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  Through it all, the term “Third World” gradually came into vogue as a Cold War construction, after French journalists, beginning in the 1950s, began describing developing countries as le tiers monde, grouping together the “poor, nonwhite, and uncommitted” parts of the globe that lay apart from the first two worlds, those of the capitalist West (the first world) and the communist East (the second world).10 The radical activist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, would popularize the term in his pathbreaking manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, which dealt specifically with the Algerian war. By then, the resistance movement against Great Power domination had already been formalized at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, which drew the likes of Indonesia’s Sukarno, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, and Yugoslavia’s Tito. The Non-Aligned Movement was declared for all the world to see in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade in 1961, in a conference hosted by Tito.

  Yet the Non-Aligned Movement was merely aspirational, and as time went on more and more of these new states found it necessary to side with either the United States or the Soviet Union in some way. And because the Cold War was so binary, any Third World regime could gain a superpower patron, no matter how lethal or foolish its domestic agenda.11 For the Cold War was the organizing principle of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, igniting conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or making them worse. It quickly became a backdrop to Bob Gersony’s entire professional life.

  But while elites in Washington believed they were bringing liberty to the world, that was mainly true in Europe, not in the vast Afro-Asian and Latin American periphery where Gersony labored. For in many of these countries American national interests—by supporting hated regimes—ran up against the very struggle for freedom and human rights. Thus, periodically, Gersony would find himself recommending against the very policy supported by the U.S. Embassy; or in support of the embassy but against ideological factions back in Washington.

  His professional life would also continue beyond the Cold War, as he reported on conflicts and carnages that the Cold War had set in motion and were consequently aftershocks of it. More crucially, Gersony’s life was a forerunner to today’s concentration on the environment itself as a national security issue, as he was also dispatched to interview the victims of one natural and weather-related catastrophe after another. The Cold War, environmental catastrophes, genocide, and, most fundamentally, refugees all became part of his professional domain. And whereas foreign correspondents interviewed dozens, representing the State Department and other agencies he would often interview hundreds in each place: more than eight thousand refugees, displaced persons, and related others interviewed over a lifetime. Whereas an individual foreign correspondent might cover some or most conflicts and disasters, he would cover almost all of them.

  Guatemala would be the first, in the course of his bottom-up experience of the Cold War and afterward from the battlefields of the developing world.

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  Of course, the Cold War, precisely because it was so archetypal, was a vast and crude generalization for the many dozens of crises going on around the globe that each had its own individual elements, themselves products of intricate little dramas with their own vivid realities for those in the field. It was as if the Cold War existed only on the surface, below which were depths and more depths of local minutiae. Gersony’s life played out in the midst of these complex little pageants about which those in Washington usually knew next to nothing.

  Thus, we return to Gersony first setting foot inside the forlorn Catholic mission in Antigua, Guatemala.

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  The Catholic mission where he stayed was, in part, a response to the growing power of Protestant evangelicals in Guatemala that were organized around the Wycliffe Bible society with its Summer Institute of Linguistics, which offered a better and more productive life in the present in return for conversion from Catholicism. Wycliffe’s influence came from its translations of the New Testament published in each of Guatemala’s twenty-two Mayan languages—the linguistic consequence of each indigenous community’s isolation wrought by an impossible mountainous landscape. Indeed, beauty, poverty, and isolation were the upshots of Guatemala’s lush, dizzying topography.

  Add to this the numbing element of Indian stoicism, a product of millennia-old pagan traditions with Catholicism superimposed on them, together with the half-buried communal memory of the violence of the Spanish Conquest and the centuries of slavery that followed. Very few of the Indians spoke Spanish, the language of both the ladinos (those of mixed European and Indian blood) and the descendants of the Spanish conquerors themselves, who owned most of the plantations and other valuable land.12 And because the Mayans knew only their native tongue, they had little access to education in a country where the whole school system was based on Spanish. The Indians, moreover, were relatively passive against the Grand Guignol of political intrigue and violence that continued to afflict this country, especially in the drawn-out wake of the 1954 CIA-inspired coup. Successive right-wing military governments ruled Guatemala while Gersony lived there. They would be followed by a truly brutal regime guilty of widespread murder against the Indians, after coming to power in a fraudulent election in 1978.

  Gersony’s first task after he arrived back in Antigua was to learn Spanish. But there were no Spanish schools. “One day I was in the central square by the cathedral, truly the most beautiful place I have ever seen, getting a shoeshine while communicating in basic Spanish with a garage worker, Luis Monzon, who told me he worked for the equivalent of fifty cents per week. I don’t know, he just seemed sparky, ambitious. I said I would pay him a dollar a day to be my friend, and spend all his waking hours with me, teaching me Spanish.” They traveled all over Antigua and its surroundings together. For Gersony, the great advantage of Luis was that he didn’t know a word of English. For twelve hours daily, Gersony plodded through Spanish with him and with his Amsco workbook. It was altogether exhausting. Luis talked constantly. Gersony couldn’t daydream for a minute. There was no escape; he had to learn.

