Andrew Graham-yooll
Fearless Buenos Aires Herald and Telegraph correspondent who reported on Argentina’s ‘missing’
ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL, the British-argentine journalist who has died aged 75, was a star reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s until he angered the military junta and narrowly escaped death by fleeing to Britain.
He then established himself as one of Fleet Street’s most prolific commentators on South American affairs, often writing for the Telegraph, and also became the editor of Index on Censorship. But he pined for Buenos Aires – a city he once described as “an invitation to be unfaithful to every love declared, to break every rule made” – and returned there in 1994, taking on the editorship of his old newspaper.
Andrew Michael Graham-yooll was born in Buenos Aires on January 5 1944, to an English mother who died when he was six and a Scottish father.
Andrew’s father, who had emigrated from Leith to Patagonia in 1928 and was destined never to return to Scotland, instilled a love of his native culture in his son. Andrew remembered the Scottish émigré community of his youth as “a weird bunch … they would still be reading Hugh Macdiarmid and Blackwood’s Magazine as if they were in Scotland.”
His father was a fruit farmer and a Socialist, an unfortunate combination, since, under President Perón’s regime, he was denied subsidies because of his politics; he eventually sold the farm at a loss.
Andrew joined the Buenos Aires Herald, an anglophone daily newspaper, in 1966, and became one of its most admired political commentators and reporters against the unstable backdrop of the shortlived governments that came and went while Perón was in exile (until he returned to power for less than a year prior to his death in July 1974).
Perón and his wife Eva, who had died in 1952, were still adored by the Argentinian people. In 1971 Grahamyooll reviewed Roberto Vacca’s La Vida de Eva Peron, the first biography to question Evita’s saintliness. “I narrowly escaped a beating,” he recalled. “Vacca was lucky to get away with his life.”
It was an early example of the independence of spirit that got Graham-yooll into more serious trouble in the run-up to the military junta’s deposition of the president, Perón’s widow Isabel, in 1976. Some 30,000 Left-wing activists and sympathisers would “disappear” in the second half of the 1970s, and Grahamyooll regularly published lists of those reported missing or killed – many of whom he knew – in the Herald. “Of course we were afraid,” he remembered decades later. “But it’s one thing to be afraid and another thing to be a coward.”
Privately, he helped people in tracing missing relatives or going into hiding; on one occasion he promised to fetch money to help a woman on the run, only to return to her hotel to find that she had been machine-gunned by the police.
One day a group of armed men
turned up at the Herald’s office; had Graham-yooll not been at home with his wife, who had just had a baby, he would probably have been murdered. He was subsequently put on trial for reporting on guerrilla leaders’ press conferences; although he was acquitted, the judge advised him that he would be killed unless he left the country.
Taking advantage of his dual British-argentine citizenship, he arrived in London with his wife and three small children in 1976, and worked for The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.
Although he had a Scottish accent throughout his life, he was keenly aware of his outsider status in Britain. In the 1980s he gave up daily journalism to edit South, a periodical on the Third World owned by a Pakistani publisher. “In the Coach and Horses pub, in Back Hill, behind The Guardian, a home news desk subeditor said, ‘You’ll be happier with them.’ ‘You mean,’ I asked, ‘I’ll be better with the Asians because as an Argentine I am only posing as a white man?’ He said, ‘Yes.’”
He developed an immigrant’s fascination with his adopted country, and in 1992 published Point of Arrival, a book in which he explored the nature of Britishness through interviews with luminaries such as John Smith and Jeffrey Archer; reviewers were most charmed by his amused but baffled observations on the public transport system.
From 1989 to 1993 Graham-yooll was editor of Index on Censorship. Despite his self-confessed “woolly liberal” leanings, he insisted that people should not be criticised for complaining about the erosion of British culture and traditions in a multicultural society. “The British are too polite sometimes to make any comment that might appear hostile … And if it is to be argued that the British Empire imposed its own culture in its colonies, well, two wrongs do not make a right.”
In 1982 Grahamyooll had made a brief return to Buenos Aires to cover the Falklands crisis, and saw General Galtieri addressing the crowds from the balcony of Government House.
“My recollection of him that day … was of a man who was acting out the final scenes of Chaplin’s Great Dictator,” he wrote in the Telegraph in 2003. “Journalists and camera crews pinned him against the door of his office, fear for his safety gave way to utter hatred in his blue eyes and he seemed to be telling us: ‘Just let me finish this island business, and I’ll get the lot of you.’”
Still persona non grata, Grahamyooll was targeted by a hit squad who beat him up so badly that he suffered permanent kidney damage; he thought that only the emergence of a wellto-do couple from a nearby hotel discouraged the men from kicking him to death on the street.
Following the restoration of democratic government he was back in Argentina in 1984 to testify against the guerrilla leader Mario Firmenich on a charge of kidnapping the businessman Jorge Born for a ransom of $60 million; Graham-yooll had been permitted by Firmenich to witness Born’s release in 1975.
By an irony which Graham-yooll found “interesting”, his protection officer during the trial was the leader of the men who had been sent to kill him nine years earlier.
In 1994 he returned to live in the place he regarded as his homeland, becoming editor-in-chief and president of the Buenos Aires Herald. He stepped down as editor in 2007 but continued as a columnist. When the newspaper closed in 2017 after nearly 150 years, he wrote a weekly column for the new Buenos Aires Times.
Graham-yooll wrote some 30 books, in both English and Spanish, including works on South American history, collections of poetry and a novel, Goodbye Buenos Aires (1999). His masterpiece was A State of Fear (1986), an account of what happened in Argentina in the 1970s peppered with his own reminiscences, which his hero Graham Greene chose as his book of the year.
“[It] is remarkable for its shivering honesty,” declared the critic Nicholas Shakespeare. “His numbly pellucid prose could be penned only by a man with a shaking hand, a full ashtray, and a first-hand story to tell.”
He relived memorable encounters with Woody Allen, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Spender, Paul Mccartney, Graham Greene and others in Committed Observer: Memoirs of a Journalist (1995), which The Independent’s reviewer found too rambling – it “would have been better value at twice the price and half the length” – but praised for its humanity and generosity. “He has a great ability to interpret Argentines – with all their faults, well-known in Britain, and with their strengths, less well-known – to the British.”
Andrew Graham-yooll was a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and was appointed OBE in 2002.
Latterly he lived in Argentina with his partner, Gladys, with whom he adopted a baby boy they had found in a remote hospital on the Argentina-paraguay-brazil border in 2000. When he told his grown-up children he was re-embarking on fatherhood at the age of 56, his daughter replied: “Good luck, we always knew you were mad, but we love you anyway.”
Graham-yooll died in London on a visit to attend his granddaughter’s wedding. He had been due to give a lecture to the Anglo-argentine Society, entitled “A Little History of the Buenos Aires Herald: Paté, Brandy and Bombs”.