Alma Guillermo Prieto is a journalist who is widely considered an authority on the politics and cultural life of Mexico and South America. Born in Mexico, raised in Mexico and in the U.S., Guillermoprieto was a professional dancer and a member of the National Ballet Company of Mexico prior to beginning her journalistic career in 1978. Guillermo Prieto has worked both as a staff reporter for many newspapers and as a freelance journalist for the Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and the Washington Post. In 1981, she reported on the massacre at the village of El Mozote in northern El Salvador. Journeying into rebel held territory, she was witness to the aftermath of the murder of 900 citizens at the hands of an American trained battalion, a horrific event denied by the Reagan administration. The official story was that it never happened but cables of the time, reveal the administration had knowledge of the massacre. It was not until 1995, the facts that upheld her reporting finally came to light. The El Mozote Massacre is considered one of the worst atrocities carried out on civilians in the 20th Century. As a freelance writer, Guillermoprieto has also covered the Colombian civil war, the Shining Path rebel movement in Peru, the aftermath of the “Dirty War” in Argentina, and post-Sandinista Nicaragua. She is the author of the books Samba (1990) about the year she spent with carnival-makers in Rio, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now (1994), Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (2001), and Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (2004) documenting the six months she spent teaching dance in Cuba in the 1970s. Guillermo Prieto is a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. A former South American Bureau Chief for Newsweek, she is fluent in English and Spanish. Her mission is to inform and lend perspective on the pressing issues from Latin America as they impact the United States and her work is widely read in both Spanish and English

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