08/04/2021 2:54 PM
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Updated 08/04/2021 15:02
In a few years of staunch polarization in Latin America and the world, with countries like Venezuela or Nicaragua in free fall out of democracy, the visions of Jon Lee Anderson, an emblem of progressive thought in the region and an insider of its deep currents, they are enlightening. He has just published
The Years of the Spiral
, an anthology of
his brilliant Latin American chronicles that covers the decisive decade between 2010 and 2020
. Our trend, according to him, has been towards deterioration and its main vectors are drug trafficking and corruption.
Jon Lee Anderson's work, as a witness to the transformations of the turn of the century, is unlike that of any other journalist in the United States. First, because of its privileged proximity to Latin America in an extensive cycle, which includes masterful chronicles, capable of describing societies from the peak of power to the most idiosyncratic details -minimal and at the same time underground-, but also through
interviews with their leaders. , perpetrators or heroic: Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet a few days before he was arrested in London.
Born in California in 1957, he was educated in South Korea, Colombia, Indonesia, and Uganda. At the age of 13, he traveled alone to see Africa and lived in Liberia, where many years later he interviewed the bloodthirsty dictator Charles Taylor. With an initiation as a correspondent in civil strife in Guatemala, but also in Lebanon, he closely narrated the armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria for outlets such as
The New York Times
,
Financial Times, The Guardian
and
The New Yorker
magazine
.
A dozen books have collected his chronicles but
his major work is
Ernesto Guevara, A Revolutionary Life,
published in 1997
, which had the complicity of Che's widow, Aleida March, who entrusted him with the private papers censored in Cuba.
For years he has been a member of the board of directors of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo, based in Cartagena de Indias founded by Gabriel García Márquez, of whom he was a great friend.
Today Anderson resides in England and, at the same time, in the world.
Other titles by Jon Lee Anderson:
•
Inside the Liga
(1986), about the World Anti-Communist League, financed by the United States, and its links with the dirty war in Latin America and the formation of paramilitary gangs called death squads (in co-authored with Scott Anderson).
•
War Zones: voices from the killing fields of the world
(1987), compilation of testimonies taken in five wars (co-authored with Scott Anderson).
•
Guerrillas
(1992), on insurgent movements in El Salvador, Western Sahara, Gaza, Afghanistan and Myanmar.
•
The Lion's Tomb: War Reports from Afghanistan (
2002), about the 2001 War in Afghanistan.
•
The fall of Baghdad
(2004), on the siege and attack on the capital during the Iraq War.
•
The colonial inheritance and other curses
(2012), chronicles of Africa.
•
The years of the spiral
, chronicles of Latin America 20210-2020, (2021) Sixth floor