  Six weeks later he had advanced from the basic Spanish of guidebooks to a working knowledge of the language, which he would continue to build upon in coming years until he spoke Spanish fluently. Little by little, seeing Gersony with Luis, tourists and other gringos came over to him, asking where they could learn Spanish. It was an anomalous situation. The area’s natural beauty and Antigua’s historical monuments drew young visitors, hippie types and others, even as there was no place to study the official language. Gersony, with Luis’s help, found families for the gringos to live with, ordered Amsco workbooks, and again with the help of Luis and others he met, set up Spanish classes offering individual instruction. The money Gersony made, which was very little, he gave to the Catholic mission where he was staying.

  Bob Gersony in Guatemala in the 1970s.

  During this time, Gersony met an “extremely dark Mayan” named Aparicio Teleguario who spoke Kaqchiquel, one of the twenty-two indigenous languages. “Aparicio was eighteen and very personable, and wanted to write a history of his people in his own language. He was a brilliant local organizer. There was something alluring about him. He specifically had a plan for a radio program in Kaqchiquel. Sometime later he died of pneumonia after being misdiagnosed by a doctor, but he left me with an idea for the future….” It was more than that: Gersony, with all the vitality and enthusiasm of someone young and on an adventure, became obsessed with doing something that would be true to Aparicio’s memory. It was the beginning of Gersony’s road to humanitarianism.

  This was also the era of Catholic liberation theology in Latin America, in which priests and nuns, influenced by the poverty-stricken communities where they served, began in the 1950s to combine religion with a call for social and economic justice. It was a gospel of freedom from the tyranny of the Church’s co
mplicity with capitalism and despotic regimes.13 Inevitably, liberation theology became an asset to Marxist opponents of the conservative oligarchical orders in Latin America that the United States, for reasons of Cold War geopolitics, was supporting. It led in some cases to radical reinterpretations of Church doctrine. In this way, Gersony, on one Saturday, the day before Easter, March 28, 1970, found himself invited to the wedding of a Catholic priest in the fog-wrapped village of Nahualá, surrounded by fantastic mountain formations, with the men in white, gray, and black kilts and the women in Spanish-imposed trajes of bold colors. Lay missionaries made up a half-pagan procession. It was beyond magical.

  Here Gersony met an Englishman with a terribly glum expression because he had hoped to marry the bride himself. His name was Tony Jackson, the only person in his rather poor, working-class family to go to university. He had studied French and linguistics at Trinity College, Oxford. “Tony was absolutely charming and charismatic, a real inspiration, with his bowler hat, umbrella, and fine accent,” not to mention his affinity for English Breakfast tea and the works of Lewis Carroll.

  But Tony was even more than that. Completely unaffected and able to befriend anyone in an instant, Tony Jackson, with his rail-thin frame, moved his hand and body as he talked to you like an actor doing pantomime. Thus, the glum expression disappeared the moment he began talking with Gersony. In fact, Jackson, too, will never forget the moment of meeting Gersony. With a short black beard, black glasses, a mop of dark hair (just before he started losing it), and a fierce, unforgiving stare, Bob Gersony at twenty-five, however insecure he felt on the inside, could have been Che Guevara’s aide-de-camp or a member of the Weather Underground. Gersony immediately poured out his grief to Tony about America’s misadventure in Vietnam. They both agreed that the problem in Latin America was land and how unfairly distributed it was.

  Tony Jackson, one of “the Gruesome Threesome,” who helped Bob run the network of language schools in Guatemala in the 1970s.

  Gersony had an idea. One day in Antigua a few months later, out in the rain, where Tony opened the umbrella to protect them both, Gersony offered to put Tony in charge of his small Spanish school, which had begun to grow with more and more students from the United States, Canada, France, and even a few from Japan. “Guatemala, Mayan Indians, the fabulous mountains and volcanoes, of course I will do it!” Jackson said, glad to be able to permanently escape from a job in Nicaragua—educating the elite for their Miami shopping sprees—that he hated. He gave Gersony $396 in savings for more chairs and workbooks, to add to those Gersony had bought himself with proceeds from buying and reselling native handbags to students. It was at this moment when the Spanish school had its true start.

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  It was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration. Though, according to a mutual friend, “Tony and Bob could not have been more different. Tony was charismatic and got along with everybody. Bob, on the other hand, was not particularly outgoing, despite possessing a strong wit.” Jackson calls himself and Gersony the “odd couple,” the British Oxford graduate and the American high school dropout, who disagreed on many aspects of politics, but who nevertheless would come to agree on the operational aspects of administering humanitarian assistance. For Gersony, Jackson would become his “lifelong ambassador to the left wing, and someone who would never complain about living conditions in the Third World, no matter how awful they were.” At the time Gersony met him, however, Jackson was still a devout Catholic, and his left-wing politics would not flower until he returned to England and settled in Oxford.

  On Christmas Day 1970, Jackson arrived back from Nicaragua for the last time to settle in Antigua, Guatemala.

