Reporting on El Salvador Bonner is best known as one of two journalists (the other being
Alma Guillermoprieto of
The Washington Post) 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
Atlácatl Battalion, a unit of the Salvadoran army in December 1981. A
New York Times staff reporter at the time, Bonner was smuggled by Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (
FMLN) 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. Bonner revisited El Mozote in 20, the subject of a documentary with RetroReport and Frontline.
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. He has also been a regular contributor to ProPublica and the atlantic.com In 2018, Bonner purchased Bookoccino, a bookstore in Avalon Beach, Australia, which was on the verge of closing. He was joined in the venture by Sally Tabner, a local bibliophile and previous store employee. Under their ownership, Bookoccino has become a favourite coffee shop for the community, and drawing international lovers of books and ideas. Its events have become legendary, attracting some of the biggest names in literature, politics, and journalism, along with local and international writers, journalists, actors, artists and intellectuals including Geoffrey Robertson, Richard Flanagan, Geraldine Brooks, Lionel Shriver, Julia Baird, Richard Fidler; Ben Quilty, Leigh Sales, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Jill Abramson, David Sange, Kathy Lette, Kate Legge, Samantha Power, Richard McGregor, Hugh White, Bryan Brown and many others.
Illegal surveillance by FBI 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==