On December 20, 1989, the United States invaded Panama with tens of thousands of troops. It was the largest U.S. invasion since Vietnam. The first U.S. military action since the fall of the Berlin Wall one month before. The testing ground for t...

In December 1823, U.S. president James Monroe delivered his State of the Union address in which he coined what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. It was a framework that would later be used to legitimize U.S. intervention up and down th...

Panama is, perhaps, the country in the region that has suffered under the longest U.S. shadow—right from the very beginning. The country and the canal would become the United States’ most important asset in the region. The United States install...

Costa Rica has been called the “Switzerland of Latin America.” In this episode, host Michael Fox takes us on a dive into this so-called peaceful and democratic beacon for a region beset by dictatorships and violence. He looks at the myth Costa ...

Noam Chomsky needs no introduction. He’s a celebrated linguist, who has long denounced U.S. empire at home and abroad. And he has a long relationship with Latin America.Chomsky’s 1985 book,

In the late 1980s, British film director Alex Cox spent several months in Nicaragua filming his movie Walker, about the U.S. filibuster who invaded and took over the country in the mid-1800s.As Cox puts it, he was trying to make “a revol...

In the early 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan launched a covert war to destroy the fledgling Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. It was brutal: paramilitary war, CIA attacks, economic blockade, and more. The war wreaked havoc on ...

The 1979 Nicaraguan revolution that overthrew a brutal U.S.-backed dictator ushered in a wave of hope in the Central American country. The new Sandinista government launched literacy and healthcare campaigns, carried out land reform and promise...

In 1912, the United States invaded Nicaragua and began what would become the longest U.S. occupation in Latin American history. The occupation would birth both a dictatorship and one of Latin America’s most important revolutionary heroes: Augus...

William Walker was a journalist, lawyer, and physician from Nashville, Tennessee, who in 1855 invaded Nicaragua with a few dozen troops and conquered the country. At the time, he was one of thousands of private U.S. citizens who had the...

A New York court has found former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández guilty of drug trafficking and weapons possession. It’s a huge verdict that will likely see the former president imprisoned for life.In the

In June 2009, Honduras faced a devastating coup that shattered the country’s fragile democracy and sunk the country into violence, repression, and a decade-long narco-dictatorship. But the people fought back.In this continuation...

In June 2009, a devastating coup shattered Honduras’s fragile democracy and sunk the country into violence, repression, and a decade-long narco-dictatorship. But the people fought back.In this episode, host Michael Fox dives int...

In the 1980s, Honduras was ground zero for U.S. operations in Central America. It was a base of operations for the U.S.-trained, funded, and backed Contras, in their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. And it was a staging ground for...

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has been reelected. While the official results aren’t yet in, with 70 percent of the ballots counted, Bukele has received an astounding 83 percent of the votes. He declared victory on Sunday night over X, fo...

Guatemala's new president Bernardo Arévalo was inaugurated on January 14. But it did not come off without a hitch. Outgoing opposition lawmakers did their best to try to stymie the swearing-in of Arévalo and some of his party members. Arévalo’s...

Today, we look at Radio Venceremos—a grassroots guerrilla radio station that broadcast throughout El Salvador’s Civil War, denounced violent state repression, and inspired a nation.In this episode, Michael Fox travels to San Salvador, wh...

1980s El Salvador was ground zero for the U.S. intervention in Central America. The United States  funneled over $6 billion to El Salvador in mostly military aid and police and security training throughout the country’s 12-year civil war, ...

In this episode, host Michael Fox visits a memorial for the disappeared on the outskirts of the Guatemalan town of San Juan Comalapa. He walks back in time to the 1980s, into the country’s genocide of Indigenous peoples, uncovering the overwhel...

In this episode, host Michael Fox looks at the outsized role of the U.S. banana corporation, United Fruit, in Central America. You literally can't talk about the history of Central America in the 20th Century without mentioning it. Fox goes in ...

Two hundred years ago, on December 2, 1823, then-president James Monroe delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. In his address, he laid out what would become both one of the most consequential and devastating ideas for Latin Ameri...

On Jan. 8th, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's capital in a failed attempt to spark a military coup. In scenes that drew instant comparison to the events of Jan. 6th, 2021 in the US, Bolsonaro supporters smashed windows, destro...

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the Brazilian presidency on October 30th. He defeated far-right president Jair Bolsonaro by just over 2 million votes. Tens of thousands of Lula supporters descended on Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue ...

The first round of Brazil’s elections has come and gone. As expected, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the big winner, with 48 percent. But he fell short of winning outright. Current president Jair Bolsonaro exceeded expectations ...

The Amazon is a place that both Brazil’s former military regime and President Jair Bolsonaro have eyed with dreams of development, looking to take advantage of bountiful resources.It’s a place where Bolsonaro’s deconstruction of state in...