 I want to thank you all for joining us today for this very unique event. I am Keith Mines, Director for Latin America at the US Institute of Peace, and I'll moderate our session today. So USIP, for those of you not familiar with the Institute, was established by Congress in 1984 as a nonpartisan public institution dedicated to preventing, mitigating, and helping nations recover from violent conflict. Our Latin America program covers eight countries in the hemisphere, in the Andes, Central America, and Haiti, with a regional office in Bogota. So for the past eight weeks, USIP has hosted a remarkable exhibit of the photography of war and peace in conjunction with the Seven Foundation. The Seven Foundation is a nonprofit media education organization established in 2001 by Gary Knight and Ron Javiv to help transform visual journalism by empowering new voices and creating stories that advocate for change. The exhibit challenges us with the question, why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine? It takes us through war and into peace, through the lens of photojournalists covering eight conflicts, with a post-grip covering two more. The late Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, described the exhibit this way. The searing images and moving essays teach us much about the lessons of history, the costs of war, and the overlooked challenges of achieving lasting peace. It reminds us the gaps that exist between peoples can be bridged, wounds can be healed, hatreds can be dissolved, and the once unthinkable can become reality. If there is a willingness to pursue dialogue and embrace our common humanity. So we've asked two photojournalists and one print journalist today to join us to discuss these questions in the context of the conflicts in Central America. Although they will reflect on their work more broadly. This is the final event of the Imagine exhibit whose last day is Monday, August 1st. So if you haven't been yet, it's still time to get over here. It's been an honor for the Institute to be the part of the first run of the in the US of this remarkable exhibit. And we appreciate the trust of the Seven Foundation in choosing USIP. So Bill Gentile is an independent Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker whose coverage of conflicts in the hemisphere includes the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, the Salvadoran Civil War, the US interventions in Panama and Haiti. He's also covered the first Gulf War and the post-911 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as various conflicts in Africa. His recent documentary work includes Freelancers with Bill Gentile, Mexico, a feature-length film documentary about the new breed of foreign correspondence filling the void left by mainstream media's retreat from foreign news. His latest book is Wait for Me, True Stories of War, Love and Rock and Roll published last year. Robert Nicholsburg worked as a time magazine contract photographer for nearly 30 years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries. He's the author of Afghanistan, a distant war published in 2013 which represents his 25 years of work in Afghanistan. The book received the 2013 Oliver Olivier Rebot Award from the Overseas Press Club for the best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines or books. His new book, Afghanistan's Heritage, Restoring Spirit and Stone in Conjunction with the State Department, was published in English, Dari and Pashto in May 2018. He was a 2019 Logan nonfiction fellow during which he brought together his 1982 to 84 photographic coverage of the Guatemalan Civil War combining the archival documentation of genocide of the Ichil Maya by the Guatemalan military. Nicholsburg is a graduate of the University of Vermont and lives with his wife in Brooklyn. Jose Luis Sanz is the Washington correspondent of El Fado, an editor of El Fado English. He was the director of El Fado for seven years and a founding member of Sala Negra, an investigative journalism team specializing in violence, gangs and organized crime in Central America. He's been awarded the LASA Media Award and was part of the teams who received the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Prize and the Latin American Investigative Journalism Award and the Hillman Prize. So I peruse the work of each of our photojournalists over the past week and it is truly mesmerizing. There are common themes. Young men between battles looking confident, ready to prove themselves. Young men in battle looking confused and terrified. Wounded men after battle looking dejected and in pain and always civilians caught in the crossfire images of pure desperation. They're at the same time riveting and challenging. They challenge our image of conflict and force us to confront the results of policy choices reminding us that even good policy choices come with a high human cost. So I wanna give Bob and Bill a few minutes each to present several of your photographs and share with us the story behind them. How did you experience these conflicts through the craft of photographing them? What impact do you hope they had on the viewer both then and now? So if we could start with Bill and then Bob. Hi everybody and thank you for joining us. Both you here personally and those of you who joined us online. Some pictures. As you just saw I work at American University now and I make television documentaries as opposed to making still pictures. This picture here I made in 1979. I'm one of the few American journalists who covered both the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 as well as the Contra war throughout the 1980s. At this time I was working for United Press International and in many ways my story is as much about technology and what technology has allowed us to achieve in the field as it is about covering different stories. As you can see here this is a black and white picture. At that time we had to carry around the people who worked for United Press International. We carried around entire dark rooms that we had to rebuild in hotel bathrooms and transmitted our pictures over landlines to New York City which is where UPI was based. Today I make pictures. I make documentaries with this, with an iPhone, something that we never even dreamed about at that time. But this was my birth under fire I guess you could call it. I had never seen war before. I had never seen men and women fight up close and very dangerously to achieve political ends. So this was my baptism under fire I should call it. Not long after this we saw a reaction to this action and it dealt with these folks here. These are Contras. They