You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.
My name is Manuel Va jo Chizerb.
In June twenty twenty, I was kidnapped by a drunker telling the outskirts of Mexico City. I was tortured and held for ransom along with my partner, and we came out alive. Ever since I was released, I began documenting the lives of the many families of the people who were also kidnapped and didn't returned.
This is my story and the story.
Of how violence has corrupted a country, families and thousands of lives.
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous account of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener. Discretion is advised.
I'm a documentary's photographer. I don't thought of myself as much as a journalist because I collaborate very closely with the people that I work with, so that's very problematic for journalism. I try to use art and photography and filmmaking has a way of raising awareness of the horrible situation that we are living in Mexico. Since the last sixty years, I focus mainly on violence and state terrorism and the consequences of both crimes of state and crimes
made by particulars but sponsored by a criminal state. I grew up in Mexico City. I come from a middle class family. We ended up with not much left after a lot of financial trouble.
When I was eight nine.
Years old, I started living in some of the poor's neighborhoods here, knowing some of the most marginalized people here in Mexico City. But thanks to my dad, I managed to break through to go to college. I was studying cinema in a very fine public school, but I had to drop out after what happened to me. The thought of doing films fiction films in a student environment didn't fit with what I was doing anymore. It didn't make
sense after my experience with bioleness to stay. So I went out and started looking for answers and for the meaning of what happened to me. Violence here started approximately in nineteen sixty five, when some farmers and rural teachers attacked a military barrack in the northern part of the country. But the thing with violence before twenty fourteen is that
it was suppressed from the general public mind. After twenty fourteen, the Ajotinapa Masket nappings happened where the army, in coalition with Drocker Tales and the local police of Guerrero, took forty three students from a rural teacher school. That made everyone aware of the situation of Mexico. I used to live in the Berry center of Mexico City, very close to the Anchle Thella Independency, which is like a national
monument and at the place where all the protests start. Like, if you're protesting here in Mexico City, your protest, most problemly starts in that monument. So I lived like a few blocks away from there, and that was like my first experience with social justice and with protesting here, which used to be very very dangerous. Now everything is dangerous, and protesting is just like as dangerous as doing anything else. But I joined those protests as most of my friends
has most of younk people. I would say they were a massive protests. The funny thing is that I was starting to felt the need to document. I didn't know what, but I felt the need to document. And I also felt very intimidated by Mexico. I was trying to get a way to approach Mexico in a less appassive way, like not so directly. So I decided to leave.
Mexico for a year.
My plan was going to the United States and working with Mexican American immigrants. I thought that it might be easier for a twenty one year old version of me to work with Mexico away from Mexico than working with Mexico in Mexico. I was supposed to live on March twenty one, twenty twenty.
I have my ticket.
I have a lot of people all over America that were going to receive me where they were going to let me stay in their homes, to take me to the people that I needed to work with. But of course COVID happened. That just didn't happen. It was very sad for at the same time, I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Because what happened next. I mean, I don't know if I was naive. It's just that.
There's levels of knowing, at least from my point of view. There's the level, the intellectual level of knowing that you're living a dangerous place, and then there's the bodily level of knowing. Yet that day I acquire the bodily level of knowledge. That's what happens here a lot, like people know what they don't know. I knew in my head,
but I didn't know my body. Again, after twenty fourteen, we all know that this is a very dangerous place to be, even here in Mexico City, where people feel that Mexico is much safer than it actually is, because the government has really made an effort to make this place as peaceful as possible, because the people here are the only people that have a real way of testing, because their political opinions are much more built because of
economic possibilities, because of we have a lot of colleges here, a lot of university, is a lot of education, and most other places in Mexico don't have them.
So in Mexico City.
People feel that this is a much safer place than it actually is. My ex partner and I. She was doing an experimental film and we were trying to film the sky. She needed to have some shots of the sky, so I told her, let's go to the outskirts of the city, to the highway that connects Mexico City with Guernavaca, which is a nearby city like a summer city, and with a Capulco with Guerero, with the places where the maskt nappings happened.
