Why Did Karl von Spreti Die?

First Edition. Year of publication: 1970. Print run: 10,000 copies. Cover price: 6 zł

Preface to the book:

I am aware that this reportage contains shocking passages, and I therefore consider it necessary to state that every sentence is based on documents, and my personal impressions constitute only a marginal part of the whole.

This is a reportage about the kidnapping and death of Count Karl von Spreti, the West German ambassador in Guatemala.

But not only about that. It is also a reportage about crime as an instrument of domination — and about the mechanisms of intensifying terror in a country where other methods of rule and colonial dominance are no longer possible.

Because of the murder of Count von Spreti, Guatemala became a country widely talked about for a few days. That was an exceptional situation. In reality, the true murderers work silently in that country, and local propaganda ensures that no cry reaches the ears of anyone in Europe, Africa, or Latin America itself.

Spanish sociologist Juan Maestre calls Guatemala “the Vietnam of Central America.”

And it is a Vietnam — only on a smaller scale. Moreover, it is a Vietnam that the United States does not wish to acknowledge, so as not to create a contagious and troublesome example of a people fighting for freedom within Washington’s sphere of dominance. But the mechanism and meaning of the civil war in Guatemala are the same as in Indochina.

Count von Spreti was a victim of that war. A logical victim — far from the first, and far from the last.

Large passages from this essay were incorporated into Kapuściński’s next book, “Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder”, in the chapter “Death of an Ambassador.”

“Why Did Karl von Spreti Die?” is a small booklet I wrote in Mexico at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. In Latin America that was a period of intensifying guerrilla fighting. In 1967 Che Guevara died and his unit was destroyed in Bolivia, but at that time guerrilla movements still existed in other countries — among others in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Guatemala. One of the Guatemalan partisan units murdered the then-ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Guatemalan capital, and the event received enormous publicity.

As so often happens, the media reported the affair without any attempt to understand what it was really about. Since I knew Guatemala and lived in neighbouring Mexico, I wrote a text that was in effect a polemic against the wave of nonsense and oversimplifications that had flooded the world press. I wrote about Guatemala, which was and remains one of the most unfortunate countries of Central and Latin America — a country of unending dictatorships, unending political murders, unending killings, unending macabre suffering and poverty. I explained the context in which the murder of the ambassador had taken place — an ambassador who at that time was on very good terms with the regime. A cruel and dictatorial regime. Condemning the murder itself, I explained the situation in which it occurred. This is a book against the misrepresentation of world opinion by us — journalists.

Ryszard Kapuściński

Excerpts of the text were published as Kapuściński’s correspondence from Mexico: 1970 Tygodnik Kulturalny no. 24, p. 3–4: Why Did Karl von Spreti Die? Fragment. 1970 Trybuna Ludu no. 143, p. 2: Why Did Karl von Spreti Die? Fragment.

source: kapuscinski.info