Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The CIA’s Assassination Campaign in Mexico w/ Alexander Aviña | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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The CIA’s Assassination Campaign in Mexico w/ Alexander Aviña | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those familiar words, roughly from Gramsci as glossed by Xi Jekk, I welcome to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm G. here of the nation magazine, which is the sponsor of this podcast.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot going on in the world, obviously with the continuing conflict between the United States and Iran and the release and Donald Trump's visits to
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: China, but I don't think we should ignore a very startling CNN report that appeared alleging that the CIA has ramped up activities in Mexico and is involved with targeted assassinations of figures that describe as members of Mexican drug cartels.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this report in CNN, which I'll link to in the show notes, has been denied by the CIA, in very interesting terms saying that it in dangers or Americans.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also, as we're met with a great anger by the President of Mexico Claudia Shimbong.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of you, because it makes it look like there's a unilateral American action being conducted in her country without her knowledge.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think the whole thing is a very dangerous escalation and really sheds a light into the sort of larger issues of American foreign policy and a Donald Trump.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: To talk about this, I'm very happy to have on Alexander Avinia, who is an associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University and has sort of reaching in the past about
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Mike, we might call American counter insurgency in the region, which I think this is very much a part of that tradition.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: A tradition that has led to in the past like enormous violence and I think that's something that can really help us understand both what is happening and also I think the grave dangers.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, thank you for being on the program.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, thank you so much for inviting me.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Happy to be here.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, let's just first, here's the story for listeners.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What exactly is being reported by CNN?
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And why is it so, I startling?
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, there report the CNN put out, I think, a couple days ago now, alleges that there is an intense and expanded CIA operation on the ground inside Mexico that
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: looks very much like war on terror operations in West Asia where the CIA operatives or assets are assassinating mid-level in Mexico.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is legend that there is assassinating mid-level cartel operators.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like drug.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So kind of like the middle management of of narco trafficking organizations trying to go after finance guys.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: The guys who really make some of these organizations run, right?
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not the more famous kingpins, and not necessarily the ground level soldiers, or even the smuggling meals, but going after middle management.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was sparked by an assassination that happened a couple months ago, where somebody who's alleged to have belonged to an arco-trafficking organization was car bombed in central Mexico.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the CNN report alleges that it was a CIA ground team that was responsible for it.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I remember correctly, yesterday we got a New York Times report soon thereafter, who made the suggestion that it was Mexican government security forces,
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: who actually did, who are actually conducting some of these operations and that CIA folks are kind of hanging out in the background providing support and intelligence.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we have two different recordings on this issue, what it is concerning though is that we have
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to talk about this, not the first time that CIA has been in Mexico, but it seems that we do have a more aggressive presence of the CIA on the ground in Mexico, waging war on terror, style, operations, and tactics, but applying them to people that they identified as narcoterrorist.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is becoming, I mean, we saw it with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro on his wife.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, they have noticed earlier this year, but narcoterrorism since last year since Trump came into office again, has become the frame through which they're using to
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: justify and expand US imperial control over the region and what we're witnessing in Mexico now is is a very sensitive theater in which they are trying to operate secretly but no longer after these two reports came out.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is a whole bunch of things you said there that are kind of worth unpacking.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the larger theoretical framework is that what one is seeing is emerging of two instruments of American power.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is a sort of war on terrorism and the other is a war on drugs.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And both of which have like sort of like long histories.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in some ways, I guess the tactics that have been developed on these sort of global war on terrorism,
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly in the Middle East are now being fused with the sort of war on drugs.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the other, he was like, you know, the extent of CIA involvement and you know, like obviously like with, you know, the spooks when it was has a level of plausible availability.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's certainly this been a long history of the CIA like you know working with like local police or military in these regions often creating them which itself is kind of like you know field escalation But I mean like whether they're like you know the ones like you know pressing the button on the bomb or just standing next to the guys pressing the button seems to feel like a little bit like
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: relevant, what was more notable is that, yeah, I mean, the CIA is involved.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, I mean, the third strand from what you said is that this is like a real political problem for the Mexican government, and for Mexican American relations, you know, given the past history of this and sort of, you know, like understandable sensitivity to these about national sovereignty, right?
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, so is that like, are these the three major kind of issues?
