by Don McCullin
27. THE TRIBE WHO KILLED CHRIST
The question I’m most often asked about going to war is—how much danger money did you get? And I can always detect a certain incredulity when I give the only possible answer: ‘None.’
I have a letter of contract, dated 13 February 1974—almost exactly ten years after I started going to the wars—in which the Sunday Times agrees to pay me £5,392.80 a year, in return for which I am pledged to make myself available forty-seven weeks of the year, and not to work for any other British national newspaper. Work for any other publication of any kind had to be cleared with the editor of the magazine, and while I retained the copyright of my pictures, Times Newspapers could use them at any time without a fee.
While £5,000 was certainly a reasonable wage in those days, it was no more than was paid to senior sub-editors who never emerged from behind the security of their desks in Gray’s Inn Road. Compared with earnings in the field of advertising and fashion photography, it was of course not even modest.
There is no reason to believe war correspondents are less grasping than other human beings, but I have never come across one who went to war to get rich. There were some journalists, good ones too, who would not go to war if you gave them the Mint. Others would show up at the front without permission and no more than a faint hope of recouping their expenses. Like every other journalist, war correspondents might expect a bit extra, usually in terms of time off, after a good or a particularly harrowing job, but danger money never came into it. And really, when you think about it, the idea is laughable. The amount of money that would compensate you adequately for getting your head blown off doesn’t exist.
My life, though, was about to enter one of its less dangerous phases. The death of Nick Tomalin had been a brutal shock. Nick had been good friends with most of the top executives on the newspaper, with Harry Evans in particular, and while unquestionably he had acted on his own initiative, the question arose as to whether he would have used his initiative in this way if so much had not been expected of him, or if there had not been so much enthusiasm for going to the limit for the paper.
Inevitably Nick’s death cast a shadow over the paper’s swashbuckling style. I cannot remember a memo on the subject going round, but there was a definite sense of reining in, of a new caution, particularly in the foreign field. It was a change of mood rather than a decision, and for that reason its effects went deeper.
The main consequence for me was that I found myself doing more but safer assignments. This trend was accelerated by a change of magazine editorship. Under Godfrey Smith, and his young successor Magnus Linklater, I had enjoyed the easiest of rides. Both were genuinely curious about foreign parts and would, after little persuasion, allow me to go almost where I pleased. This situation changed when Linklater gave place to Hunter Davies who, though a very considerable journalist, made no secret of the fact that he was less than infatuated with happenings beyond Dover.
For eighteen months I didn’t cover a war of any sort, though I was rarely idle. Coming from Carlisle, Hunter Davies was keen on the North and I was up there several times, photographing Hadrian’s Wall at its best and the dustridden steel town of Consett at its consistent worse. After Consett we got a lot of flak. A local schoolmaster wrote in: ‘Now that your reporter and photographer have crawled back to their holes in London, we’re rather proud of our . . .’ I’m always amazed by how lovable awfulness can become.
I took a spin around Japan with Alex Mitchell who was charmed by the opportunity to dismember the corporate state, and I did a long story about racist hoodlums in Marseille with Bruce Chatwin. We tried to trace hoods who machine-gunned Algerian settlements by night, but there was also a High Society element to the investigation.
One evening Bruce and I were invited to dinner by the estranged wife of the mayor of Marseille who seemed to occupy the official residence with a woman friend while the mayor and his new lady were away. As the wine flowed the two women started competing for Bruce’s favours. The mayor’s wife brought out all her jewellery, which she had had crushed into a huge dice. She threw it on the table, saying, ‘I’ve had my jewellery refashioned.’ Not to be outdone, her companion then brought out her own dice and threw it down. Bruce sat there egging them on with that angelic, mischievous face thrown back in laughter, and that is the image of him that came back to me when I heard of his tragic death in 1989.
