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A PERILOUS INCOMPATIBILITY

Colette Avital, my childhood friend and once very brief object of desire, now Consul General of Israel in New York, had heard of my situation and offered me a post in her press office. A month-long investigation by the intelligence unit probed into my past, anatomized my family, dissected my work history and scrutinized my political proclivities. Declared “kosher,” filled with eagerness and anticipation I went to work as a press officer. Thus began for me a dizzying descent into obscurity, an obstacle course to nowhere, a road jealously patrolled and sabotaged by petty bureaucrats sporting large egos and armed with an ambition eclipsed only by mediocrity and ineptitude. Before long, I was suffocating -- no, drowning -- in a fishbowl infested with piranhas. Abandoned as I was to a rat pack of power-hungry mandarins, all busy feeding their vanity, I surrendered and retreated to the numbing routines to which I’d been consigned. I’d been hired to work as a press secretary, publicist and media point man. Instead, I became everybody’s translator, proofreader, scribe and linguistic troubleshooter. Every upstart paper-pusher who couldn’t put a fucking comma in its proper place, much less write a coherent sentence, came to me for help and expected to get it at once. I complied because, in good conscience, I could not allow the tripe that was being placed before me to appear on Consulate stationery. In short, I’d been alternately unused, misused, abused and exploited. In the process, I discovered that diplomacy (politics/propaganda) and journalism are perilously incompatible -- if not mutually exclusive. I was a journalist, not a politician, less yet a diplomat. I’d acquired a fresh inventory of newspeak and, in the process, developed an increased intolerance for the genre.

Eighteen months later, I quit. Addressed to Colette and never acknowledged, my letter of resignation, here heavily redacted in the interest of discretion, read:

I should have written sooner, when the idealism and exuberance I’d brought to the job of press officer began to erode. Both have since been replaced by feelings oscillating between exasperation and insensibility. The climate in your Communications department swings precariously between lunacy and inertia, confusion, and gloom. Everything is ad-libbed and executed badly on instructions by taskmasters who are out of their element and who delegate work they themselves are utterly incapable of conceptualizing. The strictures inherent in my present circumstance have made it painfully evident that I could not ply my trade from within your bureaucracy. Most disheartening is the realization that I was unwittingly used to help promote other’s people’s diplomatic careers. Under the circumstances, disillusioned but confident that at the age of 56 I can still attain some measure of professional contentment, I hereby tender my resignation. I gratefully acknowledge your initial support at a difficult juncture in my life.

Considered an oddity by some, a loose cannon by others, I never learned how to play “the game.” Incorrigible, bored by routine, undisciplined, easily disillusioned by people, I’d skirmished and burned bridges before. I would do so again, in personal relationships, when friendships turned flighty, when compelled to wonder to what extent kindness of heart makes stupidity bearable, or in employment, when shackled by inhibiting rules and strictures. The penalties for such deviance include defeat and alienation. Dreamers never win. Victory would render us superfluous. The dividends, however, often hidden from view in a moment of crisis, include an array of fresh challenges and opportunities that I would be quick to seize, often oblivious to or in defiance of the perils they entailed.

Less than a month later, determined to return to traditional journalism, I moved to San José, Costa Rica. Free-lance assignments involving the plight of Central American street children and persecuted indigenous minorities, opened new doors and served as a springboard for more lucrative employment as an independent reporter. This extraordinary odyssey, which would last twelve years, took me from the Mexican highlands to the jungles of Panama and yielded a bounty of articles and commentaries that graced the pages of various U.S. and Central American newspapers and infuriated some readers.

Fiscally motivated, Kathy Keeton’s suggestion that I travel to Central America instead of Brazil would, in retrospect, prove auspicious. Brazil had long been synonymous with festering hillside slums and chic downtown esplanades teeming with rising tides of homeless children. It also had the dubious distinction of turning a blind eye to self-styled enforcers bent on purging these omnipresent pariahs from Brazilian society. Whereas these well publicized pogroms are reactive and spontaneous in Brazil, a nation of nearly 200 million, they seem to have escaped serious scrutiny in parts of Central America, notably in Guatemala and Honduras, with a combined population of about 15 million, and where the systematic, pro-active, state-sponsored extermination of homeless minors had reached epidemic proportions.

Central America is a region rocked by political chaos, plagued by economic decay and convulsed by horrific violence. Entrenched military plutocracies have given way to civilian puppet regimes that continue to thwart efforts at democratization by intimidating the feeble and indecisive voices of reform. Gross inequalities in wealth and status (fewer than one-tenth of the people own and control over ninety percent of national resources), unfavorable currency exchange rates and mounting trade deficits have further weakened faltering economies by increasing unemployment, freezing wages and unleashing unforgiving rates of inflation. Conservative estimates place the combined regional unemployment rate at nearly forty percent. Better than seventy-five percent of all households earn poverty-level incomes. The level of poverty for children under five has topped at eighty-five percent. The poverty level among kids aged between six and fourteen now exceeds eighty-six percent.

A steady decline in family income had led to an increase in child labor. In addition, already skimpy state-sponsored social programs for children were being stripped to the bone by recurring and increasingly harsher austerity measures. As a result, more children were being abandoned or expelled by families that obeyed the Church’s mandate to multiply and populate the Earth. Regrettably, the Church, which is wont to voice concern for the unborn, does little or nothing on behalf of the living.

The 75,000 children roaming the streets of Central America are divided into two groups: runaways from households eroded by overpopulation, poverty, alcoholism and abuse; and children abandoned or cast out by families no longer able to provide for them. Viewed as “vermin,” “a blight,” “parasites,” and “criminals,” unwanted, unloved, the inheritors of dysfunctional societies, they are invariably labeled as “bad for tourism,” “bad for the neighborhood,” “bad for the country.” Endorsed by indifferent or openly hostile governments, this perception had inspired successive waves of bloodletting against these children. Intimidation, threats, illegal detentions, vicious beatings, torture, rape and extra-judicial executions at the hands of law-enforcement agents, once sporadic, were now widespread. Corrupt and inept judicial systems turned a blind eye to such impunity and rarely arrested or convicted the culprits. Mounting evidence suggested that the executioners were “embedded” in government. And the carnage continued.

What began as a probe into state-sponsored killings of street children set the stage for the study of other socio-economic ills in the Isthmus, mostly in Guatemala and Honduras, all traceable to the vestiges of colonialism, government corruption, political chicanery, apathy, sloth and other signs of decadence. It would be a bumpy ride on a road strewn with hazards.

Large obstacles put us on guard; small ones whet our appetite. It’s often the latter that makes us trip.