When we started to leave the city, I told.
Her, let's be very careful these places, like this part of Mexico City is known for its violence. That part of Mexico City is actually controlled by a cartel called the Cartel Lawac.
I don't know.
It's still very weird to think about me telling her that, but I told her, let's be careful. This place is dangerous. Women get raped here constantly.
People get killed.
A lot of people have been taken from here.
Let's be careful. We stopped in front.
Of a construction side company. Those places, those guys have there like millions of dollars of machinery. I don't think that nothing is going to happens here. In front of the construction site, there was the highway and she took out a triple a camera and I took out my phone and she started to do her saying like just
stood there. And at the ten twelve minute mark, I thought we should really leave this place, like we should like I turned around and I saw like no one, just like the Mexican countryside, and I felt like we should maybe leave this place at this very moment, like this was enough. I thought, like, you're just being paranoid. Nothing is going to happen. It's okay. And that's also what the families of them missing always say, like you always think this is going to happen to someone else.
You never think it's going to happen to yourself. I was, I think filming my fit with my sound like just wasting time. I turned to the right and I saw five guys with submachine guns running towards us, and I.
Felt like shed.
They came forward to us. I raised my hands. She saw me with my hands up. She turned to the right, she saw the guys. She put up her hands and one of the guys came to me and told me give me the cartains. I thought that they were going to take the car. I just handed him the car keys and they told us get in. And when they said get in, I had like this moment of my life is about to change.
They had obviously their faces covered.
They sat here in the middle of two of them, and I was facing the floor of the car with my face on the ground. I started to ask questions and to tell them that that we were well with him Christians, and that we didn't have money, and that we were that we were from one of the small towns nearby. That that backfire soon after I tried to raise my head and I got kid.
They told me don't look at her face.
So I'm facing the floor of the back of the car. I could feel that we were on the on the highway. They started driving at like one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, and at some point I can feel the road changing or more like gravel. So at the point that they entered the road, I knew that it was pretty fucking serious. They drove for like ten more minutes
in absolute silence. At that point, they told us they're going to need that two hundred thousand pieces fifteen hundred dollars to release us, which doesn't seem like much in America, but it's a lot here. I tell them like, there's no way that we can give you that, Like, our families are not rich. And of course they didn't believe that we had a camera, like a very expensive camera that was owned by your school.
Also because of our.
Skin tone, which is fairly light, they thought that we have more money, which is a common misconception.
So when they asked that, I knew that we were in real, real trouble.
They stop in the middle of the countryside and they tell me get out of the car. They take me in front of the car and they tell me, like, kneel down.
I thought that these guys are going to shoot me. I kneel down.
They bade me up horribly. At that point, I take both of my arms to my face. I think that's like natural instinct, and they start kicking me horribly. TA could film two of my ribs cracked. They tell me that's for Lyon for telling us that you were from one of these towns.
We know you're not.
Because they are from there. Of course those guys were from there, So I fucked up. So I'm completely bat up, and they tell me get up. I raise my face and I can see like a mountain, a lone tree and a corn, and they take out my ex partner and they told us to start walking.
We started to go up into the mountain.
Which is a very common thing for the cartels to do. Most of the clandestine graves are found in the countryside.
So I started to think about that.
Some was setting I could still see very clearly, and I was just very worried about her. I was in front of the group and they were walking with her. They took us to these cliffs that they told us to call our families. So I was given my phone. I called my father and I told him these guys came with guns and they need this much money.
He started freaking out and I told him, like, calm down, you have to be like very very calm.
And they took the phone away from me and they started to chalk with him, which we were told to lay on the dirt and taste it. There were hands still covering or foreheads. At first, they were doing nothing, making phone calls to our families and making us speak with them. That was about two hours then, I mean the song was set. It was dark and they started to to.
They started to torturous.
They called our families and there's this common practice here.
In Mexico called tablada, which is like.
