Raymond Bonner is an American author and investigative reporter who has been a staff writer at the New York Times, The New Yorker and has contributed to The New York Review of Books. His latest book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, was published by Knopf in February 2012.
Early life
Bonner graduated from MacMurray College in Illinois, in 1964, where he majored in Political Science. He lettered in soccer, track and cross country. He earned a J.D. degree from Stanford University Law School in 1967. In 1968 he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, and was honorably discharged with the rank of captain in 1971. Before taking up journalism, Bonner worked as a staff attorney with Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group, as the director of the West Coast office of Consumers Union, and as director of the consumer fraud/white collar crime unit of the San Francisco District Attorney's office.
Bonner is best known as one of two journalists who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, in which some 900 villagers, mostly women, children and elderly, at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Atlacatl Battalion, a unit of the Salvadoran army in December 1981. A New York Timesstaff reporter at the time, Bonner was smuggled by Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place. When the Post and Times simultaneously broke the story on January 27, 1982, the US government and its allies at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal dismissed its central claims as exaggerations. This whitewashing effort was initiated because Bonner's report seriously undermined efforts by the Reagan administration to bolster the human rights image of the right-wing Salvadoran regime, which the US government was supporting with large amounts of military aid in an effort to destroy the FMLN. The Atlacatl Battalion that perpetrated the massacre was an elite Salvadoran army unit that had been trained in the US at US military bases, and armed and directed by US military advisors operating in El Salvador. This was part of a larger US effort to conceal from the public the human rights abuses of the Salvadoran regime and its role in supporting it. As a result of the controversy, escalated by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times removed Bonner from covering El Salvador and assigned him to the financial desk, and he eventually resigned. Also as a result of the controversy, according to journalists like Anthony Lewis and Michael Massing writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, "other newspapers worried about looking soft on Communism and toned down their reporting from El Salvador." A forensic investigation of the massacre site years later confirmed the accuracy of his reporting.
Later work as journalist
Starting years later, Bonner has written on contract for the New York Times, covering the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnian War, and the two terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia. He was also a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1988 to 1992, writing from Peru, Sudan, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Kurdistan. From 1988 to 2007, Bonner lived in Nairobi and then Warsaw, Vienna, and Jakarta. Since 2007, he has written book reviews, principally about international security, for The New York Times, The Economist, The Australian, The National Interest and The Guardian.
In 2008 the Washington Post reported that Bonner had been one of the four journalists whose telephone call records had been illegally obtained by the FBI between 2002 and 2006. During that time Bonner had been based in Jakarta, Indonesia, filing reports on detainee abuse and illegal surveillance.
Pro bono work
Bonner is the co-founder of OneJustice, an organization that expands the availability of legal services for Californians in need through innovative partnerships with nonprofits, law schools, and the private sector.
Personal life
Bonner currently lives in New York. He is married to Jane Perlez, who is also a New York Times journalist.
Awards
Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1985, for "Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador".
Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, 1996, by the Nieman Foundation Fellows. The citation reads, "In his work in Central America, the Philippines, Central Europe and Africa, Bonner has demonstrated a passionate, principled journalism."
