureaucratic kind issuing from Moscow.
In any case, the political winds are changing: after rebelling against Moscow’s strategy, Cuba finally renounces its relative independence and support for guerrilla groups in the region. After the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia – the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 – and the lack of firm reaction to this intervention on the part of the United States, Fidel Castro’s fears will not go away. He is worried that as Washington did not react firmly to the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops, by the laws of analogy the still-possible – as he thinks – American invasion of Cuba might not meet with decisive opposition from Moscow.
Castro decides to protect himself in case of a US invasion of Cuba: he swallows his pride and, contrary to the expectations of people on the left the world over, including many Latino communists and some Cuban ones, he supports the crushing of the Prague Spring. He sends out a clear signal to the Kremlin: let’s end the argument about the revolutionary path taken in Latin America – Moscow is the only Rome of world communism, and there won’t be any more questioning of its leadership. He publicly expresses the hope that if socialism were ever threatened in Cuba, the Soviet Union would help.
The practical confirmation of Castro’s new policy is his visit to Chile in 1971: he befriends socialist Salvador Allende, who is introducing revolutionary changes peacefully and democratically. Castro shows the face of a realist: he is afraid that the Chilean right, supported by the United States, will overthrow Allende’s government on any excuse at all. That is why, during his visit to Chile, he cools the ardour of the left-wing radicals who are demanding that Allende introduce socialism immediately without considering the will of a large part of society.
As Kapuściński reports from Chile:
Fidel Castro’s visit and the speeches he made here prove that breaking the Latin American left into two currents is today a closed chapter in the history of the continent . . . Several times now he has repeated that the path which in Cuba led to the triumph of the revolution [i.e., armed fighting] is not the one and only path to victory. For many Latino leftist groupings, fixated on Cuba as the only ideal, these declarations must sound shocking . . . Some people will shift to the communist left wing, and the small unreconciled groups will descend to anarchistic positions devoid of ideals and will lose political significance.5
Havana’s change of political strategy also has practical consequences for the work of the correspondent from Poland. Kapuściński – who should, as it were ‘ex officio’, be writing about the world in accordance with the Moscow line – is more sympathetic towards Havana’s ‘dissident’ policy. Now his dilemmas are at an end; he writes it almost straight out:
This general evolution of Havana’s with regard to the problems of revolution in Latin America has equally important, positive significance for the policies of countries in the socialist camp on this continent. During the disputes between Fidel Castro and the local communist parties, our situation was difficult: on the one hand we supported Cuba, but at the same time we also supported the communist parties. This was not in the least comfortable for us.6
No longer must Kapuściński be torn between sympathy for Castro and loyalty towards the pro-Moscow decision-makers in Warsaw.
In his polemic against his friend’s book about the killing of Karl von Spreti, Wiktor Osiatyński wrote:
Kapuściński has substantiated a crime. He has justified murder committed in the name of the struggle against exploitation, oppression and dictatorship . . .
What Kapuściński has written is enough to make us understand why the guerrillas kidnapped and shot von Spreti. I do not think it is enough to justify them. For Kapuściński it is. For from his book it unambiguously emerges that responsibility for the ambassador’s death lies with: Guatemalan fascism, which forced the guerrillas to take up this form of struggle as the only one they had left; American imperialism, which kept this fascism alive; Nixon, who failed to persuade the Guatemalan authorities, though he could easily have done so; and finally to some degree Brandt, who did not put enough pressure on Nixon. The guerrillas are not responsible at all.
And yet it was the guerrillas who put the gun to von Spreti’s temple and pulled the trigger.
After reading Kapuściński, I understood why they did it. However, as distinct from the author, I was not convinced they had to do it. And I didn’t like this book.7
Kapuściński never commented on his friend’s essay. ‘Fine,’ he will say on occasion. Nothing more.
‘I think here he was guided by a personal code: not to argue with his friends, not to escalate the differences, to forgive them their errors,’ proposes Jerzy Nowak.
Perhaps he does not want to debate with Osiatyński, because in parrying his friend’s arguments he would have to find some convincing reasons for the taking of someone’s life – and in public discussion, isn’t that suicidal? How can you dispute an issue like that when at the same time you are opposed to any sort of killing? How can you do it in such a way that the debate does not become a defence of terrorism and political murder?
Kapuściński avoids the word ‘terrorism’ – he knows a word like that makes everyone into a hostage, a prisoner of language. How do the phrases ‘defence of terrorism’ and ‘defence of political crime’ sound, and in what way does ‘recognition of armed struggle as one of the acceptable paths’ sound different? That is why Kapuściński uses the word ‘guerrillas’, not ‘terrorists’, and the term ‘armed struggle’, not ‘terrorism’.
He does not regard Karl von Spreti as an incidental passer-by but rather as a political player in the Guatemalan tragedy; the representative of a government that gains advantage from exploiting the banana republic and co-operating with a criminal junta justifiably viewed as an internal occupying force by those who have been repressed. As Dr Cuadra, the lawyer quoted by Kapuściński, says: ‘According to martial law, this is a case of the capture and execution of a hostage.’
However, Kapuściński is not trying to find good grounds for murder – there is no such thing – but to take a short walk in the shoes of the kidnappers, to feel his way into their situation, the drama of the country, the tragedy of the oppressed. And then to ask questions: Can we understand the actions of the guerrillas? Can we understand the young people from Guatemala, Brazil, Uruguay and El Salvador who reach for rifles and bombs in their struggle against the external or internal invader?
