Alma Guillermoprieto

In 2018, she won the Premio Princesa de Asturias in Communication and Humanities, Spain's most prestigious award for authors.

In 2004, Guillermoprieto published a memoir, Dancing with Cuba, which revolved on the year she spent living in Cuba in her early twenties. An excerpt from it was published in 2003 in The New Yorker. In the fall of 2008, she joined the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago, as a Tinker Visiting Professor.

A second anthology of articles, Looking for History, was published in 2001, which won a George Polk Award. She also published a collection of articles in Spanish on the Mexican crisis, El año en que no fuimos felices.

In April 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermoprieto taught the inaugural workshop at the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, an institute for promoting journalism that was established by García Márquez in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. She has since held seven workshops for young journalists throughout the continent.

In 1993, she published an article in the New Yorker on Pablo Escobar; this article, "Exit El Patron," was referenced in the Netflix series "Narcos".

Her first book, Samba (1990), was an account of a season studying at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro.

Guillermoprieto won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1985 for research and writing about changes in rural life under the policies of the European Economic Community.

With great hardship and at great personal risk, she was smuggled in by FMLN rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place. When the story broke simultaneously in the Post and Times on January 27, 1982, it was dismissed as propaganda by the Reagan administration.

In the mid-1970s, she started her career as a journalist for The Guardian, moving later to The Washington Post''. In January, 1982, Guillermoprieto, then based in Mexico City, was one of two journalists (the other was Raymond Bonner of The New York Times) who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in which some 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Salvadoran army in December, 1981.

Guillermoprieto was born and grew up in Mexico City. In her teens, she moved to New York City with her mother and she studied modern dance for several years. From 1962 to 1973, she was a professional dancer.

Alma Guillermoprieto (born May 27th, 1949) is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.