Air Date: 8-12-2026

Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

Democracy Now!

Ring of Fire

Patrick Boyle

The World

and Al Jazeera English

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, VENEZUELA - THE MONEY, THE OIL, THE RUINS

Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

And Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

And now, on to the show.

the US-led coup on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resurfaced the historical echoes of decades of US intervention in the region.

The US State Department posting a message online saying, quote, "This is our hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened," unquote. The comment followed remarks by President Trump, who referenced the Monroe Doctrine, a credo enacted by US President James Monroe in 19 tw- in 1823 that's been repeatedly invoked by US presidents in order to justify US political and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean through much of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This is President Trump

and the Mo- Monroe Doctrine is a, a big deal. But we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot They now call it the Donroe Doctrine. I don't know. It's, Monroe Doctrine. We forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don't forget about it anymore.

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. 

Leftist governments across Latin America swiftly condemned the US military attack on Venezuela and Maduro's abduction. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Monday he would, quote, "Take up arms for his country if necessary" in response to Trump's threats against Colombia.

Petro also said in a statement, quote, "Come get me, I'm waiting for you here," unquote, as Trump specifically targeted Petro, claiming without evidence Petro's involvement in cocaine trafficking. Trump has also threatened military action against Cuba and Mexico. This is Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Mexico's position against any form of intervention is firm, clear, and historic. Following recent events in Venezuela, where the United States government carried out a direct intervention that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as well as the loss of human lives, Mexico reaffirms a principle that is not new and admits no ambiguities.

We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Latin America's history is clear and compelling. Intervention has never brought democracy, never generated wellbeing or lasting stability. Only the people themselves can build their own future, decide their path, exercise sovereignty over their natural resources, and freely define their form of government.

Our position is clearly enshrined in the Constitution of the United Mexican States. 

That was the Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. For more, we go to Phoenix, Arizona, where we're joined by Alexander Aviña, associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, who's extensively researched and written about capitalism, the US-backed war on drugs, and state violence.

Author of the award-winning book, S- Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside. So if you can talk, Professor Aviña, about what this attack on Venezuela means for Latin America, what some are calling the, re-hemisphering, of Latin America 

Good morning, Amy. yeah, I think this is, I...

In co- contrary to what Trump was saying, the Monroe Doctrine has never quite been forgotten by the United States. It's just the methods of enforcing it or implementing it in the region have varied across presidential administrations a- and across political parties. I think it, it bears to keep in mind that, US empire in Latin America is a bipartisan project that involved both Republican and Democratic parties.

Just thinking about how President Obama is the one who labeled Venezuela nat- a threat to US national security back in 2015 is one pertinent example. So I think what we're witnessing now is just a quite visible and unabashed assertment, assertion of US power over Latin America. Now, that's one way to read it.

The other way to read, this move, and particularly in light of the national security strategy, it's also, it's a moment to read it, is a moment of US weakness, right? They've- they're basically conceding other parts of the world to peer rivals. They've more or less accepted that they cannot compete frontally with China, for example, in Asia.

So as has happened in the past when the US has forced resistance or defeat elsewhere in the world, they come back, quote-unquote, "home" to the Western Hemisphere, and they use Latin America as an imperial laboratory, as they have since almost the founding of the United States. and it's... So the US has long served as, as, as historians like Greg Grandin have written about, as, as a workshop of empire where the US gets to refine its imperialist tactics abroad, but they also use those moments to try to create internal domestic political hegemony depending on which political party or which political coalition is in the ascendancy.

The moment, the difference now, I think, is that it's, again, to reiterate, this is a US, a moment of US weakness internationally, but I think also for the Trump coalition is a moment of weakness internally. one way, I think the way I read this is a... if you have to continually have to say that you're strong and you're powerful and that you own the Americas constantly online through different images, through different, public appearances, in a way that's a, that's a weakness, right?

The fact that you have to continuously assert how powerful you are. so that's one way to read it. 

Talk about the Monroe Doctrine, what most people, certainly don't understand going back to the early 1800s 

So the Monroe Doctrine is famously, ha- contains multiple meanings. it depends on who's reading it at what moment in time, et cetera.

But initially, this was not a law, right? It was a promulgation of President James Monroe that asserted that Latin America, or the Americas, was to remain a place strictly for Americans, broadly defined, of the region, and it was an, a sort of a anti-colonial statement against European rival powers in the context of Latin American independence wars.

And initially, Latin American independence leaders, like Simón Bolívar, saw this as a positive. They fi- they figured that the United States was going to be an ally in their efforts to overthrow colonial rule. but even someone like Bolívar really quickly learned that the United States was not gonna play that role, and that it was going to just resume the imperialist control over the region that had previously been taken up by European powers.

The other, it, the other important moment in this history is when, with President Theodore Roosevelt invoked his own Roosevelt Corollary in the late 18- or the early, early 20th century, when he essentially made, the United States an international police power over the Americas. and it justified a constant US military intervention in the region using the justification of, the justification that any, quote, unquote, "loosening of ties of civilization" in Latin America would then trigger some sort of US police response in the form of, US Marines invading, Latin American countries to the tune of about 34 between 1900 to 1934.

and then Trump comes in, and he's ... First, he talked about a Trump Corollary, and now he's taken over the entire Monroe Doctrine to call it the Donroe Doctrine. And again, as, as your previous guest was saying, it's difficult to assign some sort of serious ideological coherence to whatever Trump says.

But the, I do see that this is an effort to coalesce a really fractious internal political coalition within his party, within the United States, at the same time that it's witn- that it's wielding, illegal, violent actions against sovereign Latin American nations like Venezuela. 

to enact land reform, against Allende, who died in the palace on another September 11th, 1973, as the US-backed Pinochet forces rose to power.

Do you see this as an extension of this, as we wrap up? 

Yeah, I do. and again, it's just part of this long history of constant US intervention in the region to prevent and not tolerate Latin American assertions of sovereignty and self-determination. Those two examples are also good to highlight that it doesn't matter what type of Latin American leader is in power and how they achieve that power, in the end, if they are deemed intolerable or a- antithetical to US imperial designs, they are going to be overthrown or destabilized by the United States.

You could have St. Francis as the president, and he will still be overthrown by the United States if a president of this country deems that leader to be a threat or an obstacle to US imperial designs in what they have long characterized as, quote-unquote, "Our hemisphere, our backyard." So this is just one more action.

The, the one innovate- the one new thing, relatively new thing, is that they're using narco terrorism charges, against the President Nicolás Maduro, and that's a more recent 1980s origin story. But it still fits within this longer history of constant US violation of Latin American sovereignty and attempts to assert self-determination.

Custodial capacity. Those are two words buried in an executive order that I need you to learn. Custodial capacity. Sounds like nothing. It sounds like a box you've got to initial at the bank. But what custodial capacity means is this money doesn't belong to us. We're just holding onto it until the rightful owner gets it back.

Hell, I've held money for somebody before, and I get nervous as hell. It didn't matter if it's five bucks or $5,000. I literally start sweating. I sit there with my hand physically clenching it in my pocket. And then you know what I did with that money anytime somebody asked me to hold onto their cash?

I give it back to them. Give it back to them at the end of the night. That's like the entire job. That is custodial capacity. And the money in this particular executive order isn't just $5. This isn't just $5,000. We're talking $13 billion that belongs to Venezuela. And six months in, no one in the United States government can tell you where that money went.

And credit to the Financial Times, they looked into this, and since the raid that captured President Maduro back in January, and since this administration installed Vice President Rodriguez in the chair, still really run by Rubio, the United States has controlled Venezuelan oil exports since that day.

That is a mu- as much as a quarter of the entire Venezuelan economy. $13 billion in sales sitting somewhere in American accounts in custodial capacity. And Donald Trump has said out loud in public that we are, quote, "making a lot of money," end quote, off Venezuelan oil. Making money. But what about your gas prices?

And by the way, the Department of Energy, they put out a statement about this money that is absolutely bonkers. I'm talking Jesse Spano on caffeine pills bonkers. They said that these funds will be disbursed for the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people. And there's an and in there on money that the executive order says doesn't belong to Americans.

And you know that money isn't going to go to people like you and me. And let's think about this. What about that money? What could that money do? Two earthquakes hit Venezuela back to back. The United Nations put the damage at $37 billion. At least 5,300 people are dead. 5,300 people dead. And economists have told the Financial Times that six months into this, evidence of any real recovery in Venezuela is muted.

AKA, there's no money flowing. And again, that $13 billion could cover roughly half of the earthquake damage. And look, we all know that invasion of Venezuela has always been about nothing more than oil, power, and grift from the very beginning. And now billions in oil money are being controlled by America with zero transparency and zero safeguards.

But there is somebody you should watch. And I'm going to tell you, it's a Republican. Maria Elvira Salazar, Republican in Miami. She represents about as hardline anti-Maduro a district as exists anywhere in this country. And she spent a hearing on Tuesday asking her own administration for full disclosure because of, quote, the importance of transparency over where this money is going.

She's asking the hard questions. So when the Republican from Miami is the one that's asking the Trump regime where the damn Venezuelan money went, this is not a partisan issue. This is a question of basic human decency. And in the comments, tell me, we've already screwed the pooch down there. What should we be doing in Venezuela?

Things, of course, weren't great to start, but then we kidnapped the president and Rubio is allegedly running things. So now what do we do? The one rule about a custodial account is that you give it back. You don't get to decide that the owner wasn't using it well.

You don't get to take a handling fee. You don't get to sit on it while their capital city is under rubble and then put out a press release about how it's going to be dispersed for the benefit of Americans and Venezuelans. 

To understand how the White House ended up running Venezuelan crude sales through a bank in Doha, you have to look at the testimony Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January.

Rubio described routing the first $500 million through Qatar as a short-term fix to a short-term problem, and there was a real problem. PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company, was running out of places to store the oil. Tankers were sitting offshore full of extra heavy crude with nowhere to unload, and if the oil didn't move, the oil wells would have to be shut down, which risks permanent damage to the wells.

So the US administration brought in Vitol and Trafigura to sell the stockpile, with the proceeds landing in an account in Qatar National Bank under US supervision. So why a Qatari bank account? as Scott Anderson and Alex Zerden pointed out in an analysis for Lawfare, there were two legal problems associated with putting that money into an American bank account, and they're both good ones.

Ordinarily, when a president uses IEEPA to freeze foreign assets, those assets are protected from court judgments. That's how the Bush administration held Iraqi oil revenues after 2003 when the country was being rebuilt. But in 2002, Congress passed Section 201 of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA, which is what lawyers call a notwithstanding provision.

The statute opens by saying that notwithstanding any other provision of law, anyone holding an unsatisfied court judgment against a terrorist party can seize that party's blocked assets in the United States, including, and this is the part that matters, the blocked assets of any agency or instrumentality of that party.

A notwithstanding provision is Congress writing a law and adding in advance that it beats whatever else you were about to cite. It's the legislative equivalent of, "I don't wanna hear it." Venezuela has a big problem with that clause. US prosecutors have repeatedly accused the Maduro regime of assisting designated foreign terrorist organizations, the Colombia guerrilla groups FARC and ELN, and criminal outfits like Tren de Aragua.

The Second and Eleventh Circuits have read agency or instrumentality very broadly, holding that it can cover an entity that merely materially assisted a terrorist party or played a significant role in its activities. District courts have taken that standard and applied it to PDVSA, allowing people holding judgments against FARC to go after a Venezuelan oil company's frozen assets.

So the state oil company of Venezuela is, for the purposes of this particular statute, a subsidiary of a Colombian guerrilla movement. Corporate structures can be complicated These judgments run to hundreds of millions of dollars. If that first $500 million had touched a bank in New York or a US Treasury account, lawyers for the terrorism victims would have been filing attachment orders long before the wire even cleared.

The money would have gone straight into litigation, and none of it would have reached Caracas. By routing it through Doha, the US government put it beyond the physical reach of an American court. The second problem is even better, and that's because the White House created it itself. It turns out that the person in Venezuela that the US government talks to on the phone is not necessarily the person the US courts think is in charge.

In Caracas, the administration deals directly with interim President Delcy Rodriguez. Inside the federal court system, official recognition policy has been sitting undisturbed since 2019, when Donald Trump recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido. As far as the courts are concerned, the opposition-led 2015 National Assembly is still the only body entitled to control Venezuelan state property in America.

So the executive branch is negotiating with one Venezuelan government while the judicial branch holds the assets for a different one. The United States is disagreeing with itself about who runs Venezuela. IEEPA lets the president freeze assets to stop them from moving. It doesn't let him take ownership of them and hand money to someone else.

That's a wartime power, and this isn't war. Freezing is a lock on the door. It isn't a deed. So if the administration had put $500 million into a US account and then wired it to Delcy Rodriguez, representatives of the 2015 National Assembly could have walked into court and argued that the executive branch was giving away their money, and they'd have had a point.

Qatar has no such difficulty. Qatar never recognized Juan Guaido or the 2015 National Assembly. Qatar recognizes whoever is in the presidential palace, which is a foreign policy with the great advantage of never needing to be updated, and the Treasury already knew this trick. In September 2023, as part of the deal that freed five American detainees in Iran, the Biden administration authorized the transfer of $6 billion of frozen Iranian oil revenues out of South Korea and into accounts at Qatari banks supervised by the Qatar Central Bank.

Iran never got the cash. The money could only be released to approved vendors for humanitarian goods under US oversight, and when Washington wanted the arrangement stopped after October 7th, Qatar stopped it. So faced with a sudden mountain of unsold crude and a courthouse full of people holding writs, Doha was the easy answer.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega made a rare appearance on Sunday to deliver a stark message. There will be no more elections in the country ever. 

Aqui no volveran a ver elecciones

Ortega made the announcement at a rally to mark the 47th anniversary of the end of an earlier dictatorship. Back then, it was Ortega's leftist group, the Sandinistas, that brought down the former military regime. Ortega is now 80 years old. He's held power for more than two decades in what's currently described as a co-dictatorship that he and his wife, Rosario Murillo, lead together.

She is 75. 

To understand how we got here and where things are headed for a country with leaders that decide to simply stop elections, we turn to Cindy Regidor, a Nicaraguan journalist currently based in San Jose, Costa Rica. 

I think that now the world can see that Nicaragua is a full-on dictatorship and that even, the leader, Daniel Ortega, is, openly admitting it.

This is not the moment Nicaragua suddenly became a dictatorship. It is the moment Ortega publicly admitted that there would no longer be even a pretense of democratic alternation. 

Take us back to the beginning, 1979, 1980. remind us who the Sandinistas were and who Ortega toppled. 

The Sandinistas led the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

This is a right-wing dictatorship that remained in power for 40 years. Daniel Ortega is a former guerrilla leader and one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolution, and he was president of Nicaragua during the 1980s. Then he lost a democratic election in 1990 and returned to power in 2007. And since then, he has gradually dismantled democratic institutions, and he has concentrated power around himself, his wife, Rosario Murillo, and their family.

going back to the 1980s with the Sandinistas, they became something of the darlings of international socialist movements. the British rockers The Clash even named one of their most political recordings Sandinista. I want to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s when Ortega was not president.

he actually ran several times and was defeated, but when he came back in 2007, help us understand how Ortega went from being a former freedom fighter, then a well-behaved democrat heeding the popular vote, to then becoming what is effectively a dictator. What happened? 

