A Mighty Purpose Read online

  Jim Grant would, no doubt, have approached whoever was in power. El Salvador presented an unrivaled PR opportunity—if the child survival revolution could take root in a place racked by war and death and constant terror, then it could take root anywhere. He could hold the example up to any country that resisted a large immunization campaign. “If it was a success, you could tell the rest of the world, ‘Look, don’t give me silly arguments about why you can’t do something when a country completely destroyed by war is doing it right now,’ ” says Kayayan. “That was Grant’s major interest, and he mentioned it very, very often—too often for my taste.”

  But it was not his only interest. Grant would include the following stark fact in nearly every speech and press conference on El Salvador: the number of children in the country dying from vaccine-preventable diseases (an estimated twenty thousand a year) far exceeded those killed by bullets. He would call on all Salvadorans to fight the “common enemies” of measles, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough. But in a country so riven by carnage, would anyone buy it?

  The first person that had to be convinced, of course, was Duarte. But before approaching the president, Grant had consulted the US ambassador to El Salvador, Tom Pickering. A tested diplomat who had served in Nigeria and Jordan, Pickering had come to his post in El Salvador in 1983. Grant knew him from his days in Washington. A strong supporter of Duarte, Pickering had himself drawn the ire of the death squads—a right-wing plot to assassinate him was reported in the New York Times in June 1984. He lived in San Salvador’s wealthy San Benito neighborhood, in a house guarded by Marines and surrounded by “a very high tennis court fence for rocket protection.” On his backyard patio, next to a swimming pool, the tall, bald, businesslike ambassador would host guests for breakfast.

  In the fall of 1984, according to correspondence, one of those guests was Jim Grant. He and Pickering spoke several times. During one of those conversations, Grant asked his old Washington friend what he thought about UNICEF spearheading a mass immunization campaign in El Salvador.

  “He was discussing the importance of getting these kids vaccinations and inoculations,” Pickering recalls.

  The ambassador listened to Grant and then tossed out an idea: “Why don’t we try for a ceasefire?”

  Grant immediately glommed on to the concept. During moments like this—when a new, transformative idea bobbed up—Grant’s eyes would often sparkle with childlike mirth.

  “Do you think that would work?” Grant asked.

  Pickering said he thought it would, because the guerrillas had already agreed to limited ceasefires on other occasions (though nothing as grand and complicated as this would entail). Duarte had also initiated talks with the guerrillas about a peace process.

  The two men then discussed logistics. Pickering asked how long it would take. Grant guessed a week. Was he ready to mobilize? Could he get all the training and resources in order? Without hesitating, Grant said yes, he could take care of it.

  “It was the usual Jim thing,” Pickering says. “He was never in any doubt.”

  Brokering a ceasefire in the midst of national civil war for the purpose of immunizing kids would be a first—at least on this scale. Nils Thedin, a Swedish elder statesman on the UNICEF board, had articulated a vision several years earlier of children as “a zone of peace.” In the late 1960s, before Jim Grant’s time, UNICEF and the Red Cross had delivered aid to both sides during the Nigerian civil war. During the Vietnam War, UNICEF provided relief to children in both North and South Vietnam. But a national military truce to aid children? That was novel. It struck some as truly zany. Would either side really go for that? Wouldn’t it be seen as sign of weakness? The paranoia in El Salvador had become calcified—not even Jim Grant could chisel through it.

  Adamson recalls one meeting at UNICEF headquarters when Grant mentioned the ceasefire idea. The suggestion was met with a pause and “an almost audible gasp.”

  The plan invited a label of extreme naïveté. Military conflicts can’t just be stopped—it almost sounded like the fanciful musing of a tie-dyed couch surfer whose only experience with armed combat was watching Apocalypse Now. But Jim Grant knew war intimately. As a lieutenant in the US Army during World War II, he had helped hold off the Japanese siege of the Burmese town of Myitkyina and would later win a Bronze Star.

  Once while flying in a two-seat plane to interrogate some Japanese prisoners, Grant and his pilot had taken a detour to throw grenades at Japanese positions. The plane was hit with a bullet from below, and they were forced to land on a sandbar on the banks of the Irrawaddy River. They scrambled to fix the plane and, as they were doing so, a Japanese boat began speeding toward them. The boat had a gun, and it started firing. The plane was hit two or three times as the pilot furiously tinkered with the engine. Finally he got the plane working again, and he and Grant took off just in time, skimming over the water and narrowly escaping capture by the Japanese.

  Toward the end of the war, Grant had worked under the command of General Joseph Stilwell and had later been tasked with helping General George Marshall negotiate an ultimately failed truce during China’s civil war. He had remained in China after World War II to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), helping deliver aid to the Communists (the jeep he drove had sixteen bullet holes in it from various excursions).

