The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America

by Alma Guillermoprieto

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478031390
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Series:	American Encounters/Global Interactions
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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 Cuarón’s Roma  187
20. Forty-Three Students Went Missing: What Really Happened to Them?  213
Acknowledgments  239