Alma Guillermoprieto: “We are on the edge of a precipice. I don’t know whether we will fall”

Alma Guillermoprieto opens her latest collection of chronicles with the impact of a story she never managed to publish. In November 1988, while living in Bogotá, she heard that 46 people had been killed in the massacre in Segovia, a small town in Antioquia, in just an hour and a half.

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Horrified and fascinated by the news.

She travelled to Segovia months later, heard the name Fidel Castaño for the first time, spoke with frightened residents and tried to write a report for The New Yorker. She never delivered the piece. But the experience helped her understand what she now describes in This Improbable Promised Land: Stories of Latin America in This Century. Segovia, she writes, became one thread in the story of how drug trafficking weakened democracies and filled the continent with dead.

Guillermoprieto discussed the book on Saturday at Querétaro’s Teatro de la Ciudad, in conversation with Javier Lafuente, deputy director of EL PAÍS América. At 76, she shared anecdotes from 44 years of walking through Latin America and its stories, describing her life as “long and complicated, benevolent and lucky: very rich”.

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Long and complicated, benevolent and lucky: very rich.

Her career began in an unexpected place. She had gone to Cuba to teach contemporary dance before becoming a reporter in Nicaragua, carried along by the excitement of the Sandinista revolution. Writing for The Guardian at four cents a word, she recalled, “I was 28, I knew nothing, I was extremely naive and I fell in love with everything. It was impossible to see a flaw.” The violence in El Salvador, where she was among the first reporters to publish on the El Mozote massacre, damaged some of that innocence. Later, meeting her first reader by chance on a London bus made her realise that she was writing for people, not for the revolution.

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I was 28, I knew nothing, I was extremely naive and I fell in love with everything. It was impossible to see a flaw.