And in the late 1970s, you make a decision, like a lot of kids, which is to take a road trip. And you take that road trip right into guatemala in a moment of civil war, essentially. Well, my fathers family. My fathers from a russian jewish immigrant background family from here in boston. But my mothers family in guatemala is an Old Fashioned guatemalan mestizo catholic very traditional guatemalan family. And i had spent a lot of time in guatemala as a child, the first couple years of my life, almost every summer, summer after summer. But then, as i become more and more your typical American Teenage kind of kid, i become sort of selfconscious about that. I want to fit in the way americans do. And i sort of begin to stay away from guatemala, i guess. I hadnt been down there probably since sixth grade or so. And sure, then in college one day with my friends, we didnt really have anything to do that summer. And one of my friends had a new ford mustang, and i said, lets drive down to guatemala. And we did, you know . And that would have been about 1976. And. Hinojosa when the political situation was. Well, the political situation. Hinojosa was percolating. Was just percolating. I remember the big. My big moment of political intuition was one night, late at night, we were out just Walking Around Guatemala City looking for something to do. And a vw thing stops in the street to ask us if we know where theres any party going on. And they were students from salvador. And they were. There had just been a huge massacre at the university in salvador. And they had fled, because the situation had heated up there first. And i remember they had the strongest pot id ever smoked in my life. We got into the vw thing with them. Hinojosa and youre like, wow, guatemala. And we drove around hearing their stories, you know . I had never met anybody before who. You know, fleeing a massacre, right . And. But outside of that, that summer was fairly innocent. That summer was basically hanging around with my girl cousins, you know. Hinojosa and then you go back. Who were beautiful and had lots of beautiful friends. Hinojosa and then you go back and you make an incredible decision that really changes your life. Because at that point you decide to go to the morgue. This is when i go back the second time. I was just out of college, and i knew i wanted to. I thought i was going to apply to master of fine arts writing programs. And i was living in new york. I didnt quite graduate yet. And i was living in new york, working as a bartender in restaurants and all. I just couldnt get the time. And i said, oh, i know, my family, you know, down in guatemala, we have this. I was so innocent. I hardly used to read the newspapers. You know, this was about 1979. And i know we have this little chalet down in guatemala on lake amatitlan, which is not the beautiful, spectacular lake. Lake amatitlan is the sort of polluted little lake outside the city. But we had an old chalet there, and i thought i can hole up there and write and do the three short stories i need to do to submit to a writing program. Hinojosa this was going to be, like, your getaway. It was my getaway. And i get there, and my uncle is like, youre crazy. You cant go live out by the lake. You know, theres been violence there, you know, theres a war going on in this country. And so i live at my uncles house. Hinojosa when he said that to you, when your uncle said, look, theres a war going on, did you understand . Not really. I began to understand. It was fascinating, because im living at my uncles house, working on my new york city love stories, right . They were the most apolitical. Hinojosa because youre a new york city bartender whos trying to figure out life as a writer. And meanwhile, yeah, you know, youre picking up the papers every day, and youre beginning to see the codes, right . Because guatemala was basically. That happened to be the most violent year for the city, because thats the year we know now in history that the Guatemalan Army Intelligence Forces really cracked down on the urban guerilla networks, the student networks, and so forth. And theres just dead bodies turning up everywhere. And they never identify in the paper what happened. So youre reading the papers, and theyre always saying, you know, he was last seen, you know, et cetera, et cetera, his family last saw him, the mother says he wasnt involved in politics. You know, always these little code words, right . And theyd say, you know, body found. Just an endless cascade of bodies being found all over the city, always described as showing signs of torture speaking spanish a coup de grace in the head. Host these are kids that are basically your age at that point. My age. Hinojosa 20, 21, 22, 23. Sure. And then one day were at a family cocktail party, right, and this other girl, shes the daughter of family friends, shes at the public university, and shes studying to be a doctor, and shes telling me about, like, part of their Medial School practice. Because its the public university, its the free university. And they do their forensic studies at the morgue. And she says to me, you have to see what its like in there. Some mornings, you know, theres bodies stacked up like firewood outside, and you should see the condition theyre in. And thats the moment where my life changed, really. Thats the moment. Because i could so easily have gone, you know, no, i dont want to see that, or. The journalist in me opened up at that moment, right . And i said, yeah, okay, ill go see it. And to get me in there, she was so funny. It was so innocent. She put me in a medical robe. I even had, like, a little stethoscope around my neck. You know, and she said, dont say anything. If anyone asks us anything ill just say. You know, ill do the talking. And we go in, and sure enough, it was like. You know, it was like falling through a hole. Its a moment where you looked in and you saw what i saw. And you said, who could have done this to anybody . Hinojosa and you used that kind of metaphor. You say that you felt like you were falling