Planking, grabbing a plank, a plank of wood and beating someone. So they started planking me. Then I really thought like I might have like a broken something after this, if.
There is an after this.
And that's the point where I started to think like there might not be an after this. They started to beat me up with a plan to kick me. One of them he had like his feet on top of my head and then he stood up in my head. I just remember like pushing with my hands to the floor in order for my head not to touch the floor, hoping for it to relieve some of the pressure because I felt that my head was going to explode. They really started to push me in order for me to
scream and beg when my family was listening. Begging for your life is the most degrading human thing that you.
Can do to another human being.
It's not the physical pain, is the psychological pain. I feel that torture really changes you, like being in at the complete mercy of someone. It really changes your mindset, It really changes It really changes how you buried your own dignity and your own sense of self. And it never leaves you. I think that's the that's the most horrible thing. It makes you feel dirty for life again, losing to your technity. And I was very worried for her too, like they were beating her up that much locally.
But she was being really fucking strong, like very calm. She was telling them, we want to cooperate, we want to get out of this alive.
Please don't hurt.
Him, like she was really.
She was really strong.
Things got like much worse. They grab the nice again. Going back to that racial thing, we're speaking about a country where racism is a real issue as much as in America.
For me, it's much more worrying because it's invisible.
People here, like round, people here have been oppressed during the last five hundred years, and they have been completely eradicated from most top positions, from economic positions, from political positions until like the.
Last three years.
So there's a real racial resentment that is very valid. And they saw my very curly European looking hair and they told me like, oh, we hate your curls, which again is very much understandable. And then they started to to cut it with a knife and they took a bunch of skin from the back of my head.
I could feel the worms or.
Blood like covering my face and.
Mixing with dirt.
I could feel like the dirt in my lungs, and I could feel the dirt in my throat and my mouth. I kept spinning a mixture of blood, saliva and and dirt, like my saliva was coming out of me like in bulks. They started hitting me with the gun in my head, and I could just hear like if I was inside of a fat Greek pottery thing, like if you hit it with your finger, how it sounds like like almost musical.
I could hear that inside of my head after the first four or five and it went on like I felt that they were going.
To blow my head off.
They kept torturing those for eight or nine hours, and I could hear my father during that whole time, like how she was trying to negotiate and to lower the money.
That had to be.
That had to be delivered, while I was like enduring it. I didn't feel any disassociation. I couldn't disassociate because I would be disassociating from what happened to her.
So I was very much afraid of what happened to her.
At some point they did like sexual torture.
I I don't want to talk about it, not so much because of me, but because of her. Yeah, And that also never leaves you like again, that loss of dignity, like in front of people.
It's really fucked up.
It was very very cold, and she had like a skirt and a little blouse, and I was wearing.
A leather jacket.
And at one point when they had stopped because people came, and when they were about like ten people, one of them, when there was just one of two of them, he told me, rise and called your girlfriend, because it's very cold. So I stood up facing the ground in order not to see their faces. I kneeled and I hogged her with the leather jacket and I.
Told her I love you. She told me I love you.
And I was covering my face from the ground, and I could see the moon leaking like to my fingers, and I could feel like the warmth and really that that was a really peaceful moment. I could hear like the wind blowing through the through the trees, and and I think that was like the happiest moment of my life.
I felt at that point that if they killed me, it was okay, and at the end everything reduces to its minimum expression, which is like this search of of of meaning true through finding other people that loved you. And I had that because I had someone with me and we were not alone.
And I think that's what life is about.
After a bunch more torture, like nine hours into it, they told us to go back to where we came from. We started walking. They gave me the tripod, which is which was a very big tripod, and they told me like carryings. I carried the tripod and I could see like the whole countryside. I could see no highway, but I could see like the little hills, and the sky was purple. I have no explanation for that, but the sky was.
Really, really really purple.
I've never seen a night like that in my life.
And the moon was so.
Bright I could see like perfectly every single detail. Was that very strange part of Mexico, which is the place where rural areas.