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I think one way and I've written and talked about this in the past one way to understand what Trump and the Trump administration has has in mind for for the for all of the Western hemisphere in Latin America and particularly in the Caribbean is that they're trying to mel these three what they were would refer to as three wars I were on drugs were on terror and war on migrants and it's coming it's conflating these three wars and
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: forming it into one logic that I think helps us connect and explain why they kidnapped Maduro, why they've assassinated nearly 200 people in the Eastern Pacific or the Caribbean who were simply on boats.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't know if they were trafficking drugs or not.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have pretty good evidence that many of them were not trafficking drugs, but nonetheless they were killed by US air power or drones.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It also helps us understand what the U.S. was doing, is doing in Ecuador right now, right, on the helping Ecuadorian military conduct raids against people who they'd claim our narcotarrers, but subsequent reporting, in one instance, said that it was dairy farmers who were captured and tortured for no reason, right?
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in the Mexican case, we've seen a, this, I mean, we can go back, man, but like, there's a lot of this has to do with kind of fringe, right,
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: a politician discourse from the 2010s that started to talk about Mexico as a failed state that we should designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and maybe like people like Louis Gomert, right?
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that Texas representative from the 2010s.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But these ideas essentially became more mainstream within the Republican Party by the time we get to like the 2023 presidential primary where they're all all these candidates we're trying to outdo themselves on the stage by saying, I'll bomb Mexico, I'll send special for it was like this total like Taylor shared in Cicadio like fever dream, right?
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which is now like becoming standard operating procedure apparently.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the CIA in Mexico has had a long presence.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was during the Cold War it had one of the biggest if not the biggest
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kind of also because the KGV had a pretty big presence.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Mexico City was like this global crossroads of the Cold War.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then please, yeah, I'll be in my KGV like they did assassins.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are the, the precursor did assassins.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trotsky in Mexico.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I've been out there, and in the years of this particular podcast, what Mike remember, our earlier discussions at William F. Buckley, who when he was a CIA agent, was in Mexico City, and I believe this handler was E. Howard Hunt, who was interesting.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, kind of a notorious figure involved with all sorts of CIA history, and putting the cool and Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, and the Watergate break-in.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So so there's yeah, are you that that's sort of whole and yeah, as well as as well as our visitation of the Embassy in Mexico and how he was monitored.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So so so I'll be like, yeah, that your Mexico has been actually like a major site of Cold war intrigue of the sort of the highest level
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, totally.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think he, how it has one of those terrible quotes when he's describing what they didn't want them out in 1954, where he said, yeah, we were trying to do like, we were trying to bomb them and use terror tactics from the air, like, like, we were stuka bombers.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're like, oh, you don't like it.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you guys are admitting your American Nazis.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we now know they, like, at least four Mexican presidents from the late 50s to the early 80s, were all CIA assets or informants.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were on the payroll.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is one of the characteristics of Mexican history, particularly after the revolution of 1910, is that as you suggested earlier, right?
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because of shared history with the US, the question of sovereignty, political, economic, and geographic sovereignty is really it's key to any sort of political configuration in Mexico.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we've had this public appearance of a throughout the 20th and we still see it to this day.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have this, these very strong public affirmations by political leaders at Mexico's a sovereign nation and they would never allow the US to do things on the ground that would somehow undermine their definition of sovereignty.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's a marker throughout the 20th century, particularly during the Cold War, even as you have four CIA assets, Mexican presidents, publicly they're saying, we are, you know, non-alignation, we are anti-imperialists.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're revolutionary, we're anti-US.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: But secretly, we now know that we have like declassified conversations for instance between President Lisa Chavarría, who was in there from the late 60s, certainly 70s, talking to Richard Nixon saying, look, if the US doesn't back me, then the, the,
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: the banner of revolution and progress in Latin America will be carried by Fidel Castro.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So either you guys work with me or you work with Fidel.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we do have a lot of evidence not the Mexico was essentially spying on Cuba and passing that information along to the US.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: During the 80s, the CIA in Mexico was working with Mexico's dreaded secret police, the DFS, the DXNF, that I'll just say, what are you that?
