Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  By the time I called at noon, the editors already had seen the Washington Post and the New York Times, the wires, and news radio, which were not available to me. There was little news on daytime television at home, except for a startup called CNN, which the big networks dismissed as the Chicken Noodle Network. The imbalance of information—the editors knew everything and I knew nothing—made me feel more anxious and unprepared.

  I asked the hotel operator to dial the number in Washington. I turned on the TV, thinking I might need more aerobics. In a few minutes the operator rang to say my call was ready. I said hello, someone in Washington answered after a few clicks, and the operator left the line. I explained to the desk that I had a couple of things going but was vague about the story.

  The editor who took my call was patient and encouraging. Give it a day, he said, and then file. What a relief. I gave my cab driver a high-five, and we jumped back into the taxi to resume the search for news. The driver chose an expensive place for lunch, where the menus were covered in hairy cowhide, which put me off ordering steak.

  Fortunately for me, the country was small, and the players were few. They were accustomed to talking with American reporters because their country’s future depended in part on the US government, which was in part influenced by US public opinion, which was at least in part influenced by us in the media. The conservative Salvadorans recognized this explicitly and complained that we were biased toward the left-center politicians or even the rebels. Their bumper stickers declared: “Journalist: Betray Your Country, Not Ours. Tell the Truth!”

  This might have been funny if reporters were not being threatened, beaten, and killed. Everyone, even the print reporters, taped the shorthand “TV” on their vehicles or attached white towels borrowed from the hotel to the antennas. Somebody had made t-shirts that read in Spanish: “Journalist—Don’t Shoot!” It was hard to know whether the shirt was a shield or a bull’s-eye.

  At the American outpost in the capital, the fortified US embassy, my first press briefing was so crowded I had to sit on the floor with other reporters. I started to recognize the journalists and learned two things from their questions to the US military officer briefing us: how much they knew about the story and whether they were friendly people. I didn’t ask any questions, but I took pages of notes.

  After a few days, I felt more comfortable. I saw some of the reporters enough that I started to introduce myself. At least now when I went to breakfast, I could eat with someone. To a newcomer, the seating arrangements appeared as deliberate as a state dinner. The “A-team” was the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and maybe a reporter from a TV network, especially if the person had started his or her career at a newspaper. There also were reporters from the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, and news outlets from Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

  The reporters often plotted together where to go, whom to interview, and less directly, what to cover. There were several reasons to do this. First, it was safer to report in small groups than alone. Second, while the news organizations were competitors, the reporters often were friends who trusted each other. Finally, it was better to know what the competition was doing than to be called by the desk at midnight asking why the other paper had something different. Not necessarily better, but different. I had experienced all of this covering City Hall in Chicago, where competitors routinely agreed on “the story” for the day.

  Reporters still competed for scoops, however, which had a trickle-down effect on the rest of us. If on Monday a New York Times reporter discovered armed conflict in a rural area, the story would be in the paper Tuesday. The network correspondents in El Salvador received early copies of the New York Times, so at dawn they would race off to the same rural area in search of combat video called “bang bang” for Tuesday’s nightly news. By Wednesday, editors across the United States, including mine, had seen this new “hot zone” in the paper and on television, so they would assign their correspondents to cover the action, furthering the impression that something big was happening. The predictable process was annoying and defeated the whole purpose of having independent eyes and ears on a story.

  The reporters who were not on the A-team did not consider themselves to be in the minor leagues, and rightly so. Many were experts on the region, but they worked for the wires, news magazines, radio, television, newspaper groups, or regional papers in Dallas, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. The Miami Herald considered itself the paper of record for Latin America, and the Herald’s excellent reporters owned the story as much as anyone.

  As the new kid with little experience, and working for a venerable company that lacked snob appeal, I was not going to start on the A-team. I barely got up the nerve to speak to them. These people were legends and my heroes. The Washington Post’s Ed Cody had covered wars around the world, spoke a half-dozen languages, and didn’t even take notes. He had a tiny notebook he rarely removed from the breast pocket of a golf shirt. He wrote down only the occasional word or phrase. Mostly he just listened, really listened.

  I heard that one of the stars, Julia Preston, taped and transcribed every word of every interview and permanently archived all her notebooks. Another guy, Clifford Krauss, had been shot in the head covering a story here, and now he was having breakfast a few tables from me.

  Just as impressive were the photographers like Jim Nachtwey, Susan Meiselas, and Cindy Karp. They not only had to understand the story, they had to anticipate what would happen so as to be there to photograph it. Photographers never had the luxury of covering the story by phone, or recovering a scoop they had missed.

  I remember standing under a tree to avoid the burning sun and watching Newsweek’s Bill Gentile shoot photos with the intensity he brought to everything. While I watched, the back of his light-colored, cotton shirt began to darken with sweat. He lowered the camera only to wipe his eyes or adjust the heavy bag of gear on his shoulder. Soon his shirt was completely dark, soaked. All in the time it took me to drink a soda in the shade.