I think that at the beginning, they were pretending to be a democratic government, and they knew that they had to play by the rules.

but at the same time, they were systematically trying to co-opt all the other branches of power, the electoral authorities, the judiciary system, and the electoral processes that happened during that time were not really fair. And, the most obvious example of that was the 2021 election when all the presidential hopefuls were either detained or banished and stripped from their citizenship.

And so what has happened is that because after the 2018 protests, they knew that they were no longer popular, they just decided to intensify repression, and they imposed a de facto police state. And so they no longer cared about what the nation thought about them. They just knew that they needed to remain in power 

I'm speaking with Nicaraguan journalist Cindy Regidor about the announcement by President Daniel Ortega that his government is not going to hold any more elections.

Cindy, can you just elaborate a bit more on how this co-dictatorship between Daniel Ortega and his w- wife, Rosario Murillo, has operated and how it's further undermined democracy in Nicaragua? 

In practice, Daniel Ortega has remained as the symbolic leader of the revolution, but it is Rosario Murillo who is well known to be the person that is actually taking all the decisions in the country.

She gained notoriety in the 2007 election because she was the one that ran the campaign, and it was considered successful, of course, because they won. This also stemmed after Daniel Ortega was denounced by his stepdaughter for sexual abuse. 

And Rosario Murillo, she decided to side with Daniel Ortega instead of with her daughter.

And so what many people think is that's basically the moment where Rosario Murillo gained leverage, became Daniel Ortega's equal. 

Yeah, pretty stunning. How have these moves towards consolidating control of the country been perceived among Nicaraguans? 

if you look at the footage from the 2018 protest, you can see that it was massive.

The majority of the country, the private sector, the church, the NGOs, and the population in general, they were demanding that the repression stop and that the president should resign. And the only reason why we no longer see that, it's because any kind of protest that is not allowed by the government is completely forbidden, and you can end up in jail or banished from your own country.

So Cindy, Ortega says with this move he's building a wall between him and the opposition. What meaningful opposition still exists in Nicaragua? 

Inside of Nicaragua, there is basically none. And if there are some members of the opposition inside Nicaragua, they must remain silent and under the radar because otherwise they would be put in prison.

And then the prominent leaders are all exiled, and many of them after being in jail for several years, and the government then decided to expel them from the country. And so they're not allowed back in the country, and there's no possibility of organizing any kind of movement from inside of Nicaragua 'cause the repression, the crackdown is very heavy.

I also wanted to ask you, Cindy, about relations between the US and Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. in recent years we know they've been bumpy and antagonistic, but for some reason, Nicaragua lately seems to have escaped the level of attention and regime change that the Trump administration has directed at Cuba and Venezuela.

Why does it seem the White House does not have Nicaragua in its crosshairs? 

Yeah, no, I think Nicaragua, it doesn't seem to be a priority right now, especially when you have a country like Venezuela. And Nicaragua does not have Venezuela's oil reserves, and Nicaragua doesn't have the same geopolitical significance such as Cuba.

So at this point, there is no public indication that the United States is preparing an operation similar to the one carried out against Nicolás Maduro. But I do think that it does have an effect on how Ortega and Rosario Murillo are now acting, and I think that it does create fear and paranoia. But the reality is that so far what we have seen from the United States is mainly economic sanctions, visa restrictions, trade pressure, but no more than that so far.

So one last question, Cindy. Earlier when we heard Ortega making his announcement, I noticed some applause when he said, "No more elections." Who still supports him and Murillo in Nicaragua? 

They still have a base, a part of the population who either strongly believes that they are still representatives of the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship.

You may say radical left wing Nicaraguans who still believe that Ortega and his wife are victims of a conspiracy by the United States. And, there's also people who are afraid, and they work for the government, and they need to side with them because otherwise they could lose their jobs or worse.

Can you talk about who De Espriella is? Give us more on his background 

De- De La Espriella is a lawyer. In fact, he, runs a law firm, firm from Miami in Florida, but he cannot practice law legally in Florida, but he has a law firm there. 

the way he- Clear, he's a US citizen as well as Colombian and lived in Florida, in Miami for years?

A- absolutely. He's a US citizen. He claims to be a Republican, and he claims allegiance to the United States and to the Republican Party. And he has very close links to, he says, and they're sh- shown, to, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and to O- Ohio Republican congressman Bernie Moreno, amongst others. it...

Throughout the campaign it was always an issue amongst lawyers and constitutional lawyers in Colombia whether he could actually be a presidential candidate and president when he has to abide by his, loyalty to the United States government. He became a millionaire by representing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, Alex Saab, the famous Colombian, who was a part of Maduro's government in all kinds of corrupt businesses, and others.

And that's how he made his money, and whenever he's been challenged to show the source of his money, he, backs off and disappears. And he's actually, someone who uses legal threats and legal suits against anyone that challenges him or criticizing him, including 109 journalists whom he labels, activists disguised as journalists, including, one Colombian seeking asylum and living in Phoenix, Arizona for 10 years, Beto Coral, whom, in coordination and by direct order of Marco Rubio, is now jailed.

and we don't know where he is in the United States, and he's being denied his right to legal defense because he criticized De La Espriella. And, one more thing is De La Espriella, there are several legal, lawsuits against De La Espriella for criminal charges, including, paramilitary involvement, money laundering, drug trafficking, et cetera.

With all this known, he became a presidential candidate with the support of the United States government 

That's what I wanna ask you about. Can you talk about President Trump's endorsement, of, of de Espriella? and talk about what you think the role is of the Trump administration, not to mention Marco Rubio, in this election.

Eh, actually, the easiest way to answer this is to ask what the, the de la Espriella's role will be in the US administration of Colombia. In fact, de la Espriella appeared and he supported, he supports Israel. He promises to do exactly the same as Milei is doing in Argentina, Bukele is doing in El Salvador, the war on drugs.

A, a emulating and repeating President Trump's, directives. A, so in fact, de la Espriella is, more of a Republican representative of the Trump administration that will now rule Colombia. He promises more, he lies, he, fabricates stories, and he uses legal action against many. And he has become wealthy, not unlike President Trump, by doing all these things.

And let me ask you to follow up on your point about him going after people who criticize him. A Colombian activist living here in the United States, who is seeking political asylum, was detained by ICE last week for his criticism, of de la Espriella, immediately following a memo issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, claiming that Beto Coral was interfering in US policy.

Petro's demanded his release. What is known about this man's whereabouts? 

he was captured in Phoenix, as you say, and in fact, the sequence was first De la Espriella, nine hours before he was captured, announced that something was going to happen, pointing in this direction, because he was criticized.

One has to underscore the fact that, Corral did not criticize anyone in the US. He did not criticize the government. He... There's no wrongdoing against anything in the US. He became involved in the political campaign in Colombia from the US as a blogger, which he's very well known as, and, he criticized De la Espriella.

So De la Espriella announces nine hours prior that something's going to happen. Then Marco Rubio writes an, an order to have him captured. Four agents capture him. There are images of this. Then he goes from Phoenix to a low-security jail in Phoenix, then to El Paso, then, to, Minnesota, and then somewhere else in order for him not to have access to legal representation.

Because in the federal system in the US, lawyers from one state cannot act in another state, and this was all orchestrated from the highest officials in the US administration for and with De la Espriella. And also, Bernie Moreno wrote a note, a tweet, that w- was made public in which he addressed, the, the journalist, Corral, stating that he w- was not allowed to sup- or criticize a friend of the United States in the United States, and that he will pay for it

Yes, the quote from Marco Rubio was, "Allowing Corral to remain in the US undermines US foreign policy interests in Colombia's democratic processes and signals that foreign nationals may use US platforms to conduct politically motivated disinformation campaigns and litigation targeting foreign democratic actors without consequence."

Manuel Rosenthal. But 

that's correct. and the pr- the, the statement is, shows what's happening. In fact, those, these informing, manipulating, lying accuse the ones that present truths, facts, evidence. If there is anyone that is actually undergoing investigations for criminal activities is De la Espriella, but, not Beto Coral.

But Beto Coral, he can actually be sent to jail by the Secretary of State of the US for crimes he didn't commit. The criminals are now attacking the victim. 

Can you talk about what this means for Gustavo Petro? Was this a referendum on his presidency? 

i- if it was a referendum on his presidency, he won it.

nobody, no president in the history of Colombian has had as much support leaving a government as he does. m- most people in Colombia love Gustavo Petro. That's number one. Number two is more than, 12 million votes for a leftist candidate in Colombia is unprecedented, unthought of. It's, at least a million more votes than led Gustavo Pe- Petro to the presidency.

So in fact, this is not that. It's actually, the same as a global confr- confrontation through the electoral systems between manipulation, fear-mongering, lying, threatening, propaganda on the one side, criminal, with a lot of money behind them, and on the other side, decency, respect for nature, respect for human rights, a, a clean career being labeled as criminal.

And we can see once again who's winning. So we knew whether Iván Cepeda won or lost, we knew what we have to do is face this confrontation through but beyond the electoral system, and it's what's happening everywhere. 

I've followed Cuba's many ups and downs, but none compare to today's sense of despair. 

It's not just that the houses are falling apart, it's that they are absolutely full of people.

People have nowhere else to live, so they live one on top of the other in homes or apartments that were once just for one family. In this place, there are probably 30 at least. Sometimes the roofs fall down on their heads. 

This is where I met Leidymary. She lives up here with her mother and is training to become a teacher.

Without electricity, she can't study and her boyfriend can't work, she says. And although she's barely 16, she's weary beyond her years. "

I 

don't really care anymore. You get tired, honestly. When there's no power, I fall into a deep sleep. I just sleep." 

a private restaurant, well-fed foreigners and the very few Cubans with money dine seemingly oblivious to the thin boys waiting outside in the hope of getting a coin. They offer to watch cars for a tip or something to eat. The Cuban Revolution's promise of a classless society that can provide for all is long gone.

The next day I stop to buy some bananas when I spot a man selling lettuce. 71-year-old Reynaldo Taboada says he can't afford to buy on his meager pension. 

I'm retired and I'm hungry. Yes, me, I'm hungry. I'll say it in front of anyone. I'm going hungry because here there's real hunger, serious hunger.

There's real need. I've been without electricity for two days. I live in the Martin neighborhood, and we've had no power for two days. The little food I had in the refrigerator spoiled. 

Really? 

Yes. 

And what are you looking for now? 

Anything, really. Something to eat, something to survive on. I say it in front of anyone because I'm not afraid.

My name is Reymundo Taboada, and I'm not afraid

My friends tell me, "You have to control yourself. They're gonna put you in jail for talking like that." But I don't care. Let them. How long are we going to continue being cowards? Enough. I'm dying for Trump to get here.

Sharing such opinions in public and on camera was unthinkable until recently But years of economic turmoil, now intensified by a five-month-long US fuel blockade, have pushed the island and its people to the brink. It's not even possible to collect rubbish. And this is more than an eyesore. This is a sanitary disaster.

The rubbish system here in this country also needs to s- be completely overhauled, as you can see. And it's not just a matter of not having petrol, it's just that there is no system anymore to account for the amount of rubbish that people generate now. Yuvanka lives in front of the rubbish mound and says she's losing her mind.

Welcome to the house of flies. look, there are flies, flies everywhere. Look, I've had this for 15 days and nobody takes the rubbish away. And right there is a medical clinic. The doctors can't work because no one's picked up the trash. Welcome to the house of flies. 

She's cooking lunch. Banana con ajo.

Banana con ajo. Bananas with garlic. That's gonna be the food for today. Here's the garlic, here's the bananas. That's it. And who's to blame? 

I don't know who is to blame. If I tell you, they'll lock me up. 

But if that was once the norm, it's no longer the case. Today, everyone complains, but not everyone against Cuba's one-party state.

Rolando Barrero, a passerby, blames decades of US economic sanctions. 

Whenever we're about to do business with another country, they immediately put obstacles in our way, and they impose sanctions on countries that trade with us. Trump says he wants to help us, but in reality, they're just squeezing us more and more.

Are you afraid that the United States might use military force or invade? 

No, I'm not afraid. I'm not saying they can't attack us, but it will be hard. It would be a difficult war because the Cuban people are very patriotic. There's a lot of Cubans in the US that want Trump to attack and bomb us, but they don't know the consequences that can bring for their families and the Cuban people because I'm sure our people will fight.

The Cuban people are not softies. We proved it in Angola. 

Perhaps, but in two decades, the population has dropped from 12 million to less than 10 million because of mass immigration. Most of the people I knew well have left. For those who remain, remittances from family members working abroad aren't enough to make up for the impact of the US fuel blockade These patients have chronic kidney disease.

They couldn't make it to this hospital in time for their dialysis treatments, and now they're in critical condition. With public transportation barely functioning, patients and doctors tell us they can't risk leaving the hospital at all. But Dr. Yamil Garcia says she's more worried about the blackouts and lack of fuel for generators.

To put it simply, electricity is vital for us, not only for the machines you see here to function, but because hemodialysis requires water to filter the patient's blood. When the hospital's power plant is down, we need to pump the blood back into the patients manually. 

Cubans are known for their resourcefulness.

But in the countryside, it's now back to the absolute basics. With no electricity, juicy tomatoes are rotting in this tomato paste factory, once the pride and joy of Fidel Castro. Leon Figueroa, a fifth-generation farmer, tells me that this malanga crop will be his last. 

I can't plow the soil for the next crop.

In a few more months, people will have nothing to eat. As it is, we can't get our produce to market without petrol. I don't see any solution or an end to this. There's lots of negotiations, they say, but the truth is we have no idea what will happen. 

In the past, farmers could only work for the state. But the irony is that now that they have more autonomy, they're being held back by the US fuel blockade.

Back in Havana, I notice people with bicycles and motorbikes getting on a bus to cross the harbor tunnel. It's the only way because the tunnel has no ventilation. Only vehicles that can go more than 60 kilometers an hour are allowed. It's a good opportunity for a chat about US President Donald Trump's strategy to force regime change.

It's good to take resources away from our government, but since we're the ones at the bottom of the food chain, the fuel blockade only punishes us. 

You agree or not? 

We're asking for change for sure, but not like that. "

Foreign intervention like in Venezuela is not the way," adds John Manuel. 

If another country wants to impose change here, it's not from the goodness of their heart.

They want Cuba for themselves. We need to change our system ourselves from the inside, like Fidel Castro did with the revolution. But his formula from 60 years ago, it doesn't work anymore. We've been resisting for six decades.

With some of his frustration off his chest, the self-employed construction worker prepares for the long pedal home. I've lived and reported in Cuba for years, but I never thought that political or at least economic change would be this painful. Trump has threatened to take over and do what he wants with Cuba.

And while the Communist Party is at last talking about introducing unprecedented economic reforms like in China or Vietnam, the people of Cuba have no real say in what happens to them.

We've just heard clips starting with

Democracy Now! tracing how Trump's rebranding of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as the "Donroe Doctrine" continues a bipartisan, centuries-long pattern of U.S. intervention against Latin American sovereignty, from Guatemala to Venezuela.