The most interesting enterprise of this peace period was the investigation I made with Norman Lewis of the disappearances of Aché Indians in Paraguay. When a new road to Argentina was driven through the rain forest habitat of the ‘white Indians’—as the Aché are called because of their light skin colour—land prices shot up and Indian hunts began. Many of those captured were taken to a camp at Cecilio Baez and about half that number never seen again. In response to an international outcry, the Paraguayan government dismissed the camp’s administration and invited an American missionary group, the New Tribes Mission, to take over. Norman Lewis was not reassured.
The New Tribes Mission drew support from the born-again Christians in the Bible belt of the American South. It was aggressive in its pursuit of Indian souls and not too fastidious in its methods.
To Norman’s mind, the way the missionaries attracted Indians with gifts of knives, axes and mirrors as bait, and then would ‘integrate’ them into their settlements, was scarcely better than methods adopted by the more rough-hewn Indian-hunters. Those Indians who didn’t die of white man’s diseases (like the common cold) were rapidly demoralised and, in white man’s hand-me-downs, fitted only for poverty-stricken lives in the teeming city slums. The Indian clearing services provided by the missionaries were appreciated by many Latin American dictatorships who would show their appreciation by handing over chunks of land. A Paraguayan army officer once told Norman that missionaries were more efficient at clearing Indian areas than the army. ‘When we go in we shoot some, and some get away. They get the lot. When the missionaries clear an area they leave it clean.’
Norman and I flew to the Paraguayan capital of Asunción with the idea of seeing conditions in Cecilio Baez for ourselves. The Paraguay of General Stroessner, Latin America’s most enduring dictator, was not a place that disgorged its secrets easily. It was probably this discretion that made it attractive to the many Nazi war criminals who lived there. When Norman spoke about our mission to a distinguished local anthropologist in Asunción, he was advised against seeking a permit from the Ministry of Defence. The best method was to go in by village bus with two hired trusties, otherwise we might be the ones to disappear.
We decided to enlist the help of the British Embassy and found a willing accomplice there in Julio, a Paraguayan schoolteacher who worked part-time on the Embassy staff. It was Julio who smoothed our way to the Ministry of Defence, where we met polite, but vigorous, attempts to dissuade us. The official explained his reluctance to give us a permit by reference to his last bad experience. He said that a French couple, ostensibly on a scientific mission, had filmed the Aché in Cecilio Baez indulging in sexual intercourse and that this film had surfaced in the blue movie parlours of Panama. Then, after a few days, the barriers seemed to come down and conveniently Julio found the time to drive us halfway across Paraguay to Cecilio Baez in his deux chevaux.
It was a long drive and heavy rains made the dirt road impassable. We diverted for the night to Julio’s home in Caazapá. Julio was a most entertaining companion, chatty and well read, but I remember Norman saying to me that he had never before come across a schoolmaster who held himself in quite the way he did. That evening Norman came up to me and said with a quiet chuckle, ‘I accidentally opened the door to Julio’s room and saw our schoolmaster buckling on an automatic pistol. He also had a dagger strapped just above his right ankle.’
Next day Julio showed us how to have a good time in Caazapá in the rain. He explained that vendetta duels used to be conducted conveniently close to the cemetery. S
ince the showing of the film High Noon, they tended to be held in the main street. A sudden buzz of excitement led me to believe a duel was being laid on for our benefit, but it was only a local bullfight.
I became excited photographing the storm clouds and the effects on the light, and this obviously moved Julio, who told me I was opening his eyes to the beauties of Paraguay. And while I didn’t feel nervous of Julio, whose presence was presumably designed to protect us, I thought it reassuring that the man with a gun should admire what I did.
It became clear that this particular mission to Cecilio Baez would have to be aborted, but there was one more diversion on the way back to Asunción. In the little town of Coronel Oviedo there lived the Great Witch of Paraguay. Her name was Maria Calavera (Mary Skull) and General Perón of Argentina was said to have been one of her regular clients. Her speciality was helping people to put their affairs in order by predicting for them the exact date of their death.
