Alma Guillermoprieto Reflects on Latin America’s Arc
After decades covering Latin America's tumultuous politics, legendary journalist Alma Guillermoprieto speaks to Jacobin about chronicling life in a region where destruction comes easily, bravery is necessary, democracy is elusive, and the future is uncertain.
An image of President Claudia Sheinbaum among supporters of her Morena Party in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 1, 2024. (Angel Delgado / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Abe Asher
Alma Guillermoprieto has, for many decades, been among the most respected journalists covering Latin America in the English language — a canny observer of the region’s often tumultuous politics and a gifted chronicler of its vibrant life.
Earlier this year, Guillermoprieto published what she called, due to the “realities of age,” her closing collection: twenty stories spanning Latin America in the twenty-first century titled The Years of Blood.
The stories, which cover topics ranging from the political demise of Evo Morales to the disappeared students of Ayotzinapa to the acclaimed Mexico City–set film Roma and beyond, are preceded by an introduction in which Guillermoprieto wonders how so many of the movements she covered could have ended in “disillusion and broken futures” and expresses her hope that, “in the not-too-distant future a much younger writer will be able to report and write the stories of how peace was consolidated throughout these lands.”
When I spoke with Guillermoprieto earlier this month, she had just finished a breakfast of forest-harvested blue mushrooms, goat cheese, avocado, and blue tortillas in the village of Malinalco in the state of Mexico. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.
I was struck by a line in the book’s introduction where you question the sense of optimism with which you covered particular movements or moments, asking, “What were we thinking?” Do you feel like you were naive in certain moments of your life and career reporting on Latin America?
I felt that introduction was really necessary, given that it is unlikely that I will ever do another major piece of exhaustive reporting again, just given the realities of age and the sense that I’ve seen a lot. It’s a closing collection, and so it needed an introduction to that closing — which among other things addressed, or tried to address, the many questions I’ve been asked over time about the work and the writing that I’ve done. One of them has been, “Well, wasn’t it terrible to have to go see these horrible situations?” And the other one was, “Are you sorry about anything you wrote in light of what’s happening today?”
I’m not sorry about anything I wrote at all, because it was based on my best possible effort given the realities of the time and what we knew about those realities. We reporters are not lab technicians. We do history on the fly, and so the collection is simply a record of that history.
To address your question directly, yes, I think that we were all very innocent. The Nicaraguan revolution was such a moment of hope, and we were so eager for hope. And the big lesson I would take away now from all of that is that it’s sort of like gaining weight and losing weight. The first one is really easy, and the second one is terribly hard. Destroying is easy. Building up is hard, or even nearly impossible. So the whole revolutionary approach to change in Latin America is what I now question — yes, seriously — the sense that you can achieve overwhelming and permanent change by destroying what there was. In the case of a very poor country like Nicaragua, and so many others, if you destroy what little there was, then you find yourself with an empty bank account and no buildings. So I don’t regret the optimism. I feel wiser now.
There are many wonderful stories in the collection. There are also a fair number of dispiriting stories. One that stood out to me was your reporting on El Salvador in 2010. I’m curious looking back: How do you understand what you saw there in light of what’s happened since, and how do you understand the rise of somebody like Nayib Bukele?
There was a string of actions over time taken by Salvadoran political actors and US actors that had unforeseeable consequences, and so let me try to list them: the idea that guerrilla war could bring about positive change; the idea that a guerrilla mentality leads to good politicians — it turns out that guerrillas are not good politicians, by and large; the idea that the United States understood what was going on and what it was doing in the region; the idea that the United States thought that it was serving its own self-interest by its actions in the region; and the idea that Barack Obama had that the thing to do with foreign-born adolescents in prisons was to ship them all back where they came from. To reiterate, the latter wasn’t Donald Trump’s idea.
All of these factors combined have led to the nightmare that El Salvador has become. We never can tell the future five minutes from now — I never tire of repeating that, an earthquake could happen right now where I’m sitting this very minute — but it seems to me that Bukele is going to last in power a very long time.
Is that a change that you have observed through the course of your reporting career?
Yes. I think that the ’90s were a hopeful time in that the idea of democracy was in the air, and the idea that democracy was achieved by free and fair elections was something that everyone bought into. With the end of the dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and so forth, there were politicians who won elections and were willing to open up the public sphere, notably the media. There was a much freer press; polls were allowed. An unusual fact is that polls were not used or even allowed in many countries beforehand. There were no polls in Mexico until Salinas got elected in 1988. That’s how closed the political circles of power were. So there has been a change in the perception that democracy is achievable and desirable. The disillusionment that came after that period of hope is what we’re stuck in now.
Do you have a sense of what the watershed moments were in turning people who might have had that hope that democracy was achievable into people who care little for the concept?
