Across more than four decades, Alma Guillermoprieto has reported from Latin America’s wars, revolutions, dictatorships, insurgencies and failed democratic promises.

The Years of Blood gathers work on Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, moving between massacres and elections, guerrilla movements and criminal economies, political spectacle and the ordinary lives caught underneath them. It is not a neutral survey of the region, nor does Guillermoprieto pretend that journalism can float cleanly above history. 

Guillermoprieto understands ideology and state power, but she is equally attentive to posture, clothing, jokes, fear, boredom, vanity and the strange theatre through which authority makes itself believable. The collection includes her reporting on the El Mozote massacre, Colombian guerrilla warfare, the Sandinistas and their aftermath, the Mexican drug economy, and Venezuela’s collapse under Nicolás Maduro. Read together, the pieces form a history not only of bloodshed but of disappointed futures: liberation movements that become governments, governments that become rackets, and populations repeatedly asked to survive somebody else’s grand design.

This is political writing with literary intelligence but none of literary journalism’s usual self-regarding perfume. For readers of Ryszard Kapuściński, Svetlana Alexievich, Jon Lee Anderson or the best long-form work of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Duke University Press first edition, 2025. Paperback in near-fine condition with minimal handling wear; internally clean.