This was not the kind of information that I was keen to acquire, but Norman couldn’t resist. I’m not sure what he got out of Mary Skull but he had a quiet smile on his face when he returned to the car.
We made another run to Cecilio Baez a couple of days later, this time in a Land Rover with a driver (again referred to us through the British Embassy) who was an English veterinary surgeon with no discernible armament about his person.
Clearly we were unwelcome at the camp. The head missionary, who looked like a crop-haired Marine, grumbled about our turning up three days after we were expected. With a slight edge of surprise on our side, we tried to allay his concern by saying we had no intention of making blue movies as the French couple had. The missionary looked blank. There had never been a ‘French couple’. He surprised us by saying he had 300 Indians in the camp, for this was considerably more than we had been led to believe and suggested that mission care was indeed keeping more Indians alive. He explained that the overriding purpose was to bring salvation to those in a state of sin. All the missionaries in Cecilio Baez ‘worked with the unreached’.
While Norman was still talking, I slipped away and started taking photographs. The stench of neglected sanitation in the hutted camp area was overpowering. One thing soon became obvious: there were nothing like 300 Aché in this camp—at most there were fifty Indians, all of them in pitiful condition. The young children all had distended stomachs and decayed teeth that told of malnutrition. The adults all seemed unfocused and listless. Some of the young missionaries hovered uncertainly around me while I took pictures, though I achieved some immunity when a little flaxen-haired boy, the son of one of the missionaries, decided to take a liking to me. I accepted his offer to carry my tripod.
As I went over to a little hut, a missionary started gesturing no admittance. I went in and found two old Aché women, emaciated and very close to death. In the next hut lay a young woman with untreated wounds, a small tearful boy beside her. I asked my missionary boy what had happened and he, unaware of the grown-ups’ party line that everybody in Cecilio Baez had come there voluntarily, told me the truth. All three women and the boy, he said, had been taken in a recent forest round-up; the youngest woman had been shot in the side while trying to escape.
This confirmed Norman’s evidence, from other sources, that some of the missionaries went on Indian-catching raids. Indeed, it was wholly impossible to credit the notion that the Aché could be ‘attracted’ to this place without coercion. It could be that the missionaries were saving Indian souls but the evidence of neglect of their bodies was there to be seen.
While we were going about our business the younger missionaries formed up a rank and sang hymns. Norman described it as the most sinister experience of his life, and it wasn’t a moment I wanted to prolong.
We tangled again with the New Tribes Mission some years later when Norman heard a curious story about the Panare Indians who lived in the Venezuelan interior. The Panare were known for their immunity to any white man’s attempt to civilise them, and resistance to evangelism was enhanced by the lack in Panare language of words for sin, punishment and guilt.
A census-taker had come across a Panare community in the Colorado Valley and had tape-recorded them singing their ancestral songs. She returned a year later with the intention of playing back the songs to entertain the Indians. Once the tape-recorder was switched on, the Indians leapt up in panic and denounced the voice of the devil. For Norman, this was a sure sign of New Tribes Mission activity.
We made the expedition to the Panare in the company of Paul Henley, an anthropologist who spoke their language and who was an adopted member of the tribe. The first Panare we saw told the whole story. He was a young man in the traditional red woven loincloth astride a bicycle bearing the message ‘Christ Saves Us’. The Panare, it seemed, had been half-saved, incorporating bits and pieces of Christian culture but essentially going their own way.
We were allocated one of the thatched longhouses and made welcome—up to a point. The Colorado Valley Panare did not want me to photograph them. At first I thought this might be a prohibition imposed by the NTM missionaries, but then the missionaries all took off in their charter plane soon after our arrival, leaving behind them a piggy bank for every Panare child and a reworked version of the Crucifixion story in which the Panare killed Christ. It was still ‘no photographs’, even after the missionaries had gone.