were supported by the United States as was the previous regime in Nicaragua, the Somoza regime supported by the United States. These Contras, many of them were former national guardsmen under the orders of the Somoza dictatorship and they regrouped and started a Contra war against the Sandinista regime to oust the Sandinistas. These here, this is the aftermath of an ambush. These are Sandinista troops, members of the Sandinista People's Army. I spent an extraordinary amount of time with the Sandinistas because I was based in Nicaragua from 1983 until 1990. So, and by this time I was working for Newsweek Magazine. I was Newsweek Magazine's contract photographer for Latin America and the Caribbean. These folks were just attacked in an ambush by the Contra forces that regrouped after the 1979 revolution. A couple of these young men were hurt. Nobody, thank goodness, died as a result of this ambush. But this was the way that the war in Nicaragua took place. It was very, you saw very, very few frontal confrontations between the Contras and the Sandinistas. The war played out very, very much like the war in Vietnam played out. Long periods of walking through the mountains, tropical highlands of Nicaragua, interrupted by ambushes and chants and counters in the mountains, explosions of fire and machine guns and mortars and so forth. And then the result carrying wounded and dead out of the mountains. This was a picture that I've included. I have two books. I did a book on Nicaragua, a book of photographs that came out in the late 1980s. And I just published this book, and Keith mentioned this, Wait for Me, True Stories of War, Love and Rock and Roll. And the picture that we're seeing here on this screen is included in that book. And it says an awful lot about me, about my career, about what I was trying to do in Nicaragua. I made this picture shortly after the ambush that you just saw, the picture of the ambush that you just saw. This group of people asked me and a colleague of mine to make pictures of a militia man, this dead militia man, who is surrounded by some of his colleagues and his family. The woman behind him is his wife. Those are his two children. The woman in red is his mother. And the man on the left with the AK-47 is his father. And these people had invited us to make pictures of the dead because they understood the power that we, the foreign media, had. In countries like Nicaragua, the voices of people like this, workers, poor peasants, the disenfranchised, they were very, very rarely heard inside the country. And their voices were even more rarely heard outside of the country. But when we, the international press, came to these countries and documented what was happening to them, they understood somehow that we were there as objective observers, dedicated journalists, sometimes risking death and permanent disfigurement. We were there to tell the truth and get their stories out to outside players in the hopes that their lives could be made for the better. I'm gonna read really quickly. It's gonna take me a minute to read this about what this picture shows and why it's so important for me now. Okay. I can do, I can do, I can do with this besides, there's a little I can do with this besides a straightforward portrait of the whole scene. As I'm looking through the camera, composing the shots, and these people are posing there for us, making their statement, I see that the wife of the dead militiamen is staring straight at me. She's the only person in the group who makes eye contact with me, and it's more than just a stare. It's a piercing connection that cuts past everything else in the picture. I look at the picture today in my book and her stare completely dominates the page. And I can hear what she's saying to me. Then and now, this woman whose husband very much and very much a part of her entire life is lying dead in a wooden box in front of her. She's talking to me. This person who has had her existence and that of her children devastated in a single day. And maybe I'm so shaken then and now because I seem to have been in this room before, heard the words before, felt the sadness before, that presses against me again like this, the heat under this black plastic roof. This is what she said. Open quote. Look what they've done to my life. Show the world what happened here. Close quote. And a paragraph later as I'm driving out of the place, returning to Managua, I write again. I still hear her talking to me and I answer her. This is what I said. Yes, I say to her, I promise, I will show them. And in a nutshell, that's pretty much what we did in Nicaragua. We had a press corps in Nicaragua that was dedicated to telling the stories of disenfranchised in the hopes that their lives would become better by foreign intervention, by players outside of their country doing something positive. I had an extraordinary connection in Nicaragua. My first wife named Claudia. I married Claudia. This is her youngest brother, Danilo. I met Claudia during the revolution in 1979 and we got together after the revolution and so forth, got married and so forth. And through her family, which her family was really, really well connected with the Sandinista government, I saw the revolution from inside. The fellow by the name of Alan Riding, who at the time was, he was New York Times Bureau Chief in Mexico and Central America, wrote that a lot of journalists covered the story of Nicaragua, but he wrote in a critique of a review of this book, he wrote that I, Bill Gentile, had lived the story. And I lived the story through my Nicaraguan family. This is Danilo, I guess he's 17, 18 years old here. He joined the Sandinista People's Army. He was badly wounded in an attack by the Contras and this is Danilo in a picture that was made probably less than a year ago. He's blind, he took a mortar around in his head. The mortar, shrapnel affected his brain. He's blind, he can't walk by himself, he can't feed himself, he can't have a conversation. He is a living testament to the human cost of war and that's what the best of us tried to convey in Nicaragua, the human cost of war. That's it, thank you very much for your attention and I'm happy to take questions later on in the program. Good afternoon, thank you Keith and Mary for putting this program together. Clicker. So to begin my pictures from El Salvador, three will show and two and three, sorry, three from Guatemala. I covered Central America for Time Magazine from 1981 to 1984 as a contract photographer and while I had most of Central America to cover, I was based in San Salvador, covered Guatemala, Honduras, occasionally Nicaragua and