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were, you know, their expertise was to torture and disappear.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: People that they identified as communist or guerrillas, but they're also really important player in the development of the transnational political economy of narcotics in Mexico.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you have instances in the 80s where the DEA is going after certain DFS police agents, because they were either involved in drugs
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: auto smuggling rings and the CIA would intervene and be like, no, no, those those are our assets, leave them alone.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're great anti communist fighters who are kind of going to look the other way if they're stealing cars and San Diego and LA and then driving them into Mexico or if they're somehow involved in the drug trade with with Central American figures or the Colombians.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, the CIA is just, obviously, the CIA, when we say those things, the calendars are really nefarious, dark history, and not just Mexico, but really in the Latin American past.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why, it's about the issue of Mexican sovereignty that's really touched off of Firestorm about this latest report.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's also because like when you see the CIA as a Latin American, like it speaks to a really dark sort of practically, well, in certain countries, genocidal history That the you that the CIA was somehow involved with whether directly or indirectly
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, user brought up the, you know, very interesting sort of contradiction of the American role because on the one hand you had, you know, one wing of the American government that's like very concerned with narcotics trafficking and the war, you know, war on drugs.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: which has become since the 70s, you know, a bigger and bigger part of American foreign policy.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you have like another winger, uh, with its own reasons, like, you know, found it very useful to work with, uh, drug dealers.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in some ways, I mean, like, that sort of dialectic or contradiction plays itself out in, in, in,
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: operational terms as well, like isn't it the case that do the escalation of the war on drugs and the sort of training of police and military in Mexico and other countries, the United States is actually like enable the drug train because it's this kind of equation where you know they also have greater access to weapons and greater like military technology and training.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: You get the phenomenon of like counter narcotic nauticals, which is like, you know, it's, it's goes back to the 1970s.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think the dialectic that you mentioned is really interesting because the way that they resolve it to produce a synthesis, I guess.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the 80s, you start to see the development of the term narcoterrorism.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it was actually the guy who coined it.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was actually a predecessor of mine.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't, he was gone by the time I got to Arizona State.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: a really prominent figure, the committee of Santa Fe, prominent Nielcon, he was ambassador to Costa Rica and Colombia under Reagan, and actually had to testify in the Iran-Contra scandal because when he was ambassador to Costa Rica, he was somehow involved with those southern front contra-fighters.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, he's the one who started to talk about narco-terrorism as a way to
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, we need to figure out, we're going to think about anti-communism as anti-terrorism because of the Sunday needs does because of the PLO, and then we can just throw in that the Kremlin and say it's the Kremlin who are kind of pulling the strings, but then they added the narco part, right?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's almost like someone like Lewis Towns was anticipating
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: the winding down of the Cold War as a framework that would justify US Empire in Latin America and was hinting at a post- Cold War order or just to find ideological framework to both understand Latin America and then apply US power.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And which eventually what happens, right?
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the 90s, it's that the idea of narco terrorism that becomes bipartisan and that leads to things like,
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Plan Colombia, where under the Clinton administration and in George W. Bush, they sent billions of dollars to the Colombian government ostensibly to fight drugs.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what they're doing is they're fighting these long standing guerrilla movements in Colombia, while backing a Colombian military and security force apparatus that are won involved in an archotrade and two also committing horrific human rights violations.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when Trump comes in last year and starts talking about Narco Terrorism, I immediately thought of Louis Tams and I thought about this unipolar moment in the 1990s is how that became the justifying framework for U.S.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Empire.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: It gets kind of pushed aside because of the war on terror 9-11.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then in the 2000s, you have these weird connections where you have congressional investigations that try to tie like
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Sinaloa cartel to like, how moss because of tunnels or the MS 13 and al Qaeda working together, just insane shit, right?
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It has bulag, it's thrown in there with Uwa Chavez.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it, that is, it's, it's come back and it's become the way that I think Trump is trying to justify both.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: policies toward Latin America and the Caribbean, but then also to justify the crackdown that we see domestically with this ethnic cleansing campaign against migrants.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's a really interesting way for them to connect the domestic and the exterior at least in the Western Hemisphere.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I do think like the war on drugs does provide an ideological justification that is otherwise lacking.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't actually get a sense in the United States on a popular basis as much appetite for empire.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly not like in the, these words in the Middle East, but even in like, I don't know how many people really want the U.S. to read that's like dominant.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: military force.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, like there's like genuine real world, um, and realistically base concerns, you know, about, uh, the drag addiction, which has, you know, really ravaged uh, the ice, you know, things like fentanyl.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's, um, um, a lot of evidence that in places where Trump has done well are those places where like fentanyl deaths have been very high.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is like this, this, this, this speaks to like a kind of popular base, and it's a
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I totally agree, I mean, I think of what of JD advances first, I think campaign commercials are the Senate, where he's like, the U.H.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mexicans.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, the whole thing was like, these evil brown men are poisoning us.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that is, that is an animating political concern.
