“I Wish This Book Did Not Have This Title”
Interview with Alma Guillermoprieto about “The Years of Blood”
A frank and wise account of over 40 years of reporting from Latin America by one of its most seasoned journalists
By Caroline Tracey (Border Chronicle)
HAVANA TIMES -“What I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care,” journalist Alma Guillermoprieto told C-SPAN host Brian Lamb in 2001. Guillermoprieto, now 75, has had a storied career covering many of Latin America’s most consequential events and movements.
Born in Mexico’s Federal District (now Mexico City) in 1949 and raised in the San Rafael neighborhood, Guillermoprieto moved with her mother to New York City as a teenager to join Martha Graham’s modern dance company. After teaching dance at Cuba’s National School of the Arts for six months—an experience she wrote about in the 2004 book Dancing with Cuba—she eventually decided to channel her energies elsewhere.
After getting her start covering Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, Guillermoprieto broke the story of El Salvador’s 1981 El Mozote massacre, which the Reagan administration had taken pains to cover up. In recent years, she has covered the crisis of femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, along with the prolonged and unfinished investigation into the 42 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico.
Her newest book, The Years of Blood, was published by Duke University Press on April 25. It brings together dispatches from 2002–21, featuring characters such as gang members from El Salvador, a licentious Mexican priest, and female lucha libre fighters in Bolivia. Guillermoprieto spoke with Border Chronicle reporter Caroline Tracey about reporting from Latin America then, now, and into the future.
You have had a storied career covering Latin America for publications like the Washington Post, New Yorker, and New York Review of Books. How did your career get its start, and how did it take the shape it did?
I started out in Nicaragua in 1978. I didn’t really intend to become a reporter. I just wanted to see what a real revolution was like. So I borrowed some money for the plane fare and took myself to Managua. I wasn’t really sure where Nicaragua was on the map, and I think that was true for a lot of us—it was a Central American country with 2.5 million people. Because the revolution there overthrew a dictator, and because the participants seemed so young, enthusiastic, and idealistic, I was able to see it all with my own eyes. I discovered the real drug of reporting, which is just that: you see what other people can’t see. You tell them a story about what you’ve seen. It’s a wonderful way to live life, so I’m still going.
The United States has “new journalism”; Latin America has the crónica. How do you see your work in relation to those traditions?
I never really asked myself that question. I just wrote. George Balanchine used to tell his dancers, “Don’t think, do.” So I think that’s how I go about it. But I was a New Yorker reader my whole life. We didn’t have much money, my mother and I, but a New Yorker subscription was really important to us. It was our big treat. So I grew up reading some of the best journalism there is. That’s what I consider my training.
Speaking of Balanchine, you had a career as a dancer too. How did that training in a musical and corporeal discipline influence your work?
It was not an illustrious career. I started at 12 in a Mexican modern dance company, and I moved to New York largely because I wanted to study with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. I taught for Merce in Cuba. I wrote a book about that. I think largely as a result of the Cuban experience—which was insane, and that’s not putting it too strongly—I had great doubts about the worth of dancing, and so I stopped.
I think what dancing gave me is that you have to be tough as nails. It gave me physical resistance. The kind of reporting I did for 40 years required enormous amounts of physical energy and guts. Dance gave me that, and a certain kind of perfectionism.
You write in the introduction to The Years of Blood that Latin Americans’ optimism about democracy and civil society has declined since your previous books The Heart That Bleeds and Looking for History. What moment in Latin America does this book capture?
The 40-year period of my career has gone from Latin American countries trying to modernize, with a certain amount of hopefulness and energy and prosperity, to grappling with what it means to be modern, to the collapse of that possibility and alternative ways of seeking a future. They’ve tried dictatorships, guerrilla uprisings, and democracies. Because none of those worked, they have left a gap of rootlessness and disappointment, and no social mobility. That’s where the drug trade moved in. It’s also the period that this collection covers.
You open the book by describing how articles about the Segovia massacre in Colombia didn’t answer your questions, which led you to realize that you needed to cover it yourself. When you go to a place after the breaking news, how do you approach reporting?