I think there were different incidents leading to the same conclusions in different countries but, just to speak of Mexico, one lesson that I’ve learned over time is that if people are not allowed to practice democracy, they don’t know how to do democracy. So you have mediocre politicians running for office and trying to run disorganized countries. The election of Vicente Fox in Mexico after the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) fell apart in 1994 was just such a disaster and disappointment. That, I think, was game over. It also coincided with the rise of drug groups’ infiltration into political society.
There are some on the Left in the United States who are looking to Morena as a possible model. Do you think it makes sense to look to Morena for a path forward for a broadly defined left-wing movement in the United States?
Do I think it makes sense for activists or people who seriously believe in a better world through politics to look at a uniquely Mexican phenomenon as a model to follow? No. We’re very divided in this country right now about the significance of Morena, so I realize that I am going to cut half of my readership off right now by saying this, but to me, Morena is a modernization of the old PRI model. PRI is the party that governed Mexico for seventy-two years and then took a breather, and, I think, has come back in the shape of Morena.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador joined the PRI when I believe he was nineteen or twenty-one years old. He could have taken different options, but he joined the PRI and he stayed in the PRI for many years, and I think his vision of what Mexico should be corresponds to the PRI utopia. Because the PRI did have, in its early years, a very idealistic and nationalistic component. The huge mass organizations, the tolerance of corruption because the PRI was “realistic” — you know, the sense that you have to have a little corruption to kind of grease the wheels — the importance given to elections as a ritual, and the relative invisibility of congress, so that it’s a love-hate relationship between the dear leader, the president, and the masses, el pueblo. Every time I hear the word “pueblo,” I duck. It’s an antidemocratic idea.
If not Morena, where are the places that you’re looking for hope right now?
I wrote a little book in Spanish called ¿Será que soy feminista?, and I got hammered by some strange people who should have known better because I didn’t quote any notable Mexican feminists in it. The whole point of the little book is that the great movement for change, the great hope, the great fighters for democracy and equality and fairness and justice, not just in Mexico but in Latin America, are the grassroots women’s movement. Fighting for their children to appear, fighting for the right of their children to have access to nutrition and education, fighting for their own right to stand up and speak out — they have really made an enormous contribution. They may not realize that, as they go around the countryside looking for their lost ones, what they’re really fighting for is an end to the horror. And it’s just odd that there isn’t an article about that in the collection, because I thought I’d said my piece in the book in Spanish.
I did want to ask you a little bit more about the process of your writing. I read a short review of your new book that was printed in Foreign Affairs —
In Foreign Affairs? Oh my God, I never thought I’d live to see the day.
Right! It wasn’t the first place I’d gone to look for coverage of this book — but there’s a short review there, and it includes the claim that your “despairing vision of a Latin America beset with so many problems, including gang violence, plays into the dark imagery propagated by the current occupant of the Oval Office.” Do you think about the potential that your reporting can be read in this way?
Well, let me go right back to El Mozote and the reporting that Ray Bonner and I did about that massacre in 1982. The Ronald Reagan administration put it out that we had happened to report about this infamous massacre in order to defeat the vote in Congress to certify that El Salvador was making progress, I believe toward democracy — I can’t remember. And I was flabbergasted by this accusation, because one of the reasons that I was such a failure as a reporter for The Washington Post in the United States is that I don’t really care in the slightest about what Congress, or Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump, or anyone in power, but in the United States specifically, may or may not think about what I write. They are not my concern. In the final piece about Ayotzinapa, just as in my reporting about El Mozote, I’m only interested in getting it down on the record what these sons of b-tches have done to people. That’s all I want.
There’s another very nice line in the introduction where you celebrate the “great, bubbling-over, defiant life” of Latin America. As the United States struggles and appears to be going down a very dark political road, what are the resources that Americans must look to Latin America for about how to maintain effervescence even in the face of challenges?
I have no advice to give to people in the United States. It’s a hard time. But here’s this: the United States has historically placed a very high value on optimism and the search for happiness. And I think that those are not necessarily helpful concepts when you’re facing a monstrous situation.
Is there a particular story in this collection that you’d really love for people to read? A piece that captures something of the flavor of life that puts into perspective the stakes of these political events?
I’m fond of two pieces. One is the review of Alfonso Cuarón’s magnificent Roma, because one of the great things that Latin America ceaselessly produces, like bees produce honey, is art: consistently beautiful ways of looking to interpret reality.
And the other would be the Bolivian wrestlers story, just because it was so much fun to report it, it was such a giggle, and those women are so terrific. Everybody in Latin America has to be brave in order to survive, but women have to work really hard at it — harder even.
Is there anything else you’d like to add, either about your work, the collection, or any of the other topics we discussed?
Reporting as a mode of setting reality down may be deeply flawed, but it’s also what we have — particularly in situations where people are not free to say what is happening to them. And reporters are routinely disparaged now, and it’s hard to make a living, and it’s hard to find a place to publish what you write, but reporters are the ones who set down history as it happens, and are necessary.