down to Costa Rica once in a while down to Panama but essentially El Salvador dominated the news and had the most coverage in that period of time. It was off in front page and had a full-time bevy of correspondents, cameraman, TV stations, radio journalists and all the wire services. So in context, 1981, the Miami Herald was still very prominent. It was down in Central America every day with a story in the paper. The New York Times had a stringer, full-time reporter in El Salvador and we generated a lot of coverage so as a first-time photographer in that region, I had to keep up with the reporters who had many years advanced coverage in the area and my roommate was the time correspondent so I had full access to information and spent a lot of time reading and trying to keep up with reporters who essentially were ahead of me but for a weekly magazine in the middle of the Cold War, it was important that we knew in advance what the events would be coming off of us in Washington D.C. every six months. Military aid was put in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for approval so every six months we were guaranteed a page or two, possibly just a note in Time Magazine and remember, film was sent up North unprocessed. I never saw the film. It went to Miami and then by that late afternoon it got to Time Magazine in New York. The deadline was Friday night. The magazine came out on a Monday so we had no fast turnover of material and whatever picture I took on a Tuesday in the best of all worlds had to be relevant again by the following Monday and we had to be able to sort of read tea leaves, have our own crystal ball and be able to project what the news would be the following week in relation to the picture and news report that was delivered. Also of note is that the reporting included Time Magazine people in Washington and particularly coverage of the State Department so they were competing files from the reporters and this being a word driven publication. I was lucky to get one picture into the magazine and often maybe a thumbnail plus a picture on the table of contents very often a lot of work and not much in the way of real estate in the magazine. This particular picture you can see the main officers of the Salvadoran Army. This person here Colonel Nicholas Carranza it turns out was a paid CIA agent for many years and took residence in the United States. Lopez Nuela was head of the police department and between his heading up of the Treasury Police and the local police responsible for all the brutality and the violence, the desk wads and a lot of the mayhem which the United States knew about but was not very happy in trying to control and very unsuccessful in controlling it. Carranza ended up I think in Tennessee. He became a janitor, oh strange. Often while working five, six, seven days a week if we took a day off we would go down to La Libertada which is a beach resort on the Pacific and try to take some time off but always we would go to the city morgue just in case there happened to be something there and here you have some unidentified men trying to identify most likely family members that had been dumped on the side of the road by a desk wad and if you look closely it's a little tough to see. I believe this man has just recognized this is either his father or his brother. The longer you study this their facial features are the same but he's been beaten up pretty badly and both were shot in the head. This was a common occurrence for us to chase bodies and to try to counter whatever was coming out of Washington as foreign policy that they really didn't have any basis in reality with policy and the reality on the ground. These are rebels in Usulutun province taken in 1983, coming through town looking for information this woman here obviously knows this fellow but you can see the variety of costumes, dress, notebook here, sport jacket here, cowboy hat, poverty, big family in an area of El Salvador very often under contention in Usulutun. This is the sugarcane flat area in the southeastern part of the country. The ERP which is this group had a lot of control in that area very often during the day it was difficult to find the gorillas but on occasion if you stuck around long enough you could find them, interview them and photograph them. Here you have the Che Guevara look, the far away look, cowboy look, it's really very interesting costumes. I must tell you that this film sat in a box for 25 years unedited because I shot color for time and two cameras of color and one of black and white time never looked at the black and white, they processed it. So recently I've gone through it and scanned it all in. We're gonna switch to Guatemala here. This is in Totos Santos up in the mountains in the Hue Hue Tanango province department and they have just been told that they will become part of the civil militia by the military that they must patrol the streets and the back roads. They're not happy about this but they were threatened by the military. You can see here people objecting to a colonel telling them what they had to do under threat and this was devised as a way to come between the guerrillas in the civil war and the army to try to take away the pool of recruits, put guns in their hand and basically be cannon fodder. Now I've never seen this kind of pushback and you can see their determined look with this fellow who could easily come back and kill them. There was an amazing amount of killing going on. This is 1982. I drove a lot of the back roads myself and I still can't believe I'm here today given the severity of that civil war back then and the violence, 45,000 people were disappeared, 200,000 people were killed in the 36 year civil war. They did not mess around in Guatemala. It was the most sinister place I've ever worked. Mysterious, spooky, scary and I must say people at the US Embassy were not very helpful for us. They didn't really want us there as opposed to El Salvador which had a much different interplay with journalists and in fact one of the public affairs people at the US Embassy in Guatemala said why are you here? Why is Time Magazine here to interview the US Ambassador? There's nothing going on in Guatemala. Go back to El Salvador. And one of the worst things you can say to a journalist or photographer is that there's nothing going on here. I still can't believe he said that. There's a lot going on in this image. Now this is quite a unique picture. Very often I had to take the prism off of my camera. They were not autofocus and guess the distance and this is in January of 1982, one of the worst years. I mean there weren't very many good