When Reed Brody was 12 years old, he and his little brother, Clifford, wrote the Constitution of the Free Republic of Brodania.
They had argued with his father, Ervin Brody, a Hungarian who left his country after World War II with a backlog of persecution with him for his status as a Jew and a masterful gift for languages.
The brawl that day at the Brody's in Manhattan hid nothing beyond a slight disagreement of character.
Something anecdotal that Reed Brody doesn't even remember.
But fundamental, because it led him down the path where he continues today after years of activism in the field of human rights.
"In that role, Cliff and I established that the Free Republic of Brodania would not relate to kings or dictators, but to peer-to-peer states, on the basis of democracy."
Of that eruption that fired the incipient lava of his talent, he barely remembered until this past summer he rummaged through the family memories inside some boxes.
There was preserved that Magna Carta emerged from the momentum of adolescent principles.
The most solid, pure and unshakable that many have in their entire lives.
Then he understood why he is where he is.
Reed balances today, at 67, within an acceptable skepticism that preserves the long hair of his hippy past.
But he is not mistaken: according to him, his career conforms to a succession of failures.
"The vast majority," he says.
"But with some exceptions that have been worth it."
As much as to help change the course of international justice.
Of these exceptions, this lawyer and activist, generally nomadic but living in Barcelona during the pandemic, highlights four: his role in denouncing as rapporteur the atrocities of the Nicaraguan Contra under the umbrella of the Government of Ronald Reagan, his action as a popular accusation with Human Rights Watch (HRW) against Pinochet, the persecution and prosecution of Haitian Jean-Claude Duvalier —although he died without trial— and the conviction of Chad's dictator Hissène Habré, now imprisoned in Senegal.
Now he is following in the footsteps of Yahya Jammeh, the satrap who dismembered the Gambia between 1994 and 2017 before leaving power and going into exile in Equatorial Guinea.
Perhaps this is why Reed Brody is known in various parts of the world as
The Addictor Slayer.
Reed Brody, in Chad with victims of the dictator Hissène Habré.
Time is a rigid and capricious variant of this law.
Many times it is at the expense of fortune and you have to know how to take advantage of it within the few opportunities in which it presents itself.
But not determination.
It serves, in the first place, to set objectives.
In his office at Human Rights Watch, Brody posted a map on the wall.
“I invited my colleagues to point out the countries where the tyrants and torturers against whom we should open cases were found.
It was a very interesting exercise ”.
No one had placed Chad there, but then he met Delphine Djiraibe, the president of the human rights association in that country.
“I hardly knew who Hissène Habré was.
I was interested that he had taken refuge in Senegal, the first country in the world to join the International Criminal Court.
At that time I had the idea that we should greatly promote international justice in Africa and that woman tells me that they have suffered the atrocities of someone worse than Pinochet ”.
The problem was that he had gone unpunished and had lived in Senegal since 1990. "Since then, we have called him that: the African Pinochet, a qualifier that speaks very badly of both of them."
With that nickname, the cause creeps.
“We went to the country, we collected information from the victims, we collected their stories.
The process begins in 2000 and they arrest him.
There begins a long serial that lasts 15 years to bring him to trial, ”says Brody.
The international dance begins.
"When Senegal initially refuses to prosecute him, we choose Belgium, which asks for his extradition."
Why there?
Then said country and Spain were the only States that applied international justice even if the accused did not reside in their territories.
In them you could start a case, indict and request extradition.
But that jurisdictional exception that had been applied after the
Pinochet case,
at the beginning of the century, did not last long.
In Belgium, according to Brody, the law was the most generous in the world and began to create problems: cases were opened against everything imaginable, including George Bush Sr.
"Then Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State for Defense [of the United States] appeared, and warned the Belgian leaders: either change the law, or we will take NATO headquarters."
It's over.
In Spain, three-quarters of the same happened.
The Government of Mariano Rajoy repealed that law in March 2014. But in this case it was not due to pressure from the United States, but from China, after the cause opened in Spain for genocide in Tibet.
With that crack open, Brody's team seized the opportunity and found witnesses who could bear the brunt of Habré's crimes in Chad.
It is impossible to know the number, but during the case 40,000 were considered between 1982 and 1990. “It is essential to personify the cases, not institutionalize them.
We found Souleymane Guengueng, a very charismatic guy.
Religious, with his own story to tell: he swore before God that, if he got out of jail alive, he would fight for justice.
And when he is free he begins to organize himself ”.
They took him before the Minister of Justice.
“With all the effort it takes to move them around, it's worth it the moment they talk to those in charge.
Nothing can compare.
When someone tells you about it and you commit to it, everything starts to work ”.
The passing of that victim caused such an impact that, despite the law having been repealed, the Belgians included a transitory provision that allowed the rescue of the Chad case as a result of the political tour that Guengueng himself made in Belgium.
