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

The Years of Blood: Stories of a a Reporting Life in Latin America by Alma Guillermoprieto (Duke University Press, 2025)

Her new book, The Years of Blood, offers, as its subtitle suggests, “stories from a reporting life in Latin America.” A widely decorated journalist, Guillermoprieto has written, in fact, several lives’ worth of reportage on the region. While she began chronicling Latin America in 1978, this volume collects essays published in the 21st century—most after 2010. Like her earlier compilations from the 1990s and early 2000s, The Years of Blood bridges the gap between Latin America’s past and present and feels wonderfully suited for the college classroom.

Guillermoprieto has specialized in explaining Latin America to English-language audiences through long-read articles in prestigious U.S. outlets. The pieces gathered here first appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic and, above all, The New York Review of Books. The readers she must have imagined for those magazines surely resemble university students enrolling in an area studies course at a U.S. university: intelligent, highly educated and curious about the world, but without much prior knowledge of Latin America. On topics as varied and complex as art, politics and security (or lack thereof), these articles strike an extraordinary balance between accessibility and depth. 

The audience in question also needs to find the material engaging, and on this score Guillermoprieto more than delivers. Reading her masterfully evocative dispatches took me back to my own undergraduate experience at Grinnell College, where my Latin American history professor assigned another book by a journalist: Tina Rosenberg’s Children of Cain, a collection of deep, incisive examinations of the Shining Path, the Argentine Dirty War, the rise and fall of Central American revolutionary movements and other topics concerning “violence and the violent” in 1980s Latin America.

One could plausibly argue that Latin America now is generally more violent than it was back then; violence is, of course, a central theme in The Years of Blood. The author opens the preface with a story about Segovia, a Colombian mining town that, in 1988, witnessed one of the earliest and largest paramilitary massacres that would roil the country’s countryside in the 1990s and 2000s. This was all part of a wider, regional tragedy unfolding into the present: Latin America currently has “the highest homicide rate of any region in the world,” Guillermoprieto notes.

She has the insight and experience to guide readers through how we got here. A younger version of herself, she admits, first understood the Segovia incident as “a story about evil murderers pitted against innocent civilians.” Over time, she came to see it instead as part of a broader cycle of violence—one involving security forces, drug lords, guerrilla leaders, and ordinary Colombians—with origins tracing back, in part, to the U.S. War on Drugs.

Just as importantly, journalistic reporting—at least of the quality on display in the essays on gang terror in El Salvador circa 2011, or those on the killings of students and journalists in Mexico (the author’s country of origin)—can bring to life the origins, consequences and realities of violence for students far better than any social-scientific research paper. If anything, the essays here can be too vivid. Thankfully, the reader can chase down the more depressing material with Guillermoprieto’s equally excellent stories on lighter subjects like women’s wrestling in Bolivia (“Here comes Martha, flying through the air!”) or Diana Kennedy, the British food writer who helped elevate Mexican cuisine globally (“Delicious!”). 

Violence, it is worth noting, is not the only thread weaving these essays together. Guillermoprieto notes that her first volume, The Heart That Bleeds (1994), was suffused with the celebratory optimism that accompanied the fall of Cold War-era dictatorships. Looking Through History (2001) was somewhat less jubilatory—the “hangover” was kicking in—but peaceful elections remained the norm, commodity prices were about to boom, and new political projects seemed poised to offer fresh answers to old questions. Fast forward to 2025: Latin America is emerging from a second “lost decade” of economic growth and poverty reduction, arguably more severe than the first. Democratic institutions are on the defensive, at best, and the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the region like no other. “This book,” Guillermoprieto writes, covering more recent decades, “is the story of disillusion and broken futures”—I wish the title reflected this wider framing. 

After all, not all Latin American countries experienced bloodshed to the same degree in the 21st century. One of the most memorable essays here (I am biased) concerns Nicaragua, which has escaped cartel or gang violence. Guillermoprieto began her career there in 1978, covering the hopeful story of how Sandinista guerrillas were helping a country topple a “dreadful dictatorship.” Four decades later, she was writing about how a “dreadful duumvirate” had taken hold, one that, in her estimation, “has surpassed Somoza in sheer arbitrary evil.” The saga of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo spans eras in Latin American politics, punctuating broader regional regrets: “We look back on the dreams of change,” Guillermoprieto observes, “and wonder, What were we thinking? What was it that guerilla movements were supposed to achieve?” 

Her stories on Hugo Chávez (“Don’t Cry for Me Venezuela”, 2005) and Evo Morales (“Bolivia’s Tarnished Savior,” 2020) similarly documented hopes raised and lost. But they were not cynical takedowns. On the contrary, what makes Guillermoprieto such a powerful chronicler of leftist disillusionment is her ability to draw on experience and memory to convey why these projects once felt so electrifying and full of promise, even as she unapologetically recounts their failures.

Together with helpful postscripts that bring events up to the present where necessary, the stories compiled in The Years of Blood cover a period—the last quarter century—awkwardly situated in the way scholars teach and think about Latin America: too recent for most historians, yet too distant for many social scientists. That is precisely why this collection is more than the sum of its brilliant parts.

Mateo Jarquín is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University. He is the author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024). He earned his Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 2019 and was a Graduate Student Associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).

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