Ring of Fire detailed how the US seized control of $13 billion in Venezuelan oil money, held under an executive order's 'custodial capacity,' with no one able to say where it went.

Patrick Boyle explained how the administration routed Venezuela's oil sales through a bank in Qatar, putting the money beyond the reach of the American courts where creditors are waiting to claim it.

The World reported that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced there will be no more elections ever, publicly confirming what a journalist called a full-on dictatorship he leads with his wife.

Democracy Now! described De La Espriella as a Trump-style Republican who made millions defending paramilitaries and drug traffickers and now promises to rule Colombia on Trump's directives.

And Al Jazeera English documented daily life across Cuba amid blackouts, uncollected garbage, and failing hospitals, as residents voiced despair once too dangerous to speak, blaming both the government and the US fuel blockade.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic, and I promise this will connect.

For more than ten years now, people have been reading Trump's comment about his ability to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters as evidence of the cult-like status of his followers.

If someone thought deeply about it, they may give Trump credit for developing that cult-like relationship, but I think I've homed in on a very specific element of Trump's relationship with the truth and what he chooses to say out loud that goes a long way to explaining the truth of his Fifth Avenue comment.

The missing detail about that hypothetical scenario is what he would say about it afterward. I think we all know instinctually now how that would go. He would shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in cold blood and then announce to everyone proudly that he had done it. Of course, he had done it, anyone could see that it was the right thing to do and, frankly, everyone is lucky that he was there to take such decisive action.

He doesn't leave it up to people to judge his actions and rest comfortably with the knowledge that his supporters will defend him no matter what he does. He's constantly playing a mind game with the public that's designed to preemptively diffuse accusations of corruption or wrongdoing of any kind by always announcing proudly what he's done. It's the brag defense that plays on the assumption that guilty people don't brag, they hide.

Trump and company invading a foreign country, kidnapping their leader, taking over their primary industry, and appointing themselves managers of billions of dollars of that country's wealth is something that any former administration would have only ever thought to do if it could be done with the utmost secrecy. By this point, Trump knows instinctually that his greatest defense is to announce all of his crimes and corruption publicly which is exactly what he did.

Within days of invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolas Maduro, Trump was announcing that he would personally be managing Venezuela's oil revenue and explicitly threatened the remainder of the Venezuelan government with further military actions if they didn't cooperate. It was only a few days later when the more lawyerly language came through in an executive order Trump signed, promising that the U.S. would only hold Venezuela's money in a custodial fashion, but it was the unfiltered and unashamed version that came first.

Previous American presidents who have committed crimes had the decency to be ashamed and knew to try to hide their dealings. When Ronald Reagan's administration was blocked by Congress from funding the anti-communist contras in Nicaragua, they found a loophole by selling missiles to Iran and giving the profits to the contras, bypassing Congress.

The echo between Iran Contra and Trump's action in Venezuela is striking. The motivations are different but at the core, it's foreign money moved at executive discretion with Congress cut out.

In Reagan's day, when the details of Iran Contra began to surface, they started shredding documents, knowing that they had committed felonies. The scandal nearly broke the presidency, and they felt that concealment was their only hope.

We heard Trump's version from his own mouth, saying publicly that the revenue from oil sales in Venezuela would help pay for the war itself. It's still unclear what all Venezuela's money will be used for, because Republicans are blocking the oversight, but the fact that Trump's instinct was to believe, and announce, that it could be used to effectively pay for the war is quite telling. Again, the brag defense used up front.

The other, even more famous presidential scandal, Nixon's Watergate, still involved secrecy and shame. He fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep his White House recording tapes buried. The lesson that society collectively learned from that incident and others is the truism, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up." I think Trump took that lesson entirely to heart and is one of the few people in the country shameless enough to implement the lesson in a counterintuitive way. Most criminals would take the lesson that it's important to be extremely careful in your cover up, Trump's takeaway was to skip the cover-up entirely and do the opposite, announce your crimes proudly.

In fact, note the detail on Trump's 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn star. His only criminal convictions came from the one scandal where he tried doing it the old fashioned way and biffed the cover up. And that was the last time in his political career that he felt cover up was necessary. After he survived the Access Hollywood "Grab 'em" tape by refusing to feel ashamed, he knew he could survive anything.

The brag defense is the primary reason that no political scandal has ever stuck to him in the public eye for more than a week or so. And it's the novelty of this strategy that has turned American politics on its head for the last decade.

For the average person who doesn't pay close attention, they rely on the reasonable shortcut in thinking that guilty people hide things. If there's no smell of cover-up, then there's likely no crime, and they can file it and move on. That's essentially the single most important mental loophole that the brag defense exploits.

Our government theoretically has regulations and checks and balances, but I don't think any of us understood how dependent those checks were on the general public believing that abuses of power were happening. Trump diffuses accusations that he's corrupt or abuses his power just enough to cast doubt in people's minds and for those in the Republican Party who want to defend him, that's all the fig leaf needed to block all potential investigations.

That goes all the way back to his first impeachment in 2019 when he brag defended his "perfect call" with Ukraine's Zelenskyy, releasing the transcript himself. He brag defended firing James Comey in 2017, the FBI director investigating him. He also brag defended his business history of paying very little in taxes as a demonstration of how smart he is, the list is nearly endless and the pattern continues to be in full force today in the wake of his actions in Venezuela, with the clear and obvious potential for corruption and abuse related to the management of Venezuela's oil proceeds.

Democrats are pushing a bill, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, that would force the Government Accountability Office to audit everything related to those custodial accounts filled with Venezuela's money, currently being managed in secrecy by the Trump administration. As of this recording, not one Republican in either chamber of Congress has signed on to that, and although the GAO is poking around on its own, they're likely to be stonewalled by the administration and without a law giving their investigation teeth, there will be no path to a complete and enforceable audit. The simplest reason for this, as I see it, is the difference between Reagan's people shredding documents and Trump preemptively brag defending every daily wrongdoing, large and small.

At its core, it's not about Trump having convinced elected Republicans that he's committed no crime. It's simply that he's diffused the energy behind what should be accusations of corruption in enough minds in the general public. That's enough to make congressional Republicans feel safe enough taking no action against Trump, knowing that they won't be punished for it in the next election.

Trump's entire presidency and all of the crimes and corruption that have come along with it all rest on what is effectively a mind game. His devoted cult-like followers don't require the mind game so that means the real target is the convincible middle who aren't very plugged in and depend on reasonable shortcuts. Too many of them rightly perceive that Trump doesn't hide much but then wrongly conclude that it's because he must not be doing anything wrong.

And the best way to defeat a mind game is to name it. I actually think that one of the reasons why Trump has been able to have the political success he's had is because this particular mind game of his hasn't been called out and made to be widely understood in the general public with a memorable and sharable phrase. People have an extremely difficult time understanding concepts that they don't have words for, but once something gets a label, it allows the mind to latch on to it in a new way so if you know anyone in the persuadable middle, those people not too plugged in, try telling them about the brag defense.

History is full of arms races. Bigger weapons, stronger defenses, tighter regulations, smarter criminals. It's a never-ending game of cat and mouse. The U.S. has regulations and enforcement mechanisms, but it turns out they largely depend on the assumption that the criminals will attempt to act in secrecy. Trump's core hack of the system turns out to be his utter lack of shame, which is necessary for the brag defense.

Now, the game of cat and mouse will continue as we learn the lessons from the Trump era and work to devise even stronger regulations and safeguards to ensure those put into positions of power in our government are made to act within the standards and ethics necessary for a functioning democracy.

We've gone through periods before where corruption and scandal created a strong appetite for a burst of new regulation. We may be on the precipice of another such era, but we need to make sure that it's not just the highly politically engaged on the left and the Democratic Party who have that appetite for new safeguards. We also need to move the middle.

And the middle does move when pushed hard enough. The middle moved on immigration and family separation during the first Trump term, it moved after the Dobbs decision on reproductive rights, and it moved after January 6th.

We need for the middle to be moved again for a pro-democracy, anti-corruption reform agenda. Getting enough people to hear the brag defense as the confessions of wrongdoing that they are can help build the electoral majority and public outcry for the reforms we need.

The next generation of rules needs to be enforcement mechanisms that don't depend on a functional Congress, because we've seen how hyper-partisanship, combined with Trump's brag defense, has worked to make Congress abdicate its oversight responsibility almost entirely. Our job is to build the pressure for future regulations that depend more on independent investigators and automatic triggers that don't need Congress to approve and can't be dismantled by the president.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, VENEZUELA - THE MONEY, THE OIL, THE RUINS

Followed by Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

And Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

The death toll from the twin earthquakes has risen to over 200, expected to rise dramatically as rescuers search for survivors trapped in the rubble.

Thousands of people remain missing. At least 4,300 are injured in the two quakes that struck about 100 miles west of Caracas Wednesday evening as many people were at home celebrating a national holiday. They were the strongest earthquakes to hit Venezuela in over a century. In Caracas, residents look for friends and family trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

We are here in solidarity with a colleague whose wife is under all this structure. His children, he has two children, and his wife under there, and with the hope of finding them alive. And we are here, as I say, in solidarity, hoping that his family is well. And as I say, I am not from the area. My building suffered some damage, but nothing compared to what this guy is going through in this place.

Survivors of the earthquake have shared horror stories about being trapped under collapsed homes and businesses.

My name is Eric Paul Martinez Santos, and I am a survivor of the earthquake that occurred yesterday afternoon. I was in my building for four hours until I was rescued by someone from civil defense, or I'm not sure. 

They didn't have many tools. They couldn't find the chisel, the drill, the grinder. They went at it with their nails.

I also helped because they passed me a tool, and it saved me because I had a lot of furniture in my home that protected me from the wall. 

We go now to Caracas. We're joined by Andreina Chavez, reporter based in Caracas, her building damaged by the earthquakes. I'm so glad we could reach you, Andreina. Can you describe what's happening right now?

We experienced this double earthquake. I was on the street when it happened, a few blocks away from

my building. the absolute commotion was incredible. when I was running on my way home, I saw at least three buildings partially collapsed in front of me. thankfully my own building didn't collapse. it

did have substantial damages. and fortunately we are, everybody in my building is safe. however, there are other areas in Caracas, for example, a place called Los Palos Grandes, which is in the east of Caracas. It is severely affected. There is a huge building there that collapsed, and a lot of people are trapped under the rubble.

We also saw several buildings that collapsed in San Bernardino, which is west of Caracas. and from what I understand, in a lot of these places, the rescue team haven't been able to arrive because all the efforts are concentrated in La Guaira state, which is

a di- a

disaster zone. In La Guaira state we have more than 250 buildings that collapsed. there are thousands of people still missing, thousands that are trapped under the rubble. We still don't know exactly how many people died, because right now we don't have a clarity about that. the-

The entire Venezuelan police, the entire Venezuelan military, protección civil, the civil protection, the firefighters, 

volunteers of all kinds, they're all working. They're all concentrating their efforts in La Guaira and parts of Caracas to save people, to rescue people. However, of course, we weren't prepared for a disaster of this magnitude, so it's not enough. That is why Venezuela has been calling people, calling other nations to please send equipment, to send rescue teams, to send, humanitarian aid, anything possible to help Venezuela overcome this tragedy because we obviously cannot do it alone.

And a lot of that has to do that, of course, Venezuela is a country that has been under US sanctions, that has been economically asphyxiated for at least 10 years now. So Venezuela is a country that

has an infrastructure that is very deteriorated. We have, public services that are very deteriorated, and all of that has been something that, that has really added to this tragedy 

And, Andreina, you me- you mentioned, the, the US sanctions and, efforts to, to shut down, Venezuela's economy, but yet you're still y- there's still quite a bit of civic activity by citizen groups, by communes.

Could you talk about that as well? 

Yes, absolutely. every single institution in Venezuela, like I said, the national police, the military, firefighters and e- all kinds of volunteers have been working

tirelessly since Wednesday trying to rescue people. But we also have people from communes, from the Venezuelan communes, from popular organizations. These people are organizing, gathering food and anything, medicine and anything that, people in La Guaira might need. And themselves, they are carrying all of this humanitarian aid and taking it to La Guaira.

Only yesterday at the end of the afternoon we saw a huge caravana of motorcycles, people who are, collecting food and taking it themselves to La Guaira. So there is a huge, network of solidarity going on right now. We also see that there's people outside of Caracas in other states like Zulia, Aragua, other places in which people are collecting food, collecting medicine, collecting clothes, blankets, water, and bringing it to Caracas to help people here.

So there is a huge network of solidarity right now. We have university students in the, Central University of Venezuela who are using the university spaces to collect all of this aid and to volunteer to rescue people. So we have a lot of solidarity right now. so despite the fact that Venezuela certainly needs a lot more help from other countries, we have, a, a huge movement going on right now to try to do everything possible to save people.

This is a story about Venezuela, but it starts with Israel. See, Israel had stolen the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. So in 1973, those two countries attacked Israel to try to get that land back. The United States responded by sending Israel more than $2 billion in military aid to fight Egypt and Syria.

So some Arab countries were like, "Okay, you want to support Israel? Then we'll stop sending you oil." 10 petroleum exporting countries placed an oil embargo on the US and other countries supporting Israel, and the price of oil went up. So what does this have to do with Venezuela? it became one of the few countries the US and others could buy oil from, at almost four times the price than the year before.

This meant that suddenly tons of money were coming into the country. But in Venezuela, it was private companies that extracted and sold the oil, and most of them were foreign. So the profit from all that oil wasn't staying in the country. Most of it was going back to the US or Europe, where those companies were from.

At the time, Carlos Andrés Pérez was the president. People called him CAP, and he decided to nationalize oil. In other words, the government took the oil industry back from private companies. Now it was the state in charge of oil operations and managing the profit. With that oil money, Venezuela built roads, universities, hospitals, public housing.

It was the oil bonanza of the '70s.

This is a time when some middle class Venezuelans would fly to Miami for the weekend just to go shopping. It's when the phrase became popular, meaning it's cheap, give me two. Because the bolivar, Venezuela's currency, was so strong that they could afford to splurge. But in the midst of all that progress, there was one Venezuelan giving the country a warning.

He said, "Oil will bring us ruin." It was Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso. He had been Venezuela's oil minister, but he called oil the devil's excrement because Venezuela was becoming very dependent on it. 

The overwhelming majority of what Venezuela exported was oil. 

The economy revolved around it, so the highs were high, but when the price of oil inevitably fell, it was going to be painful.

Venezuela became Latin America's richest country because of its oil, but the overdependence on it would also be one of the reasons for its downfall. There were also two other concerning things happening in Venezuela at the time, corruption and debt. A lot of money was being funneled into the pockets of a few through oversized contracts and straight up stealing.

The government was also borrowing billions of dollars. Since oil money was pouring in, they expected they would be able to easily pay it back, and then the price of oil crashed.

Venezuela was no longer bringing in enough money to keep up with its spending. The government responded by devaluing the bolivar. Now the wages that working Venezuelans were making were worth less. Prices were doubling from one year to the next, leaving some families struggling to afford food. Less than 10 years after the oil boom began, the party was over in Venezuela.

