Credits: “Alma Guillermoprieto 2018” NotimexTV, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Introduction
Born in Mexico City, Alma Guillermoprieto first worked as a journalist for the Guardian reporting on the Nicaraguan Revolution before switching to the Washington Post in 1981. Like Bonner, Guillermoprieto traveled to the village of El Mozote after receiving an invitation from the FLMN. Guillermoprieto arrived in El Salvador around a month after the massacre had occurred. In her article, Guillermoprieto describes what she observed as she traveled through the town of El Mozote and the surrounding communities. Guillermoprieto provides a statement from the US Ambassador to El Salvador Ernesto Rivas Gallant in which he “rejects” the allegations that the Salvadoran Army had killed civilians. To show the other perspective, Guillermoprieto also includes survivor Rufina Amaya’s retelling of the alleged massacre. Like Bonner, Guillermoprieto makes a conscious effort to remain unbiased with her writing by repeatedly using the word “alleged” when describing the massacre. Guillermoprieto ends her article with a reminder that President Ronald Reagan will be making a statement about the Salvadoran Army’s progress towards respecting human rights the following day.
The US government had the same reaction to both Guillermoprieto’s and Bonner’s articles: explicitly denying that a massacre had occurred and categorizing the articles as leftist propaganda. Government-allied newspapers like the Wall Street Journal wrote counter articles that criticized Guillermoprieto for blindly believing the stories of civilians without gathering sufficient evidence. Additionally, some articles accused Guillermoprieto of supporting the FLMN coalition while others went even further by suggesting that Guillermoprieto sympathized with the Communist movement. While she was not reassigned like Bonner, Guillermoprieto still felt the pressure of writing about US involvement in El Salvador during the Reagan administration. Eventually, investigations conducted after the civil war proved that Guillermoprieto and Bonner were correct in their claim that a massacre had occurred in El Mozote.
Source Excerpt:
“Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres.
Reporters taken to tour the region and speak to the survivors by guerrilla soldiers, who control large areas of Morazan Province, were shown the rubble of scores of adobe houses they and the survivors said were destroyed by the troops in the now deserted village community. Dozens of decomposing bodies still were seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident.”
Link to Alma Guillermoprieto’s full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/27/salvadoran-peasants-describe-mass-killing/bc5bb029-b5e6-4282-bd24-35739ea5b38c/
Guillermoprieto, Alma. “Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing”. Washington Post. Jan. 27, 1982.