  My three notebooks filled up quickly, and I filed a story every day. Much of my work focused on El Salvador’s coming presidential elections, and I met all the candidates and memorized their platforms. After two weeks, one of the Washington editors told me to slow down. Take a breath, he said. When you write, let us know you are there. Have a dog step on your shoe or the sun warm your back.

  His guidance released me from my fear of getting scooped on something minor. After that, I spent more time writing the stories and really thinking about what I wanted to portray, rather than just shoving out facts and figures. I wasn’t working for a cushy monthly magazine, however, and I would be judged not by how much I learned but by how often I filed good stories.

  My regular taxi driver, Alejandro, agreed to guide me to a small mountain town that had been tossed back and forth between the guerrillas and the army. We had just met, but I didn’t hesitate to go anywhere with Alejandro, even a conflicted area. He took me to dangerous places, at some risk to himself, partly for the US dollars but also because he was interested and cared about his country. He cared enough about me to invite me to backyard barbecues with his extended family, where the little kids held my hands and jumped on me, the exotic American, and I cheerfully swung them by the arms in dizzying circles.

  On the road leaving the capital, we were stopped at a military checkpoint. After I presented a press credential issued by the Salvadoran Army, I interviewed the young soldiers, dark-skinned boys from the countryside, about what they had seen.

  Later, far from the capital, armed men flagged us down at a guerrilla checkpoint. The “Gs,” as some reporters called them, were thin and hard, with scraggly beards, homemade uniforms, and weapons ranging from a farmer’s shotgun to automatic rifles. I showed identification issued by the Salvadoran press association, not my army ID, so they wouldn’t mistake me for a government agent.

  I interviewed the young men, and a few women, about where they were from and why
they were fighting the government, looking over my shoulder in case an army patrol was approaching. At least nine foreign correspondents had been killed in El Salvador at the time, often in crossfires.

  Alejandro drove us up a winding unpaved track through a pine forest, watching carefully for fresh dirt where a mine could be hidden. I suggested we follow a bunch of cows walking up the road to let them discover the mines first. When darkness fell suddenly in the dense forest, I was briefly but intensely afraid, and I promised God that if we made it out safely, I would not return to this place.

  The power had been knocked out by the rebels, and no food had gotten through for several days, so that night we ate leftover tamales by candlelight at a solid wooden table in an empty hotel. The windows were open, and we could hear distant gunfire and occasional yelling. The mountain air was pleasantly cool; I hadn’t known this country could be anything but hot and humid. The other guests at the dinner table were a heavyset Salvadoran Army captain in fatigues and a human rights lawyer from the city.

  After quite a few beers, the captain vowed to fight the rebels to the last man, saying, “You can’t turn the other cheek if you’ve been shot in the face.”

  The lawyer just sighed, again. He shook his head in the darkened room and said, “That’s a parable, mi capitán.”

  A reporter friend, Larry Jolidon, silently approached the table in the dark, not wanting to intrude if I was doing an interview. I nodded for him to take a seat.

  The lawyer, who had been matching drinks with the captain for a couple of hours, said to me, “You treat us like animals. You want to know how many have been killed, which side is killing more today. No one wants to know, ‘How can the United States help El Salvador?’”

  The truth was that El Salvador mattered to the US media only because it was part of the struggle for world dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Backed by the United States, a small, wealthy elite had long used the army and police to crush protests and kill opponents. In response, rebels took up arms and sought help from Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Salvadorans might have fought a civil war without us, but I was there as a reporter only because President Reagan and the Soviets were focused on Central America as a battleground in the Cold War. Washington and Moscow drove the news coverage here, more than events on the ground.

  The next day, I could not help but smile when Larry took the lawyer’s advice and asked every person we met, “How can the United States help El Salvador?” Both of us used the responses in our stories.

  El Salvador was the place I had feared the most, but soon it was just another story on my beat. Covering elections there was not all that different from covering elections in Chicago or El Paso, except that the stakes were much higher. The war was terrible for the Salvadoran people, but I made Salvadoran friends and developed sources. I found my place among the press corps, and soon I felt comfortable, if not completely relaxed.

  I did have a moment of doubt when I filed my expense report. I had paid a $60 bribe at the airport to get through Mexican immigration, but I wasn’t sure if the company would reimburse me, or if that was even legal. I called to ask the Washington bureau’s office manager, a chain-smoking old-timer, whom I found a little scary.

  I explained about the bribe, and surprisingly, she said, “We’ll call it a ‘gratuity.’” She also noticed on my hotel bill that I had crossed off the charge for one movie in my room, because I considered it a personal expense.

  “I’m putting the movie charge back in your expenses to be reimbursed,” she said, from that moment adopting me as another of her boys in the bureau. “What do they expect you to do at night when you’re all alone?”

