When he was just 12 years old, young Reed locked himself in his room with his brother Cliff and together, like Puigdemont, proclaimed the independent republic of their room. Then they broke free from paternal tyranny and drafted a Constitution based on equal rights and the express prohibition of trading with any nation governed by a king or dictator. They named their new country Brodania.
At 15, young Reed canvassed his Manhattan neighborhood in support of any progressive candidate. Door to door. And in college, he led the movement against the Vietnam War.
At 30-something, already practicing as a lawyer in New York, he traveled to Nicaragua to closely observe the Sandinista revolution and discovered the horrors perpetrated by the US-backed counterrevolutionaries, his own country. "My life changed at that moment", he acknowledges today. "In Nicaragua, I encountered victims of atrocities funded by my Government for the first time and promised to expose what was happening. I didn't know how I was going to fulfill that promise, but that day I made the most important and easiest decision of my life."
Upon returning home, he resigned from his coveted position at the Attorney General's Office and returned to Nicaragua to start a career investigating crimes against humanity worldwide, uncovering genocides, and facing absolute horror. Fighting for human rights. Pursuing tyrants, despots, and autocrats... Ultimately, hunting dictators.
Reed Brody, born in Brooklyn 71 years ago but a lifelong citizen of Brodania, son of a Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant who survived labor camps in Germany and Ukraine after World War II, has been a legal advisor and spokesperson for the NGO Human Rights Watch and has spent nearly 40 years buzzing around like a fly in the ointment behind the necks of the most despicable figures on the planet.
He participated in the case against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, recounted the cruelty of the Contras in Nicaragua, pursued the bloody former president of Haiti Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier, unsuccessfully tried to prosecute George W. Bush for torture after 9/11, is still on the trail of Yahya Jammeh in Gambia, and dedicated half of his life to cornering Hissčne Habré, responsible for a regime in Chad that left nearly 40,000 murders and hundreds of thousands of rapes, forced disappearances, and cases of sexual slavery.
Habré, dubbed by Brody as the African Pinochet, was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity after nearly two decades of investigation. His case is now the storyline of Catching a Dictator (Debate), a thrilling chronicle in which the New York lawyer recounts all the obstacles he had to overcome alongside a team of victims, jurists, and investigators to achieve the historic sentence against Chad's dictator. And a journey that is also the personal odyssey of a kind of Indiana Jones in search of the last cursed autocrat.
"I'm not a saint, I just do what I'm passionate about", Brody says in perfect Spanish on the other side of the computer screen from the Barcelona apartment he shares with Catalan filmmaker Isabel Coixet. "I could be working at a top law firm on Wall Street, but that's not my idea of life. It doesn't interest me, it's not who I am."
Behind him, a framed world map hangs on the wall. It's one of his obsessions: Brody recounts that in 2006, after Pinochet's last arrest before his death at the Military Hospital in Santiago, and after celebrating a process that would be "a warning to all tyrants in the world", his colleagues at Human Rights Watch hung a map in his office and, like in spy movies, began pinning portraits of dictators, drawing lines, and sticking pins in the most dangerous destinations on the planet. "Who are we going after now?", they repeated.
"There were about 20 pins," he says today. "But they weren't just dictators, there were also torturers, some hidden in very protected places."
"You have to know your opponent well to anticipate their moves and sometimes resort to unorthodox and not always legal plays"
None caused him as many sleepless nights as Hissčne Habré (1942-2021). "Every dictator is different. I called him the African Pinochet, due to the judicial parallel we used, but in reality, they had little in common," he explains. "Pinochet was a defender of the old right-wing Catholic guard, and Habré presented himself as a great revolutionary. But in the end, they can all be related, even to modern dictators like Viktor Orban or Donald Trump. They all rule through the use of force and fear, even if they win elections. The current dictator of Chad would win a free election, and so would Putin, but that doesn't mean they tolerate dissent."
