Harris Whitbeck ’87 grew up in Guatemala City in a bi-cultural household, the son of a prominent local businessman and an American from Alabama. Although he has traveled and lived all over the world, Guatemala remains his home and the place he has always returned to relax and recuperate with friends and family. Today, the country of around 17 million is a stable democracy and, in his words, a country of “great natural beauty, great food, and rich culture.” 

Guatemala hasn’t always been the stable country it is now. From the 1950s to the ’90s, the country was caught up in a very one-sided civil war perpetrated, for the most part, by a series of military dictatorships backed by the U.S. against the Indigenous people. Whitbeck grew up at the height of this war, but, according to him, it didn’t have the scarring effect it might have had.

“Growing up in an elite, very protected bubble in Guatemala City, I was not subjected to the horrors that I read about later,” Whitbeck said. “I was extremely privileged because I was not affected the way so many tens of thousands of people, particularly members of the Indigenous communities, were.”

He wasn’t totally protected from the war. As a very young child, he overheard adults talking of death squads and worried that they would come for him in the way other children fear the bogeyman. Later, when he was a teen attending a private school, the military discovered a guerilla safehouse close by. He and the other students had to remain in hiding at the school for the day while soldiers attacked the house. Apart from these incidents, he characterizes his childhood as normal.

Whitbeck was insulated because he came from an influential family. His father was a close adviser to the military dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian, supported by the Reagan administration, who justified his massacres of Indigenous people on religious grounds. At the time of his death, Montt was on trial for genocide.

As a teen, Whitbeck met and interacted with many international correspondents. While he had a limited understanding of the conflict they were covering, he admired them and set his sights on becoming a journalist. So, when it came to college, he chose to study in the U.S., where journalism was a less dangerous profession. He can’t remember why he chose Washington College, but said, “I loved it. I took to it immediately.”

Importantly, it was at Washington that he learned the truth about his own country. He credits Professor Dan Premo with opening his eyes to what was really going on in Guatemala. Premo had him read Bitter Fruit, among other enlightening texts, which tells the history of how the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and supported dictators there for decades.

Whitbeck, although more “progressive than any member of [his] family was or is,” has always been very open with his family.

“I had very deep conversations and debates with my father about what was happening in Guatemala,” he said. “What was beautiful about them was that they were always very respectful and very loving and taught me the value of listening to others and hearing other stories, which helped me become a better journalist.”

After college, Whitbeck became a reporter for a TV channel in Guatemala City. One day the military announced a news conference about a girl it had rescued from the guerrillas. He and his camera crew got to the rescue site before anyone else and were surprised to find the building open and unguarded. Inside, they found the “bullet-riddled” bodies of young men and women—the guerrillas—and “it was obvious they had been executed.” They filmed the scene and returned to the TV channel with a scoop—proof the military was carrying out extrajudicial killings.

“If you want to continue living and working in Guatemala,” his boss said, “you can't tell it that way.”

Whitbeck then returned to the U.S. to pursue a master’s in journalism at Columbia University. After he graduated, he got a freelance gig covering the first post-Sandinista elections in Nicaragua. There he met a CNN bureau chief who took him under her wing and got him a job in Atlanta with CNN.

He was hired as a Spanish language reporter, but when they realized he was bilingual, he began reporting in both languages. He jokes that they got two journalists for the price of one. He thrived at CNN and by the mid-1990s he became CNN Latin America bureau chief stationed in Mexico City, where he would live for the next 15 years (although he reported from countries around the world during this period).

After 9/11, CNN asked for volunteers to undergo war zone training to cover the conflicts against al-Qaida and the Taliban. Whitbeck signed up but it wasn’t until just before he was assigned to Afghanistan and CNN asked for his next of kin that he felt real fear. On the flights to Moscow and then Tajikistan, that fear turned to terror. When he landed, however, things changed.

“I saw Northern Alliance fighters with their Kalashnikovs and U.S. warplanes flying above me,” he said. “I was living the reality of what I was afraid of and the fear just dissipated.”

He crossed the Hindu Kush on horseback, not knowing where he was going, yet “there was no longer any fear,” he said. “I realized that fear is a lack of knowledge and once you have information about what you are afraid of, you realize fear is just conjecture.”

As well as reporting on Latin America, he spent many years reporting from conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After 20 years at CNN, much of that time rotating in and out of war zones, he left the company.

One week later, he was in Miami talking to a production company about doing documentary work, when he met a friend who worked for the Discovery Channel. She asked if he’d like to host the Latin American version of The Amazing Race, a reality TV travel show in which contestants follow clues and race each other to win prizes. 

“I watched it and got hooked,” he said. “It is a reality TV show, but it’s also about travel and communication and it’s very good.” He took the job and hosted the show for four seasons, traveling across Latin America with the contestants. “I had a lot of fun, and although it wasn't the type of work I was doing before, it was a great experience.”

He spent the next few years doing freelance work for various news media, often preferring longer form documentaries over headline news stories. Then, after César Bernardo Arévalo de León won the presidential election in Guatemala, Whitbeck met the president-elect at a dinner party.

“I just want to thank you because as a citizen, for the first time in my life, I was able to vote for somebody and not against something,” Whitbeck told Arévalo. They exchanged numbers. “A couple of weeks later he sent me [a message] and said, I'd love to talk to you. And so we met, and he invited me to join his government.”

“I'm not a political animal and never had political ambitions,” Whitbeck said. But he accepted the position as minister for tourism, and, to his surprise, loves it. 

“People come here and realize what a beautiful and safe and fascinating country it is,” he said. “The sense of purpose that I'm experiencing now, I haven't felt that, I think, since maybe graduating from college. And that's beautiful. I mean, I turn 60 next year, and I feel like I'm 25 again.”