by Craig Oliver
We could never predict who or what we would encounter in El Salvador. An unforgettable incident occurred one morning while we were on what we called “routine patrol” of the jungle roads. Hearing gunshots, we headed for the action. We came upon a group of soldiers circling the bodies of three teenagers. The victims’ torsos were still smoking from wounds made by the high-velocity bullets that had torn into them as they knelt on the ground, hands tied behind their backs. The sergeant told us they were suspected members of a “Communist cadre” and so had been executed. But they were dressed in typical teenagers’ clothing, jeans and T-shirts. One of them was a stunningly beautiful girl wearing flirty red-plastic shoes. That grisly scene haunted and angered me. So this was the professional army that American Special Forces were training.
In El Salvador I learned about the terrible gap that too often exists between policies enunciated at a White House news briefing and their horrendous consequences on the ground. I wondered, not for the last time, if the cost in blood and treasure of a war fought for a dubious cause didn’t make for a pitifully hollow victory.
Nicaragua was a very different story. There the United States had no puppet government in place, and although the Sandinista regime was Marxist, the Reagan administration did not view it as a major continental threat. Consequently, it attracted less attention from the American media. As a Canadian crew, however, we visited frequently. Various Canadian aid groups and the Canadian Catholic church had been active there for years, and a number of Nicaraguans had attended Canadian schools.
It was difficult not to have some respect and even sympathy for the Sandinistas. In 1979 they had overthrown one of the most hated and repressive military regimes in the Americas, that of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. When it became known that Somoza and his cronies had pocketed millions in foreign aid following the country’s devastating 1972 earthquake, Somoza’s government lost any remaining moral authority in the eyes of the world and was eventually abandoned by the U.S. government under Jimmy Carter.
Prior to the successful revolution, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a coalition of socialist groups, had conducted a guerrilla campaign of strikes, hostage takings, and armed insurrection against the Somoza regime. When the guerrillas finally took control, the country was in economic ruin. Among the new regime’s first programs were land reform, grassroots political organization, and measures to improve literacy, health care, and working conditions.
The Sandinista leadership was a mix of dedicated Marxists, practical socialists, and leftist intellectuals. By 1982 they had imposed so-called emergency security measures that the Reagan administration pointed to as a pure Communist dictatorship. It was true that Fidel Castro was a hero to many of them, but the Sandinistas never adopted the nation-as-prison pattern of the Soviet Union. They jailed the noisiest of their political opponents and were not particularly gentle, but they didn’t routinely murder them. A degree of open criticism of the government was permitted, including an opposition newspaper.
The leadership did, however, accept military and economic aid from the Soviet Union. For that reason, the Reagan administration hoped to contain and even squash the Sandinistas before they spread the Communist contagion to other Latin American countries. The United States imposed a harsh economic embargo and in effect bought itself a counter-revolutionary army, the Contras, to wage another guerrilla war in the country. Congress prohibited federal government funding of the Contras in 1983, but the administration continued to finance its dirty work through such covert schemes as the sale of arms to Iran. The revelations surrounding the Iran-Contra Affair were the low point of Reagan’s time in office, though he himself preserved a deniability of the essential details. The Contras never succeeded, and in 1984 the Sandinistas gained the legitimacy of election victory under their bespectacled, intellectual guerrilla leader, Daniel Ortega.
We in the CTV crew covered those elections and were moved by the turnout of thousands who lined up in the hot sun to cast ballots. One night the Contras attacked our hotel, the site of the government’s election headquarters, with small arms fire. I threw my mattress against the balcony window to protect myself from shards of glass if the room was hit. Tim Kotcheff, who had come down to produce a special item on the elections, took a different approach. He phoned the front desk to complain about the noise and inquire how long it was expected to last. Not long. The army arrived and the insurgent band disappeared into the bush. Later we covered the impact of the embargo and the Canadian companies who continued to do business in Nicaragua in defiance of the American policy. Small local industries that were still able to sell abroad were endlessly thankful to Canada and happy to say so on camera.
Even during the worst of the bloody struggle with the Contras, Nicaragua never became the killing ground that El Salvador was. But it was a country at war, and tension was always in the air. In the capital, Managua, we sometimes dodged flying debris when Contra bombs were set off, a pathetic gesture in a city that had remained largely shattered and unrepaired since the 1972 earthquake. The war itself was hard to get to. The Contras were ineffective as an insurgency movement; their specialties were bombs and ambushes of Sandinista troops. All of this happened in the hills and jungle, and government troops would not allow us to join them on patrol. As a result, the most serious threat I faced in Nicaragua was a love affair that turned out to be a dangerous liaison.
We had hired a young American woman, clearly a Sandinista sympathizer, as our translator. The two of us became fast friends, very fast in fact, in that live-for-the-moment atmosphere. Such attachments had no consequences and, at that point in my life, I had no reason to resist urgent impulses.