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, like, because of centuries of both on a popular level, and I think at an intellectual level, the idea that
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: American isolationism actually has existed as a thing in the past and can exist today.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's always been a myth because if you ask Latin Americans about American isolationism, they're going to give you a different answer.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But from a domestic perspective, it's almost like Americans intellectually, politically, and maybe even in popular ways, don't necessarily understand US expansion in Latin American the Caribbean as a form of empire.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just our backyard.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's what animates and gives power to Trump's meddling in the region as they try to reshape the region in a like far right form, right?
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like I think right now is the we can talk about this if you want, but like I think Latin American the Caribbean face a really precarious moment where we had a, you know, a big, when you get, I'm lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo,
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: victory in Mexico in the late 2010s, they're seen to be like hints of like a second pink tide.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And those hints are more or less gone, right?
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like so, or the Trump administration is doing their best to kind of go, you know, put out the the embers of the first pink tide and to have a far right wing control over the region.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is how why something like the Honduras gate scandals really important.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why the shield of the America's meeting that happened a month ago or so is really important.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: They do have like a right wing project for Latin America and that's going to lead to some of the Shint CIA's shenanigans that we witnessed during the Cold War, right?
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Funding political opposition parties, funding political opposition newspapers, maybe assassination attempts, destabilization, et cetera, et cetera.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, I think that's right.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think of like the two different parts.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one is a way in which this sort of so-called isolation and sort of fits in with a broader history of American involvement with the region.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's generally been true although it's not widely understood that what Americans
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, called isolationism was always been a project of, you know, hemispheric domination.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you look at the sort of classic figures you are associated with America first historically, like Herbert Hoover or Charles Lindberg.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, even going back to the, you know, the imperialist of the late 19th, early 20th century.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the idea was that the U.S. shouldn't get involved with affairs in Europe because, you know, like white men shouldn't fight other white men.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let the Europeans start their own problems out, and that America's America's actual frontier in area to dominate is the western hemisphere with also the Pacific as being a kind of area of future expansion.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, well, one of the, like obviously Trump is a kind of reactive figure, you know, opportunistic, and you want to credit him too much with any intellectual intent.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think that the sort of broader forces within a Republican party that have, you know, adhere to that worldview, like, like, you make it a kind of like a logical, like, policy.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is partially based on longstanding traditions.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: ideological consistency or coherence to trumpets really that's a that's a nearly impossible task but I think figures like So Steven Miller I think is an interesting figure because I think ideologically he's done a lot of the work to connect the domestic to the foreign in the Americas and to
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: to say that he's an isolationist, to say he's a defender of Western civilization, while also saying, but we all we believe in is an imperial expansion.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, he says expansion into the Americas, but that doesn't count as imperialists because, you know, by default, like this is our area.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is our sphere of influence.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Cold War variants of this is like Marco Rubio, right?
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like Marco Rubio is embodies kind of like the long-standing contradictions and consequences of U.S.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Empire and Latin America during the Cold War, right?
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like Miami and South Florida is one of these nice little gifts that the Cold War and Latin America gave to the United States where you have a far right
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: anti-communist, revances, political culture that has been nourished, generationally, pretty much any, any time there's a revolutionary process in Latin America, their losers go to South Florida.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then they create this really, that's an interesting political culture that animate someone like Marco Rubio, right?
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like so, any has a personal connection to Cuba.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But they're the ones, Mike Walts was also part of this.
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Initially, he had a bunch of Florida men, Trump had a bunch of Florida men to begin in his administration, and they do see their political project in Latin America as rolling back the failures of the Cold War, right?
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So their language is very cold war.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Their language is very anti-communist.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's, I think, really.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So to combine those two, like Steven Miller's kind of ideas on the domestic and migration and ethnic cleansing with someone like Marco Rubio, I do think that's what we see kind of like the ideological stuff that's beaten out people like Elders Colby who was like, like, anti China Hawk, right?
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like it seems like it's an interesting struggle that we've seen within within the people closest to Trump.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and just like on the domestic friendly music, I think the Republican center of base of the Republican party has shifted towards Florida, like it just seems like a very important state.
