Alma Guillermoprieto

Thursday March 20, 2014 — 7:00pm

CAS Gallery/Wesley Foundation
1210 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146

Alma Guillermoprieto has been investigating and writing for many years about the drug wars in Latin America for the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. She will discuss how the billions of dollars spent on the "War on Drugs" has paradoxically led to an expansion of the drug trade, and how the drug culture has infiltrated social structures and institutions throughout Latin America.

Guillermoprieto will also discuss the building of an online altar like those built for Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican day of remembrance for the dead, to honor the memory of 72 migrant workers from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, who had been heading north to the United States through Mexico, along a stretch of railroad known as la bestia — the beast. 

“If you want to understand what’s happened in Latin America over the last 30 years, if you want to feel what it was like or see what it has to do 
with you, you simply have to read Alma Guillermoprieto... She is an original voice whose place is secure in a tradition of journalism from Crane to Orwell to Agee and Halberstam.” 
—Philip Bennett, Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy and Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, 
Duke University; former Managing Editor, The Washington Post

Alma Guillermoprieto is a highly acclaimed Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press, and whose work has also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world. After a career as a professional dancer, she turned to journalism, working for The Guardian and The Washington Post; she also was South America bureau chief for Newsweek.

Guillermoprieto's articles for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books were collected in The Heart that Bleeds (1994), now considered a classic on Latin American politics and culture during the "lost decade," and in Looking for History (2001), which received the George Polk Award. She is also the author of Samba (1990) and Dancing with Cuba (2004). Guillermoprieto has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and has been Tinker Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago.

Open to the Public 
Free of Charge

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