street roots
8
May 27, 2011
Witness for
the revolution
Photojournalist Ken Hawkins reflects on San
Salvador massacre, Jonestown and his new
work to use photography to combat poverty
Above, E l Salvador federal soldiers
crouch in the foreground as
demonstrators climb over bodies o f the
dead and dying to take refuge inside
the San Salvador Metropolitan
Cathedral from the hail o f gunfire.
Ken Hawkins, the photographer, was
on those steps only seconds before the
shooting began.
A t left, the dead, shot by the federal
soldiers, are laid out on the sanctuary
floor o f the San Salvador Metropolitan
Cathedral, the church o f Archbishop
Oscar Romero, currently being
considered fo r sainthood. The dead
and dying were dragged inside the
sanctuary from the steps o f the church
where they were shot.
Photos by Ken Hawkins
BY STACY BROWNHILL
STAFF W RITER
n todays media landscape, writers can
get away with reporting battles from
afar. But conflict zone photojoumalists
* have no such luxury. Action is their shop
floor. Armed with cameras, these men and
women don’t just capture scenes of bullets
and bloodshed, they live them. Last year,
more than 100 journalists were killed on the
job, according to the Internatiohal Press
Institute; two renowned photojoumalists,
Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, were
killed last month in Misrata, Libya.
Portland’s Ken Hawkins was a conflict
zone journalist At 61, Hawkins is quiet and
still as he unravels his memories amidst a
swarm of black and white negatives.
Through his camera lenses, Hawkins
captured the Vietnam War in 1970, the
Jonestown mass suicide in 1978, the
Sandinista Insurrection in Nicaragua from
1977 to 1979, the massacre at Metropolitan
Cathedral in El Salvador in 1979, and other
historically explosive events. He has worked
for TIME, Newsweek and Wired, and has
been a member of prestigious agencies such
as SYGMA and the American Society of
Media Photographer^. In the calm of his
Lake Oswego home, it’s hard to imagine
Hawkins running through gunfire; but he
did, and he photographed it.
Hawkins returns this week to the site of
one of his grisliest photo-shoots:
Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador, El
Salvador. Thirty-two years ago, Hawkins was
on special assignment in San Salvador for
Paris Match, covering the hostage taking of
a French ambassador who was being held by
the People’s Revolutionary Bloc (BPR), a
left-wing guerilla group. Unexpectedly, he
ended up witnessing a massacre when
I
Ken Hawkins
created
EverySecondChild.
org to highlight the
work
photojournalists
are doing in the
area of child
poverty. Hawkins
says he created
the collection of
photos after
covering so many
stories around the
world that
negatively affected
children. The
project’s name
comes from a
2005 UNICEF
report that of the
2.2 billion children
in the world, 1
billion live in
poverty; in other
words, every
second child.
police opened fire on a peaceful BPR
demonstration outside Metropolitan
Cathedral on May 9,1979. Twenty-four
people were killed on the Cathedral steps,
many were wounded, and Hawkins himself
barely escaped.
Six months before the Sari Salvador
massacre, Hawkins had descended upon
Jonestown to cover the mass suicide of
more than 900 people for Newsweek. The
Cincinnati-born, Atlanta-grown, Portland
migrant (and Street Roots volunteer and
board member) describes the San Salvador
massacre and Jonestown suicides with
remarkable candidness. He also discusses
the similarities he sees in the recent Arab
Spring, disheartening trends in journalism
and his online gallery projects — 52Selects.
com and EverySecondChild.org.
S ta c y B ro w n h ill: Describe the massacre
in San Salvador at Metropolitan Cathedral.
K e n H a w k in s: I was 29 years old. Paris
Match had hired me, because of my
experience with long lenses, to cover the
hostage taking of Michel Dondenne at the
French Embassy in San Salvador. No one
was sure if Dondenne was even alive, but I
got a picture of him through a window. After
that, Paris Match wanted sidebars on BPR
(the guerrilla group holding Dondenne).
BPR was holding a demonstration at
Metropolitan Cathedral, so I decided to
cover i t
It was a beautiful day. Vendors were
selling tamales in the square by the
Cathedral, government workers were eating
lunch in the park and protestors - mostly
youth - were reciting speeches to the
crowd. Yellow balloons were everywhere, in
support of the demonstration. I was there
with two other reporters from Associated
Press and United Press International. It was
high noon. '
I saw two groups of soldiers in riot gear
coming around either side of the Cathedral,
sealing it off. I felt all the hairs rise oft my
back and I knew something was wrong. My
antennas were still up from reporting in
Nicaragua. I grabbed the other two
reporters one of
them was reluctant —
and said, ‘we have to
go.’ We were halfway
across the square when There were people crawlln
over dead bodies to get
I heard shooting and?
the soldiers opened
inside the Cathedral for
fire. We kept dashing
protection. The soldiers
away, in between cars,
sealed
off the area for 2 4
shooting film as we
hours, and the smell in thi
went. There was no
timè to be scared.
confined space was
I remember blood
coming down the steps. tremendous. It was a
violent, inhum ane messag
A pregnant woman got
hit. A number were
to the people and BPR
wounded. There were
saying "yon are not going
people crawling over
to unseat onr government.
dead bodies to get
inside the Cathedral for
protection. The soldiers
sealed off the area for
24 hours, and the smell in that confined
space was tremeridous. It was a violent,
inhumane message to the people and BPR
saying “you are not going to unseat our
government”
There were conflicting reports
afterwards. I was one of the few neutral
observers. I heard the command to fire, but
the government’s version was that soldiers
See W ITN ESS, p a ge 9