And ccenies join.
The car we were in, which was a white folkswagon, came in and they parked in front of the of the lawn tree and they told me give me the trypod.
I gave them the tripod.
They told me, kneel down, we're going to kill you. I kneel down. They put the gun in my head, and there was like this moment of silence. I just like stood there completely silent, and they just stood there, completely silent for what felt like hours, and one of them said like, no, get them in the car. That's where physical pain really started to go up. They weren't torturing us anymore, but I could feel my cracked rips, I could feel a cracked backbone, and I was completely speed.
Up facing the floor of the car.
I had like a all of bloods alive.
And dirt in front of me.
I was just like my lungs were expelling all these dirt that had that I had like swallowed during the during the torture. And then there comes the part where.
We built a relationship.
Fifteen sixteen, seventeen years old.
Of course, these.
Guys don't control the operation, but these are the guys who who are in charge.
Of doing the dirty work.
They started speaking like between them, and then they started to talk to us, and one of them in this very strange moment of.
Clarity that I now feel that is the best field work that I will ever do in my life because of the level of sincerity that I felt coming from them.
They told us, like, we do this so they don't do this to us.
They they started talking about other things that they have done, talking about people that they have killed, and that.
They were very afraid of the of.
The guys making like paying them to do this so so that this was their way of keeping their families safe too. We have told them that we were pillow students. And then one of them told us, like, you should do a movie about this, and we told them, like you think that's a good idea and told us yeah, and please in by us if you if you do it, please do in bide us. Uh please bring it here uh to the to the to the town's nearby so we can go.
And honestly, I will do it. I'm going to do it.
Uh, I'm going to do it.
I have to.
These guys were again they weren't like this uh military guy in one time aimal torturing like the case, were like children and I could feel that they were as afraid as has us. That's what I mean when I say that that those guys are victims, like those are so young and have so like so so few opportunities, that it's a real tragedy that they are doing this and that they are losing their humanity. That's such a young age. One person goes missing each hour, and ninety
four people gets killed every day. That's during the last during this last administration, which is the most violent that we have ever got. Again, when I see when I hear these guys telling us to do a movie and to invite them after torturing and abusing us, like if they.
Were like.
Some children excited to know, like some random filmmakers, it's really like the personification of the social problems in Mexico, of all the things of racial issues, of class issues, of extreme poverty, of everything, it's concentrated in those people that were speaking to us on that day, on the true big time of this thing. We are also victims, but again we kept our humanity intact. We came out of that better people. Those guys came out of that
without their humanity. Again, in that sense, those guyes are the ones who are really suffering the consequences of this terrible violence. From my point of view. Later I found out that my father had a friend in the part of the police that takes care of kidnappings if I get away completely honest, I don't have the certainty for this, but there's no other explanation because.
They didn't got the money. They didn't get the money. So what I.
Really think is that someone in the police asked them to let us go. The cartels, which are also the people who kidnap.
Most of the time.
They are controlled by the police, and they work very very closely with the police. Like law enforcement and criminals here, they're the same. There's no other way for them to let us go after asking for so much money and letting us go for one tenth of what was asked or doesn't make sense. I felt the gravel road, then I felt the highway, and they told us we're going to let you go. Here, we're going to be following you. You're going to drive until until you get home.
Don't stop.
They opened the doors, they went out, they went to the back. There was this moment of thirty seconds of silence. They told us to wait ten minutes. After thirty seconds, I told her, get into the driver, turned on the vehicle, and let's fucking go. She started driving. She uses glasses and she didn't have her glasses. It was like five thirty in the morning. Still there wasn't light. It was so misty, and I just started laughing. I said, like, there's no way that we came out of this shit alive.
And we drove until our house completely covered in dirteen blood and got into her house and we were free.
The first thing I did.