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's not too long ago, it wasn't actual swing state, but now see the sort of you know.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: bedrock of the GOP and also is a political figure.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump himself is now, you know, he's basically a fart a guy, right?
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a marilego.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And all the authors of people who are the future of the party or have some stake in the party like the Santas and Rubio are based in Florida.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So part of this story is the way in which Florida has become the sort of anchor of the GOP.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it's it's the it's for me also about because I my first teaching job was in Florida, so it was an interesting time to teach from 29 to 2016 and by that time I left
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: the most belligerent students in my, like in my Latin American Revolution's classes, I'm not sure why these kids were signing up for that class, but like the most belligerent group tended to be more recent arrivals from Venezuela.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it was really interesting to see in my class kind of like the interaction between like the descendants, like Cuban American students, with Venezuela and American students, the Nicaragua and America.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like in my, in my class, like it's seen real time, I saw in real time,
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: some of the political cultural shifts that were happening in South Florida that really become dominant.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's also like a huge anti-black component to it as well.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: An anti-blackness brought from Latin America, but also a local, very Florida figure of a form of anti-blackness that really came together and BLM and the George Floyd Riverbellion with some of these figures saying so pretty horrendous things about BLM.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: their vision for Latin America now.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we haven't even brought in like Israel and Zionism because one of the interesting things is that the way that we see one of the ways that we see the divide between left and right in Latin America is like who's pro-poilestine and who's pro-Israel.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's taken a left-right dynamic, right?
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think this starts during the pink tide.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: It probably harkens back to late 60s, early 70s.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: But right now, within Latin America, right wing forces are proudly,
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, they go out to the street in March and a place like Brazil and they're proudly waving Israeli flags also like the spread of like evangelical Christianity and Christian Zionism in Latin America has had a huge impact, especially in a place like Brazil.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like, and if we bring in out hintina with their.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have you had me lay who I still kind of struggle to understand?
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, like, you see it clearly, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really really, really really, really really, really really, really really, really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: versus the left, which would be someone like Gladyshainbaum, who is of Jewish descent.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think we can say she's anti-zionist and has demonstrated solidarity with Palestine, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, which is, his victory was a huge moment historically, one because, as Hugo Chavez famously once said, he called Colombia the Israel of Latin America.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for a leftist in Colombia to take power like Petro was a huge moment.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's also probably been other than like Cuba,
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: or certain or of Venezuela's, he's been like the biggest proponent of Palestine since October of 2023.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it is, so it's very clear that political divide between one of the political divides between left and right Latin America is like who supports Israel and Zionism, genocide, who doesn't.
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you start to see then with the help of the United States, kind of try to organize right-wing political forces in Latin America along these lines as well.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now with the Honduras gate thing, which has not really been reported in the U.S. widely.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: They brought in Netanyahu to start working, you know, providing money with right-wing figures in the region to kind of go after a more progressive governments like Shane Bomb and Mexico or Petro and Colombia.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, no, no.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, some of this is, I mean, there's a kind of maybe a prehistory of this with the alliance that like Israel had with Guatemala in the 1980s and the sort of, you know, some of the training that the IDF did.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean,
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: My general sense, and I'm far from an expert in this area, is that the older Latin American right was like, you know, sort of like Catholic reactionaries who, you know, like Franco, we're actually in the where he is real for classically anti-Semitic reasons.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even if they might be provisionally alike with that for like geopolitical reasons, but but they seem to have been a shift towards a more wholehearted embrace of Israel.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think, honestly, I think when we look at the partition vote, 1947-1948, all of Latin America voted for it, except Cuba.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Israel started off with pretty strong base of support in Latin America that starts to gradually wither, particularly after the 67 war.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And with the founding of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, I think by the late 60s, I think Cuba Revolutionary Cuba was probably the first one to recognize them and then to be vocal about the causes of Palestine and international forum in the late 60s, and because of Israel's role in popping up,
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: military dictatorships and desquad regimes in South America and in Central America in the 70s and 80s.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it really whatever vestiges of like leftist sympathies that Israel had in the late 40s, really 50s, I completely went away.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Israel gets identified as a proxy of U.S. empire, right?
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And a place like Guatemala, I mean, they did horrific things.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: They played a clear role, direct role in helping facilitate both the extermination of urban guerilla movements in the late 70s, but also the so-called quiet genocide in which something like between 100 to 100,000 myand peoples were exterminated.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the early 80s, under during the rule of a evangelical Christian maniac, uh, Ephraim drills more.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that trend has has continued, I think, to this day, right?