One night she confessed that she was the mistress of the commandante of the secret police and warned me that he was quite jealous. I wasn’t overly concerned; after all, the Sandinistas loved Canada. Spanish machismo would not be denied, however. Soon after, while she and I were quaffing a bottle of the best French champagne (at two dollars U.S. a pop, thanks to the black market) a posse of uniformed military men paid us a visit. I was invited to be an honoured guest at a noontime event at army headquarters the next day. With plans to travel into the countryside, I declined with regrets. These were not accepted. A military escort would pick me up on the morrow.
The following day I was taken not to the army base but to a flat concrete bunker that I knew to be the headquarters of the secret police. As I was marched down a long, dark tunnel, I speculated on how many had come this way before me, never to retrace their steps. We emerged into a drill hall and a gloomy scene. A crowd of several hundred people, about half in military garb, sat before three open coffins whose uniformed, bemedalled occupants had been killed a few days earlier in a Contra ambush. I was shown to a seat directly in front of the bier, cheek by jowl with the portly commandante in question. One after another, armed mourners approached their departed comrades and let loose with fiery orations. I understood nothing, but the meaning was clear: bloody revenge on the gringos. My host spoke not a word to me, though he seemed to eye me accusingly during his shift at the caskets. It was time to leave town.
There was one final coincidence, if it was one. In the airport waiting room, a military policeman motioned me to follow him outside. I clutched my passport tightly as he led me behind the terminal building. He stopped and then slowly drew out his pistol. Alarm turned to relief when I saw that he held the gun in his open palm like an offering. Would I care to buy his sidearm? I agreed the nickel-plated Smith & Wesson was an admirable weapon and the fifty-dollar price tag a fraction of its cost in Virginia. Rather than insult the policeman with an immediate rejection, I raised the issue of getting the gun through airport customs. He assured me that would not be a problem. In Miami, however, the officials might not be so co-operative, I reminded him. The policeman pleasantly accepted my refusal and let me go on my way.
Perhaps, like so many in that country in those days, he was just a fellow desperate for Yankee dollars. Or he may have been t
he accomplice of a jealous lover who needed a reason to arrest me. El Commandante went on to become a respected politician and poet in his homeland. I often wonder what became of our mutual girlfriend.
In the spring of 1982, Don Cameron dispatched me to Argentina to cover a rare modern-day shooting war between a former imperial power and a one-time New World colony. The dispute centred on the British-dependent territories of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, three hundred miles off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic. Long claimed by Argentina, Las Malvinas provided the ruling military junta with a rallying cause for patriotic sentiment and a distraction for citizens who were chafing under horrific political abuses and economic mismanagement.
On April 2, Argentina’s military forces invaded and occupied the largely agricultural islands. The inhabitants were easily overcome: Sheep outnumbered people, and the population had little more than a few shotguns to defend themselves. The strutting generals back in Buenos Aires had told Argentinians that the British lacked the moral courage to fight, that they were fat and lazy. This was a tragic misjudgment of Britain’s Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. When diplomacy failed, she stunned the junta by sending a naval task force to retake the islands.
I arrived in Buenos Aires feeling, as many did, that this was some sort of Gilbert and Sullivan theatrical production that would amount to little more than a shouting match. Cameraman Malcolm Fox and I set up in the elegant Marriott Hotel in the city square across from the train station. Two blocks away, the trendy Florida Street shops were brimming with luxury fashions while inflation ran at exorbitant rates. For more than a month, I filed almost nightly stories, the satellite feeds transmitted from the top floor of the hotel.
At first it was a cakewalk of an assignment. We covered the shuttle diplomacy as efforts were made to head off a confrontation. Canada uttered the usual sighs and appeals for a fair and lasting settlement. Al Haig met with the generals, who appreciated that he was one of them, but he was unable to break the deadlock between the British and Argentinians. He told reporters that the situation was not looking good, and suddenly the mood toward the international press cooled appreciably. On the streets, people stopped to lecture us, and the ever-present police turned hostile.
Moreover, as we started to hear horrendous tales about the regime, our attention was drawn to Argentina’s domestic politics. For four years, the military had carried out a war of extermination against so-called “leftist revolutionaries.” In a highly organized campaign of state-sponsored torture and terror, they had murdered an estimated three hundred thousand people, most of them young men and women. When mothers and grandmothers mounted a public campaign to find the “disappeared ones,” some of them too were killed. Accounts of thousands of people thrown to their deaths from aircraft and of torture cells inside the Navy Mechanical School, not far from the elegant shops and theatres of downtown Buenos Aires, were chilling to hear.
More shocking was the knowledge that leading businesspeople, journalists, and Catholic clerics silently and in some cases actively supported these crimes. I realized how ignorant I had been of the realities in a country proud of its cultivated ways but permeated by fear. A lawyer invited me to his home for dinner and behind closed blinds and in a voice barely above a whisper confessed his agony over what was happening to his country. He was a sophisticated, well-educated man who explained that everyone he knew was afraid to speak out against the military bosses. He provided eye-opening and invaluable grist for our reports back home.
