Although I do not believe that my own life has ever been in danger, I dare say that I have been surrounded by grief and absence for years. Surrounded by dead people. On January 28th I received an email from a stranger. He immediately informed me of the sudden death of his brother, whom he had not seen for years, and thanked me for photographing him. “One day he came out of prison and suddenly died in his sleep,” he explained to me in English. Only the subject of the message contained his name: Isaiah Joseph Tarin.
For a moment I doubted I knew Isaiah, and the first thing I did was go to Google. My thoughts suddenly went back to a summer in 2017 in Los Angeles, where I spent months interviewing former gang members from various gangs. After years in the heat and hustle and bustle of the streets, many of them tried to start a new life with the help of the Rev. Gregory Boyle, the founder of a revolutionary bakery-restaurant where everyone from the chefs to the waiters were present. members. At Homeboy Industries (something like Gang Industries), they also received job training, therapy, and learned how to boost their self-esteem or control feelings of anger. Isaiah was one of those tough guys that I talked to for hours. Very young and very smiling, he had three names tattooed on one of his cheekbones, I seem to remember those of his ex-girlfriends: Kaelyn, Chelsea, Monique.
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The truth is that something almost no one tells you in a timely manner when you’re working as a reporter in a foreign country is the tough drop of people you carry with you on both sides. People who are your sources, where the press and the right to information are under severe attack, but also fellow journalists who arrived where they were not welcome and were not allowed to return home. People like María Hernández Matas, a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) worker who was murdered along with two other colleagues (Tedros Gebremariam and Yohannes Halefom Reda) in June 2021 during the war in Tigray (Ethiopia). About three months earlier, Hernández had told me firsthand how military troops had captured and looted 70% of the region’s health centers and hospitals, as well as the desperate situation facing civilians in Tigray. In October 2021, a colleague from Doctors Without Borders asked me via email to share the recording of the interview with them: they simply wanted to hear María’s voice.
Equally painful and, in my experience, more common is the murder of fellow journalists. In April 2021, when a jihadist group killed David Beriáin and Roberto Fraile, who lived in sub-Saharan Africa, in an ambush in Burkina Faso, we received a nervous message: “Are you there? Hello” It was known that something bad had happened. It was known that the dead were Spanish journalists.
Again, I don’t think my life would have ever been in real danger. But I can’t help but remember the death of Palestinian videographer Yaser Murtaja in Gaza when I was living in Jerusalem in 2018. Or the unpunished murder of Al Jazeera’s star correspondent Shireen Akleh, also by Israeli shrapnel in May 2022. I can’t stop thinking about the 15 journalists (eleven Palestinians, three Israelis and one Lebanese, according to CPJ, the Committee to protection). Many journalists have been murdered in just 10 days since the Islamist group Hamas carried out a heinous attack on civilians in Israel and that country attacked Gaza with greater violence, leaving more innocent lives.
Sometimes I wonder what we are doing – or rather, what they are doing – risking their lives for our desire to witness, denounce and tell with facts and images realities that the majority willingly ignores. At least 15 more reporters were killed in Ukraine’s almost forgotten war, according to CPJ. And I use the verb “murder” again because language is everything, and even more so when we talk about war crimes.
According to the World Press Freedom Index 2023, conditions for practicing journalism are unfavorable in seven out of ten countries worldwide, led by North Korea, China and Vietnam. The report also warns of a growing rejection of journalists on social media and online, as well as the dangers of increasing disinformation, as we are witnessing in real time in Israel and Gaza, with fatal consequences.
For all these reasons, I dare say that I have been surrounded by dead people for years. Protected by the memory of complex people I had the privilege of interviewing in those past lives that keep coming back, and by the faces of untamed reporters – many of them local, underpaid and in the shadows – singing in a kind of lullaby or mantra I would tell them in a loop: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Your work was not in vain.
Patricia Martinez is a data and investigative journalist currently working for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative program at Columbia University in New York.
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