years while I was there but this is on the military base in Santa Cruz, D'Aquiche. This is a man you can see. He's been taken off a jeep by the intelligence members of the army and being taken into this path here for interrogation. And there's probably a 99% chance he did not come out. You can see the way he's walking. He's being pushed, uncoordinated and most likely was on a list to be picked up. They never heard me take the picture. Remember cameras back then were not electronic. They made a lot of noise. I often had to cough when I took the picture but I just kept a steady distance between myself and what was going on and then got out of there. But if you were willing to take the chance and push it, they often left us alone. But again, Guatemala was a difficult place to work. And something a lot of people didn't know that the Taiwanese government was there for Syops. The Israeli army was there for communications. The South African army was there to advise them on divide and rule. The Argentines and the Chileans were there for counter-guerrilla and interrogation methods. They were all there. And we never saw them in El Salvador but you knew they were there in Guatemala and for this public affairs fella to tell us that nothing was going on in Guatemala, go back to El Salvador, I find quite amazing still to this day. So with that in mind, Jose Luis, I think is. Yeah, I'm just going to give him your thanks. But thank you very much. Great, well let me bring, if I could, that was very sobering, very powerful. I wanted to bring Jose Luis into the conversation. Now, as someone from El Salvador and that has experienced this in a very different way, but as you experienced the post-war in El Salvador and did extensive work in Guatemala and the rest of Central America over the past 20 years, I wanted to ask what part did photojournalism play in shaping attitudes inside these countries about the wars and how, if at all, did images shape perspectives and understanding of this crucial piece of history now? And then I wanted to really focus on the understanding of the war and its place in Salvadoran history, in society and especially among youth. I was surprised when I was there recently that 30 years on, granted 30 years is not yesterday, but it's not 100 years, the kind of lack of understanding of many Salvadorans and particularly the rising generation of what the war, what it was, what it was about and kind of not having a place for it in their own understanding and narrative of the country. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation. It's an honor to be with you here, finally, with you. Well, a lot of ideas come to my mind. One of them, first of all, the reporters, the foreign correspondents that work in El Salvador, Guatemala, especially, I will talk about El Salvador. They kind of set a standard for the Salvadoran journalists, not only during the war but in the post-war. And that's really important and we all know that in El Salvador. Generations of journalists learn from the international media and I can think specifically in several photographers that are well-respected in El Salvador. I'm talking about local reporters, local photographers like Francisco Campos, Luis La Muñeca Romero, Luis Galdamez, many of them, they work with you, they learn from you and they set a standard. But also I just learned that during the 80s, the number of people, of young people inscribing themselves in the national university and public one to a study journalist was three times the usual. Because they wanted to tell the story, to explain what was happening in El Salvador. And that's part because George Oppen, because the local journalist at that time was mostly desk work without a lot of underground reporting. And also most of the media, they were some way partisan, were not totally partisan. So that's one thing that we need to keep in mind. It's not only that you told to the world what was happening in El Salvador, Guatemala, you educated the gaze for the post-war journalism. The way we understood, understand still now in some way the job. And some correspondence or special envoys were also stayed in the country and became teachers in universities for a while. So I think that's really, really important. And then is the fact that you documented the world. And that's interesting because, I mean, there's a paradox here because most of the people in El Salvador never had access to this, to these photographs, to the photos, to the stories written by foreign journalists. Even now they don't have access to many of these stories or photographies or to the documentaries. But at the same time, this is the record of what happened. And has in part, I can remember the genocide trial in Guatemala. Journalists were invited to be part, to testify in the trial, in Spain, in the Jesuit case trial. And now in the investigation of the Romero's murder, Romero's murder in El Salvador, the work of international and local journalists has been part of this and it's still really important because we will talk later about the memory and the political factor in this. But the thing is that in El Salvador, we don't have, and I am going to do the question about the young people, we don't have a film industry. We don't have the TV stations, never broadcasted these images or the footage of the war. I directed a documentary in 2009 about the presidential election that brought the FMLN to a power. And the first 10 minutes were footage from the war. And after the screening, I talked with the audience and most of them were shocked with that images because they had never seen that. Even if this is, those images are part of archives in El Salvador, they don't have access. So, and as I said, we don't have a film industry. The first post-war film about the war focused mainly in the victims or in the civil, in the civilians was both a scene of interest. This is a Mexican film from Luis Mandoki, a Mexican filmmaker. And I saw how this was cathartic for the people in El Salvador. To see themselves, their reality, the impact of the war in the screen. In this context, well, also the war is not part of the curriculum in the schools or in most of the universities. So, people knows what happened in the war because of their families' stories, because of journalism, and because of the political leaders' narrative. And that's, I think, part of the problem. So, most of the young people doesn't understand or know what happened in the war in El Salvador. Thanks, that's tremendous. Bill and Bob, I wanted to put one question to both of you if I could. Several weeks ago here, we hosted the rollout of the Colombian Truth