In 1998, Cap ran for president again. Venezuelans elected him, hoping that he could take them back to the golden years of the '70s. But this time when he took office, Venezuela was out of money and in a lot of debt with US and European banks and creditors. And to stay afloat, they would need to borrow more.

That's where the International Monetary Fund comes in. The IMF is a global organization, but mostly controlled by the United States. They offer to help nations with financial troubles, but under certain conditions. They could lend Venezuela more money, but Cap would need to reverse what he did in the '70s and go back to private companies being in charge of the oil industry.

The government would also have to devalue the bolivar even more, which would make life less affordable for people. And on top of that, they would need to cut the subsidies that were giving Venezuelans some relief amid the crisis. In his first term, Cap said the IMF was a way for industrialized countries to force developing nations to submit to abusive policies that took money from a country's basic needs to send it to Western banks.

But in his second term, he agreed. One of the things Cap's government did was raise gas prices. Venezuela was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year keeping gas prices low for people. When they eliminated that subsidy, bus owners passed the cost on to their customers. And one morning in February 1989, Venezuelans from impoverished towns that were traveling into the city found out their bus fares had doubled overnight.

They reacted by overturning buses and burning them. The outrage spread, and soon there was rioting in multiple towns. The government responded by ordering the military to shoot. The official death toll was close to 300, but outside groups estimated that as many as 3,000 people were killed. That day became known as El Caracazo, and it showed Venezuelans' outrage that the poor were being forced to carry the burden of fixing the economy

As this sentiment was spreading in Venezuela, the country would first meet Comandante Hugo Chavez as a lieutenant colonel in Venezuela's military, Chávez led an attack to remove CAP, but they failed. Chávez was captured and allowed to go on TV to tell the others to stand down. 

Compañeros, lamentablemente por ahora los objetivos que nos planteamos no fueron logrados en la ciudad capital.

Nosotros acá en Caracas no logramos controlar el poder.

Por 

ahora, he said. They didn't reach their objective of taking over power for now. After this, Chávez became a celebrity. Not only had he tried to remove a government that had become very unpopular, but he also took responsibility for what happened and hinted that he would be back. He went to prison for the attempted coup, but was freed after a couple of years, and in 1998 he ran for president This was a time of large inequality when 5% of landowners controlled 75% of agricultural land.

See, Venezuela used to be an agricultural country, but with the oil boom, farming declined. The country started importing its food. Large plots of fertile land sat unused, and workers moved to the city. They settled in urban slums. And there it was easy to see that the country's oil riches were not reaching everyone.

While Venezuela's elite and upper middle class were living lavishly in the '70s, there were marginalized towns living in misery. Chávez promised to redistribute the country's land and oil wealth. He said, "In an oil rich country, people should not be going hungry." He gained the support of impoverished neighborhoods around the country and became the president of Venezuela.

Within his first few years in power, Chávez would pass almost 50 laws. Two of them in particular would upset the country's elite and the United States. See, at this point, the Venezuelan government had opened up the oil industry to foreign investors. Private companies used to pay the government a fixed fee of more than 16% for extracting and selling Venezuela's oil.

But after the oil opening, some companies like ExxonMobil were able to negotiate that down to as low as 1%. The result was that they made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Venezuela's oil. When Chávez came to power, he passed a law that raised taxes again on private oil companies, now bringing royalties up to as high as 30%.

The money that these private companies used to keep before Chávez now would go to the state to fund things like healthcare, education, and housing. Chávez also passed a land law. Large estates that were sitting unused could be expropriated. The government could forcibly purchase the land and give it to small farmers or farmer collectives because according to Chávez, the land should be used for the benefit of the country.

Venezuelans in poor communities loved Chávez and were happy with his policies, while upper classes wanted him gone. The country was divided along economic class lines. 

International emergency teams are continuing their search for any remaining survivors of the powerful twin earthquakes that hit Venezuela last week. Nearly 200 buildings have completely collapsed, and the death toll is now close to 1,500. Tens of thousands of people still remain unaccounted for. Now, Interim President Delcy Rodriguez visited the heavily affected area of La Guaira on Su- on Sunday under pressure for what many see as the government's lack of response.

Yinka Oyetade reports 

A palpable grief hangs over Venezuela after two earthquakes struck, and that grief is now giving way to anger. Families say they are being forced to carry out rescue efforts themselves, digging through rubble with little more than their bare hands because heavy machinery has yet to arrive.

I pulled my daughter halfway out. I pulled her out. They just come to take pictures. They don't help us, and they won't let us into the disaster zone. They don't give us any equipment, and we have families in there. 

We want support. We want heavy machinery. We want to take our family members with us. I'm not the only one in this situation.

Their frustration is being echoed across the hardest-hit areas, where residents accuse authorities of responding too slowly. In La Guaira state, access remains tightly controlled, with special permits needed to enter. Volunteers hoping to help have found themselves instead stuck in long queues, unable to reach those still trapped.

Survivors are also pleading for better security, along with urgently needed food, clean water, and medicine. Interim president Delcy Rodriguez insists recovery is underway. 

We have already recovered 75% of the electricity service. Teams will continue working until electricity is completely restored in La Guaira.

It's the same with water, which is 68% recovered. 

Looting is adding to the chaos, with pharmacies, supermarkets, and other businesses being ransacked. While some blame opportunists, others say desperation is driving people who have lost everything in a country that was already struggling long before the earthquake struck.

Elinor Raikes is head of program delivery overseeing the International Rescue Committee's programs in Latin America. She joins me now live. Eleanor, first of all, what's the latest you're hearing from your teams on the ground on the situation there in the earthquake zone? 

Thanks for having me. as you might expect, with this kind of, natural disaster, every day since it happened has revealed more and more of the devastation.

So our teams on the ground are telling us, that each day that passes makes them realize just how, significant the impact has been, how widespread the humanitarian needs are, and how complex it's going to be, to mount and deliver an effective response to this. these earthquakes were very, significant, in terms of their direct impact.

hundreds of multi-story buildings, destroyed, aftershocks compromising, the, the relief effort, and search and rescue continuing. but this is also a natural disaster that happened in a country that was already experiencing very significant economic turmoil, economic collapse, and displacement crisis.

So this is a country that, that had preexisting vulnerabilities that are gonna make this even harder, to respond to. 

What's it like for NGOs like yours or others who are on the ground at the moment? Are they able to get access to the worst-hit areas, or is there even difficulty getting access due to what you were just saying?

We have teams on the ground, and they have been able to get to the impacted areas. We also work very closely with, a number of trusted Venezuelan local organizations, which allows for us to have, you know, even wider spread, and work with organizations that were already working in, i- in the area.

but earthquakes always, have this challenge, where you have a, the logistical challenges in, physically getting to the area. The airport was damaged, telecommunications down, water systems compromised. there's a lot that comes with an earthquake that means that it's compounding the challenge of, of getting emergency relief to those that need it most.

So it is still quite complicated, but we are able to get, at least basic relief items, to impacted communities, critical medical supplies to frontline health services. but this is going to be a response that's gonna require a weeks and months-long effort, not days and weeks. 

Eleanor, as you've been speaking, we've been seeing some live images, coming from Venezuela of the search and rescue efforts.

It has been over four days since these two earthquakes hit. Is there any hope for survivors still at this point? 

I think the, the, the search and rescue continues and, it's important, I think, for, those involved in that not to give up hope. But obviously every day that passes, sadly, the chances of survival do diminish.

There are tens of thousands of people still missing and unaccounted for, so it's important that the search and res- ... continues as, as long as it can. alongside a, a dramatic scale-up needed of, basic food, water, shelter, other relief supplies, for people who are, lost their homes, too afraid to go back to their homes.

and many s- many residential buildings still considered unsafe. we have teams report... My team is reporting that, there are many people sheltering in schools, in, in open spaces, in parks, without, the, basic things they need. Children too afraid to sleep. this is really...

We are still in the early days of this, o- of the aftermath of this earthquake. and the needs are quite critical. 

How many international organizations like yours are in the area now? A- and what kind of cooperation is there between all of you? 

Cooperation and coordination is so important, in the early days of a natural disaster.

I think it's really amazing, the international response to this. and so there's been a lot of, new, responders arriving in the country in addition to, organizations like ours that were already present. and coordinating the relief effort, is so important. I think it is happening, but it's obviously can be chaotic in the early days, after a, a big disaster like this.

one additional challenge, on top of the, the fact that Venezuela was already a country with 8 million people, in humanitarian need, with very under-resourced public services, was the fact that Venezuela, like many other countries around the world, was really hit by, dramatic cuts to foreign aid, to humanitarian funding.

so many organizations in Venezuela, over the last year have had to scale down or even close their services. so that is gonna be an additional complicating factor, i- as we try to mount a, a robust response to this disaster unfortunately. 

If you've driven past a filling station anywhere in the United States, you've seen the red triangle. Citgo runs about 4,000 stations, along with pipelines, storage terminals, and three large refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois that between them process over 800,000 barrels of crude a day.

The facility in Louisiana on its own is the seventh-largest refinery in the United States. Citgo is a 113-year-old American company that has been owned by Venezuela's state oil company since 1990. It was the most valuable thing Venezuela owned outside Venezuela, and the Gulf Coast refineries had been specifically re-engineered to handle Venezuelan crude, which is heavy sour and generally unwelcome elsewhere.

The assumption in Caracas had always been that whatever happened at home, Citgo was untouchable, which brings us to the single most expensive lesson in corporate formalities ever administered. The reason a creditor normally can't touch a subsidiary that's a corporation is that a corporation is a separate legal person from its owner.

Your creditors can come after you, they can't come after your company, and they can't come after your company's company. This is the entire point of the corporate form, and it's very hard to overcome. Courts do occasionally set it aside, piercing the corporate veil, but it is rare, and it's treated as an extraordinary remedy for extraordinary facts.

Delaware courts pierce the veil in a low single-digit percentage of the cases where somebody asks. You do not get there by being badly run or insolvent or unpleasant. You get there by demonstrating over a period of years that the separation was never real in the first place, which Venezuela did repeatedly, publicly, and on the record.

For two decades, the government in Caracas ran PDVSA as a cash register with a corporate charter attached. When the state needed money for social programs or political favors or to cover sovereign debts, it told PDVSA to wire the money, and PDVSA did. The president of Venezuela appointed the company's president, its directors, its vice presidents, and its shareholder council.

Employees were fired for political reasons. The government committed the company to selling oil to allies at large discounts and handed out mining rights without asking the company first. None of this caused any difficulty inside Venezuela, but it caused a great deal of difficulty in Delaware In 2016, a Canadian mining company called Crystallex won an arbitration award of $1.2 billion against Venezuela after Hugo Chavez nationalized its Las Cristinas gold operation in 2011 without paying for it.

Venezuela declined to pay the award on the grounds that it didn't want to, so Crystallex registered the judgment in Delaware and went after PDVSA's shares in PDV Holding, the company that owns Citgo. The argument was that PDVSA was the alter ego of the Republic of Venezuela, and that its American assets were therefore available to satisfy Venezuela's debts.

Now, when the defendant is a sovereign state, the courts don't use ordinary veil piercing. They use a 1983 Supreme Court case called Bancec, which says that a state-owned company is presumed separate from the state unless the state exercises such extensive control that the company is really its agent, and Crystallex had been careful.

They didn't ask the court to declare that PDVSA was liable for all of Venezuela's debts. They asked for something much narrower, a finding that these particular shares, though they had PDVSA's name on them, were really Venezuela's property. Modest, constrained, nothing to worry about. The Third Circuit then affirmed it in language that wasn't narrow at all, and later courts have read it as settling the general question.

Crystallex asked for the door to be cracked open, and the appeals court removed the door entirely. The alter ego ruling worked on Venezuela's creditors the way a dinner bell works. A queue formed in Delaware, bondholders and expropriation claimants, including ConocoPhillips, Gold Reserve, O-I Glass, and Tidewater on a first-come, first-served basis.

Judge Stark appointed a special master to run a forced auction of PDV Holding and pay them out of the proceeds, at which point Venezuelan politics produced its one moment of national unity. The Maduro government and the democratic opposition, who agree on essentially nothing, both denounced the auction.

The arrangement they were objecting to works like this: PDV Holding is controlled by the opposition, PDVSA on the ground is controlled by Maduro, and the opposition represents PDVSA in American courts because the United States doesn't recognize Maduro. The company was defending itself in court on behalf of a government that considers its own lawyers traitors.

Everyone involved objected to the sale. Nobody could agree who owned the thing being sold The auction took eight years and was not what you'd call orderly. Amber Energy, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund that has spent 40 years buying claims nobody else wants and then somehow collecting on them, won the first round in 2024 with a conditional bid of just over $7 billion, which the creditors rejected as too low.

The process restarted. Gold Reserve, bidding through a vehicle called Dalinar Energy, came in at 7.4 billion, and then raised itself to nearly 8. Amber won last November with a bid of 5.89 billion in cash structured alongside settlement with the 2020 bond holders. Judge Stark approved it last November, writing that it offered the best combination of price and certainty of closing that anyone had submitted Certainty of closing being the operative phrase, the highest number on the table lost to the number most likely to survive contact with the appeals court.

Gold Reserve responded by asking for the removal of both Judge Stark and the special master, citing alleged conflicts, including their financial advisors. That motion was denied. Elliott, it should be said, is experienced at this. This is the fund that spent 15 years pursuing Argentina over defaulted bonds, and in 2012 seized an Argentine naval vessel.

The vessel was a three-masted sailing ship on a goodwill tour with cadets aboard. Elliott's subsidiary had it detained in Ghana over a debt of just under $300 million. It stayed there for 10 weeks. Argentina eventually got it back through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The same campaign involved going after the presidential aircraft, the assets of the Argentine space agency, and the money Argentina was owed for its stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

when a hedge fund with that record turns up at a distressed auction, the outcome is fairly predictable. Elliott gets a large refining network at a price the sellers dispute. Some of the creditors get paid, and Venezuela is left with nothing. The deal still needs a license from OFAC, the Treasury office that administers US sanctions, before it can close.

The Financial Times has noted that Paul Singer, who runs Elliott, was an early financial backer of Marco Rubio's political career. Rubio is at the State Department and does not sign OFAC licenses, so make of that what you will. the oil money is offshore, and the refinery now belongs to a hedge fund

because it is so illegitimate, cannot win an election.

They got trounced in an election two years ago. Delcy Rodriguez might be the most unpopular politician in Venezuela. the most popular politician in Venezuela is Maria Corina Machado, who is being excluded by the Trump administration. So the goal for the, Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez is to delay, delay as much as they can.

They did that in 2004 with a recall referendum. They did that in, the 20-teens with, indefinite talks that lasted forever and where they focused on legalisms and paperwork and all kinds of stuff except the real issues, and that's exactly what's going on now. We're not focusing on the real issues. 

And the real issues, Elias, what are they? What do Venezuelans want to see change in their country when they're looking at these politicians? 

I, I actually, so I think that, most people will probably, say that they want to see elections, right? Most people, inside of Venezuela at least.

But then what we see and hear, I think I, I need to, take a point that Charles, said, which is that, this is a strategy of the Venezuelan government or Delcy Rod- Rodriguez to delay. But I think, this is 100% coming from the United States, so I don't know if it's so much a delaying tactic, but something that the Trump administration wants.

