Sarah Esther Maslin is an independent journalist who has worked across Latin America. 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, based in São Paulo, and before that was based in San Salvador and Buenos Aires. Her reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, VICE Magazine, 1843, Columbia Journalism Review, Buzzfeed, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and other publications. She has appeared in broadcasts, podcasts, and films for NPR, PBS, BBC, CNN, WYNC, Vox, ABC, LBC and other outlets.

She is the recipient of an American Society of Magazine Editors NEXT award for journalists younger than 30, a Mirror Award for media reporting, a Fetisov Journalism Award for Environmental Reporting, an MHP Gold Award for Foreign Reporting, and a spot on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. One of her stories was included in the “Little Norton Reader: 50 Essays from the First Fifty Years.”

She is currently a 2024 New America ASU Future Security fellow and a writer-in-residence at MacDowell. She was a 2023 Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a member of the first class of residents at the Carey Logan Nonfiction Fellowship in 2015-2016, and a 2016 recipient of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

She graduated from Yale University with a degree in history. When not working, she can be found hanging off a cliff in a harness and rock climbing shoes.