Sarah Esther Maslin, ASU Future Security Fellow, is an independent journalist who has worked across Latin America and is currently based in São Paulo, Brazil. She has spent nearly a decade reporting in El Mozote, El Salvador, a village where U.S.-trained soldiers killed over 800 civilians in a massacre in 1981. She is writing a book, to be published by Spiegel & Grau, about the long aftermath of the massacre and the impact of violence, trauma, and impunity on a community and a country.
From 2018 to 2023, she was the Economist’s Brazil correspondent and before that was based in San Salvador. Her reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Nation, and other publications. She is the recipient of an American Society of Magazine Editors award for journalists younger than 30, a Mirror Award for media reporting, and an Ochberg fellowship from Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in history.
Selected Work
- The Salvadoran Town That Can’t Forget: A story for the Nation about how exhumations three decades after the El Mozote massacre brought both hope and challenges to survivors.
- A Grim Discovery in El Mozote: The story of one El Mozote resident, in his own words, pieced together from interviews. A New York Times Magazine “Lives” column.
- Worldwide Covid-19 is Causing a New Form of Collective Trauma: An article in the Economist from August 2020 about how communities from six countries were coping with the emotional toll of COVID-19 and what to expect as the pandemic continued.
- How an Innocent Man Wound Up Dead in El Salvador’s Justice System: An investigative article for the Washington Post that reveals how systemic impunity affects victims of past and present violence.
- A Light in the Underworld: A profile for the Columbia Journalism Review of a group of Salvadoran journalists struggling to cover violence in a society where most people believe the only solution is more violence.