Raymond Bonner (born 1942) has been an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. He has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker and contributed to The New York Review of Books.
Bonner graduated from MacMurray College and 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 a director for the West Coast office of the 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 (the other was Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post) who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, in which some 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Salvadoran army in December 1981. A Times staff reporter at the time, Bonner was smuggled by FMLN rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place.
When the story broke simultaneously in the Post and Times on January 27, 1982, it was dismissed as propaganda by the Reagan administration, as it seriously undermined efforts by the US government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid.
The Times was strongly criticized by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, by Accuracy In Media and by the Reagan government for reporting the story of the massacre. The Times was pressured to pull Bonner from the Central American Desk. The then managing editor Abe Rosenthal moved Bonner to the Business Desk and Bonner resigned soon afterward. He continued to contribute as a freelance correspondent and returned to the staff of the Times in 1992 after details of the massacre were verified when a United Nations forensic team excavated the site and found hundreds of skeletons, including many tiny ones, and the reality of the El Mozote massacre was confirmed.
He has since written on contract for the New York Times, covering the Rwanda genocide, Bosnia, and the two terrorist bombings in Bali. He was also a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1988—1992, writing from Peru, Sudan, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Kurdistan. From 1988 until 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 it emerged, in an article in the Washington Post, that Bonner had been one of 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, filing reports on detainee abuse and illegal surveillance.
Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1985, for "Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador".
Overseas Press Club Award, 1994, for coverage of Rwanda.
Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, by the Nieman Foundation Fellows, in 1996. “In his work in Central America, the Philippines, Central Europe and Africa, Bonner has demonstrated a passionate, principled journalism,” the citation reads.
He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by The New York Times in 2001, along with Sara Rimer, for their coverage of the death penalty.
Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador. New York: Times Books, 1984. ISBN 0812911083 ISBN 978-0812911084 (Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award)
Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy. New York: Times Books, 1987. ISBN 0812913264 ISBN 978-0812913262 (winner of Overseas Press Club, and Sidney Hillman Foundation awards for best book on foreign affairs)
At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife. New York: Knopf, 1993. ISBN 0679400087 ISBN 978-0679400080 [1], [2]