I really enjoyed doing day stories. I wasn’t the best. I wasn’t bad, but not the best. There are great day reporters. But I really like to go back and see what’s left after the news, how people’s lives have changed after the news.
I think a day’s reporting dictates tomorrow’s reporting. You learn something that completely changes what you thought about a story, or at least I hope it does, and then I follow that lead. But I try to make sure that I talk to both the people in power and those who have to live with those changes. That’s about as neutral as I think you can be.
In the book, you describe the challenging conditions under which many Latin American newspaper journalists work. You refer to them as “seekers of the truth who operate within extremely narrow confines.” It can be hard for onlookers from the U.S. and elsewhere to grasp the forms this danger takes. Why do local journalists run so much risk in their work, and how does working for international narrative publications provide a degree of insulation?
Our countries in Latin America are riddled with violence, most of which is caused by the drug wars. The drug wars are an idiotic attempt to control the flow of drugs to the U.S. by having Latin Americans kill each other. Given that, if a drug chieftain has it in for you and you’re an international reporter, that chieftain knows that if he kills you, it’s an international incident.
But if you kill a local reporter to intimidate all the other local reporters, nobody gives a damn. The vast majority of reporters who are killed are from small, provincial newspapers—reporters who don’t get paid much and whose professional training is very poor. Let’s say a photographer takes a picture of a corpse that the drug chieftains don’t want published. They’ll give him a warning, maybe two, and by the third time, he’s killed. But this is how reporters make a living—by working. So they are caught in a tremendously difficult situation.
It makes me very bitter to say this, but when there is a protest march to call attention to the horrific number of reporters killed in Latin America, the only people who show up are us, the reporters. It’s simply not an issue for the larger civil society.
You famously broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, committed by state forces in El Salvador in 1981. The Years of Blood includes your 2024 reporting on the Ayotzinapa massacre, whose perpetrators are a more complex mix of drug cartel members, local police, and high-ranking military officials. What through lines and rifts do you see between the violence of the Cold War era and the more dispersed violence of today?
In the 1950s and ’60s, Mexico had a homicide rate comparable to that of Kansas. One of the causes of its tremendous increase in violence has been the huge influx of guns: where there used to be knife fights, now there are machine gun fights. Anyone with a machine gun can set himself up in the extortion business.
That said, what happened during the years of dictatorship and guerrilla violence is that murder became a way for people to communicate. Before, you said, “I don’t like you” by punching someone in the face. Now, drug traders say, “Get out of my way” by staging a massacre.
It’s completely out of control, and I don’t know if it’s possible to return to normality. But trying to control violence with more violence is a formula that has not worked. Over a 50-year period of trying, it has failed. So it may be time to try a different approach.
Across your body of work, are there large questions that you feel you are trying to work out an answer to?
With this book, I finally understood that the question I’ve kept asking myself is the question that all the social movements I’ve covered have also asked themselves: How can we change? How can we not be the violent and unequal society that, unfortunately, we are? Along with our many glorious virtues as individuals, families, and creative people, as a society we have this collective problem. How do we change? How do we improve and become a more fair, stable, just, and equal region?
Have you come to any answers?
No. But it’s not my job. My job as a reporter is not to look for answers, but to seek the right questions and try to understand what it is that people are asking themselves and what they desire. What people want, it turns out, isn’t always the same over the years.
In the introduction to The Years of Blood, you write, “I wish this book did not have this title,” apologizing that it is not more optimistic. Amid increasing violence in Mexico and Latin America, rising fascism in the United States, and many other dire world circumstances, where do you think we can look for hope?
I have a little book about feminism that hasn’t been translated. The idea is that Latin America’s contribution to feminist movements isn’t theoretical: It’s in the organizations and popular movements. Whether it’s Marielle Franco for Afro-Brazilian communities, who was murdered; María Elena Moyano, who founded the Vaso de Leche movement in Lima—and who was also murdered; or Esther Chávez in Ciudad Juárez insisting on a conspiracy to murder young women and keeping track of their deaths, that’s the great contribution. Popular movements, community movements, mobilizing, and refusing to stay down.
The Years of Blood by Alma Guillermoprieto can be purchased from Duke University Press.