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February 19, 2005

Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced

In October, 1980 Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer, 42, was riding in a car driven by her eldest son, Fernando, when they were intercepted by assailants who shot Fernando in the face, killing him. Witnesses say Irma was dragged by the hair and thrown into a station wagon. She was never seen again.

June Carolyn Erlick, the author of Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, was invited to tell students at The Fletcher School how she decided to write Irma Flaquer’s story. It started nothing more than an assignment. “I didn’t know it was going to take over my life,” said Erlick. As a correspondent for the National Catholic Review, she was first based in Bogota, Colombia. In 1984, she went to Nicaragua to cover the war for Time magazine. Later, she freelanced for a number of other publications including the New York Times and the World Press Review and spent a total of fourteen years in Latin America.

Finding information about Irma Flaquer wasn’t easy so many years after her death. She managed to track down Irma’s sister, Annabella, who had left Guatemala for Miami. However, Annabella, didn’t want to talk about what was clearly a painful subject. “She nearly hung up on me,” said Erlick. After Irma’s death, Annabella had fled her country in fear. However, Erlick was persuasive and Annabella agreed to the interview during which she played tape recordings of Irma’s. At that point, Erlick was hooked. Something in Irma Flaquer’s voice compelled Erlick to write her story.

Erlick describes Flaquer as a woman who never intended to be a reporter. Like other women of her generation, she just wanted to be a wife and mother. Her unusual upbringing probably inspired her to take a different direction in life.

Flaquer’s father was a theatrical producer from Catalan; her mother was an opera singer. Irma spent most of her childhood on the road with her parents as they performed throughout Central and South America. She was exposed to a more sophisticated life but at the same time, she saw the desperate poverty that plagued the region.

At first, Flaquer’s life seemed bound by tradition. At age 17 she married Fernando Valle, a young architect. They had two children, Fernando and Sergio. Marriage and mother hood didn’t suit Flaquer so the couple divorced when the children were quite young. In an unusual step, Flaquer, chose to allow her husband’s mother to raise her two boys.

To support herself, Flaquer turned to writing. She began by writing for a church newspaper where she began to become interested in the rights of the indigenous people of Guatemala. By the age of 20, she had her own column called “Lo Que Otros Callan” or “What Others Don’t Dare Write.”

For the next twenty years, Flaquer became one of the few women who worked as a political writer. These years are what Guatemalans now refer to as “the dark times.” For Flaquer to criticize church officials and corrupt politicians, including the Guatemalan president, was inviting trouble. Flaquer was determined to expose the plight of the “disappeared,” union organizers, or members of the party opposing the government whose bodies would be found floating in the river. Flaquer took photographs of the bodies and wrote about the human rights abuses in her column.

Flaquer made powerful enemies early on. She was threatened on numerous occasions and beaten up once. In 1970, a hand grenade thrown at her car left her with shrapnel wounds and hearing loss. The assassination attempt caused her editor to encourage her to go into hiding. She couldn’t bear living in exile and when she returned to Guatemala where she started writing her column for La Nacion.

In July, 1980, her editor begged her to stop writing for fear that the paper would be attacked. She agreed. However, as Erlick explains, once Flaquer stopped writing, she had no political cover. Essentially, she shut herself up in her apartment, fully aware that her enemies intended to kill her. On October 16, 1980, they did.

June Carolyn Erlick is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ReVista: the Harvard Review of Latin America. Though theories abound, she doesn’t know who kidnapped and killed Irma Flaquer. What she does know is that Flaquer lost her life because she fought for those who had no voice. Erlick was determined not to allow Flaquer to suffer the same fate. And, she insists, “Every time an idea is suppressed, it comes back stronger.” In the case of Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, that is certainly true.

Article by Deborah Jones, MALD '06

Posted by jessica at February 19, 2005 01:05 PM