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the streets are definitely more propelstein.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, the identified for a political party or a government to identify themselves with Israel or with Netanyahu at this point, signifies their right-wing position very clearly.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that wasn't always the case in the
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, no, no, and so if we step back a little bit and think about, you know, the broader American foreign policy.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's been some talk about the sort of like right-wing international, and you know, like, figures like Bannon trying to make alliances, you know, with right-wing regimes in like a hungry and elsewhere.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's there has been like some of that, but it seems like in the Western Hemisphere like it's been far more successful than it has been in Europe or even like you know, outreach that the Trump administration has made to like Modi in India.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean those seem like pretty superficial like kind of like ideological affinity where's like what you're describing in Latin America as he seems like like very thick dense networks.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: of connections and the finities, right?
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the reporting on on Dura Skates shows is it shows that connection between right wing, right wing governments currently in power and places like on Dura's and in Argentina working very closely with Trump officials and other U.S. government officials
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: part in, but convicted narco presidents like the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S., I mean, he's like, they have transcripts of him saying like, we're going to smash the cocaine up the noses of gringles, right?
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, it's pretty damn in evidence.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And during the, the pressure against Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela last year,
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: who was being accused, I would say wrongly, being accused of being an archo.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: You get this weird moment where Trump actually partens an actual convicted narco president in the US legal system.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now that guy is playing a key role as an intermediary within this right-wing international within Latin America, this trying to raise funds to destabilize and metal in places like Colombia and Mexico.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we now know it also involves
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: of Netanyahuan Israel, and then apparently also some some groups, some like rabbinical groups in Central America that have also provided money to this international, again, to destabilize governments that they see as pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a really important year in Latin America right because we have presidential elections for Brazil and we have presidential elections for Colombia, if both of those elections go in the favor of the right wing with the help of this international with their in covert meddling, then we do have a region that's an overwhelmingly right wing.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: leaving Mexico by themselves to a certain extent, right?
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cuba right now is being strangled slowly, right?
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it would mark a huge shift.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you look at the polling in Brazil and in Colombia, it's really, really tight.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So any sort of meddling that this,
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: right wing is Rayleigh backed, Argentine time backed international can do could have huge concept electoral consequences for the region and we already saw like Trump did intervene in the Andurus election.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that actually is Argentine point and in Argentina, yes, exactly that with the congressional election.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is, again, it speaks to the U.S. has been doing this in Latin America for decades with going back to where we started with the CIA, right?
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they're old-handed at this in terms of how to try to influence elections or at the very least try to set the conditions socially and politically within a country that could lead to the electoral outcomes desired by the United States.
• 32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's right.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one thing that emphasizes, you know, one shouldn't see Trump as an anomaly.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is like a little vast American history of this.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm curious about it, because I'm speaking from Canada right now, and here, like Trump's talk about, you know, the 50-first state has sort of suffered a lot of anti-Americanism.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, leading to a sort of a centrist liberal government, the very best used that very cynically to hold on to power.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like I'm wondering, like, actually, I mean, in the case of Argentina as we saw, like I think Trump was seems to have been effective in influencing that election.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But whether that's going to hold, we'll see.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like, is there some degree, which is like, all of this could backfire, that like, you know, that this coulds for on national sentiments in these countries, so think like, well, you know, we don't
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's been the trend.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It just, the time, the pacing for it, right, isn't really unpredictable.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But if there's one trend of U.S.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Empire in Latin America is that we get to the, we have certain moments with U.S.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Empire overextended itself and also generates local resistance on the ground, usually organized around questions of national sovereignty and social justice.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, but the question now is to see,
• 34:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: the pacing of it, you know, where could emerge?
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: But also, like, one of the, in Greg Granand talks about this a lot, though, something that might mitigate what I just described, this historical dynamic, is kind of like the, the internationalization of like US style culture wars that then have been taken into different Latin American countries, re-contextualized the local conditions with the use of like social media.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I, it, it,
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's weird, man.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's really weird to see in a place like Chile, for instance, where they have like a the son of a Nazi, as president who really is, you know, I mean, I just, he, he, he one power attacking Venezuela and migrants, who he accused of being there without papers and also responsible for, you know, rising crime rates.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Many of those same migrants who were anti-malludo and were so happy when the US kidnapped my little.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's also
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But historically, yes, when U.S.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Empire continuously violates the sovereignty of these nations, there generally is a nationalist backlash that's generally attached for economic reasons, for global capitalist reasons.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also attached to these questions of social justice to it.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think the one area where the U.S. really has to be careful with this is the area where we started in Mexico.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: That they really have to tread carefully in Mexico for a variety of reasons, right?
