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The trouble
with Newt is
Newt himself
Alan Fisher
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
I was advised
to leave at
first light
Norman Fenton
I read with a specific interest John Forsyth’s piece (15 March) on his experience of a possible disappearance in El Salvador. I was filming in Salvador at the same time, and staying at the same hotel, the Camino Reale, but did not knowingly come across John. But given that most of the world’s media were crammed into the hotel at the time of that election, one may perhaps be forgiven for failing to locate another Scot, even with a Glasgow Herald accreditation.
Given the USA’s overt support for the Duarte government, the city of San Salvador had become a strange melange of dark glasses and machine guns, to quote John. But the Washington PR machine was still grinding away in the background, and one found oneself invited to barbeques at Major D’Aubuisson’s swimming pool complete with his bikinied daughters and other female friends. But the war and its terrors were never at any great distance.
But it all had been very much worse. This had not been my first visit to Salvador. I had previously covered civil wars in Guatemala, and then El Salvador. But neither of these wars had made the international headlines, and at that time my crew and myself were the only foreign press in Salvador. We had made contacts with the Green Cross, a group of volunteer medics, who, just barely tolerated, continued to dangerously patrol the city of San Salvador in their Green Cross ambulances after the local curfew had come into operation, and provide succour to those who had been shot, wounded or killed, and abandoned to the empty streets.
I was with them on one of their nightly patrols when, totally without warning, there was a huge explosion destroying a US bank by the roadside, just before we reached it. No sooner had we skidded to a stop than the ambulance was surrounded by the ubiquitous dark glasses and machine guns. Without any great ceremony I was whisked away from the ambulance and taken back to the army HQ. They had only one question for me. How had I known that the explosion would happen at that very moment, and who had told me? They obviously believed that I was responsible for the Green Cross ambulance being there, at that very time. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
I insisted on returning to my hotel and they made it quite clear that their investigation would continue the following morning. In the middle of that night, I received a call from a Columbian contact I had made and was told to walk out of the hotel at first light with only my wallet and passport, making no attempt to check out, conspicuously leaving my luggage behind. Within three hours I was in Miami Airport.
The concern was not principally for my own personal safety, but for any information I might accidentally pass on which might implicate some innocent amongst the Green Cross volunteers. I was contacted some time later in the UK by my Columbian contact to be told that the problem had simply evaporated since the only supposed-witness had disappeared, and no one in dark glasses wanted to draw any attention to the failure in allowing such a disappearance to happen.
It is not the dark glasses or the machine guns I remember most. It was the row of gold cross pens in the breast pocket of the spotless shirt worn by my ‘interviewer’. These pens are the equivalents of graduation certificates of those who had successfully completed the courses in ‘counter-insurgency warfare’ run by the United States army ‘School of the Americas’ in Panam, and now at Fort Benning Georgia.
The Americas deserve better.
Norman Fenton wrote and produced for Thames TV a dramatised version of the inquest in Pretoria into the killing of Steve Biko, the black South African activist. Later, he extended his original version to stage-length and ‘The Biko Inquest’ was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company
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