Alma Guillermoprieto
I felt that introduction was really necessary, given that it is unlikely that I will ever do another major piece of exhaustive reporting again, just given the realities of age and the sense that I’ve seen a lot. It’s a closing collection, and so it needed an introduction to that closing — which among other things addressed, or tried to address, the many questions I’ve been asked over time about the work and the writing that I’ve done. One of them has been, “Well, wasn’t it terrible to have to go see these horrible situations?” And the other one was, “Are you sorry about anything you wrote in light of what’s happening today?”
I’m not sorry about anything I wrote at all, because it was based on my best possible effort given the realities of the time and what we knew about those realities. We reporters are not lab technicians. We do history on the fly, and so the collection is simply a record of that history.
To address your question directly, yes, I think that we were all very innocent. The Nicaraguan revolution was such a moment of hope, and we were so eager for hope. And the big lesson I would take away now from all of that is that it’s sort of like gaining weight and losing weight. The first one is really easy, and the second one is terribly hard. Destroying is easy. Building up is hard, or even nearly impossible. So the whole revolutionary approach to change in Latin America is what I now question — yes, seriously — the sense that you can achieve overwhelming and permanent change by destroying what there was. In the case of a very poor country like Nicaragua, and so many others, if you destroy what little there was, then you find yourself with an empty bank account and no buildings. So I don’t regret the optimism. I feel wiser now.
Great Job Alma Guillermoprieto & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
