Pablo Dreyfus, according to Bill Godnick

An exclusive article for the montlhy newsletter “En la mira – The Latin American Small Arms Watch.” Click here for subscriptions and for previous issues.

I had only heard of Pablo Dreyfus and seen his name in a few publications when I met him for the first time in June 2002. I was in Rio to meet with Rubem Fernandes and Rangel Bandeira to talk about possibly developing a joint research project with the British NGO International Alert, for whom I worked at the time, on small arms control in the countries of the Southern Cone.  They instantly turned me over to Pablo both in terms of work and as my host. I ended up staying in the apartment Pablo rented in Ipanema right around the corner from the entrance to the Cantagalo favela.  It was summer and Rio was experiencing 40 degree heat that week is what I remember most distinctly.

When I met Pablo I was surprised to find him the opposite of all of my expectations. I expected to find a more flamboyant and stereotypically Argentinean. Instead, I found a more quirky and humble guy. We also had a lot in common both being prematurely bald guys in our early thirties, half-Jewish and half-Catholic, with French ancestry and interest in security issues in Latin America. While we of course became good friends, the relationship we maintained over time was that of distant cousins perhaps always picking up where we had last left off, but never feeling the need to be in constant contact. Hanging out with Pablo was always easy and he was always straight forward when he had things to do.

The first project we worked on together took about a year to finish with field research trips to Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay some of if funded by International Alert and some by Viva Rio´s own ongoing work in the region. Pablo involved Ben Lessing from the US and a young Brazilian lawyer Carolina Iootty in the research and writing.  The end product ended up being Small Arms Control in Mercosur published jointly by Viva Rio and International Alert in both English and Spanish.  It was a solid piece of research that we would have never been unable to undertake without Pablos´s experience and energy.  I can distinctly remember squabbling with him over editing as he always wanted to say more rather than less. I am sure there are others who had had this same experience with him.

The research project also contemplated a workshop in Buenos Aires that we organized in June 2003. While it was a fairly informal and unremarkable event, it brought together many of the Southern Cone actors that would eventually become involved in the UN small arms process, IANSA, the Latin American Coalition on Armed Violence and the national disarmament campaigns in Argentina and Brazil. Two participants went on to become important political figures in their countries, Daisy Tourné the former Minister of Interior of Uruguay and Juan Ramón Quintana the current Minister of the Presidency of Bolivia.

In writing this piece I was asked to share my thoughts on what I had learned in working with Pablo over the years. Quite a difficult question as I looked to Pablo as a peer and much of the learning was probably implicit and part of a process of giving and receiving feedback on ideas, research and hypotheses about the nature of public security illicit arms trafficking in Latin America. Nonetheless, I will give it a try. Some of the things I think I learned from working with Pablo were perhaps not new, but reinforced by his approach to research in particular. I can think of three off the top of my head.

First, good research is a process and not a product. While funding is required to keep research, and more importantly researchers, afloat it is not the driving force behind good research. Of course one has to submit, complete and disseminate research, but that does not mean it is done. Research requires constant updating. Some of the best research I have seen and been involved with has begun and finished without any funding at all.

Second, being a credible researcher in the field of public security requires a constant back and forth between crunching numbers and reviewing statistics in a university or a research office and visiting the institutions, communities and people living on the most vulnerable front lines of our societies. Pablo´s trips to Brazil´s border areas and many other countries of the region have generated research that provides important reality checks. Pablo lived the concept of triangulation in social science research.

Third, and finally, Pablo with his impressive credentials could have easily opted for a life in a North American or European university or perhaps with a fancy private intelligence consultancy firm. Instead he chose to work with a somewhat Bohemian NGO that thinks globally and acts globally and believes solid research is the basis for sustained advocacy. I don´t pretend to know exactly what drove Pablo to stay so long in Rio, but I guess it is a combination of several things including being in the middle of the cutting edge of the debate on public security, being somewhere where his research made a difference, finding a family and community in Viva Rio and Rio de Janeiro and just simply being in a place and doing things that made him feel alive.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at a meeting of the Observatorio sobre Crimen Organizado para América Latina y el Caribe in Costa Rica an invitation I received primarily based upon the recommendation of Pablo. When we passed around the table at least half of the people were there because of their relationships to him. In all of these spaces and places I continue to see Pablo walking into the room, sitting down and sharing his latest research findings, haunting us like a friendly ghost. He reminds us to be sincere in our research goals and practices, not to lose contact with what is really taking place in our communities and place ourselves where we have a chance of making a difference.

Bill Godnick
Lima, Perú
September 2009