And then the, I think the big question here is does the Trump administration want an election in Venezuela anytime soon, right? and I think this is the key question that we need to see. and if there was, if they push for an election, what do they want that to look like? And, this, commission is probably gonna be looking at the electoral authority and, the different institutions that ultimately in 2024 they said that Maduro won, and, they put an end to the discussion, like the Supreme Court as well.

And that's supposed to be the mandate of, this commission. I'm not sure, if, they're gonna want a completely, free and fair election, very soon as in 2027, so next year. but, and I think this is where we're gonna probably gonna start seeing some kind of clash because right now, besides Maria Corina Machado, someone who is really popular politically is Trump and Marco Rubio.

What happens if they're saying, "You know what? It's not time for elections," and they keep, delaying, and, they keep doing business deals and, with oil and mining and the restructuring, and it keeps, praising Delcy Rodriguez, but they're not doing the election, which is presumably what most polls say that, the Venezuelans want.

And just looking at the, the structure of these talks, right at the top, it says that they are going to be looking at the assistance of victims from both earthquakes. Vanessa, why do you think that this has been put at the top? is it will disaster work where politics haven't? Is this a way to bring both sides together, do you think?

Yes. there's a, there's sort of a classic in, in, in politics that one of the way... There are two things where you can get opposing sides together, right? One is sport, things like FIFA events. and the other one is, to work together for to resolve a natural disaster, right? Because natural disasters are, apartisan.

nobody caused them. Mother Nature caused them. although arguably the scale of the disaster was caused by so many years of kleptocracy and corruption. And it's something that actually to move the money, and to move the supervision of the money, both, both in order to access the funds... When, again, we tried to do this when I was posted to London.

if you got the two sides to come together, then you would get, access to those funds and get some sort of tracking and tracing of those funds so that both have, their neck in the docket, so to speak. their, if the mo- if money goes missing, they, both sides have something to lose, and they have something to work on together, and they can both claim success if it goes well.

In my experience, we've tried this before. it, which was during the pandemic. It didn't really work. Arguably, the earthquakes are so visible- ... and it's spectacular, on a global scale that, that working together to resolve that would be good for both parts, not to mention the Venezuelan people who need it.

You can't have elections in a country that is already have a, has a destroyed infrastructure, and now we have tens of thousands or up to 100,000 people, we don't know, 'cause figures are, honest figures are hard to come by in Venezuela, who are displaced. where are these guys gonna vote? how are you gonna run that?

So that would be one of the things that would, that the Trump administration is trying to get the actual infrastructure of back up, and to get these parties to work together because it's, other than sport, natural disaster is the second, sec- second place you bring other- Okay ... opposing sides together.

and Charles, with your diplomatic background, do you agree? Is this the right way to approach these talks, to bring these parties together? Of course, we've seen so many failed talks in the past. 

I would have started these talks a week after January 3rd. Look, offline, not with the political parties necessarily, but with, university presidents, top lawyers, respected officials, maybe retired politicians, Is it too little too late then?

behind the scenes. S- you can start now, but having these formal talks set up between the... they, y- you, the other panelists can explain to you the assembly of 2015 versus the current assembly. it's... you can't explain that to somebody without giggling 'cause it makes no sense at all.

The parties in Venezuela are Maria Corina Machado and Manuel, her, her, the, the guy who was elected president two years ago- 

and the United States of America. It's 

the United States of America that's holding the talks. let's, let's talk about her then, Charles. She's not involved.

She's not at the table at the talks. So are these talks even legitimate?

I can't tell you what legitimate means in the Venezuelan context anymore. Look, we're going through this, we, and I don't mean me personally, we're going through this charade of pretending that Venezuelan institutions are legitimate, that the Chavista assembly is legitimate, that Delcy Rodriguez, who is the henchman of Nicolas Maduro, is legitimate, that the way the United States is handling their oil funds with complete lack of transparency is legitimate, and that excluding the most popular politician in the country is legitimate.

all of this is something that we're, trying to tie together and make something out of. and in reality it, the... if you want to have legitimacy after six months vacancy of a president, there's supposed to be elections in Venezuela. Nobody thinks there should be of elections today- 'cause there's no faith in the electoral roll. That is, who votes and where do they vote and how do Venezuelans in the exterior, outside the country vote? There's certainly no faith in the National Electoral Council, which stole the election of 2024. essentially turned out the lights, turned them back on, and when they turned the lights on they said, "We won."

and there's no faith in the Supreme Court, which then, validated the theft of the election. So- 

... 

what needs to be done goes way beyond, the electoral mechanism, defined narrowly, and it's broadly, and change needs to come. 

Okay. Elias, I'd just like to get your- For me 

when- 

S- sorry.

Please- no ... please just continue there, Charles. 

Sure. what I was going to say i- is that, Senator Rubio keeps talking about phases one, two, and three, and that elections can only come after the economy's recovered. I don't think the economy can recover unless there's a transition to democracy.

What you're seeing now is, businesses, not American businesses, but Venezuelan businesses are not investing in Venezuela. European and Latin American businesses are not investing in Venezuela because there's no rule of law in Venezuela, and you'd be foolish to invest where there's no rule of law.

Venezuelans are not returning home. I've spent the last 10 days in Peru and Chile, where there are thousands and thousands of Venezuelans. Everyone I've met, I ask, "Oh, what do you think of Del- oh, don't trust Delcy Rodriguez. When are you returning home?" "I'm not going home." if Venezuelans aren't, don't feel that this is a safe enough place to return home, w- there's a basic problem here, and that problem can be solved through democracy.

Venezuela needs more democracy, not less. 

Next, Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

it goes back to the 1960s and talks about, in particular, this moment, Cuba's Tricontinental Conference in 1966. it mentions this a couple of different times, and I just want us to understand why the authors of this report believe that moment was so significant and what transpired there.

I would agree with the authors of that report that was a significant moment. it was a significant moment in the, in, in global history and the history of third world politics. the basic context here is the following. The Cuban Revolution triumphs in 1959. 

The Soviets have a lot to thank Castro for.

When he led his guerrilla forces into Havana against the dictator Fulgencio Batista 27 years ago, he achieved virtually the impossible. He established a communist satellite right on the doorstep of the United States. 

It has domestic ambitions first and foremost, which I can talk about. But as the revolution radicalizes to a socialist project in the throes of conflict with the United States, the Cuban government also positions itself as an ally for anti-dictatorial but also increasingly radical and socialist sort of insurgent movements in places around the world, mostly in Latin America and the African continent.

Remember, this is a moment of decolonization. Latin America, it was decolonized in the early 19th century, so Latin American nations are independent. But a number of Latin American countries are run by right-wing military dictators, the kind of military dictator that the Cuban revolution itself overthrew inside Cuba.

This was an event in 1966 that brought together kind of an amalgamation of radical movements, some armed insurgent movements, others not armed per se. From around the Third World. This is where the tri-continental part, right? Asia, Africa. So who, for 

example, yeah, was in attendance? 

representatives of African liberation movements fighting against colonial rule in places like Angola, insurgent organizations that were not necessarily massive or enormous, but trying to create a space in places in Latin America to fight against right-wing military governments there.

Representatives of also a more radical U.S. left, people associated with black nationalism, for example, right? So this sort of notion that the Third World needs to unite, in pursuit of common objectives, common development objectives, common objectives of throwing off the colonial mantle. 

The authors of the report use this term third worldism.

And you alluded to it a moment ago with this tri-continental conference. But what exactly does it mean? What are we talking about there? 

It was that countries of the quote-unquote Third World, which again is a very sort of Cold War term, right? Countries that are either, not the global capitalist West- Okay

and, or democratic West- ... or the Soviet Union and the affiliated Eastern Bloc. And so Third Worldism is a way, in a sense, to try to appropriate that kind of Cold War label of a First World, a Second World, and a Third World, as if it's less important, and to say, we are on the front lines of important, confluence of political and economic challenges that our societies face.

Throwing off the mantle of colonial rule where it still exists, thinking about how underdeveloped, economies in the Global South can actually develop. What's the best model for that? What are the, the political paths to taking power in name of a more radical vision in which, people from the Third World are empowered to sh- to shape their destiny?

that I think, at the surface level is the, the basic idea. 

so at the same time that the report talks about this tri-continental conference that was happening in Cuba in 1966, it also talks about this era in the 1960s in which Cuba, is framed as a nexus point for all sorts of left-wing activism, connecting things like the Black Panther movement with, Pan-Africanism and movements for independence across Africa, guerrilla movements in Latin America, that it was all in their view, united against one common enemy, the United States.

w- what do you make of that? 

So Cuba absolutely was a nexus and a hub for all of those kinds of things. the Cuban government positioned itself as an ally of what it saw as sort of- similar struggles, right? and as I mentioned, Cuba both trained, guerrilla fighters, it provided exile to people who were fleeing persecution for their ideas.

Where- ... the sort of truth quality of the report, I think can be called into question is again, how all of that is framed, right? and the way in which the report seems to insinuate a lack of agency on the part of some of those constituent groups who might have looked to Havana or gone to Havana or, seen the Cuban revolution positively.

I think particularly flagrant in this regard is the notion that Black, the, the sort of Black nationalism was somehow, born or fundamentally influenced from Havana. The report is actually quite vague on, on the wording it uses for things like causality. It talks, just to use the case of Black nationalism, about the role of a man named Robert Williams, who's one of the, the, the...

He comes up with the, one of the founders of the notion of Black nationalism, right? Who goes into exile in Cuba, and the Cuban government helps him broadcast an illicit radio broadcast called Radio Free Dixie into the Jim Crow South. now that might seem like subversion, and it certainly seemed like subversion to people like J.

Edgar Hoover at the time. But if you're in the Jim Crow South fighting, c- for civil rights, maybe you see that a, a little bit differently, right? And a- and it's also not to say that, Robert Williams' ideas weren't born in Havana. He might have turned to Havana, Havana might offered support.

But again, the degree to which Havana is tagged in this report as almost like the mastermind or that one I think can come away from this report thinking that it's somehow the mastermind, again, simplifies a much more complex story. A complex story of collaboration, but also conflict.

Robert Williams is a great example. He leaves Cuba eventually because he's frustrated that the Cuban government is not doing enough to address Cuba's own racial, disparities. and he leaves. he's fed up with the Cuban revolutionary project. So again, these are parts of the more complex story that are left out of this report.

Michael, beyond just the influence operations, this report spells out that Cuba over the decades was building an international spy network, and it names specific people, including, the former US ambassador to Bolivia. can you help us m- make sense of that and how vast this spy network has been? 

There is absolutely history, of the Cuban government having a very sophisticated, well-oiled, intelligence, capacity.

and over the years there have been a number of, very high-profile kind of outings of Cuban agents who have, worked their way, up into the highest levels of the US government. They were US officials that Cuban... that grew to have criticisms of US pol- foreign policy, whether toward Cuba or other parts of the world, and that the Cuban government was able to leverage that to get them to s- to send information.

Victor Manuel Rocha is the one that you mentioned. Ana Belen Montes, is an even more, I think, sort of nefarious case. She rose to be the, the, the head of Latin America for the National Intelligence Directorate in the US government. she was a career official, born in Puerto Rico, and worked, as a Cuban agent for years.

and so there is abs- it's absolutely true that the Cuban government has punched above its weight or what you might expect from a, relatively small country in terms of intelligence capacity.

Why is Cuba's power generation infrastructure in such a poor state? Can you give us some background on that, please?

The first is that they've lost, what was effectively originally 100,000 barrels per day, of gifted oil from Venezuela, half of which they sold on the global markets and half of which was for their own consumption. That has disappeared with the oil blockade. But second, they've simply not kept up with technology and updating their electrical grid.

So without the com- the combustible, the, the fuel, and without the sort of the generation capacity and delivery capacity, they're really in dire straits right now in their electricity. And accord- according to Cuba's own authorities, they only have a few weeks to go of fuel left. So they're, it's going to get, only get worse, and quite frankly, the measures the Trump administration is proposing are not going to provide immediate relief.

So Trump, when he says Cuba's in a bad way, he's quite correct, but Cuba might be in an even worse position because of what Trump has imposed. 

Exactly right. he's basically imposed this oil blockade which cut off a lifeline that had been given to Cuba for a long time that kept the lights on, literally, but also was essential for people's cooking oil, people's re- refrigeration of food, so food is spoiling, and even for the delivery of food, and even for the hard currency that they used to earn when they would sell part of that oil, on international markets.

This has been a, if you will, a humanitarian crisis largely of Trump's making. 

there's been this issue of the aging infrastructure, which hasn't kept up with technology for any number of reasons under the previous, Castro regime. There's been the situation created by Trump with his, decision post Venezuela to squeeze Cuba in that way.

What is motivain- motivating the Trump, the Trump administration to do this? 

Quite frankly, I think part of it is that they wanna project their power, in the hemisphere as they did in Venezuela. And I think the Venezuela model, is one that Trump thinks he can impose or use in, in, in Cuba as he thinks he's going to use it in Iran.

but it's... Cuba's not Venezuela. It's a much more disciplined revolutionary state, one party state, a command and control economy that's been in power for 67 years now. what he wants to do is basically try to root out any governments that are going to be opposed to US interests. We also have to remember that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a Cuban American.

His parents left Cuba actually before the Fidel Castro revolution, but he has really cut his political teeth, if you will, in South Florida politics where there are more than, well over, 2 million Cuban voters, many of whom are very hard line and are seeking regime change. So Trump is being pushed by, if you will, his own ego, his own plan for the Donro Doctrine, an adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as his Secretary of State, who for a long time has had, on his agenda, regime change in Cuba.

So regime change. That was my next question. You've brought us right there. Is that Rubio's agenda, regime change? 

I think it could be, and I think it was originally, but I think right now, just as they're seeing, they saw in the case of Venezuela as the time came closer and closer for the removal of Maduro, that the imposition of a democratic opposition in Cuba, in this case, in Venezuela in the other, could actually bring more chaos.

the Cuban o- opposition is, very fragmented, very atomized. It's very small. A lot of the, the Cuban leaders have left and fled to- Yeah ... to South Florida facing, repression. It isn't clear what exactly a democratic transition would ha- would be 'cause you'd have to basically, unlike in Venezuela, you'd pretty much have to pull up the Cuban state by its roots to able, to be able to create a democratic government of the sort that many people aspire to see in Cuba.

So yes, it is regime change, but quite frankly, I'm sure they're hearing a lot of analyses from the CIA and other intelligence services that it's a distant hope and one that w- pro- could perhaps bring more chaos and even outflow of refugees than was once thought. 

Donald Trump no doubt has something in mind, along the lines of what his plan was or his plan is for the Gaza Strip.

without going down that particular avenue, can you tell us about the potential perhaps that Cuba would have, if developed with the people in the right way for the good of Cuban people along those lines? Because clearly there is potential there that perhaps isn't being tapped into. 

you didn't wanna go down this road, but I'm going to, which is Trump, for Trump it was oil and Venezuela, and for Trump it's now tourism in Cuba.