into a hole, and it was a hole that basically enveloped you. I mean, those images of seeing young men, young women your age, more or less. Tell me what you saw. Yeah, i just remember very specifically the men, young men, laid out in these concrete slabs. And theyd been mutilated, you know . And the way they used to torture people back then, they used to torture. As it still is now in the narco wars with the beheadings and everything, they used bodies to send messages, and to intimidate. Its theater of terror. Of course, to someone like me to see Something Like that, whod grown up mostly here in the suburbs of massachusetts, it was. Who could be so vile . Who and why, and who are these people, and why do they do it, and whats behind all of this . And this whole series of questions opened up. And i would never be. You know, i walked into that room in some ways an innocent american kid from a, you know, split immigrant family, and i walked out of that room already contaminated, in a certain sense, by another sort of reality that i was going to have to begin to understand. There was no way i could just forget about it. Hinojosa you could have. Yes, but then i wouldnt be me, right . So it was a real. It was the beginning of an. It was the beginning of my real, true education. Because what happened is, you know, i wrote my stories, and i sent them out from guatemala to the mfa programs, and i also sent some to esquire magazine. And i got into the mfa programs, but bizarrely, miraculously, esquire magazine bought two of them. Hinojosa thats kind of. And then i said, wow, im a writer now. And they asked me if i wanted to do nonfiction for the magazine. And i remember to this day they proposed that if i wanted to go and write about sherpas in nepal. And i said, no, i want to go back and write about whats going on in guatemala. Hinojosa and thats surprising that they said yes, because, you know, when you think back about Central America and its relationship to the United States and the wars, a lot of people know about nicaragua and the sandinistas and the contras, and a lot of people know about what happened in el salvador, maybe, you know, not as deeply. But theres not a lot of detail about what happened in guatemala. Yeah. Hinojosa i mean, if you know, you know that there was a genocide. There was a genocide. It was by far the most. It was the most violent, repressive country, really that latin america has seen since the conquest. Hinojosa and the longest civil war, right . The longest civil war, 36year civil war. Why didnt it get the attention . It didnt get the attention that nicaragua and el salvador got, because the guerillas were never a threat to win. The army basically wiped out the urban networks, i guess in the late 70s. The very brutal, notorious scorched Earth Campaign in the early 80s essentially locked up the country militarily. And then a whole other process of kind of military consolidation, right, and transition to socalled democracy goes on. Whereas obviously nicaragua is under control of the sandinistas, salvador was very contested, honduras was the base camp for the contras going into nicaragua. So all those countries tended to be more part of the us policy arguments, right . Hinojosa so lets fast forward a few years. You become a successful writer, your books do amazingly well, and theyre all fiction. And then you decide, basically, to insert yourself into a very political reality. And thats. The name of the book is the art of the political murder. The art of political murder, yeah. Hinojosa the art of political murder. Set up the story behind the art of political murder. Well, you know, so i basically. You know, because that esquire article sends me into 11 years almost of working, supporting myself as a freelance journalist for magazines down in Central America, the last story i do is the sandinista elections, i think in 91. And then i basically quit journalism, and i just am burnt out, im sick of Central America, im sick of political violence. I go and, you know, immerse myself in fiction. Divine husband, which is almost like. My friends tease me, and they call it little women in the tropics. Its almost like a girly book, you know . Its all about these girls, and jose marti, and it was, like cleansing myself. Hinojosa a whole other side of jose marti, by the way. If you think you know jose marti, you dont. It was amazing. And this is how i get into the art of political murder. I knew that divine husband had to open in a convent. And i wanted to do research inside the guatemalan church. In 1998, when bishop gerardi, the head of the guatemalan human rights office, after he presides over the publishing of an unprecedented, tabooshattering human rights report on the war. Hinojosa and this is based in the church. The church sponsored. Hinojosa the church is saying, were going to open up this pandoras box about political violence. And were going to defy the amnesty. See, because when the guatemalan. The Guatemalan Army basically could dictate. The un peace accords basically dictates the terms of the peace agreement, right . And among the things that they insist on is that theres going to be an amnesty. In other words, of the 200,000 or more murdered civilians in the war, the vast majority of them killed in the 1980s. Hinojosa 200,000 people. Civilians killed. They say there can be no criminal prosecutions or investigations, right, of these countless tens of thousands of homicides. It was basically one of those horrendous. You know, the 20th, late 20th. The 20th century invention, almost of making the civilian population bear the brunt of the fatalities, you know, in a war against insurgency. That was taken to a real extreme in guatemala for so many reasons, part of them im sure, you know, a kind of genocidal rage and desire to sort of cleanse the country of these sort of. Hinojosa so the catholic church, through gerardi. Yeah. Hinojosa . Inserts themself here. Well, they say, we didnt sign the peace accords. The church is not a. And, you know, the un peace accords had said there could be