Commission. Three years, the commission interviewed 30,000 victims across the country that basically bore witness to the violence that was unleashed on the Colombian people over the preceding decades. But it occurred to me that the visual images were very limited, that there wasn't a conflict, certainly the scale of the conflict was certainly not well documented. And in your cases as well, I'm sure that you were only capturing a fraction of what was actually going on. As I look at your work, it doesn't look to me like people that came into it with an agenda. But I wanna make sure people understand my way of seeing things. It was more balanced than that, if you will, even though it does tell a story that certainly has a certain narrative. But I just wondered if you could talk just for a second about how you see your role as a witness to conflict and then to history. Maybe we'd start with Bob and then Bill. Well, having made the decision to live there, I heard everything, I smelled everything, I watched everything, and I became a very well versed observer and also had a very pragmatic approach to this. I made a lot of local contacts, let the local people lead me into a situation, take cues from them, and as journal at as best as a collaboration, I became a good observer of what was going on and even develop good relationships with people in the embassy, for instance, in order to get better information to take a more informed photograph. And that remained true whether I was in Honduras and with exceptions Guatemala, but certainly helped me witness things with proximity and you have the protagonist, the military, the guerrillas, and the civilian population in the middle. You needed good relations with all three. I did not have an agenda, but I certainly wanted to tell the story that would capture the interest of people in the US. And given that this was a word driven magazine that I was working for, the argument had to be also a visual argument and content was very important in the picture. I made sure I had things accurately stated in my captions. I didn't want a 2 a.m. call saying, who's the person on the left and find out that they were using a picture of the Honduran military. And it came close on a few occasions if someone was away on vacation, an editor, for instance. So you had to be able to translate what you were seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting to people in a faraway place that were not normally in a position of a conflict zone. And that improved my capability as a witness. Thanks, Bill. You know, I lived in Nicaragua for seven years and I worked really hard there, but I never had a job. I always saw my role. And I think I share this perspective with a lot of my colleagues. I never had a job, I had a mission. And my mission was to tell the story of these poor people in this poor country that was ruled by a brutal dictatorship and was trying to find its way forward as a country and as a people. Previous to going over completely to the visual side of journalism, I was a foreign correspondent, a print correspondent for United Press International. And I think that gave me a standard of fairness and balance that I needed to have as I moved from print journalism to video journalism to photo journalism. And I understood that when you're covering war, everything is magnified, every little detail is magnified a thousand times because so much is at stake, so much is on the line there. And I knew that I had to be portrayed and I knew that people had to read what I wrote or witness the images that I had made and come away thinking that, okay, this guy is a fair-minded observer and he's trying to communicate what's really happening there in reality. Because if you're perceived as being with one side or another, not only do you do an injustice to the story and the people who you're photographing, who you're covering, you do an injustice to the craft itself. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. So I think my training as a print journalist with the United Press International and my desire to be fair with the people who I was covering really made an impact on the way my coverage was perceived. Thanks, thanks. Jose Luis, the Colombian Truth Commission also decried the current state of a society as they put it that's trapped in a war mode in which citizens cannot envision others who think differently than they do. Some conflicts, as we show in our exhibit, push societies to a place of reconciliation and lasting peace, albeit often a begrudging peace. But some of the conflicts in Central America seem to have left lasting cleavages that have been difficult to close. I wonder if you could comment on what it is about these conflicts that in some cases have driven polarization and left societies dividing. Well, seeing the bulk photos, some of them focus on those who make decisions in front of those with their lives or the bodies on the ground. And I think what happened again in El Salvador, and I think it reflects in Guatemala and probably in Icarraba. Usually we blame the ideological polarization, but I don't think that's the problem, the real problem. The problem, I think, is the lack of stature of the political leaders, especially in the post-war. The case of El Salvador, again, is really clear, it's very clear. The real people, the Salvadorians, they made peace, made peace with the past, with each other, they embraced the peace accords, the new peace, the new situation. And, but the political leaders kind of kidnapped the process, obsessed with winning, still winning the war, the narrative of the war. I particularly think that the FMLN won the war in El Salvador, in the political one. They didn't make a revolutionary government, but they achieved revolutionary changes. The democracies, it was a revolutionary change in El Salvador, the reform of the security corps or the military, that was big. But they didn't accept it, that it was not enough for them, and arenas never accepted that. They tried to build a narrative of kind of surrendering the FMLN, and they never stepped down and let the new generations imagine a new future for the country. It's crazy, because they put a lot of effort in that, when FMLN arrived to the presidency in 2009, they were more obsessed with, again, imposing and winning the narrative, and winning the war, and protecting or manipulating the area of legacy, but coming from the world that building a real government legacy. I think that's part of the problem. The obstacle for the common future in El Salvador, and I think it's the same in Guatemala or in Nicaragua, was never the people go wounds, even if they are