Is I told someone, my camera is on my closet, grab it. Take a picture of Boss right now. And I feel that that's where it started. I knew that I had to take a picture of Boss, of the state that we had returned in, but I know that it started there, like five minutes after we got home, and it's this picture of the two of us and were like completely covered in drivel, and that my first tempulse was to capture that moment. I went to the hospital.
They told me I had like a collapsed long that the lung had leaked air between the lungs and my heart. If it didn't go away in two days, they would have to open me and do something about it. Luckily, it went away, but I couldn't breathe fairly well for a couple of months. I had some broken ribs, and of course I was completely bit up. So for like ten days I couldn't move, and then I was back.
I was back, but changed and in peace, very strange way that I just knew that something had changed one day. I don't know where it came from. What I remember in college they had told us about this guy who was missing, who was kidnapped, who was from Guerreroro, and that something had happened with the International Criminal Court of
Human Rights with his case. I started googling around and then I found the case, the case of this man cross and Radilla, who he was kidnapped because he was part of the Rea of Guerrero and he was taken by the army.
Because he wrote songs.
He wrote revolutionary songs, and he was taken, never to missing again.
In nineteen seventy four.
So I saw that and his daughter had won a case in the Inter American Court of Human Rights making the government admit that they had taken his father. So I wrote to Pittsburgh Hilt International, and I told them like, Hey, I'm trying to get to this woman. This happened to me like ten days ago.
I need to speak with her. I don't know why.
I have no idea why, and they took me to her. On my way there, I had like my camera and a bag of clothing, and I was shaking. I was with this guy from Mexico City that works with them, and he saw me. I was shaking horribly. She told me, like, calm down, We're just.
In a bus. Really, calm down.
One month and ten days, I was in Guerrero, the most dangerous part of this country, in the thera, in the house of this woman that I have never met in my life. And I didn't know why I was there. I knew I was going into the mouth of the wolf.
As we say here, into.
The center of the problem, try to make a sense of what had happened to me, Try to find that genealogy.
Of of all.
These crimes, to put myself into a into a social context, and not just an isolated crime, but like a series of state sponsored crimes and situations that have led to the situation that we're currently living in Mexico. I was looking for the source of violence, and I was looking for the for the meaning of it, and the meaning of the conversations that I had with the kidnappers.
That's the thing to.
Make sense of my pain and their pain. I had to understand where where it had originated from. It's like a river. It comes from a rock somewhere in the mountains. If you really follow or really you're going to find a rock that throws water away. That's the same. I try to follow the water that I I came out of to find out who was pouring that river of blood on my country.
And I found it.
I mean, I'm struct I found it, but I'm still trying to make sense out of it because it's very confusing and it's very complex. But I know that I've seen it a number of times. The source both in the eyes of the guys who kidnapped those and in the eyes of me and my ex girlfriend, and in the eyes of the other subvibors and the families of the missing. And that's that's the source of all pain, conflict, and resistance, the history of violence here in Mexico.
I mean, one loses everything with especially with torture, both sexual physical torture. One loses absolutely everything. Each time I see a movie, especially.
An American movie, where one person is being tortured, I always think, like, these people do.
Not understand what they are speaking about.
One loses absolutely everything but I think I've also gained a number of things.
First of all, I've gained that family.
These people, the families of the missing, really changed my life forever in the same way that these kidnappers changed my life. These people that I've known really changed my life.
They have really endured. Hell.
What happens with these people is that they have been trying to find their missing loved ones for fifty years. And not only the people of this downboard, all over the country and in different that time periods they have been trying to find their children. So I what I did is.
Go with them and.
Try to to give back to their struggle through my pictures and through my presence, to give back to their pictures, to build memory, to build like an archive that can be this caused and can be consulted in the future. There's a lot of journalism. Don't about this, but journalism is very brief and very volatile. It just comes and burns like a piece of paper. You have to have
a different product for it to last. You have to really sit in front of people and listen to them and understand them and understand the issue that you are dealing with. In order to make a product that is everlasting.
I'm not saying that my pictures.