  5

  HOW WE MET

  ——— ON LUCK ———

  When I returned to Mexico City, it felt more like home. I had a daily routine, a growing list of sources, and the story was more clear. I went back to wearing a coat and tie in the big city, instead of jeans and hiking boots in Central America, and relaxed a little. No longer so worried about getting hurt, I remained in fear of missing a story. I felt responsible for everything from the US border to the tip of South America, and I always was anxious something was happening that everyone knew about except me.

  I worked all the time because it didn’t feel like work. I couldn’t believe this was a job: I traveled to exotic places on the company’s dime, saw new things, met interesting people, and asked them anything I wanted to know. Then I wrote about my adventures for people back home. And I got paid.

  When I wasn’t reporting or writing, I didn’t have anything to do. I didn’t have hobbies or interests outside of work. Some nights I felt restless, too tired to work but too wired to sleep. On one of those nights, I tried writing in my journal, which I had kept since college, but I couldn’t focus. I called a friend to see if he wanted to go to a movie, but he wasn’t home. I paced some more, stared into the empty refrigerator. Nothing on television. Got to get out. It was a cool night in the fall of 1984, so I grabbed a jacket and walked a few blocks to Paseo de la Reforma, the main avenue near the US embassy.

  A movie called Sebastian was playing at the Cine Elektra. Waiting for the movie to start, munching my popcorn, I glanced around and noticed a young woman sitting to the right and back a few rows. She was medium height and slender, with hair that was dark brown, almost black, cut short and straight. Her face was the color of creamy caramel, with high cheekbones, full lips, and large eyes that were almost as black as her hair. She was wearing a tan trench coat and very tight, stylish blue jeans. The woman looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She was bouncing her left leg up and down, like she was nervous. I thought she must have been waiting for someone. No way a woman like that would be alone at the movies, or anywhere. I noticed she was not wearing a ring.

  The movie was a silly British import about secret agents and codes. My mind wandered. That woman looked really good. Maybe I’ll say something in Spanish on the way out, if she’s still alone. I could say something easy: Hello. How did you like the movie? I practiced saying it in Spanish.

  The movie ended, and the house lights brightened. I stood up and put on my coat, turning around to look at her. She was still alone. I practiced my opening line, timing my exit so our paths would cross. When I got to her, she was standing in front of her seat, waiting to ease into the crowd leaving the theater. I was just a step away when I lost my nerve, averting my eyes as I walked by her. She’s probably got a boyfriend. I stood in the lobby, pretending to look at the posters for coming attractions, and watched her leave the theater.

  Outside in the fresh night air, I saw the Angel of Independence monument: a bronze, winged angel perched on a tall stone pillar. At the other end of the street, on a hill, the Chapultepec Castle glowed under bright floodlights. Cars drove by on Reforma, and young couples arm-in-arm waited to cross the street. On nights like this I loved Mexico City, lighted up and buzzing. Here I was, a roving foreign correspondent in Latin America. I felt like James Bond with a notebook. Walking toward home, I dashed between speeding cars to the grassy median of the wide avenue.

  Waiting for another break in the traffic, I saw her again. The woman from the movie was standing at the bus stop, and two cars were idling at the curb in front of her. The young men in the cars were calling to her and offering a ride. Mexican men assumed it was better to try, and be rejected, than not to try at all. In the old days men whispered piropos, sweet little nothings, such as, “Who opened the gates of heaven and allowed an angel to escape?” These guys were more the type who hissed and smacked wet kisses, trying to entice her into the car.

  I crossed the street and kept going, chuckling to myself at the attention the woman was getting. I wasn’t the only one who found her unusually beautiful. I didn’t think she was in danger, just at risk of being annoyed. I looked at her and smiled, but she was staring straight ahead, her jaw tight, trying to ignore the guys in the cars. Those jerks. I should help her. And it was some kind of sign that I kept
seeing her.

  I had walked by, so I turned around and came up behind her. “Oiga,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder and using the formal voice in Spanish. She flinched and took a step away, stopped, and turned quickly to look at me, her eyes wide with fear. I put my hand on her arm, and she relaxed, even smiled a little.

  “Did you like the movie?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “It’s good to see foreign films.”

  I stumbled with my weak Spanish, made weaker by a sudden and unexpected wave of nervousness. “Do you want if I should wait to the bus?”

  She smiled again, this time a real smile. “Please.”

  Her suitors were still idling there, leaning over to see if I was going to fail. Feeling cocky, I snarled quietly, and they drove off into the night.

  We started walking, and she seemed not at all interested in the bus. Her name was Maria Eugenia Montero Salud. People called her Maru (MAH-roo), a nickname for Maria Eugenia. Lucky for me, because in Spanish Maria Eugenia was a mouthful of vowels. She said she was a dancer, and I bowed, impressed.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Why? Because a dancer has to be young?”

  “No, I was just wondering.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said. “You’re young, too.”

  “I just turned twenty-seven a few weeks ago.”

  “A Virgo?”

  “Yes. What are you?”

  “Pisces,” she said.

  “What does that mean? What are you like?” I asked.