there, still, some of them, was the cowardice of the leaders obsessed with protecting or still telling the story of the war. And manipulating, we're talking at some point these days about the war for the truth. And I think they kind of became obsessed with that, and never accepted that the war was a closed chapter. Thanks, thanks. May I follow up just very quickly, please? I think we can't ignore the role, like the 800 pound gorilla in the room. I think we have to include some perspective here about U.S. intervention in these countries. And I don't think you can really discuss what's happened in these countries without mentioning that intervention. And I think that intervention is one of the things that kept, certainly in Nicaragua, it kept the sides apart and kept them fighting. In El Salvador, for example, I think it was the Archbishop Romero, who said, ellos ponen las armas y nosotros ponemos los muertos. They provide the weapons, and we provide the dead. And this went on after the Sandinistas took power, after the Contra War. And I don't know about El Salvador, but I think in Nicaragua today, there's intervention from the United States still. And I think it is opposed to leading these countries in a peaceful way. I mean, they don't have Harvard, they don't have Yale, they don't have 200 and some years of peaceful democracy, we do. And there's something more that we should be contributing to these countries as opposed to just las armas, the weapons. Yeah, my thought. I totally agree that the U.S. and the international community can contribute even after the war to that narrative. I mean, that idea of the left and the right is still fighting for something. And it's not very productive, is it? It's not very productive, I think. I mean, the three countries are very different, though, in how they went through this process. I would argue that Salvador was different in the sense of taking a dictatorship, as we saw from the photos, and moving that in the direction of democracy. The military did sit out of politics after the war. There was a reconciliation on a certain level, and the polarization seems to be worse than the other two countries in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Salvador are a bit more nuanced, if you will. People kind of united now behind a new project, a populist project, but I agree. I think the roots of a lot of this comes from a conflict. This is the hardest part. Well, we work on a lot here at USIP, just trying to figure out how do you go from whatever got them into it, whether it's a Cold War, outside intervention, or whatever, how do you then transition to a peaceful future? And that's, again, what the exhibit is all about. And that's the hard work that I think, if I was to criticize any part of US policy, I think we tend to look at elections as being the establishment of democracy, and peace processes as the establishment of peace. And I think the thing we often miss is there is a very long process, sometimes decades of work still ahead. Again, I think that's what we've tried to capture there, and I appreciate these reflections, again, from all three countries, but in El Salvador as well, for the trying to understand and come to terms. But I think also it can't be helpful for young people to grow up, devoid of an understanding of a war that was so brutal and was so decisive just 30 years ago, and then to try to erase that and move on. I wanted to ask Bob a quick question on procedure as well. You mentioned it a little bit, but the evolution of the US military in terms of how it deals with journalists. You mentioned it a little bit, and then a little bit of the embassy. Did the embassy ever appreciate your work? Did they ever try to, because you were going to places they couldn't go. Was that something they valued in any way? And the military seems, again, to have made an evolution in how they have dealt with photojournalists. You've also worked, of course, in Afghanistan, where it was the embedding process kind of came about. Well, I kind of prefaced my answer before about Guatemala. But El Salvador had full-time military aid with advisors, and without the journalists pushing hard to get access to that, they tried to keep that away from us as whether print or visual. And then when they finally relented, I feel that this was also a public relations maneuver to help with the process of military aid being approved, is to show who was actually out there advising. And these are former Vietnam veterans. And the idea was not to show faces or names if we were given access. And if anything got published, it better be right. In other words, you had to work from behind and advise her out in the field who was training any of the Salvadoran soldiers. That needless to say, I took pictures 360 degrees. And those pictures are now out there. But you could not interview the military, you had to go through the colonel and head of the military group at the embassy. And that, you didn't want to burn that bridge, whether you were there for a week or a year. You had to keep your communications open. You needed access. And that was our biggest element to maintain is access, whether it was to the civilian population, the guerrillas, or the military access. And let the readers decide. But I pursued, I learned how to pursue the military in El Salvador from Anonymous to after 9-11 in Afghanistan where I basically moved to Bagram Air Base. And there were press set up, tents, cots we could stay there at the air base. We were given food, internet, and an occasional trip out into the countryside with the U.S. military. So they realized that it was better to have us, as I said before, maybe informally, on the inside of the tent looking out, rather than on the outside of the tent looking in. I expressed it differently before, but that was done in, I think, 2002, Tori Clark at the Pentagon with a number of the media hounding her to let us come along, or we're gonna go in on our own unilaterally into Iraq. So they realized that work with the press, take your hits, and if you're accurate as journalists, we'll deal with it. If you're inaccurate, well, you're gonna not pay the consequences, but we won't acknowledge you as often as those that people who do their homework. So I've always kept good relations with military public affairs people. I'm still in contact with them. And they realized that we are in a different period than in the Cold War, where you keep everyone at arm's length, we're gonna find a way in, and you're gonna pay the price for that. Be responsible for what you put out, my feeling. I'm responsible for the pictures that I generate. And I