Are everlasting, but that's what I aim to to make a thing that is artistically valuable, that is journalistically valuable, and that has this level of research that makes it different from just stating the fact in a newspaper.
And I have no idea how to do it.
I have no idea how to do it, but I keep trying to find ways to do it, either to making films or to making photography books that are going to come out someday at some point. But that was my next step trying to build it. And it was just me, a bus ticket and my camera, and I knew at that point that I that's what I had
to do. I had to I had to document the history of Mexico through the voices of these people, because they had the real history, which is the history of resistance and the history of not forgetting, and their struggles and their lives and their happinesses and sadness and everything they live is the history of my country. The history of my country is the hist of the people we don't have, of the lives we've lost.
Welcome back to a live again joining me for a conversation about today's story are my other Alive Again story producers Nicholas Dakowski and Brent Dye, and I'm your host Dan Bush. I heard the story in the New York Times, and I thought, you know, this is an amazing story.
What I did not anticipate was several things, one of which was his insane story about the drive back, like after he had been abducted and he and his girlfriend were tortured and relentlessly for you know, hours and hours and hours, and then on the drive back, while he's coughing up blood in the back seat in the floorboard of the car, he starts to get to know his kidnappers, and they don't they're not apologetic, but they're basically explaining to him, we're the muscle we have to do this.
If we don't do this, then we become Then they'll hurt our families. And in that moment, he has this epiphany and he realizes that these people are victims. He had the foresight to go, Okay, yes, victim, but I'm not the only victim here. Yeah. His story and his identity and his sense of purpose that he gleaned after this experience are all bound to that of his country. It's a much bigger issue. And he goes, sure, I lost my dignity and I will never get that back.
Like when you've been violated like that, when you've been tortured, you lose your dignity, You lose a sense of yourself and a sense of safety that you will never ever get back. The PTSD of that will be with you. But his captors lost something greater, They lost their sense of humanity. He doesn't look at it as an isolated incident.
He sees what happened to him as part of a series of state sponsored crimes and an epidemic in his country and his country's history and his country's legacy and a point in time and history for his country and his people that he was a part of. And so he's compelled to go do something about it. And it's just so fascinating because I thought about, you know, some other stories. We've talked to Kathy Preston, right, and she basically had she walked away, I believe, saying, you know,
I'm not a victim, I'm a survivor. And he walked away similarly, but he was like, I am a victim. You know, I did survive. But I am a victim, but I'm not the only vite.
I mean, that's the thing that frightened me the most about his story was when he said, it's the personification of the social problems of Mexico, of the racial issues, the class issues, the extreme poverty, you know. And I think when you see the division we're experiencing in our own country, when people feel like they don't have a stake in society, I think it can lead people to a really extreme place. And I kind of viewed his story as as a warning we have a society that
doesn't take care of its basic social needs. This is the obvious place it leads to. I think, you know, people are going to do what they have to do to survive. They can easily be manipulated, They can do horrible things to other people, very.
Reminiscent of I mean, Jean Valjean in Les Miserab. You know, it's he steals bread to feed his family, gets thrown in jail and tortured by this state, and he comes back out and he's this absolutely desperate man who ends up having to do whatever he can to survive for a while, and he ends up becoming this incredible case of like his situation has made him incredibly empathetic, and so he's becomes this like decent, loving man who is incredibly empathetic to the plight of the people around him,
sometimes to his detrict.
And I think Manuel is in a position where he can be empathetic because he's from a much more secure economic class. But his tormenters, you know, like he's saying, you know, they lost they're losing their humanity in this situation.
There's a parallel that's happening across a bunch of these stories. It's in one form of that thing is to do good as a form of resistance. In another form, it's the only way to move on and to survive is to get is to get yourself out of the out of the equation. And so Manuel quickly realize this is not about him, right, It's not an isolated story. It's not about his ego, It's not about what happened to him, It's about what's happening to his whole entire country.
