Unknown

AT WHAT PRICE SILENCE?

It was on a visit to Paris that I remembered the words. Uttered years earlier, they echoed with singular resonance as I gazed at the baroque building that had once housed my school. I was a teenager -- a would-be journalist armed with little more than a presumption of talent and an affectation driven by romanticism not purpose -- when I first heard the chancellor’s caustic exhortation:

“We can’t stoke, let alone ignite, the sacred pyre that must consume you, enslave you from within. Journalism is a calling. We can’t sell you inspiration. At any price. Nor can we instill the greatest of all virtues -- an unqualified reverence for truth and the dogged determination to find it, sublime and uplifting or hideous and vile, wherever it may hide.”

I’d traveled to Paris on a whim, hoping to wash away the stench that clung to my pores, to stifle the screams of anger and frustration that scorched my throat, to resurrect, in a week’s time in the City of Light, my beloved hometown, the Quixotic verve, the exhilaration and the sense of purpose that had once sustained me. And as Paris unfolded before me like a springtime bouquet, I knew that I’d been forever changed, no, damaged by the very events I’d witnessed and felt duty-bound to chronicle, by the hopeless causes I’d so impetuously championed. The obscenity and filth I’d retreated from in search of catharsis would be softened by distance, assuaged by the loveliness of Paris, by the sweet scent of lavender wafting in the air. But the malaise lingered, fed by the images of death and destruction that still danced in my head and sustained by the nausea they induced.

“If you want to say it well, say nothing,” the thinker advises. “If you want to say it better,” the doer counters, “say it out loud.”

Weeks earlier, I’d interviewed Tegucigalpa’s newly elected mayor, César Castellanos, a large man with big ideas and an infectious energy to match. Things were looking up for Tegucigalpa and everyone banked their hopes on a better tomorrow. Then came a Hurricane named Mitch and a helicopter “accident” that reeked of criminal negligence or worse. And the big man who everyone knew would have clinched the presidency, El Gordito, as he was affectionately nicknamed, was no more, and his ideas and the enthusiasm he infused in his fellow Hondurans died with him, overwhelmed by cataclysmic forces and submerged under a tidal wave of collective inertia.

In the riverbeds, hiding a scarred terrain where cadavers half-buried in the muck were still being plucked by the dozens, now grew sparse patches of wild grasses and stinkweeds. Circling overhead, their eyes trained earthward, squadrons of hungry vultures spied their next meal. A scouting party swooped past me, sending shivers down my spine. Agitated, hungry, the birds alit and scrambled through tangled masses of garbage and offal, scratching warily for some succulent morsel. The rest, waiting their turn, perched on roofs and treetops. Surveying their surroundings, they commanded a view of a city enfeebled by nature’s merciless bouts of folly and compromised by a climate of sloth and indifference that gripped the nation long before the monster storm touched down.

On the Comayaguela side of town, from the old bridge straddling the Choluteca River, a thin, meandering run of pestilential sludge, men relieved themselves with an unconcern bordering on exhibitionism. No one seemed to care.

Parque Central, a microcosm convulsing for air and space -- and a symbol of the contradictions that characterize Honduras -- throbbed with a visceral cadence perilously akin to agitation. The square was little more than a grimy tract encrusted with bird excrement where idleness exalts indolence at the altar of ennui. One comes to Parque Central to kill time. Literally. Along with peanuts, candy, sliced green mangoes dipped in salt and lime juice, ice cream and lottery tickets, can also be enjoyed crude entertainment by doleful circus clowns and would-be jugglers, and the promise of a hereafter by amateur evangelists and raving madmen.

Conditioned to believe that salvation can be attained by osmosis, beggars, cripples, drunks, vagrants, grimy toddlers and horrible harlots whittled away the hours huddled against the walls of St. Michael’s Cathedral. Missing an arm and a wing, deprived of his spear, a statue of the dragon-slayer stood atop a waterless fountain, staring uncomprehendingly at an evil beast that would not die, while shoeshine men furiously polished shoes that can never stay clean.

In the peatonal, the bustling pedestrian walkway where the tout-Tegucigalpa eventually converges, vacant-eyed, inspiring neither respect for the law nor their person, diminutive policewomen -- often dwarfed by the pistol resting on their hip -- clustered in the shade, perusing comic books or flirting with their male colleagues as mischief and mayhem went unnoticed.

Cabbies, enamored of noise, blew their horns at prospective fares, unmindful of the odious din their collective cacophony produced. Emitting acrid diesel fumes, trucks and buses ground their way through dusty narrow streets cratered with potholes and lined with crumbling sidewalks while kamikaze drivers, unmindful of pedestrians, did not hesitate to run them over to gain an inch.