In 1994, he actually sent a number of his, scouts to look at opportunities for Trump hotels, casinos in Cuba. So th- he has his eye on this because, it could become a, a paradise for Trump's, ambitions to create resorts. The problem with that is that tourism is deeply, ex- exploitative.

Those on the island oftentimes are left out. They h- often only have service jobs, and the current hotels that are in Cuba that are frequented by, foreign tourists, most of them from Europe, most of the staff of these hotels are not Afro descendant. They're more European descendant. and that's a problem because the bulk of population of Cuba is Afro descendant.

So it's, it really risks a very, creating a very sharp and racially d- defined, inequality, levels of inequality within Cuba if it's going to be tourism only that Trump uses to try to build Cuba back. 

Is there anybody, on the island, 'cause Rubio's talking about different people are needed to make it happen.

Is there anybody there that you can think of that might be able to work with, Trump, his people, in order to create this evolving Cuba, which could be for the good of everybody? 

ironically, Marco Rubio's talking to the grandson of Raul Castro, Raulito, which is funny because first of all, again, it demonstrates first of all that the revolution of 1959 is just created a dynasty.

but he's the man who can probably make things happen. But having worked in Cuba for a long time and having tried to press for a number of changes with Cubans, and in this case for an exchange program with Columbia University, everything has to go to the top. It is a very vertically dominated, structure in terms of decision-making.

So even talking to one person, even if it is a Castro, that will still, that person or whatever change will still have to confront a deeply hidebound and resistant bureaucracy that is very inefficient. So this is not a matter of just flipping a switch and opening up the markets in the tourism sector and allowing for investment.

It's going to confront an incredibly difficult, bureaucratic process and a lot of intransigence. 

How much of a threat in real practical terms at this moment is Cuba to the United States right now? Because that's the other thing about this report. It articulates, a worldview of Cuba as an extremely dangerous country to the United States. and yet I'm also aware that in this particular moment, Cuba does not seem to be in a particularly strong position.

As you say, the US has had a blockade on oil coming into the island. There have been rolling blackouts here on our show. We have, spoken to our correspondent from Cuba. he has spoken to us about these blackouts, food shortages. so what does the report say about this in terms of how really How, of how much of a threat Cuba is to the US in this moment?

I'm glad you're asking this question because this is the big, the big question mark for me too. President Trump himself has said on a number of occasions in the last six, seven months that, Cuba's a failed state- ... Cuba's about to fall. But it's difficult, I think, for the lay person to read this report and the kind of picture that it paints to understand, to match that up against the rhetoric that Cuba's, system is about to collapse under its own weight of economic failure and immiseration.

There was a video a few months back of the Cuban government put out on state media of military preparations for American action in which soldiers were shown pulling, an anti-aircraft gun on a cart that was being pulled by a donkey. That doesn't exactly project- 

Strength ... 

strength or force, right?

Which is not to say that, US intelligence shouldn't take the work of Cuban intelligence agents seriously. and I think they do. 

It seems like the argument from the authors of this report is that Cuba's strength comes not maybe from its military prowess, its economic wealth or anything. It comes from its ideology.

and I say that, Michael, if I can read just a sentence to you from the report. This is on page 99, so near the end. It says, "To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic."

It goes on to say more It's a striking argument, I think 

It's true that Cuba, and I hate to keep using the metaphor, but has punched above its weight in terms of being a symbol for the world. But part of the reason it's being a, it's been a symbol for the world either of object evil, of a one, party communist state that represses its people, or liberation that sticks it to the man in the United States, part of that is about the long history of conflict between the United States and Cuba, the sort of David versus Goliath narrative.

And so Cuba generates a lot of sympathy around the world because of the way it's, it, it is perceived, or one can argue that it has been beaten up on by the big guy. W- at a... when the US government seems to have no problem getting along perfectly well with authoritarian one-party states in a number of places around the world, Vietnam, China, never mind sort of the Saudis or others, right?

That US objections about democracy in Cuba seem to be fundamentally inconsistent with a more pragmatic foreign policy elsewhere, and so the sanctions are treating the Cuban people's collective punishment. That has long generated sympathy on the American left, going back to the '60s, and then it withered once Cuba actually became a communist state.

if that threat of Cuba as a, as an ideological example is insidious, I guess I would throw back at the report's authors, to what extent is that also a product of the way that US policy has treated Cuba over the years, and made it, y- allow, given Cuba the ability to say, we're the victims, and we're trying to create an alternate reality."

I don't think we can excuse members of the American left that have given a pass over the years to Cuba's, the Cuban government's, own human rights violations. But again, these are all arguments that we can have on the terrain of political debate, and not as an argument about threats to US national security.

We've been having this conversation with the full knowledge that, this report is not happening in isolation. Earlier this month, we saw the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announce additional sanctions on the Cuban government. this is all also happening in the context of repeated threats from the Trump administration for some sort of possible takeover of Cuba.

and I guess I, I lay that all out here, Michael, to say what exactly is the US government trying to achieve, in your view, by releasing this report? 

Hard to say for sure. so on the one hand, there's the domestic political piece, right? This, this report is kind of ammunition in domestic political arguments, and the midterms are not too far away.

It's hard to escape that, particularly with the frequency with which, Democratic Party elected officials or aligned folks are mentioned explicitly. But on the foreign policy front, the administration has been building a case i- in fits and starts over the l- the last few months about Cuba's national security threat, in a way that would perhaps tee up some kind of military operation, right?

So in the same way that we saw the United States in the Venezuela case, leverage an old indictment of Nicolás Maduro in court for drug trafficking, but then you pivot to this notion of Venezuela as this drug trafficking hub and that, getting Maduro is a law enforcement operation.

There was, like, an attempt to build a narrative that sort of set the table for what they did, even if when they did it, it was still a surprise. I think we'd be naive to not wonder if the c- if the US is do- is doing that, right? So this report follows on a number of things. It follows on significant reporting, and I would also say speculation about the extent to which China and Russia have listening posts, that is their own intelligence facilities inside Cuba, which w- one could say, "Yeah, that might be a concern for the United States."

it comes on the heels also of the indictment of Raúl Castro in a federal court a few weeks back for his alleged involvement in the, the shoot-down and killing of, US, civilians, in, in civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits in 1996. It comes on the heels of a report, unconfirmed, again, seems very speculative, that, Cuba may have acquired a certain defensive drone, capacity from the Iranians, right?

So all of these elements, and then now this report that says, there's this, this ideological nemesis sort of off, off our shores that's sowing discontent internally. 

90 miles away from Florida, And so is the ideological concerns they have, is there any veracity for the idea that the ideological influence of Cuba has grown over the last decade?

I don't know how one would measure that kind of thing, but what I can say is that the, I find the a- the allegation kind of startling in light of the ideological shifts that are happening in Cuba itself. And what do I mean by that? back 15 years ago, Raul Castro, then the Cuban head of state, started articulating a need for, economic liberalization framed as we're improving socialism, right?

But it was creating more space for the private sector, right? So the Cuban government over the last

10, 15 years has been gradually unwinding the economic model of state socialism, right? There is a private sector in Cuba today that is doing a majority of retail bus- business, still in its infancy by the comparisons about just any other place in the world you go to, maybe say North Korea.

But, but nonetheless, is a shift. And I think some parts of a kind of a very doctrinaire, some may say campus left, d- hang on to some notion that, of Cuba offering an alternative model of development. Anyone who spends a shred of time in Cuba, I think would have real questions about that.

Cuba's best economists argue that we are not a model for anybody, and we need to change things from, root to stem. I think also the, the, the real economic issues, cost of living issues in our society are driving folks to look for other models. I think there are some folks out there who have a very simplistic view of what Cuba is or the kind of model that it exists. But again, my experience is that folks who actually spend a significant time there, who don't just parachute in for a week, come to start hearing these tales of Cuban people who may like a certain thing about the Cuban system or the principle of free healthcare, but are also wondering, are watching as t- like more than a million Cubans have left in the five, five, last five or six years.

And it's not just because of American sanctions.

Now, Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

it's worth reminding, listeners first of all that this would not be Colombia's first experience with a hard-handed security and other policy. Yeah ... there were several decades- Like every other 

president 

Exactly. and during that time, we saw really the resilience of Colombian institutions. For example, blocking a potential third tcurity approach that was very heavy-handed, and tried to extend his stay in office for a third term and was stopped from doing so.

So that is, that and other examples give us sort of confidence that the institutions are robust and that they can handle, I think some of the pressures that will be against them. But let me be clear, I think that is a risk. I do think that, this sort of populist governance, and particularly some of the candidate's statements about, for example, dismissing the importance of Congress, or again, his tendency not to, easily accept a free and critical press, should raise alarm bells and I think, there is certainly an awareness and a, an acute, sense of urgency in parts of civil society to be ready to push back against any such attempts.

So I'm interested in having you put, his election maybe like a broader regional context. I can't remember if it was you that I interviewed or one of your colleagues, years ago when Petro was first elected, the first left-wing president in Colombia's history, which had been ruled by a succession of, right or center-right parties.

But here you have, an avowed leftist, Gustavo Petro, won an election. but now that seems to just be, like, an aberration and, Colombia has returned to history. And, you'll have, another right-winger in charge. But then you have him in, the context of what's seemingly like a right-wing resurgence in much of Latin America, with Milei, with Bukele.

Like, how do you perceive or, what do you think explains this trend? 

Yeah. So two points. I think the first one is that, while it's true that, of course, if we go back to a right-leaning leader, then Petro would be the exception to the rule. What is different this time is that Colombia now has a very established political left that is a force.

They have the largest voting bloc in Congress. They have forty-nine percent of voters who backed their candidate, and this is not a constituency that can be easily pushed aside. They are a relevant political actor in Colombia, and that is different from the past, and that, I believe, will persist beyond any single election outcome.

in a broader regional context, the way that I interpret this shift to the right is really the following: I think it's a reflection of voters across the region, distrusting and not feeling confident in the state. And as they do so, there is this tendency to bounce back and forth between the left and the right.

There are waves of left-wing candidates that we had for some time, Evo Morales, Lula, Chávez, and then we ha- we bounce back to the right, then we bounce back to the left and back to the right. And I really see this as a reflection of the fact that voters, mistrust or distrust the state's ability to actually deliver on promises and to improve their lives.

And this is particularly acute at the moment as we've seen an expansion of armed, sorry, of organized crime throughout the region. And when I talk about organized crime, I wanna really bring that to a sort of day-to-day level. What organized crime means in particularly the Andean region, but also more broadly across Latin America, is a deep predation on the part, on, on where these groups have a presence.

So we're talking about practices like high levels of extortion, limits on movement, kidnapping, recruitment of children, things that fundamentally change the social dynamic and frankly, the economic capacity of households to live And I think voters are frustrated with this situation very understandably.

there is a sort of anti-incumbent sentiment across the region because we haven't found a solution to this problem, neither on the right or the left. and so I definitely see it in that vein. the right is promising this hard-handed crackdown, which we call here in Spanish mano dura, and I think that's attractive because it sounds like a magic wand.

You round everybody up, you build mega prisons, get all the bad guys out, and it finishes. It's not so simple, and we've seen that, in fact, in the first experiment in trying to replicate really the Bukele model has been in Ecuador. In Ecuador, the president declared an armed conflict, sent the military to the streets, and initially homicides dropped.

But a few months later, they skyrocketed to their highest historic levels, where they have remained ever since. So these types of crack-crackdowns are very difficult to implement, very hard to maintain, and come with extreme compromises in terms of human rights and personal liberties. And I think the region is now grappling with what balance is right in terms of addressing the real security threats for civilians and communities, while also re-retaining those democratic structures that are-- that's fundamental, of course, to, to how the society and the political space functions 

so maybe before I get-- let you go, Beth, in the coming, days or weeks, what are you looking towards?

W- what are you waiting to see or hear in Colombian politics that will suggest to you, what this new era, this Abelardo era might look like? 

I think the first, thing to watch will be the secondary vote count. the left-wing candidate, Iván Cepeda, and President Gustavo Petro have said they w- they are not accepting results until that second count is done.

there are reasons-- I think that it is a risk that we could see protests around that result, given the high levels of polarization and also frankly, the closeness of the vote. again, this is a-- half the country did not elect the incoming president, regardless of who that was going to be.

This is a country that's deeply divided in two. and I think that risk increases, the risk of social unrest increases both before the electoral transition, the transition to the new administration, and afterwards if there are incendiary policies or rhetoric from the new office holder. So the president-elect, it is of the utmost importance to understand that he has to win the confidence of half of Colombia.

He has to govern for all Colombians, and that means speaking to his political opponents in a way that addresses them as a constituency that is now his. So de-escalatory messages, it's very important not to see sort of revenge campaigns or persecutions, something that I think is always a risk when you have these very radical swings from left to right.

And that will be fundamental not only to ensuring that, the incoming administration is successful, frankly, but also ensuring that the, that, voters feel represented despite the fact that perhaps they haven't, had their electoral triumph this time, that they can al-- that we can bring Colombia, which is very divided, back together going forward.

So I think those are key points to watch. I think the second point will, of course, be the relationship with the United States. the United States has been very keen and very vocal about reestablishing its influence and agenda across the Western Hemisphere. the pressure right now on, I think, the president-elect is limited because he is the president-elect, but as soon as he takes office, I do expect that Washington will have a concrete list of asks.

And I think the incoming administration will have to really start to balance those pressures and those requests with the interests of actually Colombia itself. Things like high-level captures or very ho- high-profile operations against drug trafficking organizations, they might look good in Washington.

The question is, how are they serving the, the security of communities here in Colombia, and what interventions would be necessary alongside those types of operations to ensure that there is really a sort of fundamental change to the equation, and we're not just replacing one armed group leader with another?

this characteristic is repression abroad, and we haven't really seen that in, let's say, in Venezuela with one exception of a former military officer who was allegedly assassinated in Chile at the hands of the regime.

It seems that Nicaragua is doing this much more pervasively. What are some of the tactics employed to intimidate or to repress Nicaraguans living ex- in exile? And are they using surveillance technology or hacking to find opposition members? And we also understand that the Ortega government is using, unlawfully using Interpol to intimidate and threaten exiles.

Can you paint us a picture of how some of this repression outside of the country's borders is taking place? 

One thing is the strategy that I just explained a bit, and now the tactical part is normally applied through different Arms of the regime. I would just, highlight here the intelligence part first.

The state intelligence network is, monitor communications on social media all over the place. They link the police, the army, Telcor, which is a national telecommunications company, and party structures of the FSLN, together with highly sophisticated technological devices. And there is even technological devices that can monitor geographically movements, of the people.

So exile cycles are penetrated also through hacking and spyware, which is, part of the standard toolbox that you use. But what is not that standard, beyond, what you have already mentioned, false Interpol Red Notices, is another issue that I wanted to highlight, which is use misinformation and the stolen passports alerts to trigger arrests or travel bans.

So the SLTD data bank of Interpol is strategically used in order to make people not move anywhere by misinformation about having or carrying passports that are reportedly stolen or lost or even falsified. Then the government also circulates false information to tarnish target's reputation and, in particular, their financial reputation that may trigger then Anti-Money Laundering compliance warnings, which can block, access to any kind of financial services and can lead to literally de-bank people All these actions are designed to deter any collective organization abroad, and to dismantle safe havens, and to project, domestic control abroad.