I agree with you, Dan, that there's this through line through a lot of these especially people who have I guess been done to, like who have had shit like people act badly on them. You know, a lot of these stories are sort of finding like zest in your life again, or finding meaning in your life. But I think that a lot of these stories are also about like really finding the core of your humanity and choosing your humanity when you've experienced something that could take that
away from you. You know, Manuel could have come out of this just embittered and angry, and that attitude could have perpetuated bad things in his own life. But instead he has a moment where he just is suddenly connected more deeply to his humanity.
He was interesting that he was saying, you know that he had plans to come to the United States, he had people were going to sponsor in him in his quest to become a filmmaker. And he said, then COVID happened, And he said it was sad, but I think it was the best thing that happened to me because of what happened next. And what happened next was this incident. And you know, you think of like in literary turns, it's the inciting incident that sends the protagonist on the
hero's journey, and he's so thankful for the growth. But I don't think I'd want to go through something like this even to have the kind of growth that he expected, he said, He said so, and this is you know, this is echoing throughout the show.
I don't think we've met anybody yet who says that they would take back what happened to them. Maybe one, but the overwhelming majority of people who have had these brushures with death to the point of severe bodily harm, and having reconstructive surgeries and having to rehabilitate and relearn how to walk, and all of these things horrific car accidents that forever changed them, and they all come back with the same thing of like, I wouldn't change a thing.
I wouldn't I wouldn't change any of these experiences because of who I am now and what it has taught me. Some other things happened that would not have happened to him had he not experienced this. Manuel, for instance, he talks about these moments of beauty that happened amidst this extreme stress and pain and torture. You know, he talks about the colors of the sky and how taking his coat and crawling over to his girlfriend and his captors let him sort of keep her warm for they said,
it's cold, you need to keep her warm. So he walked, he kind of crawled over there, and he put his coat around her, and he had this moment of intense, incredible, a feeling of love like he had never felt, a feeling of compassion for another human being like he had never felt.
And this yin yang of.
The beauty only exists relative to the suffering, you know. And that's a philosophical conceit that echoes throughout a lot of different spiritual practices and so forth. But you know, I think that that's we have to maybe we have to go through and experience some adversity to whatever degree, to however extreme, that is the impetus for us to transform and see the beauty on the other side. Like we can't see the beauty unless we also experience.
But I mean that's also that's also how empathy is created in people. But I think a lot of people can extrapolate from their own experiences how they might feel. But I do think that like going through something like that, even on the smallest scale, a kid falling down and hitting their head or getting pushed on the playground, they now know what it's like to have something bad happen to them, and that is the birth of empathy right there. And I think that, you know, there's some people who
are extraordinarily good at it. And I don't know if these people are born with in innate ability to feel empathy, or if empathy is sort of thrust upon them.
Well, like Manuel said, they were as afraid as us. They were afraid of the people that were forcing them
to do these things. And it reminded me. I don't know if you remember, in two thousand and eight, there was a massacre at the taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, and I remember watching like a Frontline or some episode about this, and they talked about how they recruited very young kids to go do this terrorist attack, and as they had them on the video cameras just walking through the hallways of this beautiful hotel, just marveling at the beauty of it. They'd never seen anything like.
That, you know, and.
They were just terrified. You know, they were forced to go commit these atrocities, you know, because there was no other option for them. But but I think, you know, like his his empathy for them. You know, of course, there's this racial history here in Mexico and of course they're going to be offended by my curly European hair, you know, of course they're going. Like his understanding of his own privilege, I think is what gave him that empathy.
You know, like he understood that that he's in a and he's just he's just in a much more stable, secure situation than they are, you know, And you know, I think it gave him the sense that he's not forced into this degrading, inhumane situation that they've been put into.
Yeah, I mean that, I mean for me, that that just goes back to like, was he just by circumstance or or by birth, like able to see the humanity
and them just like that? Because you listen to you can listen to a lot of shit from people who have never gone through this stuff, talking about like who paint everybody who does you know, who commits any sort of crime, or even as has the audacity to just be poor, like they're incapable of looking at that and understanding that they're but for the grace of God go I you know, whereas whereas Manuel already knows, you know, that he's privileged when he walks into this thing.
