cover image A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina's Nightmare

A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina's Nightmare

Andrew Graham-Yooll. Eland, $25.95 (168pp) ISBN 978-0-907871-36-1

News editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, a liberal English-language daily, for 10 years until his flight in 1976, Graham-Yooll endured incessant harassment from boththe Argentine military right and the guerrilla left. He vividly recounts abuses of journalistsguerrillas held ""press conferences'' in moving vehicles by abducting reporters and holding them blindfolded, and journalists were often jailed, beaten or killed for unflattering portrayals of either faction. He also describes the hopeless plight of the ``disappeared'' and the incongruity of the tormentorsa gifted poet becomes a guerrilla officer, and a right-wing leader welcomes a photographer, whom he had once severely punished, to his new restaurant. Graham-Yooll provides here a perceptive memoir of the painful toll of Argentina's civil war on his own life; his stories of the grim conflict are graphically grotesque but not superfluous. (November)