think we reached a midpoint in the cohabitation of that ground in the media, where we're now in a 24-7 media production phase. And you can try to win that and stay on top of things, but it's also kept me more aware of what's going on. I'm not in Ukraine, but I still feel I have a pretty good idea of the map in my head. Same thing with El Salvador or Guatemala. We maintain relations with the military for access, and they keep a record of what we've done, whether it was any rock where I was always dealing with Lieutenant Colonel for an in bed, and they could check up on you, and they can still check up on me if I apply. And it's an interesting learning process. You have people who don't wanna have anything to do with the in bed, saying, well, it's gonna change the way you view things. I say, that's a challenge you have to face. You can reveal what it's like to be a soldier, and you don't have to carry the flag for them. You can remain as a good inquiring journalist, and that also is the challenge that I'm ready to deal with again. I find it fascinating. Thanks, thanks. Well, let's go to questions if we could from the audience. We've got a few minutes. Ambassador McFarland? There's a microphone for you. How do you do it? And there are actually three former ambassadors to Guatemala here, and veterans of El Salvador and Nicaragua as well. First of all, thank you and congratulations on your statements and to you, Mr. Gentile, and your book. I wanted to ask, in your work as journalists in covering combat, do you find that you go through certain phases in appreciating the true extent and effect of the wars, and were there particular events that really crystallized your thinking about these wars? Thanks. Bill, maybe first. You know, when you first starting to do this stuff, no one believes that, or at least I didn't believe that I could ever be hurt in covering combat, covering war, covering conflict, because you're young and you're pretty strong still, and you try to stay in shape and you just don't, it doesn't occur to you that something bad can happen to you until you see what bullets really can do to human flesh and bone, and you get scared to your core a couple of times, that really changes your perspective. And that's, after a while, you get more, I don't wanna say more serious, but you get more cautious and you make more, you're inclined to make decisions with a lot more thought before you make that decision to suss out what can happen to you. And I think you become a better journalist. And you can show up for events like this one with 10 fingers, two eyes, and two feet still. Otherwise, a lot of people, a lot of our friends, and Bob knows this, and I'm sure Jose Luis understands this as well, that's always the risk. And I have to point out there's an extraordinary difference between the print journalists, I'm sorry, visual journalists like photographers and videographers, we have to be, and this is nothing to criticize print journalists at all, but print journalists can do their jobs over the phone, they can show up late for a battle, they can interview people after the fact and still do their work, still do their job. We don't have that luxury, visual journalists don't have the luxury, we have to be there on time when things are happening because once they're over, there's nothing to make, well, there are things to make pictures of, but the essence is not there anymore. Think about, Larry Beros' picture is called Reaching Out, there's an African-American Marine covered with blood and trauma, he's reaching out to one of his colleagues who has got his back against the blown out stuff of a tree, you know, you have to be there to make that picture in combat while things are happening because there's no amount of words that can capture that emotion for you. So, yeah, I hope that answers your question kind of. Bob, anything there? Well, I remember in the driver's ed class we were taken to the dump, the car, where the broken down cars from car wrecks were displayed to us by the driver's ed teacher of people not wearing a seatbelt going through the windscreen. And these were awful pictures that I learned to wear seatbelt and I still rolled a car, I still hit a tree, I did stupid things and without that seatbelt, I would not be here. Now, in a lot of these conflicts, you learn from your mistakes or what other people do wrong. And very many have unfortunate results. I carried a very close colleague out of, after being machine gunned by the Salvatore Army, across the street, it was clear who we were. An M-60 machine gun was used to shoot at us. There were no guerrillas nearby. And the Newsweek photographer was right behind me and got down slow and its 7-6-2 bullet severed his spine. I tucked my feet in as the bullets went right across. It was a purposeful target, targeting of us. Purposeful. And those were American bullets that they were using. You learn from that, you learn. And I went to that position because I saw a radio man with an antenna. I figured if anyone who knows what's going on and the guerrillas were coming down, they were dropping in mortars closer and closer. If anybody knew what was going on at that point, the radio man did. As soon as I got into the brush, he split. And he knew we were gonna be targeted, is what I figured out. So, am I cynical from these situations? Yes. Am I a better photographer? Yes. And I used to be a lot thinner. I just couldn't turn sideways and the bullets would miss me. But there's always somebody in a group that you're working with who might take the lead and you figure, go behind that wall. Don't go there. But in Bosnia, for instance, there were snipers with 50 caliber sniper rifles. Tried to figure out where they are. And all of a sudden, a bullet hits here, it makes a hole in the wall like that. It just missed you. Is that, that's luck? We use a lot of luck in this profession. But after a while, I think you have to give it up and pull back. Still be carefully cautious. Bill mentioned that, being cautious. But you also have to keep your wits about you all the time. And whether you're in the New York City subway, something can happen. You've seen events happen there too. I'm certainly aware of that now from my time in El Salvador and Afghanistan and in Iraq, particularly in Iraq. But it comes a time when, I don't need to be figuring this out anymore. But you learn by mistakes of others, unfortunately, but also yourself. We're going down the wrong road and we saw that in the early part of Ukraine. The Fox TV crew went down the wrong road and the Russians were there. I don't know how that happened, but I always managed to take