There were more tensions.
Senegal refused to extradite the tyrant.
But the campaigns against him from HRW in the host African country had an effect.
“Macky Sall came to power, a new president who felt very aware of the cause we had started years before.
From then on, all doors open and in 2016 Habré was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Senegalese court ”.
The case of the Chadian dictator was possible due to a specific context and circumstances.
One of those parentheses in history that open more than hopeful lights.
They go off, but they convince many people that they can be turned on again.
We are now in the midst of excruciating darkness, according to the lawyer.
"We live in a time of impunity," says Brody.
Reed Brody in London at a rally in favor of Pinochet's arrest in 1998.
So David slipped through a crack and overpowered Goliath.
Injustice is the chain dynamic of the powerful, Brody firmly believes: “And now they set the pace.
Trump has done it in the United States, against whom a case could - and can - be opened for separating young children from their migrant parents at the border, a complete attack on human rights.
It is exercised by China, which abuses based on its commercial privileges.
And Russia, persecuting opponents and journalists outside its borders.
Against that they do not act with due forcefulness from places where they should, such as the European Union ”.
Faced with such leaders, conglomerates and structures, sometimes a resistance arises with the force of law, a powerful and stubborn "no". One of those who change course. "Or a judge with balls, like Baltasar Garzón," says Brody. Yes, okay, you can end up bending him, but he leaves many seeds along the way, as was the
Pinochet case
, among others
.
London, October 16, 1998: Augusto Pinochet is arrested by order of Baltasar Garzón accused of genocide. Reed Brody shows up there as part of the HRW team. “I was going for a week and I stayed seven months.” But the pulse lasted longer. It led to three House of Lords resolutions, a campaign in which they supported the release of Pinochet retired leaders such as Margaret Thatcher or Bush, a conflict of jurisprudence within the orbit of international law and the repatriation of the dictator to Chile in March 2000, where his end was very different from what he himself had hoped it would be.
Pinochet ended his days there by appearing in court, stripped of his immunities and privileges.
Brody, Garzón and Juan Garcés, promoter of the cause, became good friends.
The lawyer owes the judge to have introduced him to his current partner, Isabel Coixet, when the film director prepared the documentary
Listening to Judge Garzón
.
“That year the case against Pinochet began, 1998, the world changed.
Garzón's cockiness and daring changed the world, ”says Brody.
Also in that same year, the International Criminal Court was established, which was created under the Rome Statute and has its headquarters in The Hague.
Between June and July 1998, Brody participated with a delegation of nine from Human Rights Watch in its design.
“He was born with defects that we saw later.
It is a subsidiary court, it acts when national systems are incapable.
It only has jurisdiction in territories that have ratified it and, until today, Russia, China, Israel or the United States are not part of the 123 countries that have done so ”.
Brody walked between London and Rome in that historic 1998 for international justice.
To fully understand the ins and outs of the
case, Pinochet
had one advantage: he could speak Spanish perfectly.
"He acted as a spokesperson and translated many aspects that could create confusion."
This strengthened his ties with Garzón and Garcés.
The years in the midst of the Sandinista revolution bore another fruit.
In that, Brody acknowledges his father's heritage.
His fondness for languages.
The love of tasting other people's words that he made his own with a marked Hungarian accent that did not seem so strange to him until he heard one of his students imitate him.
"Does my father talk like that?
How Zsa Zsa Gabor? ”He said.
Difficult to tear it off.
His diaspora was heavy.
But his surviving expertise was influenced by his mastering seven or eight languages.
Spanish was one of them.
And Brody perfected it years later throughout Latin America.
His father wanted him to be a journalist.
His mother, an artist, only instilled in him the desire to be happy.
They both transmitted conscience and rebellion to him.
She, sensitivity, fuss, taste for swimming and mobilizations against the Vietnam War.
Or a neighborhood, after parting ways with Ervin, in which prostitutes came to his door.
He, gift of languages, love of tennis and something important too: strategy classes based on a shared hobby: chess.
“So much so that I had to stop playing for a while.
I became obsessed, I saw life through a board, ”he says.
The checks have determined its trajectory afterwards.
"My job is denunciation, on the one hand, and strategy, on the other," he says.
That was for a sense of justice alien to what the Wall Street scouts intended.
They showed up to hire fresh graduates from Columbia University, where he studied, and they tempted him.
“I lasted seven months in one of those offices.
That could have been my life: dedicating myself to defend one son of a bitch against another… ”.
But no.
He decided to travel south - "from Central America down to Chile and Argentina" - where a copy of
The Open Veins of Latin America
fell into his hands
.
"Today I read Eduardo Galeano's book and in many things it doesn't hold up, but then ...".
Reed Brody, right, with John Kerry in 1972.
Then those pages turned out to Brody a kind of bible.
