For forty years and more Alma Guillermoprieto has wandered tirelessly over the Latin Americas, interviewing assassins and the families of their victims, talking to street sweepers and artists, rowdy carnival makers and thoughtful politicians (and plenty of rowdy politicians as well). Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in different contexts, like the effects of The War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions and the experiences of people mixed up in the fray of violence and drug trafficking. At the same time, she shows how Latin American art translates nostalgia and pain into great beauty. In The Years of Blood, the third volume of her collected stories, she completes her complex and always compelling portrait of the Latin America of our times, in all its tragedy and glory, as it traverses a new era of populism and demagoguery, and tries, yet again, to answer the great unsolved question: How do we change? How do we change our future so that it does not so exhaustingly resemble our past?

Alma Guillermoprieto’s reports from the field have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic magazine. Among many other distinctions, she has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Princess of Asturias Humanities Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a laureate of the George Polk Awards in Journalism.

“No writer captures the joy and the pain of life in Latin America like Alma Guillermoprieto. This collection goes far beyond the usual headlines to explore the deeper currents shaping the human experiences of everyone who lives in our hemisphere.”
-- Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

Introduction. A Reporting Life in Latin America  1
Part I. South America
1. Bolivia’s Tarnished Savior  13
2. In the Wrestling Rings of Bolivia  23
3. Don’t Cry for me, Venezuela  29
4. Confrontation in Colombia  43
5. Colombia’s Healing Begins  53
6. Confessions of a Killer  63
7. Claudia Andujar: Witness to Yanomami’s Last Struggle  75
Part II. Central America
8. Nicaragua’s Dreadful Duumvirate  85
9. Death Comes for the Archbishop  97
10. In the New Gangland of El Salvador  105
Part III.
11. “The Morning Quickie”  119
12. The Mission of Father Maciel  133
13. Troubled Spirits  141
14. Risking Life for Truth  149
15. A Voice against the Darkness  159
16. Making the Dogs Dance  163
17. A Lost World on the Map  169
18. The High Art of the Tamale  181
19. The Twisting Nature of Love: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma  189
20. Forty-Three Students Went Missing: What Really Happened to Them?  215
Acknowledgments  241