Still fresh in the memory of city folk, many of whom kept coming back to the site to gawk and cavil, the collapse of a temporary metal viaduct, a Bailey bridge erected in the wake of Hurricane Mitch by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, typified the scandalous scorn that Hondurans have for codes, discipline and the immutable laws of physics. Accustomed to disasters, they are wont to call “acts of God” the predictable consequences of their own lack of foresight. After all, who will litigate against God -- and win?

“Culture, your know,” Mayor Castellanos had told me days before he died in a suspicious helicopter crash. “My people, God bless them, they are incorrigible.” He’d raised his eyebrows, looked heavenward and shrugged his shoulders. “Our nation cries for radical and swift reforms yet we move at a snail’s pace. Progress is viewed with suspicion; mistrust leads to inertia. Politicians who keep their promises discomfit their opponents and baffle the voters. Besides, you won’t let us manage our own destiny,” he’d added without hostility. By “you” he’d meant the United States.

Amid the chaos and confusion, frenzied commercial growth had given Tegucigalpa a deceptive appearance of urban dash. Yet another stately hotel was rising, this time a stone’s throw from the presidential palace -- one wonders why and for whom, as tourists were as scarce as clean tap water.

For the people, “the pitiful pawns of history,” as my friend and colleague, the late Erling Duus Christiansen (1940-2000) aptly called them, very little had changed. “Their fate does not hinge on whether they eat bread or tortillas,” he’d argued. “It rests on their willingness to take on the challenges of democracy. Where such will is lacking despotism and bondage will rule.” While most of us accept the notion that what cannot be changed must be endured, Duus had insisted that what cannot be endured must be changed. It is this defiance of all odds, this bold challenge against sloth, indifference and timidity that come across in his writings and his personal ethic. He inspired, galvanized, jolted and even shocked his way into our consciousness.

Meanwhile, shanties kept growing like purulent warts along the higher elevations as more people from the provinces converged on a city stretched beyond its limits and resources. Many dwellings had collapsed and many more would slide downhill when the next heavy rains rolled in from the east and drenched the city.

“We Hondurans have no problem recognizing reality. We just lack the resolve to change it,” a cab driver observed as he tossed a banana peel out the window on our way to the airport.

It’s against this backdrop of chaos, antagonism and fear -- much of it attributable to colossal government ineptitude, corruption, indifference and disdain for its own laws -- that I’d headed to Central America, first in Guatemala, then in Honduras and the rest of the isthmus. The somber visions recorded during a marathon 18-hour journey in the dreary streets of Tegucigalpa, later augmented during subsequent visits, had blossomed into several cover stories. A gutsy, budding English-language publication, Honduras This Week, now defunct, had run my columns uncensored. Given a nation inching unsteadily from autocracy to semi-democracy and still cowed by decades of authoritarian rule -- military one day, pseudo-civilian the next -- the editor, an American expat, had taken enormous risks. He’d later have reason to curb his enthusiasm and dampen my own. His boss, the publisher, unschooled in English, more interested in circulation and advertising sales, had never read a word I’d written. The message this small, underfed, struggling newspaper sent by publishing my exposés -- that one of the obligations of a free press is to point fingers -- did not fall on deaf ears. But this was still a largely alien concept. Predictably, I was swiftly denounced as a gadfly, an iconoclast and a mischief maker, and the publisher was sternly reprimanded by his clients for allowing “a gringo journalist to ‘calumniate’ the fatherland.”

Later, a series of reports on the assassination of Maya chieftain, Cándido Amador Recinos, would also be greeted with threats of legal action. For its part, the Honduran government reacted to the reports with apathy, if not stupor. Made public, threats against me were likewise ignored or dismissed by the mainstream Spanish-language press. A culture of intolerance toward truth was being exalted by indifference toward the gringo that I am.

In May 1999, I filed a report titled, Central America and Genocide: The Seamy Side of Reconciliation. The original draft contained a list of 22 high-ranking retired Honduran military officers, all graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, all implicated in crimes against humanity. Unlike the Cándido chronicles, which were based on personal research and augmented by intelligence from informants, the miscreants named in the report were already well known, in and out of the region. They’d been cited by The Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, Newsweek, and The New York Times, and by watchdog organizations, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Center for International Justice and Law. Their crimes are now a matter of public record.