That's it. And we have seen this, and analyzed this in a dedicated report published by the end of the year, identifying so broad methods that we think that this is not a coincidence, and is not only, created exclusively in Managua. 

What do you mean by not created exclusively in Managua? 

It is part of a toolbox that we can witness in all over, the world today.

We can witness this as being part of the toolbox used by the Iranians. We can see it used by Belarus. We can see it used by other countries that are well on the radar of the current transnational repression reports that are out there. 

Nicaragua has seen a mass exile since 2018. By the end of last year, more than 340,000 Nicaraguans were seeking asylum abroad, a figure that's widely believed to underestimate the true scale of the exile.

What is the scale of oppression abroad? How many people are being targeted? And what are governments in host countries that have these exiles, what are they doing about it? 

Now, it is important to keep in mind that since, the protests and the crackdown on the protests in April 2018, almost 10% of the country's population has left the country.

If out of

these around 750,000, you narrow down these numbers to asylum application, that is, people who are potentially- Politically persecuted, you reach a number between, 300 to 350,000, and this is a population that is potentially targeted by these activities. Now, what we can do with our reduced resources is to interview people that come up, to us or through our networks that after four years of work we have.

And we have interviewed for the report that I recently mentioned now around 400 victims, but of course the number is much bigger. And just to give you an example of how big it should be, there is a systematic denial of any consular services to people that fit the profile of politically persecuted persons that we have detailed in our report, and these are thousands.

The effect of this is, deliberate That is, many of them, for lacking any documentation, will have lots of problems in applying and having, success, with a political asylum application procedures, for example. What are countries doing to this? It depends a bit of what their concept of, transnational repression is.

There are countries like the US that has a very narrow concept that literally reduces TNR to physical harassment. or where you can access the protective measures by the police. But it is not only this. So how do you protect people, for example, from digital harassment? There is still a lot to do.

or right now, there is an initiative by the G7 countries to have dedicated units on TNR, and, they will come up with best practices. But as far as we have seen until now, there's still a lot to do in this regard in terms of protection of people that are targeted by TNR, by the Nicaraguan government.

Nixon Geovanni Perez Paz and Glendy Marisol Gonzalez-De La Cruz were found bound, gagged, and shot in a sugarcane field in Guatemala. Their 14-month-old daughter was alive and crying next to her mother's body. The couple, whose funeral was last week, leaves behind two other young daughters as well.

Gonzalez-De La Cruz left the United States with her daughters just weeks ago, self-deporting after her husband was detained by ICE and deported last year following a traffic stop. Now, two communities in two countries are reeling and searching for answers. For more, I'm joined by Brian Muñoz. He is with St.

Louis Public Radio, and he broke the story. Brian, first of all, help us understand what we know about the murders of this couple and, in particular, the status of their children. 

Absolutely. So this is just the latest harrowing story out of Missouri about people perishing after interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In this specific case, Glendy and Nixon had came to the St. Louis area and were separated after Nixon and his brother, Rolando, were stopped by ICE officials on the way to work one day last April. They say that, the brother tells me that is, that they were on the way to their roofing jobs when a unmarked vehicle started chasing them down and pulled them over.

After they stopped, agents swarmed the vehicle, and they were taken in and subsequently deported. So- 

And that happened last year, right? 

Yes. That happened last April according to, an ICE spokesperson. 

And so Glendy decided, "Hey, I'm gonna stick it out." She stayed and decided to work two jobs, trying to put food on the table, but the rising cost and the fear of being detained and separated from her children made her do the unthinkable and decide, "Hey, I'm gonna go back."

she had an active asylum claim here according to federal records, and her friends tell me that, sh- like I mentioned, she was afraid. She was afraid for her safety and for the safety of her children. So after having said, "Hey, this is too much," she decided to go, and she took her three kids with her.

And not even a month later, I think a week or two, she was found shot and killed. So her three daughters, young, in grade school, the youngest is only 14 months old or so, are now in the custody of their aunt and uncle, Nixon's brother. 

Do we know anything about the motive here? 

That's an excellent question, and there are so many things that are unknown.

from what I've gotten from family and friends this week is the motives are unknown. Really, these folks were on their way to register a motorcycle that Nixon had with their youngest daughter when they were ambushed by assailants. They don't know who, they don't know the motives, but their families and friends have been left grieving.

Now, ICE sent you a statement reading in part, "ICE remains committed to removing criminal aliens from our community by enforcing immigration laws and maintaining the integrity of our borders." Did either of these two have a criminal record? 

Yes. So Nixon, the only thing I could find, and as it was also pointed out in the ICE statement, was he was cited and charged with driving without a license in 2024 in suburban St.

Louis. There was about a $200 fine that was paid. And ICE said that there were two drunk driving charges in Overland, Missouri. I scoured the court system that's publicly facing that would have those records in it, and I wasn't able to find They also pointed to a 2010 citation in Palm Beach, Florida, where Nixon was charged with an ordinance violation for having an open container, but it appears the prosecutors ended up not pursuing that case.

And we know that traffic stop you mentioned, the fine, that is usually a misdemeanor. Glendy, I wanna talk about her as well. She had filed for asylum, as you said. She was awaiting a hearing next year when she self-deported. What does this case and her fate tell you about the system overall? 

Yeah. I think this case is indicative of a system that advocates say is broken.

So right now, right before this interview, I looked at the track online immigration case tracker, and it says that there are roughly 45 to 50,000, backlog cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the entire state of Missouri and Kansas. of those, about 11,500 or so are backlogs in asylum cases.

So attorneys for immigrants across the state are telling me, "We're waiting years and years to be able to even get a hearing. And right now, the rules are changing so much that it's difficult to best serve our clients and to give them a fair shake- ... because we don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next."

You mentioned new rules. There is a new rule on asylum from the Trump administration this week, which means that essentially most applying for asylum will go straight to an immigration judge and won't get an interview. What do you think that means for the system? 

Absolutely. So it is a challenge for folks that are trying to represent these immigrants in immigration court.

on one hand, of course, the backlog is most likely going to be reduced, but advocates and attorneys tell me that it's going to be incredibly challenging to make a case to these judges that are only taking, a minute or two to go through them because there's so many in the backlog. So yes, this thing's gonna move a little more expeditiously, but advocates and attorneys warn that they feel like they may be a little hamstrung on best representing their clients.

I want to talk about accountability for a minute. As you've mentioned, your report suggests that the acts committed by the Ortega-Murillo regime may constitute crimes under international law, including possibly crimes against humanity, given their scale and their organization. Given that Nicaragua is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and that under the current circumstances of government control, certainly no court in Nicaragua would provide justice to the victims, what avenues for justice exist?

that's true that, Nicaragua isn't an ICC state party, and this usually means hands off, yes. But here's why international law is finding a way into Nicaragua even without being invited. I would say here the gateway is, what we call transporter crimes, precisely what we were talking about a few minutes ago.

The logic here is that if the crime, like for example deportation or persecution, starts in Nicaragua but ends in a country that is a member of the ICC has a foot in the door. And there are precedents. we've seen this before with the Rohingyas being forced from Myanmar to Bangladesh. This is an ongoing investigation of the ICC and more recently, opponents forced from Belarus to Lithuania.

Neither Myanmar nor Belarus are parties to Rome Statute, but so are, Bangladesh and Lithuania. And once you have, like this gateway, the question is how you trigger an ICC investigations, and, there are mainly two roads, but one of it is, lots cheaper than the other There are so-called, Article 5 notices.

That is, anyone can send information to the prosecutor. But the catch here is that since 2002, around, 170,000 of these have been sent, but only seven led to actual investigation. So it's a bit of a long shot, I would say. But then there comes the gold standard, and this is definitely the state referral.

if an actual member state or a group of them, asks for an investigation, like these six countries that did to it in the case of Venezuela in 2018, and this carries much way more weight. But given the overall impunity in Nicaragua, the, you should seek a multi-track strategy because the IC- she isn't the only game in town.

Justice is, in these cases, more a team sport, between several jurisdictions. National courts in countries whose citizens were victims in Nicaragua can prosecute for offshore, or one of them would be, for example, Brazil. And in addition, the door remains, of course, open for any state to take action against crimes against humanity based on universal jurisdiction like, like Argentina is doing, at present But the bottom line here is that coordination is the only practical map for justice for victims who have none at home, and the message is clear: You don't need a country permission to hold its leaders accountable for crimes that spill across borders, be it that the victims are of your nationality or be it that you're throwing out your own people.

As Jan, I was actually intimately involved in the process that ultimately led to the six countries referring a case to the ICC for Venezuela. Venezuela did not have... First of all, it was a member of the Rome Statute, which made things much easier, but it really at that time was not engaged in transnational repression, which is a whole other dimension.

Why do you think countries have acted in the case of Venezuela, but not Nicaragua? presumably a number of crimes have occurred, I would imagine, and maybe you can confirm that a number of crimes would've been committed in neighboring Costa Rica, which has accepted many Nicaraguan exiles, and Nic- Costa Rica is a, a party to the Rome Statute.

let me just put it that way. Venezuela has been on the radar of the region for being the basis of what is called the new wave of socialism in the region, whereas, Nicaragua is a anachronistic regime of old dictators. I think this is the first. The second is, though it has some geostrategic value, it is by far not that important for obvious economic reasons, but also for geostrategic reasons, as Venezuela.

Then, the action taken in the case of Venezuela came out of the regional organization of the OAS. So it was not that the case was created on the universal level, but it was first, by initiative of some states and the former secretary general of the OAS, that the information was collected, analyzed, and then reported that paved the ground for the case being brought to the ICC.

All of this, unfortunately, has not been the case with the OAS- And, hopefully, though Nicaragua has withdrawn from the OAS, we can see in the future some more concrete steps in this direction from the regional organization. 

Can you speak to that for a minute? what should regional organizations, and, do in such cases?

And concretely, in the case of Nicaragua, what should the OAS be doing, especially now that this very damning report that you've published has come to light? 

So I think that the OAS should first address the overall security issue that is created by the situation in Nicaragua. If you have a country that is actively seeking opponents beyond its borders in the region, this is not the only human rights issue, but it is a security issue.

It's a issue of hemispheric security that should be addressed by the appropriate organs of the OAS. Second, it should also be kept in mind that though Nicaragua has withdrawn from the OAS, it hasn't withdrawn from the Inter-American Human Rights System. I think there is still a long way to go by the Inter-American Human Rights System in order to prepare the ground to have more active role being played by the main organs of the organization, which could eventually lead them to more actions, maybe even in the upcoming general assembly.

There is a good opportunity to do this. 

And Finally, Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

The United States has a long history of fueling instability in Latin America, often while operating behind the scenes. Here are some of the major US interventions in Latin America, interventions that had long-lasting consequences and left a trail of instability in their wake. During the Cold War, Washington framed much of its interference abroad as a fight against communism, but in reality, its foreign operations were conducted to protect its own political and economic interests.

In 1954, the US decided it needed to dispose of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of a Western sympathizer. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the exploitative labor practices of the United Fruit Company, an American corporation. With a budget of $2.7 million, the agency armed and trained Guatemalan exile Carlos Castillo Armas and supported his force of 480 men in an invasion launched from Honduras.

Psychological warfare, including fake radio broadcasts, aerial bombings, and widespread disinformation sowed fear among the population and military, causing Guatemala's army to stand down. The coup ushered in decades of military rule and repression, as well as a civil war that killed more than 200,000 people over nearly 40 years.

For the US, however, the coup served its purpose: to set an example and warn any Latin American nation seeking progressive reform that it would suffer a bleak fate. This model of intervention was repeated across the region. In 1964, the US backed a military coup in Brazil against President Joao Goulart, whose policies threatened Washington's economic interests.

The coup installed a military dictatorship that ruled for 21 years, marked by censorship, torture, and political repression. That same year, Washington began interfering in Chilean politics. The US disseminated anti-communist propaganda to prevent socialist candidate Salvador Allende, who had pledged to nationalize Chile's copper industry, from winning the presidency.

When Allende triumphed in the 1970 election, the Nixon administration spent the next three years providing opposition groups with millions of dollars in financial aid and logistical support to destabilize his government. These covert efforts paved the way for the 1973 military coup and the brutal 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

During his rule, thousands of political opponents were tortured, killed, or disappeared. By the mid-1970s, US-backed repression was region-wide. Through Operation Condor, US-backed military regimes in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia coordinated intelligence-sharing, kidnappings, assassinations, and torture to eliminate left-wing opponents, even across national borders.

While Operation Condor was not a US program, it had the support of Washington, which provided intelligence, training, and logistical support. Not all US interventions relied on coups alone. In the 1960s, the CIA attempted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro using everything from exploding cigars to poisoned pills, but none of their plans succeeded.

In the 1980s, when Contra rebels in Nicaragua sought to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government, the US covertly backed the insurgents with military and financial support. Even after the International Court of Justice ruled that the US had violated international law, Washington was never held accountable for its role in a conflict that killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans.

By the end of the Cold War, the US was no longer relying solely on covert action, however. In 1989, US forces invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset, from power under the banner of enforcing democracy and human rights. In 2002, the US supported a failed coup attempt against Venezuela's then president, Hugo Chavez.

In 2018, Washington had accused President Nicolas Maduro of rigging the presidential election. Since then, US policy toward Caracas relied primarily on sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and backing opposition groups to influence the country's political direction. But on January 3rd, US forces carried out air strikes and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to the US.

The attack followed months of escalating tensions during which Washington accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking and enacted a blockade on Venezuelan oil tankers. Following the January 3 attack, US President Trump warned that Colombia and Mexico could also face military action if they failed to curb the flow of illicit drugs into the US.

Political analysts say Washington's intervention strategies have changed, but the objective has remained largely the same: to prevent Latin American nations from pursuing political paths that challenge US dominance in the region. 

​

There's a weapon that powerful countries use to get rid of leaders they don't like, leaders from other countries. It's called a coup. It's a French word that means a punch or a blow because it means coming in and forcibly punching out a government from power. No elections, no process, just power being seized, just someone being pushed out and someone being put in.

Coups happen in so many different ways, but I wanna show you how the coup has been used by the United States of America as a tool to get what they want on the world stage. So let me walk you through some of the major US-led coups over the years to show you that while it sometimes seems like we live in a world full of order and rules, the reality is that the most powerful countries will often get their way by whatever means necessary.

Okay, so here's how I'm defining the US-led coups that I'm gonna put on our list here. Number one, they were successful. There's a lot of failed coup attempts. We're leaving those out. Number two, there must be at least one US government official involved in the coup. And number three, we need concrete evidence that the US was actually involved, not just speculation.

While the US has been involved in tons of regime change efforts around the world, we landed on a much shorter list. These are the coups that I think best exemplify how this tool has been used for international power over the years. Okay, so we're over here in Nicaragua. It's 1909. There's a bunch of powerful American companies here, but a new president comes to power vowing to regulate them.

The US is not gonna let this happen, so the secretary of state starts spreading rumors to smear this guy, this president, saying that he's building a canal that would compete with the Panama Canal. But really, they're just upset because Nicaragua's taking loans from Europe. The US keeps painting this guy as a war criminal and someone worthy of being thrown out So push comes to shove and the US sends ships to both of Nicaragua's coasts.