  “We rented classrooms for fifty-five students, who began to include NGOs,” Gersony explains. These were aid workers in non-governmental organizations, like the Peace Corps and the Canadian International Development Agency, who, while technically government employees, were lumped into the humanitarian aid category. “Everyone studied seven hours daily for five days per week. Tony was brilliant at inspiring students and inspiring teachers to teach. People would practically jump out of the window for Tony. That’s how much he was loved. I was the bad guy in the act: the budget guy. The months went by and we grew to be 150 teachers and students.” Gersony’s policy with hiring teachers was not to care about credentials, but to look for good, animated talkers. “With that, we could teach them how to teach,” he explains.

  It never occurred to Gersony to apply for grants to run his school. All his instincts learned from his father and the commodity trade were about making the venture a self-sustaining business. Indeed, during his early days in Guatemala, he still didn’t know what grants were.

  Then Terrence Kaufman showed up in Antigua. He was in his midthirties, absolutely weird, endearing, with long red hair tied in a ponytail, a beard, and a ring in his ear long before its time. He looked like a pirate or a drummer for a heavy metal rock band—that is, he didn’t present well. People tiptoed around him. Kaufman was a Mayan linguist with a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and already famous in his field for reconstructing proto-Mayan languages. After Gersony had the idea of having Peace Corps volunteers sent down to Antigua to teach descriptive linguistics and help Mayan speakers to compile dictionaries and grammars in their native tongues, Kaufman devoted several of his summers to helping implement it. The program empowered Mayans to be experts in their own languages and to build beyond the Protestant Bible translations.14 It was during this period that Gersony kept thinking about the young Mayan Aparicio Teleguario who had died of pneumonia before he could start his radio program in Kaqchiquel. His and Kaufman’s vision followed in the young Mayan’s spirit.

  The plan was launched. Gersony’s school system, having grown out of a rudimentary operation nominally run by a group of tired Catholic priests, expanded further, with Peace Corps volunteers coming down to Antigua for two to three years each, under Kaufman’s direction. It was 1972 now. Jo Froman, a very efficient and business-like Peace Corps volunteer from Turon, Kansas, and a graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin—a beautiful thin girl with blue eyes and long, light brown hair, according to Gersony’s memory—was by this time helping Kaufman do a nationwide survey, using hundreds of informants, of all the indigenous languages in Guatemala, which numbered twenty-two, as they discovered.15 “Jo Froman had the best technical ear for languages I ever encountered,” Tony Jackson, himself a linguist, says. Froman just had this innate ability to immediately recognize long and short vowels and to imitate sounds and accents. Kaufman would go on to write the definitive book on classifying Mayan languages, published in Spanish. Froman would go on to get an MBA from Harvard.

  “I had never heard of Bob Gersony until I was told I needed to see him in Antigua to arrange a Peace Corps–sponsored Kaqchiquel course,” Froman recalls to me. “On the appointed day, I left at dawn for the long ride on a converted school bus with chickens, and arrived exhausted and out of sorts at midday. I was furious that no one knew who I was and that there was no sign of Mr. Gersony. Hours later, a dilapidated Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up. Even before he shut the door, I laid into the person who answered to ‘Bob Gersony,’ berating him for his rudeness. He listened patiently to my rant, then said, ‘So you’re Froman, not the quixotic person I was expecting. I just came from the funeral of a close Mayan friend.’

  “I was absolutely intrigued within ten seconds of meeting him. His very surprising use of the word ‘quixotic’ captured me. He exuded such warmth. Bob is bimodal, you either love him or detest him. Though, as I came to realize, communicating in Spanish took away some of the harsher aspects of his personality.”

  Jo Froman, a brilliant linguist and one of “the Gruesome Threesome,” in Guatemala in the 1970s.

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  “It was alphabet politics,” Gersony said about those long-ago days in Guatemala
. “One letter for each sound, lots of arguments about how to spell each consonant, and whether or not to impose the Spanish writing system on dialects that had never or rarely been written down. Linguists are a bunch of prima donnas,” owing to their wizard-like talent to master multiple languages and dialects in their written form, making linguists, after a fashion, the ultimate intimidating specialists in the liberal arts field.

  Gersony’s school kept growing and multiplied into a system with a board of directors, so that Antigua is to this day a center for the study of Spanish, indigenous languages, and local linguistics. Froman, Jackson (or “Jackers” as he was also sometimes called), and Gersony became known in the local NGO community by the not-altogether-flattering moniker of “the Gruesome Threesome,” because of their dynamic, unorthodox, business-like, and unsentimental approach to Third World assistance. The very fact that these three extraordinarily different people had banded together was a tribute to Gersony’s leadership qualities and judge of character, explains Reggie Norton, the Oxfam field director for Latin America, who first met Gersony in Guatemala. The three even had a mascot, Max the Wonder Dog, part German shepherd, part Belgian shepherd, and part wolf, who went off on his own all day long, visiting local schools and the market before returning home at dinner. “Hola, Max,” the schoolchildren would say. (Froman would later take Max with her to Harvard, where he wandered around the classrooms there, too.) Gersony and Froman, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week together, became romantically involved for a time, and would remain friends for life, as would happen with his other girlfriends. As Gersony explains, “I’m not conventionally good-looking. I’m not an athlete. I don’t have the gift of gab. But I’m a decent person and have led an interesting life. I never had a problem falling into mature relationships.”