Born in Mexico City in 1949, Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her entire career in the United States. She moved to New York in her teens to live with her mother. Trained as a dancer, she travelled to Havana in 1969 to teach dance classes and it was there where, in 1978, she first began to work as a freelance journalist. She started her career as Central American reporter for The Guardian newspaper, moving later to The Washington Post, where she was a staff writer in the 1980s. After a period as South America bureau chief for Newsweek, she decided to continue her career as a freelance writer. Since 1989, she has written about Latin America for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as for several publications in Spanish.

In 1995, Gabriel García Márquez invited her to give the inaugural workshop of the Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism (Spanish acronym, FNPI), since which she has held workshops for young journalists. She has been visiting professor at the Universities of Harvard, Chicago, California in Berkeley and Princeton, among others. She is a faculty member of the FNPI and serves on the Advisory Board of the Latin American Program of the Open Society Foundations, founded by the tycoon George Soros. In a career now spanning almost forty years, Alma Guillermoprieto has managed to convey the complex reality of this region through her chronicles and books on politics and culture in Latin America, especially to the English-speaking public, achieving international recognition. Her narrative journalism is written “with deep knowledge and exquisite detail”.

She began her career covering the Nicaraguan insurrection in the 70s for The Guardian. It was in 1982 when she came to the fore as one of the two journalists who broke the story, in The Washington Post, of the slaughter of civilians in El Mozote (El Salvador) by the Salvadoran Army. Official channels finally admitted the massacre, the details of which were corroborated many years later when the mass graves were unearthed. Among other topics, she has written about the Shining Path in Peru, State terrorism in Argentina, civil conflict and drug trafficking in Colombia and the drug wars in Mexico.