For forty years and more Alma Guillermoprieto has wandered tirelessly over the countries of Latin America, interviewing assassins and the families of their victims, talking to street sweepers and artists, rowdy carnival makers and thoughtful politicians (and plenty of rowdy politicians as well). Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in different contexts, like the effects of The War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions and the experiences of people mixed up in the fray of state- or cartel-sponsored violence. At the same time, she shows how Latin American art translates nostalgia and pain into great beauty. In The Years of Blood, the third volume of her collected reporting, she completes her complex and always compelling portrait of the Latin America of our times, in all its tragedy and glory, as it enters a new era of populism and demagoguery, and tries, yet again, to answer the great unsolved question: How do we change our future so that it does not so exhaustingly resemble our past?
Alma Guillermoprieto's reports from the field have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and National Geographic magazine. Among many other distinctions, she has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Princess of Asturias Humanities Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a laureate of the George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Introduction. A Reporting Life in Latin America 1 Part I. South America 1. Bolivia's Tarnished Savior 11 2. In the Wrestling Rings of Bolivia 21 3. Don't Cry for me, Venezuela 27 4. Confrontation in Colombia 41 5. Colombia's Healing Begins 51 6. Confessions of a Killer 61 7. Claudia Andujar: Witness to Yanomami's Last Struggle 73 Part II. Central America 8. Nicaragua's Dreadful Duumvirate 83 9. Death Comes for the Archbishop 95 10. In the New Gangland of El Salvador 103 Part III. Mexico 11. "The Morning Quickie" 117 12. The Mission of Father Maciel 131 13. Troubled Spirits 139 14. Risking Life for Truth 149 15. A Voice against the Darkness 157 16. Making the Dogs Dance 161 17. A Lost World on the Map 167 18. The High Art of the Tamale 179 19. The Twisting Nature of Love: Alfonso CuarOn's Roma 187 20. Forty-Three Students Went Missing: What Really Happened to Them? 213 Acknowledgments 239
"No writer captures the joy and the pain of life in Latin America like Alma Guillermoprieto. This collection goes far beyond the usual headlines to explore the deeper currents shaping the human experiences of everyone who lives in our hemisphere." - Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America "For decades now, Alma Guillermoprieto has been an indispensable guide to a region that US opinion makers stubbornly continue to ignore. The Years of Blood is Guillermoprieto at her most intense and nuanced, offering humane portraits set in turbulent landscapes, some of ordinary people trying to survive, others of people with extraordinary power who believe they control the turbulence. An indispensable window into a region that, even as it remains itself, is changing with breakneck speed." - Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth "Alma Guillermoprieto's collection of feature articles reporting from on the ground in a key period of Latin America's history will stand the test of time as a vivid ethnographic snapshot of the impact of change on the real people behind academic aggregation." - Gavin O'Toole Latin American Review of Books