  Grant knew what he was proposing in El Salvador would not be easy. But Pickering did not see it as quixotic. “To me, it was a ‘crazy like a fox idea,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘Geez, let’s try this … we could get people to start thinking about ceasefires and ending this conflict.’ From my point of view, it had a lot of political possibilities.” He adds, “I had to really depend on Jim to sell it, but he was willing to sell it.”

  “Willing” is a gross understatement. Grant was positively giddy about it.

  As an American and a former US government official, Grant had to distance himself from his country, admits Pickering. “I think he wanted to do it without the US around, given the fact that we were a real partisan and a major player on the government side,” he says.

  Before Grant made any moves, Kayayan had to lay the groundwork. He and the government’s minister of health agreed that in order to negotiate a workable truce, the minister would naturally handle the government side and UNICEF would handle the guerrillas. But Kayayan could not simply make an appointment to meet with the rebels. So he did the next best thing—he went to see the archbishop of San Salvador. Arturo Rivera Damas had stepped into Oscar Romero’s shoes after his assassination, inheriting one of the country’s most dangerous jobs. Despite the obvious risks, Damas had continued Romero’s practice of denouncing the violence committed by both sides during Sunday sermons. Though not as aggressive as Romero, he became one of the few voices of dissent in a country largely silenced by systematic murder.

  “[UNICEF’s] relationship with the Catholic Church in El Salvador was crucial,” Kayayan says. “Without the Catholic Church, we could not have done what we did.”

  Kayayan made an appointment with Damas and his assistant bishop Gregorio Rosa Chávez. Damas was heavyset, jowly, calm, and wore thick glasses. He “always looked indifferent, like he was thinking of something else,” says Kayayan—not the sort of bearing you might expect from a truly courageous defender of human rights. In contrast, Chávez was young, slim, and brimming with energy. With arched eyebrows, boyish looks, and a humble aura of determination, he was the more dynamic of the two. They both were absolutely essential to UNICEF’s audacious plan—the Catholic Church held unparalleled sway with the rebels and with almost all Salvadorans. If Damas and Chávez didn’t sign on, it was dead in the water.

  Grant had already urged Kayayan to forge a close bond with the church. The warm, wisecracking, nonreligious man would eventually become known by some as “Monsignor Kayayan,” because of a joke he would tell to a gathering of Central American bishops several years later. In addressing the group, Kayayan asked in
advance for forgiveness if he made any mistakes in speaking about the church. He then quipped, “I’m only a simple bishop from the Armenian Orthodox Church,” and grabbed the thick red suspenders he always wore and held them out, as if to suggest that this was the typical attire of an Armenian bishop. The bishops laughed, but one did not get the joke. During a coffee break, an elderly Honduran bishop approached Kayayan and said, in complete seriousness: “Monsignor, I was very happy to hear about the Armenian Church. How is it?”

  During that first meeting in Damas’s office, Kayayan did not joke around. He feared he would not get very far. The ebullient, forty-one-year-old UNICEF representative began speaking in general terms about immunization and the need to save children from preventable diseases. Damas, at first, appeared unmoved. “It looked like it would take him a long time to understand what we were proposing … physically. That he wouldn’t get excited,” Kayayan says.

  At first, Chávez sat in silence, keeping mum in deference to his superior. Kayayan kept speaking but began to feel daunted by the lack of reaction. “I had the feeling, I’m going to have a hard time,” he says now.

  Damas and Chávez eventually asked a few questions about money and what would be expected of the church, and Kayayan said UNICEF would shoulder much of the cost. Then Damas finally replied, his tone sagging with negativity.

  “But we have tried this so many times,” the bishop said. “The Catholic Church tries, at every festivity, to bring about a truce so the families can visit each other and circulate.”

  Kayayan thought that was it, the bishop was getting ready to tell him no. Then, after a pause, Damas brightened.

  “For children,” he said, “we will try as many times as needed.”

  According to an account later written by Chávez, “the arguments made by Kayayan were irrefutable.” Among them: “Children have nothing to do with the war; they are beings above suspicion.”

  Grant later met with Damas in November to lock in his commitment and then sent him a follow-up letter reminding the archbishop of the promise he had made. The letter mentioned that Grant had met with Pope John Paul II on numerous occasions to plot the church’s overall involvement in the child survival revolution. He quoted a pledge the pontiff had made to UNICEF: “The Holy See has said that ‘the entire Catholic aid network organized in the various countries of the world and especially in the developing nations … will lend its maximum support to these important simple proposals.’ ” In other words, you don’t want to disappoint the big boss, do you?

  President Duarte also needed further convincing, despite his initial agreement at the cocktail party in New York. When the idea became more than a lofty topic breezily bandied about over drinks, he apparently grew wary about the political and logistical ramifications. Part of his reluctance may have stemmed from a fear that Grant’s ceasefire could complicate his own nascent (and eventually failed) peace talks. As specific dates and other details were batted around, he replied that he would have to consult his “advisers,” which, notes Kayayan, was a euphemism for “the generals.”

