Well, actually I was never really afraid - I've only been really scared a few times. I think the most important thing for me to say is that during all these years the population always treated me very kindly. It seems that there's something special about the fact that I stood there painting among all these mourning people - people who were in a situation, which we would normally characterise as having passed the limit... They felt like I was making them immortal, like they were part of this - that this event was real... And the grief they felt was so profound that sometimes I felt like they were even thanking me....  
 
     I remember one night when I was at the beach having something to eat. This man came up to me and said: I was told that you're a painter - would you please make a drawing of my daughter who just died...? The things I knew - this enormous respect of the sign itself - I never saw it anywhere else. And the fact that I could accomplish something together with this people made them treat me very kindly. 
 
      Naturally, I've often seen the army or the paramilitary groups persecute these people. But they've only arrested me once or twice for being on the spot or for painting the event, but they never confiscated my drawings - that's really strange - they never confiscated them - nor did they break my pencils or things like that.... they only told me not to go there or not to do it again. I sent some of the drawings to Denmark and gave some of them to Amnesty International when I got home - at that time I had some good connections there - and they publicised some of them in reports about Guatemala. 
 
      During some time - at the beginning of my being there, I didn't go out to draw - I was drawing in my atelier - but there was an increasing number of people who came to see me to tell me what had happened - and I drew asking them if this was what it was like - and they said: Yes, this is what it was like. Then I started going when there had been a massacre to draw what was left... And then I started travelling because I thought - or rather: because I realised that this was a very important job to be done, since all the reasonable journalists had escaped from Guatemala and were now in exile - there's no doubt that the work they did from their exile in Costa Rica or where ever they were - was very important - but they were not here in Guatemala...  
 
      Being a travelling artist is something very special - it's different from travelling with a camera - it's like if the pencil had a special power - I don't know how to explain it - it seems that writing about the events didn't seem as authentic as taking a photo... Even though you can manipulate a photo, a drawing seems less dangerous... I think this feeling really helped me in my work...  
 
 
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