Assignment Central America
The decade of the 1980's in Central America was soaked in blood. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua were aflame. I read about it every day and when not on assignment for Australian Broadcasting I volunteered in the news room at a radical free-form radio station WBAI, Pacifica Radio in New York City.
WBAI's FM signal reached sixty miles. It was incredible that I could contribute and actually get on air to broadcast - to compile news reports from reporters in foreign lands, take them over crackling phone lines from faraway places, switches and plugs and reels turning, press the record button and the wire service clacking and sheets of it rolling across the floor as the news poured in.
After a stint in news as a reporter riding a bike across town to the United Nations, attending public events and recording speeches, cutting tape and compiling stories, finding a typewriter that worked - red crayon scribbles on the copy, cut-and-paste from the wire-services, reels of stories labeled and ready, threaded and cued. We were a beacon of radical thought and alternative news in CentAm - the wars in Central America were high on our agenda.
