Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins is an American journalist and author who has become highly respected for his work in covering international events. A graduate of Harvard University, Bevins has built a career writing about global issues, having contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He is most well-known for writing his first book, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, which was published in 2020.

Bevins spent the majority of his childhood growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, before going on to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated with a degree in Government, after which he later obtained a Master’s degree in International Affairs from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003.

At the start of his career in journalism, Bevins began working at The Washington Post as a Latin America correspondent, before relocating to Latin America and becoming a bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. From here, he went on to become the Latin American correspondent for The Guardian.

In 2008, Bevins moved away from journalism and became a communications manager for the Organization of American States in Washington D.C., with his role focusing on promoting democracy and human rights across Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. After nine years of working with the organization, he took the opportunity to move back to Brazil, where he began working for the Associated Press, covering the country’s political and economic issues.

It was during this time that Bevins began working on The Jakarta Method – a book detailing the history of the U.S. campaign against global communism throughout the cold war. The book draws from over 100 interviews from multiple countries and documents events from as far back as the 1940s.

The Jakarta Method is praised for shedding light on this previously overlooked period in history, as well as for being “a formidable piece of investigative journalism”. It details the various US-backed regimes and violent counterinsurgency campaigns that took place, and the impact those actions had on both the people they targeted and the countries they were carried out in.

In addition to The Jakarta Method, Bevins has also written or contributed to numerous other books and articles. His other works include The Other Side of Fear, a memoir describing his family’s journey amidst the political turmoil of the late 1970s in Brazil, and The Daily Beast’s The Most Dangerous Series, a series of articles portraying the stories of people who escaped gang violence and repression in Central America.

Vincent Bevins’ ability to write genuine, thought-provoking stories is undeniable, and his work has certainly made the world a more informed place. He has proved himself to be an excellent author, and an important contributor to the understanding of current international events.