David Beriain was one of here considering journalists distance is a premise of lies. Only if you stay close to things, if you feel their breath and sink the soles of your shoes into them, can you try to find the way to truth. David believed in one simple rule, to work to bring people what they wouldn’t otherwise see. Andhe is a reporter for this for no other reason. I started these lines in the past and this gives me a feeling of unreality. It seems impossible that a man like David who was experiencing a frenzied vitalism was killed by the Islamist militias in Burkina Faso together with his cameraman Roberto Fraile. They killed him while doing what he had made sense of his whole life: documenting. The east and north of Burkina Faso in recent years have become one of the least talked about war front in the world, the branch of Al Qaeda in the Sahel, the Group for the support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), and the Islamic State in the Great Sahara (ISGS), have led the clash to intensify and the border with Benin is now war. Beriain knew that the farther Al Qaeda was from European capitals and oil sites, the less Western information lights would come on, so he had gone right there. Burkina, one of the least talked about countries in the world with one of the most peaceful and friendly populations on the planet to show how Islamism was trying to exploit poverty, misery, anger in adherence to fundamentalism and how this adhesion the Islamist militiamen used it to blackmail: pay us or Islamize the country, let us trade or overthrow the government. To tell this David Beriain and Roberto Fraile died.
Poppies and campesinos
I had known David’s work through Clandestine because I had introduced his documentaries with videos.
David had bravely told the path of the drug, following the production in Mexican opium poppy fields to the border. He had interviewed the campesinos paid very little but still better than growing potatoes or tomatoes, he had met the assassins, the couriers and he had managed to decrypt the aesthetics of the drug traffickers, their obsession with symbols, communication, the ostentation that was a vindication of their power. Its greatest quality was to put the interlocutor at ease. He was a Spaniard from Navarre but who had trained on Argentine corruption, in South America he had managed to live together with the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, the oldest communist guerrilla in the world that financed itself with cocaine and cocoa and then Iraq and Afghanistan where it was said he would have wanted to live if the war was over: there was everything that made him feel alive, mountains, sky, clean faces, memory of human tragedy.
Common sense questions
When interviewing, David did not tend to stress the interlocutor: he wanted him to confess.
And then, after having accepted the confession, he tried to ask the questions that a sensible spectator would have asked: why do you kill? Why do you do this for money? Or, will the world led by Islam really be a happy world? This is how his interviews were divided: one part in which the interviewee told himself and David did not judge, did not press, and the other in which he tried to ask the questions that the spectators would have liked to ask. He had built documentaries where he personally became the protagonist by building the adventure of knowledge, a feature of his work was the tight editing, they look like action films rather than documentaries. But not fiction, far from it. For this reason some colleagues considered it too spectacular, but David tried to create documentaries with the ingredients of fiction: suspense, thriller, unexpected epilogue, while maintaining the rigor of the research.
The first meeting
We met for the first time in 2018: I had told him in the Napoli delle paranze interview, the kids who had taken over the city, David was interested in these teenage Camorra boys about their relationship with death. He was obsessed with extreme places because he considered them more suitable for fixing human behavior stripped from the mediations of ordinary life. David was impossible to fool him, yet once they had succeeded in Naples: he was the victim of a scam which ended up being investigated by the Milan prosecutor’s office. To make an episode of his program on the Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta, David’s production company relied on Italian fixers. The practice in these cases is to contact professionals who know the area well. David had entrusted himself to Giuseppe Iannini, a former carabiniere (also investigated in the investigation of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office) who last February received a three-year sentence in prison for breach of office secrecy in relation to a Camorra investigation . Iannini’s conviction came years after his collaboration with Beriain, who probably trusted the infidel marshal who – according to the accusations – made him interview actors and not ‘Ndranghetisti in any building and not in a drug refinery as he had been told. . I had written to David to tell him jokingly only in Naples could they cheat you. He replied promising to tell me what he was up to now as soon as he had a good web connection in Africa. Kalashnikov bullets arrived first. David Beriain knew that he could have fallen into an ambush, he had seen and touched death so many times that he no longer felt disgust or fear and it is precisely in these cases that prudence is lost. It seems impossible that someone like David is no longer around, always on the road for adventure and investigation. Goodbye David, I’m really sorry that they did this to you, I will miss following your movements that were the condition of your life and gave your stories, those will continue to move no ambush will ever stop them.
April 27, 2021 (change April 28, 2021 | 00:07)
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