Penny Lernoux

Penny Lernoux (January 6, 1940 – October 9, 1989) was an American journalist and author.

Lernoux was born into a comfortable Roman Catholic family in California and excelled in school. She enrolled in the University of Southern California in the late 1950s and, after being nominated to Phi Beta Kappa, qualified as a journalist for the United States Information Agency (USIA), a government arm devoted to promoting U.S. policy overseas.

Lernoux began working in Latin America in 1961, just before the Second Vatican Council. She worked in Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá for the USIA until 1964 and then moved to Caracas to write for Copley News Service, to which she remained bound by contract until 1967.

By this time, Lernoux had grown aware of extreme contrasts between the wealth of Latin American politicians, businessmen and landlords, on the one hand, and the poverty of the region's masses, on the other. She adopted a radical view of Jesus Christ and tried to relate his teachings to Latin American struggles against economic exploitation and military dictatorship. As she became a freelance writer, Lernoux gravitated toward new Latin American expressions of Catholicism, notably base communities and liberation theology.

Lernoux attracted major attention from her first book Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America, published in 1977. The book outlined her discoveries about Latin American history and extreme social inequality. Cry of the People won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Book Award in its third (1982) edition. At that time, Lernoux joined the National Catholic Reporter as a Latin American correspondent. And she continued freelance reporting, most notably for The Nation.

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