RECOLLECTIONS
My imagined romance with a newspaper did have a troubled start: I had a stepmother who laughed at my early attempts at writing a short story when I was aged 11. That did not stop me. That’s what stepmothers are for.
In 1966, when I was 22, after a job in the Anglo meat packing plant and after trying to teach English, I decided to go for a job at the Herald. The newspaper was the pits. Friends of my parents remarked that the Englishspeaking community’s failures sought jobs in the administration department of the British Hospital or the Buenos Aires Herald sports desk.
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From that beginning at the Herald to rapid departure ten years later. Michael Soltys, in his annualchronologyofthepaper’s history, for 1976 wrote, “News editor Andrew Graham-Yooll was forced into a British exile as a “troublemaker” slated to “disappear.” I thought that being called a “troublemaker” was hilarious, but the idea of being “disappeared” still causes a shiver.
My own view, on the history I have lived, is that the coup was not necessary. The guerrilla chiefs had been imprisoned, killed or had fled into exile. The military needed an excuse for seizing power, to avoid the congressional elections in September, which Peronism would certainly have won, most likely leading to even more political chaos. The descent was visible, but ignorable. The awful thing, which happened widely in the 20th century, was that people had to learn to live with fear. Like getting accustomed to having a fifth person at the table at lunch. --
My lasting interest, or more, my concern is how to describe fear and what we experienced.
The Herald was not made or ever thought of as a gallant rag that would take on a brutal government.Butsuddenly,overthe course of a few years, the Herald became an instrument that had to understand fear, danger, censorship and self-censorship.
We never had to agree that killing was evil, by whatever side. Fear had to be understood.
Self-censorship was cowardly. Killing is wrong, whatever side you choose to shoot at. We had to keep to that principle.
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Early in the 1970s, as general Juan Carlos Ongania ended his four years as dictator I wrote a report on the rape of a young woman under police arrest. Two police had ripped off her knickers, sat her on a washbasin and raped her. A Herald reader wrote in and said that it was not the kind of article she found acceptable in her newspaper.
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By mid-1972, novelist V.S. Naipaul, later a knight and Nobel winner, arrived in Buenos Aires, with a view to writing a fierce incursion into the life and times of María Eva Duarte de Perón. His article on Buenos Aires – invasive and offensive but pure gold to read – was published in the New York Review of Books in mid-August. Bob Cox paid US$100 for the right to reprint the article in the Herald, with Naipaul’s special permission.
The Montoneros guerrillas, active in the campaign for the
election of Héctor Cámpora and the return of Juan Perón, described the publication as an outrage. The key sentence was where Naipaul wrote that Evita’s red lips inspired thoughts of fellatio in the Argentine male. The leadership of Montoneros decided that I was responsible, because I was the only person they knew. The chief ordered me killed, by a hand grenade in my desk. It was my first narrow escape. --
The second, in October 1975, came from the Triple A. A second ride in a patrol car. This time it was to my death. Bob Cox saved my life by demanding that he be allowed to go with me to police HQ and that by this time, at 3am, every Embassy in down was aware of my peril.
The threats increased in frequency. First, they called the paper, the newsroom. More worrying as when they came home. --
Bob Cox, 4 July 1976: At the Irish church, seven churchmen were murdered. There were words on the wall, police painted that over. Some authority did not
want that seen. A government spokesman was furious when Bob quoted him word for word. That was bravery.
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The Herald had a daily dose of bomb warnings. “VAYAN AL DIARITOINGLÉS,sontanlocos que seguro que publican algo.” In the midst of that, and usually on Friday nights (weekend editorials, weekly round-up time), I brought liver paté I made at home. Bob took a bottle of Reserva San Juan, Maggie Porta took sliced bread so she could make toast in the kitchenette. And we celebrated the end of each week. --
The THIRD narrow escape. Time to go. Bob said no, “I need you,” then apologised. A friend of Bob’s advised him that I was a terrorist. Charming.
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I owe this life of mine, and those of my three children, to Micaela. To Bob Cox. And I should pay tribute to Stuart Russell, at Reuters, the “fixture” each day. He did not survive cancer. Finally, I owe a debt of a recognition of my colleagues of those days.