First published two years earlier, the list, and a brief account of documented offenses ranging from narcotrafficking to torture, kidnapping and illegal detention, disappearances, assassination and mass murder, was this time willfully excised from the main story text. Journalists, this one included, zealously and justifiably protective of their status as independent observers, question the very concept of an editor suppressing verifiable fact. As it is, newsmen working in Central America face harassment, intimidation, a weak judiciary and governments that view the media as dangerous meddlers. Scores of journalists have been silenced because of this presumption. The lucky ones were merely fired or demoted. TV networks had their licenses revoked; their anchors were dragged to court to face trumped-up charges of libel and slander. Maverick publishers found their offices padlocked, their printing plants demolished and their paper supply deliveries suspended. Hard-nosed journalism and legitimate dissent were discarded in favor of sensationalism, gore and banality.

Tactically expedient, the motive offered by the editor for deleting a previously circulated list of thugs -- that “some of these men live a spit’s throw away from my house” -- would prove strategically unsound. It was also a harbinger of things to come. I later submitted several articles on the soaring rate of crime and violence in Honduras. The articles were inspired in part by Cándido’s assassination and by the gangland-style, drive-by rub out in Copán that had left five people dead. The articles raised a storm of protest and triggered an avalanche of vituperations against me. They also earned me scores of anonymous threats, many of them traceable to Copán hotel, restaurant and tour operators.

Originally approved and scheduled for publication, a sequel probing Copán’s corrupt political machine was suddenly put on hold. Owing the gravity of my disclosures and the potential for legal action (or more serious forms of retribution) I was asked to edit the piece and soften the pitch. Fearing that substance would be seriously eroded by the absence of detail but anxious to get the story out, I reluctantly complied. The text was further heavily “sanitized.” Names were deleted. Other litigious elements were muted or expurgated. Notwithstanding these adulterations and a craven retreat from naked truth to adumbration, the editor, expressing concern for life and limb, declared the piece “still too hot to publish” and scrapped it.

Dumbfounded, defenseless against skullduggery, I ended what had been a long and often stormy relationship with the paper. Published after some delay, my letter of resignation, which I’d insisted be made public, was doctored. Among the deleted passages was a reference to threats against the paper by Copán hoteliers and restaurateurs to suspend all advertising so long as I was being published. The article on violence, the riposte its vicious reception elicited and the banned Copán massacre exposé were eventually circulated on the Internet and later published in Panama and the U.S. Six years later, friends still advise me to stay out of Copán.

In open societies, a free press is both an asset and a facilitator of democracy. In other parts of the world, it is still viewed as a threat to oligarchies and other deeply entrenched power structures. This attitude has created a self-view by the press that predisposes it to silence. Empowered by the elite, indebted to them, governments add insult to injury by looking the other way. A nation that controls its media or fosters a climate of fear and intimidation that cows them into self-censorship -- or silence -- can only be called a nation of gangsters.

Gazing at my old school building on Rue de Rennes, across the Église Saint-Germain des Près, and remembering the great lessons learned along the way that day in Paris, I was reminded that it is in censorship that the seeds of suspicion, fear and social disquiet grow best. When the truth is sacrificed at the altar of political correctness, the consequences are incalculable. As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) warns, “To be silent is to lie.” Unamuno was right. Silence invites more injustice, more deaths. Armed only with words, journalists wage an ill-balanced and often fruitless war. The other side has guns, greased, loaded and aimed at the truth by a triumvirate of collusive interests. The first seeks to gain global control by establishing a chimerical “new world order.” The second is keen on opening new markets for the bulimic corporate juggernaut. At the bottom are the reactionary political structures of compliant debtor nations that salivate, like Pavlov’s dogs, when the bell of foreign aid rings.

“It’s amazing that, historically, words have prevailed,” says prize-winning essayist and author, Roger Rosenblatt. His may be an ontological perspective. Words endure in the impersonal, two-dimensional realm of the printed page, but they do not prevail. Instead, they leave a wasteland of lofty rhetoric that has done nothing to change human nature, chill passions and curb hatred. Some horrors are too deep for words or, as deconstructionist philosophy suggests, writing is a dangerous substitute for living as it is likely to betray personal experience.

Ebbing passion and waning romanticism in the presence of horror produce a different kind of desolation, one felt deeply in an inaccessible region of one’s soul. For years I thought that one way of erring on the side of justice was to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, the forgotten. Behind prison walls. At mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom had been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth. Pogroms, exile, occupation, torture, war, genocide, ethnic cleansing: They’ve all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony. Shocking prime-time images of man’s inhumanity to man don’t lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered at the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts. “Past is prelude,” we declare with scholarly condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition, Shoah, the near-extermination of native Americans, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians, Biafra, the killing fields of Cambodia, the intertribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis, the bloodbath in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands, the 64-year-old blood-letting between Israelis and Palestinians, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; the wanton murder of street children.

Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities, all help intellectualize other people’s suffering. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each infamy. “You can’t change human nature,” we pontificate, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will help set our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.

The heavy capital of idealism and exuberance I’d invested in unmasking and impaling vampires had by now steadily dwindled. The reason for this lassitude was not a lack of energy or a diminished commitment to justice, but the cumulative effect of disillusionment and disgust at people crippled by sloth and inertia. I’d spent nearly two decades fighting their battles as if they were my own, my activism exhausted in a futile effort to agitate the popular conscience, to stiffen backbones weakened by despotism and exploitation. In so doing, I’d finally hit a brick wall and the stars the impact produced in my head showered me with an insight of blinding clarity. At long last, I understood that mine was a puny and hopeless contest against formidable foes. I realized that the people of Central America would never change, never rebel, not on the streets, not at the polls. A short memory and a weak character will do that to people. Neither alienation nor profound discontent will spur them to shake the political dustbin. Fearful of change, unnerved by serious reformation, they will choose to be seduced by the echo of old, hackneyed words rather than awakened by the unsettling resonance of their own reality.

Passive, submissive, Central Americans never look back, except to reminisce about a blurry and irretrievable past. They are too busy existing and procreating like lemmings to realize that they’re being fleeced, that they’re being led to slaughter then devoured by the very shepherds entrusted with their care. Occasionally, they give in to knee-jerk reactions, a primordial reflex now reduced to feeble tics that are promptly stilled by police truncheons. Feeling the sting of injustice and institutionalized villainy, they will succumb to a brief and atypical act of defiance that horrifies the flock and is then swiftly swept under the rug of public indifference. Anticipated and tolerated by the oligarchy, these random displays of exasperation are then loudly flouted as the undesirable byproducts of a free society, instead of being flagged and deplored as the warning signs of grave social ills.

For lack of a cohesive voice, Mesoamericans -- apathetic if not inert -- will continue to put into office people who know how to stir their nations’ messianic hopes of deliverance from the status-quo but who spend their term polishing the next speech instead of cleaning up the shit, which is what they were elected to do in the first place. Most will be content to live with slogans instead of awakening from the stupor of their political gullibility. Democracy does not work in a vacuum. It demands active participation by all. Its tender shoots will wilt so long as people continue to bask in the feeble light of hope. A basic right of democracy -- and a key responsibility -- is to make politicians accountable for their words, responsible for their broken promises. Long overdue is an upsurge of nausea, a loud, collective spasm of revulsion at the vampires impaled at their throats. Time has come to slam the shutters open and exclaim loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” Not the potholes and the crumbling sidewalks, not the garbage, the foul air and polluted water, not the power outages, unregulated traffic, police corruption, influence peddling, drug running, and money laundering, not the gangs and child prostitution and human trafficking, not the inept and fossilized bureaucracies, not the Byzantine red tape, usurious bank rates, lofty explanations, limp excuses, words, words, words.

But such outbursts are dramatized on television and in cinemas where the people purge themselves on a Saturday night out -- never in the streets -- or in the saloons where the national bile is habitually drowned. At the polls, where the democratic process has been reduced to a thoughtless ritual, there will be no surprises. It will be business as usual. Voters will opt for the “least worst” and hope for the best. This is the safe way out. Convictions are easily subverted by sheepish conformity. In the rush to find someone to blame for their woes, the good people of Central America will ultimately exorcise and exonerate their tormentors.

There is comfort in perpetuity. It helps deaden hopeless dreams.

What happened to the idealism, the zeal, the élan that once inspirited me? Why have disgust, rancor and indifference replaced empathy? Is it age? Is it the realization that I’d been screaming at the deaf and gesticulating before the blind and petitioning the heartless? Is it the pervading squalor, the immovable plutocracies and rampant corruption in nations so lacking in self-respect, ambition and initiative that they wallow in their own excrement and keep smiling? Is it the sudden awareness that I was speaking to myself? Imagine how much time, effort, passion and paper and kilobytes were wasted in the process, how many words uttered in vain.

“Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse,” say the cynical French. Everything slips away, everything tires, everything breaks. Battle-weary, shell-shocked, I lay down my weapons. Nature’s laws are immutable. There are those who eat. And there are those who are eaten. I was tired of sorting through the leftovers.

In time, back home, rested, cleansed and eager to find them, I would uncover other depredations and, with them, fresh pretexts for one last hurrah of rabble rousing, one prolonged final burst of fury that would bring on criticism, censorship and subtler forms of rebuke and disaffection, this time not in some backwater Third World nation but in the mythical land of the free and the home of the brave, the Grand Master of corruption, the capo di tutti capi, the United State of America.