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the Mexican government could just, if we continue to see more reporting or exposure to CIA operations, the Mexican government might just cut them off, right?
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, they might just see these.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: They already, I mean, under I'm low, they cut off the DEA and FBI collaboration.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm low preferred to CIA because they were secret.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But now they're not so secret, right?
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So will the Mexican government stop security collaboration?
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Will they stop working as when in terms of migration?
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Will they stop working as like the Border Patrol agent for the Americas?
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's people within Trump's circle that know that they have to kind of calibrate their the amount of destabilization and operations that they can conduct within Mexico, particularly because if they really want to crack down
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, they say that they want to crack down on drug trafficking or migration, those levels of introduction fundamentally depend on the Mexican government.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where, I mean, if we step back, someone who does research on the history of drugs and and state violence, if we really wanted to end drugs or drug addiction, we would actually deal with the consumption of drugs and start in the U.S., think about why
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: where three to five percent of the world's population, but we consume over 80 percent of the illicit and illicit opioids in the world.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like there's something going on here that has led people to consume drugs at this rate.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a much more productive, potentially fruitful path to follow as opposed to sending the CIA to assassinate, you know, middle management, noticles.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's, it's, and it just, you know, it's a circle.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a feed loop that just goes around, around, around.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, in terms of destabilization, there's like Mexico, but like I also have to think like because the CNN article mentioned this, that there were people in the American government that are themselves concerned about blowback, because you know, if you have transnational drag cartels like you know, they're in the US as well, and they, you know, like once you know overstate how
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they have, you know, there are people with guns who have, you know, some area with guns and some more over events, right?
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, if you're talking about, like, you know, blowback.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's easy.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the fact is that last month there were two U.S. embassy officials that were killed in Mexico, who were later revealed to be CIA.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's part of the story here, it's part of the story is, a lot of the story really starts with the killing of a mental, right?
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The former head of the Highly School Cartel and then you can kind of draw like a straight line from that to then the CIA agents who were operating on the ground in the state of Chihuahua.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: The federal government says against their knowledge and the governor of Chihuahua was a right wing opposition figure to the federal government.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the one thing I'll say is we can even go a little further back, and we had two years ago, I think, at this point, or almost two years ago, you had a state government in Senaloa working with one of the sons of El Chapo and US officials under the nose of the federal government, and they came up with this plot to capture to kidnap and to imprison El Mayo Sambada, who's one of the historic leaders of El Chapo, El Senaloa Cartel, one of El
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: that that operation has generated something like two to three thousand murders in the state of Sinaloa since it happened.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It sparked an internal civil war between El Chapo Sons and El Meyers people in Sinaloa.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So again, this is so the blowback is generally on the people of Mexico themselves.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, you're absolutely the United States.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I think that's really important to know.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there is enormous destabilization.
• 39:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, just in terms of like, I also have to think that there are quite a few Americans inside, like, Mexico.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And generally, the PS, you say the people who are affected are the people of Mexico.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, like, you know, one is taking in terms of real politics and the interest of the Iraq and state.
• 39:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I actually think like destabilizing, you know, one of the two nearest neighbors,
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: which you're deeply integrated with economically and in terms of population, to my mind, that carries all sorts of risks.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're going to spark a deportation of an English or Mexico all the expats.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that could be.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I don't know what's going on.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we could, we're spring break.
• 40:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: No more spring break.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I mean, I think with the recent sort of outbreak of violence, there's like a huge sort of collapse of tourism, right?
• 40:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, I mean, definitely like worth the way out of the suffered when in the aftermath of Edmonton's killing, but people people like going to Mexican resort, man.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I don't know.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's too.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's true.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, no, but, but in any case, I mean, I think that there's what I want to tell you, people, it's a little, you know, like the idea of destabilizing Mexico.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: like the risks that are involved there like just enormous like yeah and so in any case we've covered a lot of ground is I probably a lot more we could cover but what's again I want to thank my guest Alexander Avina I will link to he has a very extensive web page so you can find out more about them thank you yeah I know thank you so much this is great