a truth commission, but that their report supposedly would be forbidden from naming names and assigning blame. So he thought that the un report was going to be neutered. And he also worried that the un, when they went in, would be more or less, as it was, in fact, staffed by, you know, young north americans out of law school, and europeans, and that to break. They would never be able to penetrate the fear and silence that was up in the highlands. As you just said, people were isolated not just by language, because they mostly speak mayan languages, but also by geography, by history, by. And just this tremendous air of trauma. Hinojosa and distrust. And distrust. Hinojosa total distrust. And the church. If theres any institution in guatemala that people trust, its the church. Because people know whos in their local parish and so forth. And so he. Basically the way he did this report, it was phenomenal. They trained. Started off with 700 volunteers from the grass roots, from local parishes, and basically trained them how to use handheld tape recorders, and a methodology of what sort of questions to ask, and sent these people up into the villages, where nobody had ever told their stories before. Hinojosa and the stories that you relate in the book, the art of political murder, of these people talking about what happened to their sons and their daughters and the disappearances. So gerardi puts out this report, which is huge. Two days later. Hes murdered. Hinojosa hes murdered. Murdered. Hinojosa give our viewers just a context of why this gerardi murder is so historically important. The thing is i basically wrote this book almost. I lived it alongside these guys. But basically this book. This should have been a slam dunk for the army. It should have been so easy for them to create this false case that gerardi died, you know, in a homosexual murder, and smear the church and so forth, right . Young. A group of young people from the church itself, civilians, start investigating on their own in a long process that sees corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, eventually pushed aside by honest people. You get a kind of perfect storm, really, of unprecedentedly committed, brilliant young people fighting this case, with the help. Very important, because if these people hadnt been there they would have been killed the United Nations peacekeeping commission. Hinojosa but its interesting that these young people actually. Again, they knew what had happened in guatemala. They were putting their lives on the line, and yet they were prepared. I mean, tremendous courage. This was an extraordinarily important. The courage in this case is unbelievable the courage, the resourcefulness, the intelligence, the meticulousness, the patience, its a classic legal case. And i try to tell the story of how it was investigated, the problems they met, the mysteries. Because the case still has mysteries, right . And how it led to this unprecedented moment when, for the first time in guatemalan history, still for the only time in guatemalan history, military officers were convicted and sent to prison for having taken part in a statesponsored political execution,. Hinojosa amazing. What did this. The book and the reality of the gerardi case, how did it change guatemala . Well, to say it changed guatemala would be a little grand. But it definitely had incredible impact. Now, after the book comes out, im sort of in a daze. I dont really realize. My wife has died. I dont really realize whats going on. But i begin to hear reports that the book is having a huge impact in the election campaign. Because the book does, in fact, suggest that general otto perez molina, who was the leading right wing candidate for president , had a role. In fact, the main witness in the case says he has a role. And i tried to provide some supporting evidence for that, of which now, since the books come out, i have a lot more. And this became a big factor in the campaign. Hinojosa well, hes running for president , right . Yeah. Hinojosa the man whos implicated. And a lot of people say. And, you know, it was. Whether scrupulously or not, the opposition certainly used the book. And a lot of stuff got out there, and a lot of people say it hurt his campaign. Most importantly for me. And this is. I dont want to go on too long about this, because its complicated. But a big part of the book talks about how after the verdicts in 2001, so much was done. Because this verdict, this unprecedented achieving of justice, threatened so many people in guatemala if the case went forward. So much depends in impunity staying intact. And they tried to just, you know, smear everybody involved, and create this. Confuse everybody about what had happened. And the book, i think, restored the true story of the gerardi case to guatemala, and its recognized as having done that in guatemala now. And, i mean, im really proud of the fact that its been three years since that book came out. And in terms of its. For all the enemies i have in guatemala in the media and, you know, the powerful media controlled by people who are on the side of the murderers, essentially, they havent been able to find one detail thats wrong, that ive had to retract in my recounting of the case itself. Hinojosa the importance of factbased reporting is right there. So i want to talk just as we end about something that happened in your life that was really extraordinary. You. You later in life find a woman to fall in love with, and you fall deeply in love with aura estrada. Yeah. Hinojosa and just a few years after youre together. Well, we were together five years. Hinojosa five years. And no, she was. You know, shes beyond the love of my life. We were. I think i was. You know, i dont know how to say it except to say, you know, we were married two years. We were married in 2005. And i felt. You know, as a husband, and she as a wife, i think we were everything that a husband and wife are supposed to be to each other, you know . She was absolutely every. She was a genius. Hinojosa she was a writer. She