Jon Lee Anderson, journalist: ‘I can’t rule out a civil war in the United States’

Jon Lee Anderson, reporter for The New Yorker, author of numerous books, biographer of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, speaks a Spanish as entertaining as it is colorful. He’s one of the journalists who best knows Latin America and maintains ties, both familiar and sentimental, with Granada, Spain, where he lived for many years. His history of coming and going across the Atlantic and the Andes has left its mark on the way he speaks the language, with a blend of sayings and accents from many countries.

Certainly, his timbre includes what Carlos Fuentes referred to as the “territory of La Mancha,” where he currently found himself. Anderson visited Madrid and Barcelona to present the book He decidido declararme marxista (I’ve Decided to Declare Myself a Marxist) the first volume of a Spanish language compilation of his chronicles — it is no exaggeration to call it a crowning achievement of the journalism of our time — and a short essay Adventures of a Teen-Age Wharf Rat.

Question. Your favorite article in this journalistic compilation is The Distant Shore, where you recount an encounter in Peru with a previously uncontacted tribe. Why this piece?

Answer. I got my start as a journalist in the Amazons. At the time, you didn’t use the term “uncontacted,” but rather, “brave Indians.” That took place in my adolescence and as soon as I was on my own, I organized my own expeditions in the Peruvian Amazon. My first chronicles were from there in the 1980s. In 2015, I was able to be present for the first meetings between people of this world and people of the Indigenous world. Literally, people who were naked before the world. It was a shocking thing.

Q. Do we have reason to fear for democracy in the United States?

A. I think so. With Trump 2.0, we’re seeing threatening statements being announced every day. They’re not directed at the United States’ adversaries, but rather, neighboring countries with whom we have agreements and relationships of deep-seated friendship, like Canada and Mexico. That’s on one hand. And then on another, the appointments he’s making, which seem like a joke. It’s like sending a wolf to care for a flock of sheep. There are those who say that he can’t deport a million people like he’s promised, but his right-hand man, Stephen Miller, is a deportation apostle and has promised that this time, they are going to build massive camps, essentially concentration camps, with all that implies. I could go on and on, enumerating the thousand ways I’m worried about Trump.

Q. Should we be thinking about the possibility of civil war in the United States?

A. Since the midpoint of the Trump 1 administration, I started thinking about civil war in the United States, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t share it, except with a couple of people very close to me, because saying it in public seemed like too much. He’s a vengeful guy, that has always been his way of conducting himself. This man is anti-democratic, he’s a danger. I do foresee problems. The issue is that the United States, in contrast to a European country, is a very violent country, highly armed. You have to keep in mind that there are more than three million U.S. residents who in recent years have had combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the first time in my life, I can’t rule out the possibility.

Q. In one of the foundational books on reporting, Dispatches, Michael Herr said that just as the Vietnam War could not be won through conventional firepower, it also couldn’t be revealed using conventional journalism. Do you think we are living through a similar revolution? To what extent has journalism changed?

A. Essentially, I’d say it hasn’t changed. Reports are the written form of oral history that in ancient times was told around the fire. And they become canonical versions of our reality. What has changed, of course, are the more temporal things. Perhaps what is most concerning now is the propagation of the notion that we are liars. That is coming from the populists. We have millions of people who believe that we are liars and who receive their information from who-knows-what kind of sites, influencers and TikTokers. The big challenge lies in maintaining the conviction that we are valuable and honest.

Q. I Have Decided to Declare Myself a Marxist. I think that the title, in 2024, requires some kind of explanation.

A. Consider it a generalized provocation. And there are some people who tell me, “Well done, Jon, for asserting yourself like that in these times of the return of fascism.” The journalist is supposed to hide their political references, to be impartial. We have our sympathies and our antipathies. I am publishing this book the same week that I turned in a profile to The New Yorker on [Argentine president] Javier Milei, who is anti-communist. [The book’s title] comes from an annotation in the margins of a diary I kept when I was 13 years old and was seeing what was happening at the time in Latin America, in Africa. I felt sympathy for the Marxists, who tended to be the only ones who stuck their necks out in the face of the most odious systems on the face of the Earth.

Q. You said in an interview on Spanish journalist Javier del Pino’s podcast that social media is like fentanyl, which is why you abandoned it.

A. On one hand, it’s addictive — every time you look at what someone entered in that little box or who liked your content. But also, there’s the toxic aspect. Elon Musk has made X a platform for the ultra-right. Social media is the most toxic swamp on Earth. I know that many colleagues, especially young ones, depend on social networks to have a voice. But watch out! Perhaps Bluesky is the healthy response to a platform like X. But they are very turbulent waters.

Q. Why do you think that Spain has never been able to resolve its past? It’s a subject that you dealt with in your 2009 article Lorca’s Bones, which is also included in this compilation.

A. I believe that it has to do with the fact that [Spanish dictator Francisco] Franco not only forged his victory with blood and fire in 1939, but that he continued to govern through that unique act of terror for more than 40 more years. And he was able to mold the majority of Spaniards to his whims. Many Spaniards speak of the last phase of Franquismo as the dictablanda [soft dictatorship], and compared it with the 1940s. There were no concentration camps, no constant executions. Although, you have to remember that only four or five months before he died, he sent two dissidents to his dictatorship to the garrote [a handheld ligature of chain rope, scarf, wire or fishing line, used to strangle a person]. He used an instrument from the Middle Ages in front of the entire world.

I think the Spaniards started feeling comfortable as long as he let them feel comfortable. Even though, if you asked where your grandfather had disappeared to, that put you in danger and for many decades, it meant that you were linked to the Reds. So parents passed their fears down to children, and children replicated them. In many cases, nearly a quarter-century passed after Franco’s death before the grandchildren of the disappeared — many in number — began to ask where their grandfathers were buried. No one in all those years dared to ask publicly, and it was not resolved by the political class who carried out the transition. They didn’t do anything, just in case. Because, of course, the monster is still there and there’s no need to wake it up. Unfortunately, that collective fear meant that Spaniards did not take it upon themselves to address their demons.

Q. What can be done when a society turns to violence?

A. I think that in many countries, in addition to all of the primary religions, violence is legitimized, meaning, the idea of heroes and martyrs. All nations were made possible through acts of violence and from there came freedom or peace, they were created from blood that allowed that country to become democratic. It is deeply embedded in our collective psyche, that violence has taken place in one form or another. We hold onto it as the last stronghold of salvation, we have a pathological relationship with violence. It is built into the civic body that violence is possible. And we have also given governments the power to use violence against us by the pacts we have agreed on throughout the centuries.

And in more temporal terms, speaking of current figures, I go back to Donald Trump, who knows where the prejudices of groups are located. All that is missing is someone who knows how to bring out the ghosts of the past, including the violence. And that is what he has done in the United States. He has brought back ghosts that we thought were locked up. Violence floats back into his rhetoric and into the people around him. It is a threatening group that uses violent language and promises acts of violence in the propagation of their ideas once they are in power. I’ll go back to the last question: I am very concerned about it. I don’t rule out violence in Trump 2.0 because of these very factors.

Translated by Caitlin Donohue

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