So much so that his father, years later, told him after another fundamental trip: "When you went to Nicaragua, I feared that you would become a communist, but I did not suspect that you were going to become a Catholic."
He marched to the burning Central American country to witness the Sandinista revolution in 1984 and there he shared experiences with missionaries close to liberation theology.
Specifically with Father Alfredo Gundrum, in the town of El Jícaro, near the border with Honduras.
"He just died of covid, a great man," says Brody.
There, numerous victims related to him torture and murders committed by the Nicaraguan Contra.
“What I saw, I felt the need to tell.
I returned to the United States with a lot of anger and wanting to stop people on the street to raise awareness, "he says.
So much so that he recorded it and from that report emerged one of Brody's first — and rare, but crucial — successes.
His commitment was such that he left a position as assistant attorney general in New York State to focus on his new job: Nicaragua.
“It addressed consumer rights, it took companies to court: cases of Hispanic families who sent their belongings to their countries and sometimes they got lost, without guarantees.
I loved the job because I felt like Santa Claus, I acted on behalf of the state against big companies and I gave people gifts.
I faced cases and lined up on the side of the good guys, ”he recalls.
His mother had died and his father saw him on his way.
But that first trip to Nicaragua transformed everything.
“I left the job to my father's chagrin, but I had to follow that change of course.
I sent a letter to the attorney general in which he argued that the reason was the situation in Central America.
I went back there.
I was able to see what the Contra was doing with funds from my country ”.
The sense of responsibility spurred him on.
"The work that I started there is very similar to what I apply today: collecting testimonies from victims to initiate causes."
At that time, Nicaragua represented a central axis in the politics of the White House.
"It's hard to believe these days, but that's how it was," recalls Brody.
Then, various human rights groups took his report as the axis to denounce the Contra.
“A communications consultant for those groups suggested we give it to
The New York Times
two weeks in advance and it made the front page.
We then presented it in the House of Representatives to 200 journalists.
I was 30 years old ”.
That was the root of what later became Iran-Contra.
Congress cut the subsidies to the mercenaries and there the secret services began to organize the mechanism to sell arms to Iran and use the profits for the Nicaraguan Contra.
The Reagan administration marked it closely.
And Reed continued his career in Switzerland.
He went to an NGO in Geneva where he worked with the International Commission of Jurists and met Joaquín Ruiz-Jiménez.
"Don Joaquín ...", for Brody.
It is made up of lawyers from 40 countries.
“I directed the independence matters for judges and lawyers.
From there I travel around the world defending them or taking charge of other initiatives, such as helping to draft the Constitution of Mongolia, for example ”.
He joined the International Human Rights Law Group.
He then served as head of the human rights division in El Salvador after the conflict ended, under the UN umbrella and on a peacekeeping mission.
He met Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.
He worked with him.
He learned a lot despite the fact that his time there passed to the account of the failures in his life.
Not only because, years later, Duvalier dies before being tried.
"They failed to disarm the paramilitaries and they continue there."
Patience was not one of his virtues then.
Not even as logic derives from chess.
After yes.
“My successes have been the result of persistence, perseverance, and when I was young I didn't have it.
It can take 17 years to solve some cases, like Habré's in Chad ”.
Reed Brody, at his home in Barcelona, where he lives with the filmmaker Isabel Coixet.
Vicens Gimenez
His experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo also appears in the same negative account.
He landed there on the orders of Kofi Annan when he was UN Secretary General.
“He appoints me after the genocide in Rwanda to investigate the massacres against the Hutus who had taken refuge in Congo, but our report was buried and 23 years later the same cycle of atrocities and impunity continues in that country.
If you change the dates, it doesn't matter: the facts are the same ”.
Hence, these dynamics need to be transformed by experiences and jurisprudence such as that of Chad.
Hopefully Yahya Jammeh's cause in The Gambia does not last so long.
“I come to the following case: they request me from various countries.
I find among the victims of the Gambia the next chapter in which I am immersed.
We still have no cause, we are working on the case against the dictator, who is now in Equatorial Guinea, protected by Obiang ”.
He has raised funds to take him to court.
“Always from private hands.
At HRW we do not accept public subsidies, "he says.
But the time of impunity that he denounces does not open many doors in favor of the persecution of satraps.
Perhaps now, with Joe Biden, it will improve ... Or if Josep Borrell's criteria in the EU to break the principle of unanimity worked ... Meanwhile, Brody contemplates with hope and concern the departure of Trump in his country after the events on Capitol Hill: “Since In the last elections, on several occasions we have been on the verge of losing our democracy.
January 6 was the last pathetic and desperate attempt by the white racist power, which is diminished and slowly dislodged, from history.
It was spectacular, but it didn't have the slightest chance of succeeding, "he says.
And perhaps there, beyond a palpable and enraged decline, however violent it may be, a new beginning will be found in another direction.
But where to?