Exactly 25 years ago, Hissčne Habré was indicted for the first time by a Senegalese judge after the complaint of seven victims who invoked the Pinochet precedent. Just a few months later, Brody visited Chad for the first time to learn about the regime's atrocities firsthand and immerse himself in The Pool, Habré's most famous and sinister prison. An old colonial pool that the dictator had covered with cement to bury 10 cells where hundreds of disappeared were crammed. Inside, they screwed their temples, applied electric shocks to their genitals, or subjected them to what is known as the arbatachar, an ancient torture method that involves hanging the prisoner with arms and legs tied behind their back.
"It struck me to see the marks that the prisoners had made to count the days they had been locked up there," Brody recalls. "I sat on the floor and stayed like that... [He covers his face with his hands and remains silent for several seconds] I imagined what it would be like to spend a year in those conditions... A year surrounded by other prisoners, sometimes next to the bodies of other dead people."
"In these times, it's hard to be optimistic, but we don't have the right not to have hope".
What has been the toughest part of these years?
I don't know... I have been working in human rights for 40 years and have heard all kinds of stories. I have been in Sierra Leone interviewing children whose arms had been cut off by rebels. I think I have tough skin now.
How do you manage not to give up after 17 years chasing a dictator? What is the key to not losing hope?
Obsession, the obsession of not letting people down. When Habré was convicted, I felt relieved because I carried the hope of many people. I often thought everything would fall apart, but we always found a political, legal, or creative solution... I saw myself as Michael Jordan with the last ball, 30 seconds left. It's difficult, but you know he will score in the end. I knew I had to keep everyone's hope alive.
What role do victims play in these processes?
It is crucial to give each case a name and a face, for the victims to not only be part of the case but also part of their country's history. It's not the same to be convinced of the brutalities of a regime by a so-called "dictator hunter" or a New York lawyer as by a survivor who tells you their story looking into your eyes. Who says, 'I went through all of this.'
You mentioned in the book that when you decided to pursue Habré, they called you crazy and naive. Are you more crazy or naive?
I think more naive. One of my big problems is that I am too optimistic, somewhat naive. Sometimes I am not able to perceive the obstacles.
How many times have you failed?
The vast majority. I have failed, for example, in Haiti and in the Congo. It pains me to see that 25 years after our investigation, the same crimes are still being committed, with the same pattern of violence and impunity. And if there is a case I would have liked to win, it is the lawsuit against George Bush. I was never naive enough to believe he would be handcuffed, but if Bush had been imprisoned for torture in Guantanamo, maybe the world would be different today.
Brody explains that his work is not much different from the chess games he played with his father. He often imagined himself sitting across from Habré, separated only by a board. Turning to the victims, other lawyers, activists, as if they were all pawns in a final move. "The strategy of long games ran through my veins, those that require discipline, patience, and yes, a certain level of control that sometimes exasperated those around me," he says. "You have to know your opponent well, know their moves to anticipate them and sometimes resort to unorthodox and not always legal moves."
Have you ever been afraid? I have been afraid of rebels and landmines, but never of dictators or organized forces. I have had bodyguards at some point and take precautions, but I have always thought that if they wanted to kill me, they should have done it at the beginning.
About to turn 72, Brody doesn't seem ready to unpack his bags. On the day of the interview, headlines talk about a new Israeli attack on a school in Gaza that has left over 30 dead, half of them children. "Jews have a special responsibility to denounce Israel's crimes," the lawyer demands. "And that cannot be considered antisemitism."
He will soon return to the US because he says he doesn't want to "flee" his country at this time. "I believe part of my duty is to participate in the resistance," he says. And among his plans is to continue tracking the Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh and conclude the UN investigation documenting the crimes of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, against their population. "For me, it is a very important commitment because I am going back to my roots. 40 years later, the circle closes in Nicaragua."
Do you still believe it is possible to achieve a better world? Is it possible to return to Brodania? In these times, it's hard to be optimistic. And it's difficult to accept when you have spent your life fighting for social justice in a world full of injustices, but I remain naive. As I always say, we have no right not to have hope because, if we have no hope... there is no hope.