  “The initial moments of negotiation for truce were very shaky,” Kayayan says. “The archbishop had his doubts, and neither side was enthusiastic.”

  In his written account, Chávez recalls that he and Damas met with both members of the army and the guerrillas. The army’s reaction was “surprise and bewilderment” and was colored by a fear that the rebels “will take advantage of the truce to occupy positions, re-supply, heal their wounded, etc.” Chávez writes that the army at first refused, saying it “could not suspend military operations that were already scheduled.” Apparently, Duarte would have to force them to do so—if he could.

  The guerrillas took a slightly softer line. Their reservations “were practically the same,” according to Chávez’s account, but they were “not entirely opposed to the idea.”

  Nonetheless, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which comprised five different opposition groups, had good reason to be skeptical of any official proposal. Given the government’s record of denying atrocities, why believe anything it had to say? Winning the rebels’ cooperation was a formidable challenge, even for the only Salvadoran institution they trusted—the Catholic Church.

  To anchor the buy-in of a head of state, Grant’s tactic was basic, says Kayayan: “Give politicians a success story while they still are in government.” This is what he sold to Duarte—the president had an opportunity that might never come again, a chance to do something of great importance for all Salvadorans (and, of course, for his own political career). Duarte clearly saw the potential for his own benefit: he specifically requested that the immunization campaign take place before municipal elections in March that could help him consolidate his power among lawmakers.

  Once the government’s pledge of cooperation was assured—but before they had heard anything from the guerrillas—Kayayan got a little ahead of himself. At the suggestion of a staff member’s wife, he called a few journalists to share the big news. In a conference room at San Salvador’s Camino Real Hotel—where most foreign journalists stayed—he sat down with two reporters and began to describe the immunization campaign. He withheld mention of the ceasefire plan. As he spoke, he quickly realized the reporters were bored. Finally, one of them said, “Mr. Kayayan, don’t you know the country is at war?”

  Thinking to himself, What a question, he replied: “Of course I know it’s at war.”

  “So how,” the reporter pressed, “are you going to organize a vaccination campaign?”

  Kayayan answered calmly. “We are arranging a truce.”

  The boredom evaporated instantly. One reporter quickly ran up to Kayayan and asked if he could call his colleagues, other reporters, and pass on the tip. “You can,” Kayayan said. After he realized the mistake he had made, Kayayan was surrounded by reporters.

  It had hit him while he waited for the other correspondents to arrive. “We didn’t yet have an answer from the guerrillas … maybe I was making a stupid move.”

  He quickly explained the situation to the hungry scrum of journalists, and they all agreed to hold the story until the guerrillas had replied.

  Waiting for word from both sides was one of many worries that tormented Kayayan (and that may have contributed to his three different stomach ulcers). Another was the logistical challenge of mounting a nationwide immunization campaign in a country without the basic infrastructure to support it. El Salvador was broke, relying on the United States to pay many of its bills. The health care system was simply nonexistent in many places. Roads were disastrous, especially in the mountains, and in some cases were strewn with land mines. Many bridges were destroyed. The country didn’t have a refrigerated storage facility for vaccines, relying instead on a local beer company to store them and keep them cool. A cold chain network would have to essentially be assembled from scratch.

  Making Kayayan’s job all the more tenuous was the lack of a UNICEF office in El Salvador (Grant would soon open one). In the meantime, UNICEF staff from other countries met in the lobby of the hotel where they all stayed (not the luxurious Camino Real, but a cheaper alternative). The front desk served as their receptionist, Kayayan says.

  During one of Grant’s visits, as they sat in the airport lounge, the executive director asked Kayayan who would be running the day-to-day operations. “This man right here,” Kayayan replied, turning to a compact, green-eyed Colombian named Hernan Jaramillo, who had accompanied them. Grant looked at Jaramillo, whose commitment and workaholic drive would prove pivotal.

  “Mr. Grant, if he succeeds, I want you to remember that he is the one,” Kayayan continued. “If he fails, we will hang him by his foot.”

  Grant’s eyes, wide and incredulous, shifted to Kayayan. Like the old Honduran bishop, he had not gotten the Armenian’s jest.

  “Agoop,” Grant began, “why do you want to hang him by his foot?”

  Kayayan smiled. “So he dies very slowly.”

  Finally,
his eyes registered the humor, and he laughed. It would not be the first or last time Grant was slow to get a joke, according to several staff members. Sometimes, he would laugh a minute or two after the punch line had been delivered, long after everyone else had moved on to a new topic. This humor lag seems to have been inherited from his father, Dr. John Black Grant, who admitted in his 1961 oral history that, as a student, he “had an absolute inability to understand a joke … Still have, says my wife.”

  Once the church finally came back with the guerrillas’ response—they would honor an undeclared truce—the immunization campaign gained shape and speed. The initiative was dubbed the Days of Tranquillity, and a frenzied period of organization and communication ensued.