The Years of Blood

“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

"For decades now, Alma Guillermoprieto has been an indispensable guide to a region that US opinion makers stubbornly continue to ignore. The Years of Blood is Guillermoprieto at her most intense and nuanced, offering humane portraits set in turbulent landscapes, some of ordinary people trying to survive, others of people with extraordinary power who believe they control the turbulence. An indispensable window into a region that, even as it remains itself, is changing with breakneck speed." - Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth

"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." - Gavin O'Toole, Latin American Review of Books

"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, Revista

"Reading [The Years of Blood] feels . . . like . . . seeing our way through complicated, fascinating, human murk."

"Guillermoprieto's latest book, The Years of Blood, belongs in every library for its chronicle of Latin America in turmoil and the textures of daily life." - Jason Berry, National Catholic Reporter

"Guillermoprieto is a stylist who knows how to tell a tale, and these portraits are as evocative as they are informative. ... [She] takes the techniques of the journalist—interviews and storytelling—to new heights in 21 portraits of the region over the past two decades." - Fabrice Lehoucq, E.I.A.L.