The Panare are a highly photogenic people, lithe and graceful in movement, and I could just imagine the art editor’s response if I got back saying, ‘Listen, they were really amazing-looking Indians but I don’t have any pictures.’ I started trying to win hearts and minds with my small repertoire of conjuring tricks and succeeded in elevating my status with the Panare children. The adults were harder to crack. Paul Henley told me that my best chance of beating the ban would be to photograph them in some kind of action. The opportunity came with a most unusual fishing expedition.
The operation began with a trip into the mountains to cut down quantities of a liana called enerima before the Panare gathered in force on a quiet reach of the Tortuga River, a tributary of the Orinoco. Some fifty Indians lined the bank while the lianas were crushed and put into baskets which were then rinsed in the flowing water. In a couple of minutes the water began to turn milky. Soon you could see fish leaping out of the river and going doolally. This was the signal for the Panare to move in with their spears. Norman estimated the full catch at around a ton.
The enerima must have contained some kind of nerve poison. It did not kill fish but just paralysed or stunned them temporarily. While this astonishing spectacle was in progress I was able to take photographs almost at will, though photographing the Panare remained a delicate and difficult matter.
From Colorado Valley we would make excursions to other smaller Panare communities. Some of these required Norman and me to undertake intrepid treks across country, even wading rivers waist deep. In one such crossing Norman, who was ahead of me, stopped to draw my attention to a host of hummingbirds skittering along the bank. Suddenly he began hopping up and down alarmingly in the water.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not sure, dear boy,’ his benign voice floated back to me as he tried to regain his composure. ‘Feels as if something is biting at my crotch.’
The cause of this discomfort was not easy to discover but eventually we spotted the tiny fish, only a few millimetres long, that were trying to make a meal of poor Norman’s genitals.
The most bizarre location we visited was close to a diamond mining township called Tiro Loco (Crazy Shot). There the Indians traded fresh vegetables for the miners’ pots and pans.
Norman bore with me while I enjoyed some freedom among the diamond miners. They were some of the most evil-looking characters I had ever come across, but that didn’t seem to inhibit them from asking me to take their pictures. Here you could actually see drunks being pitched head first out of saloons into the
street, though we were assured by one citizen that you had to work hard to get yourself shot. The only hotel in town turned out to be a whorehouse. While neither Norman nor I was accustomed to frequenting such places, it excited me to be taking my first whorehouse pictures. For me the whole place was rather like grabbing at a live wire.
As the light faded I took to gulping down quantities of local beer, known as Pola, while a raucous crowd was assembling for the cockfight. Through the haze I became aware of Norman saying, ‘Have you finished your work?’ Yes, I suppose I had, I admitted in a slurred voice. ‘Well then, shall we go?’ he said. As ever Norman’s delicate invitation had the force of a command.
28. WAITING FOR POL POT
The Khmer Rouge were busy in the spring of 1975 dropping Russian rockets on the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and killing people left, right and centre. Thousands of mines laid around the city were claiming a dozen amputees daily. The airport was under constant fire from Khmers who had overrun all the country save this last small enclave around the capital. Even twelve-year-olds were being kitted out by a beleaguered government, handed an Armalite each and pushed into the front-line defences.
The situation was so desperate when I arrived it was hard to know where to begin. Combat photography seemed almost inconsequential beside the real story taking place in the hospitals, where conditions could only be described as Crimean. Patients with ghastly wounds littered the floors while the few remaining doctors tried to keep pace with demands for emergency surgery. There was no time for bedside manner or finesse of any sort. I watched a twelve-month-old baby having the wound left by its amputated arm stitched hurriedly as if it were an old football. The speed-sewer was not a doctor but the only man available who could work with a needle. While the blood-letting went on all around Phnom Penh operations were being cancelled for a lack of blood transfusions. Along with the carnage went the starvation. More than fifty babies a week were said to be dying from malnutrition.