The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, Alma Guillermoprieto, 2025, Duke University Press
The study of democracy in Latin America has largely been conducted from outside the region and with the detachment of social science.
Feasts of data cooked in juices of theory in the kitchens of mostly US academies have left many students digesting them strangely dissatisfied.
From the end of the dark age of authoritarian rule sponsored by Washington through shaky transitions that it then claimed credit for to the empirical measurement of “consolidation” by which scholars traded metrics about how to assess progress, Latin America has been the perfect lab specimen.
In the north, of course, the aim of all this scrutiny was to measure just how close the region was getting to us, the developed capitalist “democracies” with apparently stable, peaceful societies that had shed the brutal skin of history.
Occasionally a book came along that set the cat among the pigeons, offering a theoretical disruption or a sectoral lens on democratic health which adopted the prevailing norms of plural, multicultural and above all US scholarly yardsticks.
Accordingly, indigenous, colour and gender themes have been flavour of the month for a lot longer than, well, a month, reflecting a far more granular approach to democratic analysis than the grand, continental sweep of 1990s scholarship.
They have replaced the Cold War paradigm that had prevailed in which the struggle between left and right would—in an institutional and social context cooked precisely according to a US recipe—dissolve into something resembling the competitive politics of Washington DC.
Slow reform towards Americanised societies in which a few large parties competed consensually was the linear model of evolution. Revolutions in which the disenfranchised violently seized power they had long been denied were mere harbingers of authoritarianism.
But it was always clear from the outset of “democratisation” in the late 1970s that, in the poorest countries of Latin America in the grip of cruel, avaricious and racist elites, without social democracy it would be impossible to play “the only game in town” on soil stained in blood.
A different perspective has always been needed which, without ever excusing the excesses of revolutions that went awry, at least considered the motives and passions of the people swept up in them or consumed by them.
Raw data, in short, has never able to capture the flaws of the human condition, its hatreds, follies and cruelty, its atrocious backstories. For that, we need journalism.
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.
The Years of Blood is so called because the book is steeped in the violence and disillusionment of societies in which the utopian dreams of democracy have turned into nightmares in which “transition” has failed to bring meaningful change.
It brings together reports by Guillermoprieto,a brilliant and brave Mexican journalist, written from Latin America in the last 25 years and published in three US magazines.
One of the most celebrated journalists of her era, Guillermoprieto is probably best known for breaking the story of the heinous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981 in which the Salvadoran army slaughtered 900 villagers.
With its spine-chilling and at times bleak insights, The Years of Blood effectively represents the concluding collection of a trilogy that has told of how the fragile hope and optimism of the end of authoritarianism was so often eclipsed by a dark aftermath.
Guillermoprieto steers us with eloquent authority through three regions of her beat—South America, Central America and Mexico.
In Bolivia, she traces the unhappy last days of Evo Morales in a deeply divided society; in Venezuela, she looks at the remarkable life of Hugo Chávez and how he shaped social media populism.
It is amid the endless tragedies of Colombia that Guillermoprieto seems to come into her own, exploring the appalling violence behind the paramilitary massacre at El Salado and its equally astonishing revival—an allegory of what has happened nationally.
She delves into the reality behind the biography published by the murderous Carlos Castaño, the peerless kingpin of Colombia’s rightwing paramilitary death squads.
She explores the causes of the violent protests of 2021 under the very unremarkable President Iván Duque, and violent strains that continue to lurk beneath the surface of a country where bloodshed has for generations been a way of life.
In Nicaragua, Guillermoprieto analyses the creeping corruption of President Daniel Ortega and his weird wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, and the historical circularity of the country’s degeneration that they have come to embody.
She turns her attention to the mara gangs of El Salvador and the complex causes of their proliferation, not least that of US immigration policy bent on deporting undocumented Salvadorans. The dehumanisation of a generation of young people leaves a very bitter taste.
In Mexico, her homeland, Guillermoprieto explores endemic political corruption, the unspeakable crimes against children of priests, the huge risks faced by journalists like herself, and the persistent problem of femicide.
The writer concludes by relating the story behind the disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in Guerrero and the campaign for justice of their parents.
It remains one of Mexico’s most infamous human rights cases and Guillermoprieto’s report offers a sobering prelude to the most fraught issue facing the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum: the collusion of omnipotent drug-trafficking cartels with the police and army.
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course, and the writer has included reports that offer a vaccine to the pessimism by seeking to portray “the great, bubbling-over, defiant life of Latin America”.
She examines the invaluable archive of recipes collected by the English food writer Diana Kennedy, a testament to one of Mexico’s greatest cultural strengths, and explores the beauty beneath Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, a movie “bursting with Mexican life”.
But ultimately Guillermoprieto’s collection is about the bloody legacy of modernity’s failed ambition in the long-suffering continent of Latin America, and in itself something of a scholarly masterpiece for how it applies descriptive prowess to analytical rigour.
The journalist writes: “This book is, then, to a large degree, the story of disillusion and broken futures, an attempt to fix this moment in a continent’s history so that, perhaps, readers will find similarities with their own experience of our time and look for paths away from our present dilemma.
“I wish this book did not have this title. I wish that what humour there is did not bite quite so hard. But I have felt the obligation to observe and describe, for the record, the triumph of violence as a form of political expression and the decline of democracy as an aspiration in this twenty-first century.”
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Categories: Bolivia, Central America, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, North America, South America, United States, Venezuela