Like caricatures of Chaplin’s Great Dictator, in riding boots and elaborate uniforms, the junta leaders could have stepped straight out of a comic book, but they were far more dangerous. Their florid televised speeches about blood and honour echoed the excesses of the Third Reich. Indeed at informal social gatherings, I frequently heard opinions expressed that were strongly reminiscent of Nazi and Fascist propaganda. People spoke of a cancer eating at their society. Just as surgeons must cut out not just the tumour but all the flesh surrounding it, so too was it necessary to eliminate undesirables to save the body politic.
In the days before hostilities erupted, Argentinian officials worked to win the sympathies of the foreign press corps. I went to cocktail parties with known killers, suave in their monogrammed jackets and ties. On one occasion I attended a house party with a man I had met at a government social function. I was surprised to find myself the only foreigner at the event and thus the centre of considerable attention.
Talk naturally turned to the imminent battle. Who would triumph? Some of the guests were silent, but most agreed with my host who, using the conflicts in Vietnam and Northern Ireland to buttress his opinion, declared that soldiers from democracies were drawn from the lower classes; like their leaders, they lacked the moral fibre to fight for a cause they believed in.
A young man wearing a naval coat of arms on his jacket pocket challenged me to predict the outcome. My view was that the Argentinian conscripts, however brave, could be no match for the professional British troops, among the toughest and besttrained infantrymen in the world. I said the challenge would be much more difficult than taking on a few hundred sheep farmers and added that no one could remember the last time Argentina’s forces had done any serious fighting. We had been speaking English, but the young man exploded into angry Spanish. I retreated to another part of the room, leaving behind me shouts and the sound of a struggle. Two of the fellow’s companions were restraining him from inflicting physical damage. The person who brought me rushed us down the elevator and drove me back to my hotel in silence. I was lucky. Within days, men in civilian clothes driving the infamous Ford Falcons were picking up foreign correspondents off the street. Reporters were roughed up and dumped naked in the barrios to intimidate the rest of us.
None of us seriously expected open warfare, perhaps anticipating that a show of force by the British would bring a negotiated resolution. Instead an amphibious assault recaptured South Georgia Island and a British submarine sank the Argentine cruiser Belgrano, taking 323 lives. That night I sent out my report on the sinking, and afterwards a friendly hotel waiter suggested it might not be wise to go out at night thereafter. Our Argentinian translator and those who worked for other networks suddenly quit, and the locals shunned us. Getting reliable information became difficult, especially since any material given out by the army was laughably inaccurate. Sometimes they would provide the same photo, claiming it to be two different locations, or a bit of film that obviously predated the damage caused by British attacks.
After a second month, I was ready to return home to Washington and my day job covering the Reagan administration. Toronto sent a replacement who had advertised his intention to become a full-time foreign correspondent. I got him settled, briefed him on the most useful contacts and the best bars, and waited for him to get to work. But he wouldn’t leave his hotel room. Every time I tried to drag him out, he went into a cold sweat. Days passed while he dithered. Finally, he told me that he felt his life was threatened, that the danger was too great. It was getting a little rough on the streets, but the war itself was a thousand miles away. The poor guy confessed to me that perhaps he was a coward. In fact I think he was a highly intelligent person with a too-active imagination. You can’t cover war up close if you dwell on the personal risks. Inevitably, he demanded to be sent home. We hired a security man to accompany him to the airport.
The next candidate was the indefatigable Pamela Wallin, then host of Canada AM. Don Cameron had hired her from the Toronto Star, where she was a reporter in the Ottawa bureau. Wallin remained on the scene until the Argentinians surrendered. A photograph of her covering the fiery postwar riot in the square facing Government House is a tribute to her courage. I suspect she even enjoyed her first taste of tear gas. Cameron had warned Wallin that she was a test case; the network had not often sent women into wars. She did her gender proud. Nothing demonstrated Wallin’s talents as more than a drawing room anchor than her performance under literal fi
re in Argentina and elsewhere. Soon afterwards, she was named the network’s Ottawa bureau chief.
Waiting for my plane out of Buenos Aires, I sat in the airport bar and considered how such a highly cultured nation could have slipped so easily into barbarity. When the country returned to democracy after the junta was defeated, Argentinians made little effort to examine what had happened. Germany faced its sins and learned from the Nuremberg trials; South Africans did the same with their reconciliation courts. In Argentina trials were few, and later on the worst of the convicted killers were pardoned in the interests, citizens were told, of national unity.
In 1989, I took the most expensive airport taxi ride of my life, from the terminal in Panama City to my hotel, paying five hundred dollars for a journey of roughly twelve miles. I arrived just days before the American invasion that ousted President Noriega, once a U.S.-supported strongman but recently accused of international drug trafficking. The Panama Canal could not be allowed to fall under the control of a narco state, and the Americans were mobilizing to bring down Noriega.
Fighting had already broken out downtown, and the route from the airport was littered with burning tires and evidence of shooting. Not unreasonably, the cabs were refusing to take passengers, and only the promise of a hefty fee got me to the hotel. There I found the power cut off and had to make my way up fourteen storeys by candlelight. No sooner had I located my room than the Toronto newsroom telephoned, asking for a voice report. That story was written and read by stuttering candle flame.