Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto (born May 27, 1949 in Mexico City ) is a Mexican journalist who reports extensively on Latin America for the British and American press . Her articles are also widely used in the Spanish-speaking world. She is considered one of the most astute rapporteurs on Latin America. Their political analyzes are characterized by their own sensitivity to history and culture, and by Guillermoprieto's ability to shed light on dilemmas on a larger scale by means of pointed details.

Life

Guillermoprieto was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood there. As a teenager she moved to New York with her mother . There she studied modern dance for several years and worked as a professional dancer from 1962 to 1973. She began her career as a journalist for the Guardian in the mid-1970s , and later moved to the Washington Post . In January 1982, Guillermoprieto, who now lives in Mexico City, and Raymond Bonner ( The New York Times ) uncovered the El Mozote massacre : in December 1981, 900 civilians were murdered by soldiers of the Salvadoran Army . With great effort and at high personal risk, Guillermoprieto managed to visit the scene about a month after the massacre through the mediation of rebels of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN).

When the report was published simultaneously in the Post and the Times on January 27, 1982 , the Reagan administration dismissed it as simply propaganda. As a result, however, a number of details of what happened, as first reported by Guillermoprieto and Bonner, could be verified.

For much of the following ten years, Guillermoprieto was the head of Newsweek's South America section .

In 2001 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . For 2018 she was awarded a Princess of Asturias Prize .

reception

In Samba (1990), her first book, Guillermoprieto reports on her time in Manguiera, a favela near Rio de Janeiro, famous for its samba school . During the 1990s Guillermoprieto found her calling as a freelance journalist. She wrote long, extensively researched articles on Latin American culture and politics for the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books , including outstanding work on the Colombian civil war, the Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path") at the time of the internal political conflict in Peru Consequences of the " dirty war " in Argentina and post-Sandinista Nicaragua. These articles are bundled in the volume The Heart That Bleeds (1994), which is now regarded as a classic portrait of the politics and culture of Latin America during the "lost decade" (in Spanish the book was published under the title Al pie de un volcán te escribo - Crónicas latinoamericanas , 1995). At the request of Gabriel García Márquez , Guillermoprieto led the opening workshop in April 1995 at the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, an institute founded by Márquez in Cartagena de Indias , Colombia , to promote journalism. To this day, she continues to offer such workshops for young journalists. In 1995 she also received a MacArthur Foundation scholarship .

A second anthology of Guillermoprieto's articles, Looking for History , was published in 2001. She also published a collection of Spanish texts on the Mexican crisis, El año en que no fuimos felices .

In 2004 Guillermoprieto published the memory book Dancing with Cuba . In this autobiographical book, she reports on the months she spent in 1970 as a modern dance teacher at the Escuela de Danza Moderna in Havana. An excerpt from it was printed in the New Yorker in 2003 . During 2008, she joined the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago as a temporary visiting professor .

Works

Monographs

• Havana in the mirror. A memory of the revolution (“Habana en un espejo”). Berenberg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937834-33-7 .
• Samba . Knopf Books, New York 1990, ISBN 0-394-57189-4 .
• The heart that bleeds. Latin America now ("Al pie de un volcán te escribo"). Vintage Books, New York 1994, ISBN 0-679-75795-3 .
• Looking for history. Dispatches from Latin America . Pantheon Books, New 2001, ISBN 0-375-42094-0 .
• Dancing with Cuba. A memoir of the revolution . Pantheon Books, New York 2004, ISBN 0-375-42093-2 .
• Las guerras en Colombia. Tres ensayos . Aguilar, Bogota 2000, ISBN 958-704-635-8 .
• Los ãnos en que fuimos felices. Crónicas de la transición mexicana . Plaza & Janés, Mexico City 1999, ISBN 968-11-0412-9 .

Essays

• Mexico City 1992 . In: Gilbert M. Joseph, Timothy J. Henderson (Eds.): The Mexico Reader. History, culture, politics . 3. Edition. University Press, Durham, NC 2002, ISBN 0-8223-3042-3 , pp. 41-52.
• Medellin 1991 . In: Carlos A. Aguirre, Robert Buffington (Eds.): Reconstructing criminality in Latin America. (Jaguar Books on Latin America; Vol. 19). Rowman & Littlefield, Wilmington, Del. 2000, ISBN 0-8420-2621-5 , pp. 219-240.
• Garbage . In: Rubén Gallo (Ed.): The Mexico Reader. (The Americas). University Press, Madison, Wisc. 2004, ISBN 0-299-19714-X , pp. 291-308.
• Ciudad de Mexico, 1949 . In: Lolita Bosch (Ed.): Hecho en México (Literatura Mondadori; Vol. 340). Mondadori, Barcelona 2007, ISBN 978-84-397-2082-9 , pp. 89-92.
• Ciudad de Mexico, 1992 . In: Lolita Bosch (Ed.): Hecho en México (Literatura Mondadori; Vol. 340). Mondadori, Barcelona 2007, ISBN 978-84-397-2082-9 , pp. 93-116.

literature

• The New York Review of Books : Guillermoprieto article archive.
• Esther Allen: Alma Guillermoprieto. In: BOMB. Conversations with artists, writers, actors, directors, musicians , Vol. 87 (2004), ISSN  0743-3204 .
• Kenneth Maxwell: Dancing with Cuba. A Memoir of the Revolution. In: Foreign Affairs , 2004, Issue 1, ISSN  0015-7120 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ K. Maxwell: Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution. In: Foreign affairs. Jan. / Feb. 2004.
2. ^ Book of Members. Retrieved July 26, 2016 . 
3. ↑ s. a. Grêmio Recreativo Escola de Samba Estação Primeira de Mangueira
4. ↑ s. a. Armed conflict in Colombia
5. ^ The New York Review of Books: Guillermoprieto article archive .
6. ↑ These three essays first appeared in 2000 in The New Yorker magazine
7. ^ First published on April 22, 1991 in The New Yorker magazine . published.