His years spent in the Third World teach Kapuściński empathy, teach him to view things from the desperadoes’ perspective: those who are affected by repression, poverty and lack of prospects believe that situations occur in which there are no options left but bombs, guns, and sometimes suicide. When they’re soon going to kill you, when you have to save your friends from torture, when you cannot see light at the end of the tunnel, all that remains is armed struggle (let it even be terrorism and violence) as the act of ultimate despair. It is hard to extol or eulogize this sort of fighting, but we can and perhaps should understand it.
Kapuściński does not substantiate political crime; he explains its anatomy, helps the reader put himself in the psychological situation of the desperate, and does it with such empathy and skill – and at the same time so cold-bloodedly – that some may rightfully feel shocked at their own reaction: if after reading this I can understand kidnappers and terrorists, am I justifying political murder? Doesn’t Kapuściński go too far?
Why Karl von Spreti Died is not just a story about Guatemala but also a parable of the Cold War, as well as of latter-day and, to some extent, contemporary relations between North and South. It did not fit in with the political correctness of the socialist era, nor does it fit the kind prevalent since its collapse – certainly not in Kapuściński’s country.
During the Cold War era, a vast number of Kapuściński’s compatriots who dislike the communist regime live in the belief that Evil is always and only on the side of the Reds. Militants who refer to the ideals of emancipation and the kingdom of justice, or who simply sympathize with communism, bear – in the opinion of these people – the stigma of the forces of enslavement. By contrast, in the Cold War division, the forces of Western democracy – even if they throw bombs at civilians or run ‘universities of torture’ – represent Good.
Kapuściński shows without ambiguity that in the Third World countries the ‘free’ West shares responsibility for the enslavement of societies; it is an obstacle to aspirations towards liberation. In those countries, the communists and left-wing radicals usually belong to the forces battling tyranny and bondage. Sometimes they are the only political force with which an honest person can identify without shame.
Based on his experiences working as a reporter in the Third World, Kapuściński soon draws the conclusion that viewing the world through the spectacles of the Cold War division into East and West, communism and capitalism, obscures rather than clarifies the picture. He finds the North–South perspective more important and more accurate – the division into the affluent world and the world of poverty and exclusion, and all the consequences of that division.
Thus, after the collapse of the socialist utopia he will not be infected by enthusiasm for capitalism, for modern ideas about ‘spreading democracy’ among ‘savages’, or for America-the-empire – practices and goals for which so many people in his country sigh with a love that is barely reciprocated. Nor is he attracted by the revision of twentieth-century history in the spirit of anti-communism. After reporting from Third World countries in the Cold War era, he has seen too much.
He has also understood that our ‘better’ world is deeply involved in the appearance, at the start of the twenty-first century, of ‘Mohammed with a rifle’, which he spoke about in interviews in the final years of his life. He was horrified by the ‘war party’ in Washington and the ease with which a superpower is able to trigger an imperial incident. He was also disturbed by al-Qaeda, which he regarded not so much as an organization but as ‘an attitude, a mentality’, as ‘an attempt to send all outsiders to hell’.
He did not live long enough to write more on this great topic of contemporary times. What are the differences between ‘Christ with a rifle’ in the 1960s and 1970s and today’s ‘Mohammed with a rifle’? Where should we look for the criteria demarcating the line between a justified, but by no means good, armed struggle and the blind cruelty of terrorism, which is certainly not the weapon of the weak alone?
He did not leave a universal key, but his interviews and statements help us to think about the modern world and to pose questions about how to judge today’s conflicts. The story of the kidnap and murder of Karl von Spreti is number one on this list. And although it does not contain any simple analogies, it exposes the mechanism of ‘misleading public opinion’, as well as political self-deception and illusions: supposedly, a battle is being fought against evil, whether it is called ‘communism’ or ‘terrorism’, but the illnesses, plagues and misfortunes against which the fight is ostensibly conducted become even more wide-spread because of its methods.
For now I’m getting on with the packing, rather feebly, but I am doing it, so I hope to send off my boxes on time, and then part with the land of the Aztecs. Altogether I will have had four and a half years in Latin America, which – roughly speaking – is enough for me.
I’m already wondering what I’m going to do in Poland. I know, and then I don’t know. My ideal would be to do nothing and just devote myself to writing. That’s my provisional plan, which might fall apart on contact with reality. I might stay at the PAP, but take unpaid leave in order to write, and then we’ll see . . .
Aha, so what should I bring you? Ala wrote to say a dress shirt and various things of that kind, but perhaps there’s something else? Maybe you could send me a list of your pedidos [requests]? In any case, I’ll try to lug what I got via Ala to Warsaw.
So my dears, see you soon, very soon! I’m already eager to cross the Atlantic, to get to Europe, to Europe, there’s no life outside Europe (we’ll see what I say in a few months from now!), but maybe I’ll say the same thing – quién sabe [who knows]? At any rate, I’m coming to a big turn, a dizzying bend in the road, enough excitement to make my blood curdle. Write, write, all I want to do now is write. Dammit, if only they’d leave me in peace, if only they didn’t want anything of me, so I could hide, bury, lock myself away.8