Mm and just to come out of these with the idea that compassion is that is the connective tissue of life. And you know, and we talked about this before too where where you know, I think Nick, you you were like, you know, I don't. You can't expect and there's no expectation. But you can't expect somebody who's been victimized to be forgiving of the of the person who's got a boot
on their neck. And I totally understand that that you can you know, that's not But I do wonder if the only pathway towards any healing is if not forgiveness, some compassion for the person who whose soul has been damaged because their humanity. You know, when you act against another living being, or you act against another human, doesn't it damage your soul to some degree? And I think that's what was striking at a Love Manual's perspective. He said,
these guys lost their humanity. I lost my dignity, They lost their humanity.
And I think he understood that because he was one class maybe higher with one with a very small margin of benefit of a privilege that these kids didn't have. Well, but that he might have realized that he's part of the boot that's on their neck, you know, like it's all he understood where that frustration was coming from. I love when he said, there's an intellectual level of knowing
you live in a dangerous place. Then there's the bodily you know, like he he you can intellectualize all these social problems, and until you face to face with what it's like to have to sleep in the street or what it's like to have a knife held up out your throat, you don't realize that we're all living right on the cusp of an unstable society unless we take care of these problems that drive people to these desperate situations. And by privilege, I mean he was marginally marginally like
he had. The only privilege I think he really had was you know that he wasn't as exposed to these situations. But his family didn't have any money. They were not by any means wealthy. He had a few more opportunities, but probably because of the way that he was raised in the family's concern. But it's not like there is yeah, I mean, like I said, it was a marginal difference, But I mean he seemed very aware of what social
division does to society. And the fact that he's going to take this experience and put himself right back in that line of fire and go right back into these dangerous situations to document it is astounding to me.
Within a month of his of his incident, he was on a bus heading into the same neighborhood where it had happened. I mean, I can't believe. And he was shaking like a leaf, and you know, I can't imagine it. It's just so intense. But he had to. He was compelled to. And the other thing I wanted that took away from his story was he he was clear. He said,
I don't think journalism is the best product. For a message to last or to be received, it has to be nuanced, it has to be artistically valuable, and it has to have a level of personal story and research.
He is an incredible photographer. People should definitely go check out his website and his way with words, you know, like the way he described things. You know, I found myself in that strange place where the rural area and
the cities join. I mean, his his speaking was almost like Hemingway, very simple, but very so much poetry and everything he was saying, and that's what made it really hard for me to listen to the parts where he did have his face in the dirt when he was being beaten by a plank of wood, you know, where his he could see his girlfriend being tortured for nine hours.
Like the pacing of this story, the way he was able to bring in those moments of beauty, they really hit when you were experiencing viscerally what he had gone through.
Yeah, he was open to all senses and he was open to all experiences. He had been freed of any preconceived notions about what was coming next, and he was pretty sure he was going to die. And in that moment, knowing that you're going to die with some certainty that you're not going to make it out of the situation, that allowed him to see beyond the veil and to see the beauty of the moment he was in in a way that you know, it's that that's a really strange and interesting phenomenon.
Next time on Alive Again, we meet Annalise Cochrane, who survived the devastating Hina fires in Hawaii. Her story is one of insight and rugged survival amidst unimaginable destruction.
You always hear the question what would you do if you had twenty minutes left to live? I found out twice. It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear and blue, the water was.
Calm, and we were all about to die.
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakaski, and Lauren Vogelba Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and Names Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander h Riaz.
I'm your host Dan Bush. For more about Manuel and to see his amazing photography and to hear more about his projects, go to Manuelbeo.
Guspert dot com.
That's m A n U E l B A y O g I s B e r T dot com. Alive Again is a production of iHeart Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience, to share. We'd love to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l I v e A g A I N p R O j e c T at gmail dot com