was 20 years younger than me, as you know. She was a young writer. She was studying for her ph. D. At columbia university. But she deeply wanted to write. She did this incredibly beautiful act of rebellion the last year of her life, because it put all her scholarships at columbia at risk, and she applied in secret to the hunter mfa program. Hinojosa because she really wanted to be a fiction writer. She was desperate to write fiction. And. Hinojosa and one of the things that happened with aura was that she was this brilliant writer, but that she didnt believe it. I mean, you kind of lived what so many latinas go through, what so many women go through, which is, do i have a voice, can i write, can i trust this, am i good enough . Yeah, i mean, you know, ive seen this not just in latin america. I teach creative writing classes. And in the past ive sometimes seen, you know, all the work i have to do to get the female students in the class to speak up, while the kind of boys sit there and sort of dominate with their. You know, its funny with their raunchy jokes and everything. But often the most talented girls in the class, theyll sit over there in a row, theyre doing the best writing, and theyre terrified, right . And its somehow. I dont know why it is, but so often, like every. So many young male students who decide they want to write think theyre geniuses the minute they write, like, their first sentence. And fiction. Hinojosa ive never experienced that, ever. And the women, you know, are just sometimes the most, you know. Something. Are much shyer about their voice, and much more insecure about their voice, and much more. And its especially compounded, i think, sometimes for latin american women, especially from a culture like mexico. And so. Hinojosa its hard. And then theres personal reasons, right . And so aura was the most. Aura was a much better writer than me. She was a genius, she really was. She was extraordinarily talented. And i would sit there, and anytime i read a story i would say, oh, aura, this is so good. Shed say, youre just saying that, because you want me to. Because you love me. And id go, no you know, so it was so fantastic when she went to hunter and got validation from the people. Hinojosa let me ask you about what youre doing in auras legacy. Because aura passed away very suddenly. In a swimming accident. Hinojosa in a swimming accident that you dont really talk a lot about, exactly what happened in that accident. It was a. We were body surfing at a beach, mazunte, and there was. We. It was just. You know, we had. We had been waiting all winter and spring for this two week vacation. And wed rented a house, and, you know, it was aura, and her cousin, fabiola, and me. And it was just the second day, and it was this beautiful day, the water was full of people, and she caught a wave wrong. And even then, you know, i thought she was still going to make it. And we. You know, luckily there was a lot of people on the beach, and everyone tried to help, and we put her. There were no ambulances. You know, you forget what the infrastructure of a poor country is get an ambulance and theres no ambulance. The closest ambulance is three hours away. Hinojosa ah, dios mio, oh, my. And he had to put her in a. There was a doctor on the beach, and we put her on a surfboard and got her into the back of an suv, drove her to the nearest hospital, where they didnt even have a respirator. They had to use a hand thing. I mean, it was such a journey. 12 hours later we get her to this. We finally get her air medivaced out to a hospital in mexico city. The only. So at least her mom got to see her one more time. You know, and then she died the next morning. Hinojosa and you have decided in her name to create an amazing award, the first of its kind, which is basically to give Financial Support to young. Yeah, the aura estrada prize. Hinojosa the aura estrada prize. And its basically to say to young women who write in spanish. Women 35 and under who write in spanish who live in mexico or the United States. And you get. If you win, you get 10,000, and you get residencies in three writers colonies ledig house, Santa Maddalena in italy, and ucross in wyoming. And we gave the first prize last november. We had the most extraordinary fundraisers. We were so lucky at the last fundraiser, because it was at two weeks before the crash. Hinojosa mmm. And in one night we raised 80,000. You know, we have enough to give the prize now for. You know, we need more. Hinojosa well, you know what, francisco . What we can leave our viewers with is that if they want to learn more, they can go to auraestradaprize. Auraestradaprize. Org, yeah. Hinojosa and we can read your new book. And the title of your new book is . Say her name. Hinojosa say her name. And its about your life with aura. Its a novel, but its about aura. Yeah, thatll be. Hinojosa francisco, thank you so much for opening your heart to us here and in your writing. It means so much. Thank you, maria. Thanks for having me. Hinojosa thank you. Byebye. Hinojosa continue the conversation at wgbh. Org oneonone. Captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org oo [voiceover] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. Also by hillco partners, a texas Government Affairs consultancy. And by the Alice Kleberg reynolds foundation. Im evan smith. Hes a former texas secretary of state and former dallas mayor who served as the United States trade representative in president barak obamas first term. Hes ambassador ron kirk. This is overheard. upbeat music lets be honest. So is this about the ability to learn or is this about the experience of not having being taught properly . How have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa . I dont mean to say that hed made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. You saw a problem and over time took it on. Lets start with the sizzle before we get to the steak. Are you going to run for president . I think i just got an f from you. upbeat music
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