"Since Alma Guillermoprieto became The New Yorker's Latin American correspondent a decade ago, she has emerged as the most informed and admired writer on her part of the world. In these superb pieces of reportage and analysis she anatomizes a region we are intimately linked with yet sadly ignorant of. She writes in depth about three countries that are in deep difficulty." "Cuba, to which she returned after many years - a place in an exhausting holding pattern, waiting for Castro's departure yet anxious about what may replace him. Colombia, in which she has spent several years and which is fatally splintered among the government, the left-wing guerrillas who control large sections of the country, thanks in part to money from the drug trade, and the right-wing paramilitaries. Mexico, where she lives, which has been beset by the uprising in Chiapas (where she encounters the legendary masked leader, Marcos) and by the corruption of the government, yet is emerging for the first time into some kind of real democracy." "Finally, she gives us the stories of Eva Peron - and so of Argentina; Che Guevara - and so of the aborted Marxist revolution in Latin America; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist who in 1990 lost the battle of the presidency to Alberto Fujimori." "Looking for History is personal reportage that is infused with the author's unique understanding of a world that she is a part of, but that she can also stand apart from and sympathetically observe."--Jacket.

Eva Peron (Little Eva) -- Colombia (Our new war in Colombia -- Violence without end? -- The children's war) -- Ernesto "Che" Guevara (The harsh angel) -- Cuba (A visit to Havana -- Love and misery in Cuba -- Fidel in the evening) -- Mario Vargas Llosa (The bitter education of Vargas Llosa) -- Mexico (Losing the future -- Zapata's heirs -- The unmasking -- The only way to win? -- Whodunnit? -- The riddle of Raul -- The peso -- Elections 2000).

Eva Perón, 2. -- Colombia, 18. -- Ernesto Che Guevara, 72. -- Cuba, 87. -- Mario Vargas Llosa, 154. -- México, 178