good drivers with me and have good local contacts who had good instincts. So you have to use your instincts in these situations. Thanks. Can I have a question? Yeah, please. Really brave. One, just to state that, what you just said is still happening, not only in Ukraine, but in Palestine. I mean, this is happening, still. One and two, I think it's really important, something you both said. You said that you're the graphic journalist. You need to be there. And you talked before about being or working with proximity. And I think this is really important because I think good journalists reflect on what distance means. And you guys break the debate or open it, always the debate about distance. And I think it's the same with diplomacy. I think good journalists reflect of what distance really means. Emotionally and physically with the subjects and what is happening on the ground. I think it's very important. Thanks. Other questions? Hi, I'm Muriel Hasbun. I'm a photographer and in part from El Salvador. And I just want to thank everybody on the panel for your work, really, all this time. And personally, Bob Nicholsburg, because this is the first time we're meeting in person. But when I was in my early 20s in 1984 in El Salvador and I thought that I wanted to be a photographer, I talked to Bob Nicholsburg, who actually kind of gave me the lay of the land of what it meant to be a photojournalist. I did not become a photojournalist. I'm a fine art photographer and I actually deal more with kind of like these counter stories, which, you know, about El Salvador not being only the visuals of violence. But I have a question also for Jose Luis. You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about El Salvador through my work as well and like the effects of trauma and violence and how it is that we've seen and the history of El Salvador. And it seems to me that a lot of it is that El Salvador doesn't have a habit of confronting its own history. And that, you know, for example, the amnesty after, you know, the peace accords is like one of the, I think, major consequences or like effects of like the question that was raised initially about why is it that young people don't know about what happened? And maybe you can comment on that because I just feel like, you know, so much of it is that it's really hard for people to confront the reality of what happened and then have a dialogue and also a critical kind of response about it. And so, you know, anyway, just it's one of the things that I think is really important through the work that we do through visual images and reporting and also any other kind of art and writing that, you know, can bring these kinds of stories to expand upon the stories that are very simple and, you know, like really don't solve anything. So. Thanks. And then we're going to go to one question up here at the back after. Go ahead and answer that one teed up here at the back. Go ahead. Yes. Both. It's a lot more real. It's a lot better. Well, again, I think, I think when you say the people we need to discuss, we are talking about who are we talking about? Because the people discuss about the world, you know. I mean, the people kind of processes the way they can find the trauma and, I mean, the thing is democracy, I don't think, I think democracy is not only elections, it's not only fighting inequality which should include that, but it's also understanding that the public debate must be generated. And that's the responsibility for all those who have power, including journalists, academia. But we reduce democracy only to some topics. And I think public debate, debate about history defines if we are or not a democracy. And in that sense, we are not. And never was put in the center of the discussion about democracy. Still, that doesn't happen in most of Central America. But I think it's a huge difference between a democratic country and one that is not yet. And is that we need to discuss about our history because we have right to do that. And those in power, including, again, academia, journalists, we have the responsibility to do that because from the privilege, from the power we have. Thanks, we're a little bit over time. So if it could be a really quick question and a really quick answer. Hi there, good afternoon. Hello. Hello, hi there, good afternoon. My name is Vin Hui, I'm a student at Stanford here for the summer. You're obviously in a time and place where people are extremely vulnerable. I'm wondering if you can think of a time where you had a subject, either an individual or a group who was extremely skeptical of you, either perhaps as a journalist or maybe even as an American. And what did you say or do that made them trust you enough that they would be willing to be a part of your work? Thanks, so this will be for Bill quickly and then we'll wrap up. I have the great good fortune of having worked in what I call the tail end of the golden era of journalism. When journalists like us who were considered even by the most illiterate, untrained, unsophisticated, untraveled peasants in places like Central America, they believed that we were honest professionals trying to do our damnedest to get out the truth and to tell a proper story. So I never had, and as an American, the people in Central America incredibly were willing to accept me as an American and understood that I was not a policymaker, I was a citizen of this country and not responsible for its policies that they perhaps saw as negative toward their country. Does that answer your question? Thanks, thanks a lot. Thank you for asking. We're getting the red light here. Well, I wanna thank all of our participants for this really unique event and all of you for taking the time to share this with us and those online. I wanna pay tribute to our three panelists for the lifetime of courage and sacrifice that you've shown in Jose Luis for a lifetime still ahead, for the most part, right? But the sacrifice to capture the images, to write the stories of conflict and struggling societies. Your work has made a difference. It allows for the processing of conflict from a place of reality, not romanticizing or political spin. And if you were, we are able to get that transition from imagining conflict to achieving peace. A crucial first step is in confronting the hard reality of conflict and you've helped us to do that. So thank you very much and thanks again to everyone. The Imagine exhibit is again here till Monday. If you haven't seen it, please do so either now or come back. And I wanna appreciate again all of the time that you've given us today. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you.