They assemble a bunch of Marines in Panama, basically just flexing on Nicaragua and telling the president to step down. And the benefit of being a rising superpower is that it worked. He has no choice but to step down, and soon a leader that the US likes comes to power. The coup is complete, and really, this is the first of many instances of the US meddling in Nicaragua.

A few years later, the US is back in the region for another coup in next door Honduras. This one was plotted by a band of private American citizens, and it follows a similar pattern. A new president comes to town, in this case directly inspired by Nicaragua's president, and he wants to take back control of the country from American businesses.

In this case, we're talking about bananas. The banana companies were not gonna let this happen, and it was mostly this guy, a banana businessman named Sam the Banana Man. He's not gonna let this pesky president run his country, no. So he assembles his own militia. He literally buys a surplus Navy ship, loads it up with weapons, and starts his campaign to get this president out.

He sails from New Orleans to the coast of Honduras, and he literally invades the country with, a private army. Wait, wh- where's the US government in all this? They also didn't like the political direction of Honduras either, so they just stood back, let this private invasion happen and then at the critical moment, the US steps in to order a ceasefire, basically bullying the president to step down.

He had no way forward, no defense, so he resigns. And the Banana Man's leader of choice takes the presidency, giving the banana businessman land and a unique status to import anything he needs tax-free. And wait for it, he refunds him for all of the coup expenses using public Honduran money. This banana man literally overthrew the government and made Honduras pay for it.

Wow. In Guatemala, the CIA tried to pull the same playbook that they used in Iran, once again targeting a leader that the people had elected, but who wanted to take back the country's resources for the people, to break up these American monopolies that controlled the country's electricity and railroad.

The president even starts to seize land from one massive banana company. It was often unused land that he wanted to redistribute to the locals who could farm it and feed their families, and hopefully climb out of the system of endemic poverty in the country. Once again, I made a whole video on this, the geopolitics of bananas in Central America.

But the fact is that the US decided that they had to defend the banana companies, or else more communist reforms would spread. So the US president and secretary of state ordered an overthrow, and the CIA got right to work. The CIA hand selects a leader that they want to be in power, and then they start giving equipment and training to a bunch of Guatemalan exiles and private soldiers.

They set up a secret operation base on the outskirts of Miami. They start delivering weapons to the Panama Canal. But like the other coups, it can't just all be about weapons. They gotta own the information space. So they create a radio station that sounds like it's a local Guatemalan radio station, but really it's being operated out of a small town in Florida, and they start publishing fake news about an uprising, unrest, a rebellion.

And then at the same time, the fighters that the CIA had trained and armed invades Guatemala. Pilots start dropping bombs on fuel tanks and military posts and airports. But they weren't starting a full on war. They weren't trying to cause real damage. They wanted it to feel like a domestic uprising, like a war was on the horizon, to freak people out, and for many, it totally worked.

They thought that this was a real uprising and had no idea that the CIA was behind it all. But the president knew what was up. He had messed with the USA, and now he's hearing about it. Military leaders in his circle are feeling the pressure from the big bully from the north, and they turn on him, and he eventually surrenders.

On his way out, the president addresses his people, makes it very clear that, quote, "The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us." And just like that, one president is out, and the handpicked CIA option is in. This new regime is brutal and goes on to do horrible things, detaining people they thought were communists, killing prisoners, breaking up labor unions, and in the process, restoring the banana company's land and ensuring that they maintained their hold on this economy.

This kicks off an era in Guatemala of more political assassinations and instability, something that still plagues the country today. And yet to this day, there is no evidence that the Soviets were ever slightly interested in Guatemala. Communism was once again the excuse, but really this was about securing American business interests, tearing a country apart for bananas.

Bananas taste the best and are the best for you

okay, now let's go to this little island in 1983. It's communism again, and the US sends 2,000 troops to invade this small remote island and remove their communist leader. They didn't really know much about this small island, and they literally had to use tourism maps to plan their invasion. Anyway, American forces move in, overwhelm the Grenadian fighters, who happen to be joined by their Cuban allies.

The government collapses, and the US-friendly leader comes to power

Okay, back down to Central America. It's 1989 and we're here in Panama, where the US has control of a very important canal. And luckily, the Panamanian dictator has been very friendly to American interests. But the US starts losing confidence in this guy, wondering if he's really the best choice, ensuring the US maintain easy access to their vital canal.

Oh, and it didn't help that this guy was indicted in Florida on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. We gotta get him out. But the straw that broke the camel's back for this guy was when Panamanian troops killed an unarmed American soldier in Panama City. The US is done with this guy, so they invade Panama with 27,000 troops.

Panama's military is crushed, and the dictator is eventually arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison, and the US ensures access to its canal after all.

In 1996, amid growing criticism, the Pentagon released some of the aforementioned and previously classified training manuals used at the School of the Americas. These manuals shocked the public and human rights advocates alike. They explicitly advocated coercive interrogation techniques, including torture, kidnapping, blackmail, execution, and false imprisonment.

One manual titled Handling Sources chillingly detailed how to neutralize targets, a thinly veiled euphemism for assassination. Far from being an isolated incident, these manuals formed the very foundation of the school's ideological training from the 1960s onward. The impact of these teachings became tragically evident throughout the continent.

SOA graduates returned home, not merely prepared to fight guerrillas, but indoctrinated with an aggressive worldview that saw any form of leftist political activity as inherently subversive and thus justifiable to suppress by any means necessary. And it should come as little surprise then that the results were catastrophic.

Civilian populations found themselves caught between brutal insurgencies and even more brutal military responses. Torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances became commonplace in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile, carried out by militaries heavily staffed and often commanded by School of the Americas alumni.

And the manuals and teachings weren't aberrations. They were central components of the school's strategy to confront communism through psychological and physical dominance. This strategy would yield horrifying consequences, creating cycles of violence and repression that has scarred Latin America for generations.

Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than in El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s, a brutal civil war consumed the country, fueled by deep inequalities and political repression. The Salvadoran military, heavily supported by the United States, unleashed unprecedented violence against civilians, accusing entire communities of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas.

One infamous incident occurred in December 1981 in the village of El Mozote. Members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion systematically executed over 900 villagers, men, women, and children. The soldiers slaughtered families, burned homes, and left the village a charred ruin. Investigations later revealed that officers who commanded this battalion had trained at the School of the Americas.

The violence continued. In 1989, as we recounted at the start of this episode, Salvadoran soldiers stormed the campus of the University of Central America in San Salvador, brutally murdering six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter. The priests had advocated for peace and social justice, ideas considered dangerous threats by the military regime.

19 of the soldiers involved, including the commander who ordered the killings, were School of the Americas graduates Earlier in 1980, four American church women, three nuns, and one lay missionary were abducted, raped, and murdered by Salvadoran national guardsmen. Investigations there revealed two of the three soldiers implicated had also attended the School of the Americas.

And it wasn't just El Salvador. In Guatemala, brutal regimes employed similar tactics throughout their civil war. Death squads targeted indigenous communities, activists, union leaders, and clergy, anyone deemed suspicious or oppositional. Many officers involved in organizing these campaigns of terror were alumni of, yes, you guessed it, the School of the Americas, applying precisely the counterinsurgency methods taught at the institution.

And let's be clear, it wasn't just Latin American nationals who suffered. The various regime's brutality also struck American citizens. Chilean forces abducted and executed American journalist Charles Horman during the military coup of 1973, an event later portrayed in the film Missing. Chilean officers who oversaw the coup, including Augusto Pinochet's security personnel, had direct ties to the School of the Americas.

The sheer scale of violence carried out by SOA graduates is staggering. Human rights organizations estimate tens of thousands died at the hands of regimes dominated by the school's alumni. Across Latin America, countless families continue to search for disappeared loved ones, communities remain haunted by trauma, and societies still struggle with the deep wounds left by years of state violence.

In the United States, awareness of these atrocities eventually grew, finally sparking significant backlash. Critics asked how a training program ostensibly designed to uphold democracy and human rights could instead foster widespread repression and violence. In 1984, under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty, Panama requested the removal of the school from its territory.

The growing controversy surrounding the institution played a crucial role in Panama's insistence on its departure. But rather than closing down entirely, the school was relocated to Fort Benning in Georgia, a US Army installation ostensibly away from both the public eye and perceived political pressure in Latin America.

This move, however, did little to silence critics. In fact, relocating to US soil only heightened domestic scrutiny, bringing the controversy closer to home. Human rights activists began staging increasingly large and visible protests, including annual vigils and demonstrations at Fort Benning. At the forefront of these actions was Father Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest and outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, who founded the watchdog group SOA Watch.

SOA Watch became a central voice in a broader grassroots movement demanding accountability and transparency from the US government. Year after year, thousands gathered outside Fort Benning's gates, reading the names of victims, carrying crosses, and bearing witness to the atrocities committed by SOA alumni.

These protests drew national and international attention, eventually resonating in the halls of Congress By the late 1990s, the campaign to shutter the school gained unprecedented momentum. In 1996, following intense pressure, the Pentagon was forced to publicly release the notorious torture manuals, confirming long-held suspicions about the nature of training provided.

These documents, detailing tactics explicitly violating international law, provided undeniable proof of institutional complicity in human rights abuses. In 1999, a bipartisan group of lawmakers took their demands directly to President Bill Clinton, stating plainly in a public letter, "Graduates of the school have gone on to commit some of the worst human rights violations in the history of this hemisphere."

They argued that continuing to operate the institution would only repeat past mistakes, perpetuating violence instead of promoting peace and democracy. Though President Clinton did not personally close the school, congressional action became increasingly inevitable. By 2000, public outcry reached a crescendo, and Congress finally passed legislation formally closing the School of the Americas.

However, the victory was short-lived and largely symbolic. Just one year later, in January 2001, the School of the Americas reopened under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC. Advocates claimed that this new incarnation represented genuine reform, emphasizing human rights education, civilian oversight, and democratic governance in its training.

Critics, however, remained deeply skeptical. Father Bourgeois said, "The new institute is no different from the SOA it replaces. It is a combat school. The infantrymen and women of Latin America come to learn how to fight." Human rights groups argued that the underlying culture, instructors, and operational goals had not fundamentally changed.

The new institution inherited the same controversial legacy, training Latin American soldiers who continued to be implicated in serious abuses and political repression. In truth, the transformation from SOA to WHINSEC was less a genuine reform than a strategic rebranding, an attempt to distance the US government from a deeply troubled past without genuinely confronting the implications of decades of Cold War policy.

And the controversy surrounding the School of the Americas would not fade away. Its legacy was too profound, the scars it left too deep. To truly understand the continuing impact of this controversial institution, we really need to explore how, despite official assurances, its shadow extends well into the 21st century.

In 2009, a military coup in Honduras ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The leader of the coup, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, was a two-time graduate of the School of the Americas. This event dramatically highlighted ongoing concerns. Despite supposed reforms, WHINSEC alumni still appeared prominently in anti-democratic actions.

Latin American nations, increasingly wary of overall US influence as well as the legacy of violence tied to the school, started withdrawing their participation. Countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Costa Rica ceased sending troops to WHINSEC. These withdrawals were powerful symbols of regional distrust and underscored lingering resentment from decades of US intervention.

Meanwhile, human rights advocates continued their protests. Annual demonstrations outside Fort Benning persisted, maintaining steady pressure and scrutiny on the institution. Congressional opponents regularly introduced bills to defund or close WHINSEC, though these efforts never fully succeeded. Today, WHINSEC remains a contested symbol, celebrated by some as a genuine reform and denounced by others as merely cosmetic changes.

The debate continues, echoing unresolved questions about the ethical implications of military training programs abroad and difficult truths about intervention, ideology, and ethics. The Cold War is over, but its shadows remain long and dark. Institutions like the School of the Americas remind us that ideas matter, that education matters, and that what nations choose to teach can have consequences that echo through generations.

When US forces launched a military operation in Venezuela and captured Nicolas Maduro earlier this month, a lot of the talk was about the US action, not how Venezuela got to this point. Here's what often gets missed. Venezuela's collapse didn't start with bombs or raids. It began years earlier with corruption, favoritism, and a government that rewarded loyalty and punished dissent.

I saw that firsthand when I reported in Venezuela 10 years ago, documenting how it had all gotten so bad it even collapsed their food system. Given what's happening in the United States under the Trump administration, it's worth reflecting on Venezuela's downfall under the rule of an authoritarian leader.

When Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, Venezuelans were looking for a change. Chronic poverty and high inflation plagued the once prosperous country. By the time I visited in 2016, after more than 15 years of an authoritarian rule, the country was in shambles and people were going hungry amidst widespread food shortages.

People like Yves Marquez waited in line for days to get something to eat. 

A

once rich and prosperous country had collapsed under authoritarian rule. President Chavez and his chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, had sidelined their own economic experts and made decisions based on loyalty and self-interest, and eventually that corruption caught up with the country.

Grocery store shelves were empty. Everyday folks had to punch new holes in their belts because they were rapidly losing weight.

Here's how insider dealing destroyed their food

system. Officials began using oil money to pay politically connected people to import food. It made the politically connected importers rich. But because of the government subsidies, imported corn became cheaper than corn grown in Venezuela. The local farmers, they couldn't compete. Many of them went broke and production plummeted.

Then in 2015, oil prices collapsed, cutting off the government's main source of revenue. So the country couldn't afford to continue subsidizing all those corrupt food importers. And with many local farmers already out of business, grocery store shelves went bare. The daily search for food took an emotional toll on people, especially those caring for children.

Venezuela's attorney general, Luisa Ortega, accused Maduro and his stepson of benefiting off corrupt food imports. The US Treasury later concluded she was right. How did the Venezuelan government handle those accusations? It had charges filed against her and she was removed from her post. The United States and Venezuela are vastly different in many ways, but those stories stick with me as a cautionary tale for Americans.

For instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has refused to do what President Trump wants. The Trump administration then launched a federal investigation against him. Powell addressed it directly. 

This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

There have been international headlines about Trump, his family, and his allies financially benefiting from his public office. Some US farmers say they too are paying the price for Trump's agenda, and many worry they could go bankrupt unless things improve. Meanwhile, Trump gave a $20 billion loan to Argentina, one of his political allies.

It's just absolutely mind-boggling that we're sending 20 billion to South America to prop up a competitor essentially. 

Now Vice President JD Vance says armed federal agents in Minnesota have absolute immunity. I saw the same support in Venezuela for its armed government enforcers who were also crushing protests.

I found a secret government food warehouse where Venezuela's police and military were given exclusive access to food stockpiles. Through darkly tinted windows, we filmed them wheeling out more scarce groceries than I had seen during my entire two weeks in the country.

seven million people have fled Venezuela's corrupt authoritarian regime since I was there. That's seven million stories about the danger of authoritarianism, each one a lesson for those who are listening.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Democracy Now!

Bianca Graulau

FRANCE 24 English

Patrick Boyle

Al Jazeera English

BBC News

Global Dispatches

35 West

The PBS NewsHour

TRT World

Johnny Harris

The Cold War

and Mother Jones

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.