Two hundred years ago, on Dec. 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 America, an idea that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine.
In the inaugural episode of the explosive new narrative podcast Under the Shadow, hosted by veteran radio journalist Michael Fox, we look back on the history of the Monroe Doctrine and the devastating impact it’s had across the hemisphere. The list of US invasions, occupations, coups, and sanctions is virtually endless. Hundreds. From Mexico to Panama. The Caribbean. Colombia to the tip of Chile and Argentina. No country in Latin America has remained free from the shadow hanging over them. The shadow of the United States. The shadow of the Monroe Doctrine.
In the second half of Episode One: “The Beginning: Monroe and Migration,” we meet migrants on the edge of Central America walking north toward the United States—a very real manifestation, right now, of the never-ending impact of US intervention in Latin America.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative-narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened: a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place Fox takes us to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox, Under the Shadow is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America).
Click here to listen to all episodes of Under the Shadow.
Additional links:
Support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox
Support NACLA: nacla.org/donate
Follow NACLA on X: https://twitter.com/NACLA
Like NACLA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nacla/
Edited by Heather Gies and Maximillian Alvarez
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions
Transcript
Michael Fox: I grew up in the 1980s. I played soccer. Video games. I loved Star Wars and Back to the Future. I listened to Wham, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson. I remember I had this cassette tape of his album Thriller that was on constant repeat in my brown Fisher Price tape player. It was your average US American suburban childhood.
But, I guess, one thing was particular, and that had to do with where we lived. See, I grew up in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington DC [fireworks crack]. On the 4th of July, we’d drive in for the fireworks at the Washington Monument. In December, we’d visit the Christmas trees in the Washington Mall.
[Sound of bustling crowd] In the spring, we’d attend the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House — A big event, where I met my heroes: people dressed up as Superman or Spiderman. I remember they signed a little wooden egg for me.
When family came to visit, we’d take them to the Smithsonian: the Natural History or Air and Space Museums.
[News intro clip plays]
Morning news about things on Capitol Hill seemed local, not national, or even international. For us, Washington was local. Accessible. Tangible. It wasn’t some symbolic place across the country or the capital of the “free world”. It was just down the street. The place where my school teacher mom met my bartender dad. Close family friends worked at the Pentagon. One of my best friends’ dad, he flew Air Force One — You know, the president’s plane. In high school, my civics teacher tried to get a friend of his to come speak to our class. His name was Ollie North. You know, the top Reagan official wrapped up in the Iran-Contra scandal.
This might seem spectacular to people living in other parts of the country, but it was just part of life near Washington DC. You know, like the auto industry in Michigan or Ohio, like coal mining in Kentucky or West Virginia, almost everyone in our area had some connection to Washington or the US government. Even my grandmom, back in the late 40s, after graduating as valedictorian of her high school class but before marrying my grandad, she worked as a secretary for about a year at what was then a new government agency: the CIA.
That’s the thing. Growing up, even though US government buildings were close enough for me to touch, the actions taken by the United States abroad felt as distant and abstract as the countries themselves. I knew where Canada and Mexico were, but Central and South America was just an alphabet soup of exotic places that seemed a million miles away. Color-coded shapes on a map that appeared to have nothing to do with my suburban childhood, or the United States, or my family’s backyard of Washington DC. Boy, was I wrong.
I only began to wake up when I went off to college and then started to travel. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast. Because, even growing up on the outskirts of Washington, I was oblivious to the deep role the US has played historically in the hemisphere. The tremendous harm it has caused across Latin America throughout the past 200 years. And I know I’m not the only one who was in the dark.
This is Under the Shadow — A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, [footsteps, traffic, people chatting] I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument or a museum, but every place I’m going to take you to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to uncover what lingers of that history today.
My journey through Central America starts in Tapachula, a few miles away from Mexico’s southern border. In the rest of the series, we’ll travel through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica to reach, finally, Panama. Along the way, we’ll pick through the ashes of a US invasion and retrace the footsteps of filibuster William Walker — You know, the gringo American who invaded Nicaragua and took over the country in 1856. Yeah, crazy. We’ll visit a US military base, the site of former United Fruit operations, and memorials for the dead and the disappeared — The victims of bloody, US-backed regimes.
In each episode, I begin in the present, in a specific location, detailing the sights and sounds now. Then, in those same places, we descend into history, like taking an elevator to the past. Actual time travel [clip from Back to the Future plays]. Or as close as we can get to it without a “flux capacitor” and a sleek 1980s DeLorean.
But to set the stage, this episode is going to be a little different. Today, I’m starting way in the past and walking forward to understand how this all got started and why this series is particularly important now. Like how past US actions are literally still having an impact today, not just on countries abroad, but inside the United States itself.
This is Under the Shadow season 1: Central America. Episode 1: “The Beginning: Monroe and Migration”.
[Horse hooves on pavement] 200 years ago on Dec. 2, 1823, under a dark moonless sky, then-president James Monroe delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. In his address, Monroe lays out what would become both one of the most consequential and devastating ideas for Latin America.
It would be called the Monroe Doctrine, an articulation of the United States’s sovereign right to bend Latin America to its will. And the US would repeatedly cite it as a perennial warrant to invade foreign countries, overthrow leaders, and police the Americas. At least, that’s what it became. But that wasn’t the idea in the beginning.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, yeah, I mean, other countries have statements. We have doctrines [laughs]…
Michael Fox: That’s historian Greg Grandin.
GregGrandin: I teach history at Yale University, and I’m the author of a number of books, the most recent one being The End of the Myth.
Michael Fox: He’s also the author of Empire’s Workshop, which looks at Latin America’s role as a testing ground for US imperial strategies.
Greg Grandin: So basically, the language of the Monroe Doctrine, it was scattered throughout this larger, many-thousand-word speech. And it was very vague what the intentions were. Basically, summed up, it said that “The free and independent nations of the two American continents were off limits for future colonization by any European power.”
And Monroe let it be known that any effort to “extend Europe’s system” to any portion of the hemisphere would be viewed [by] the United States as a threat. That’s like the core of what we think of as the Monroe Doctrine. It was actually a pretty simple idea: Europe, stay out of the hemisphere.
Michael Fox: It was actually a pretty simple idea: Europe, stay out of the hemisphere. [Shouting, gunshots] Remember, by 1823, most of Spain’s former colonies in the Americas had just won their independence.
Greg Grandin: But at the time, the Monroe Doctrine was celebrated by Latin Americans, by independence leaders. One, they were happy that the United States seemed to finally come out for Spanish-American independence. That was a huge thing. I mean, there were still a couple of big battles left before Spain finally gave up completely.
But the more important thing is that they read in the Monroe Doctrine a corollary to their own anti-colonialism. They didn’t read it as a doctrine of neo-colonialism; they read it, as a doctrine, as anti-colonialism — That no part of the Americas is eligible for reconquest. They saw it as analogous to their own anti-colonialism. So there were a lot of celebratory messages to Monroe from Latin American leaders thanking him for, not the doctrine, but for the pronouncement.
Michael Fox: This is important to understand. Remember, at the time, the US was still small. Settlers were paving their way across the country, violently pushing Indigenous peoples from their land. But the United States was far from an empire. In fact, like its newly independent Spanish-American neighbors, the US had also freed itself from empire and monarchy only 40 years before.
Marixa Lasso: We need to understand that the big division at the time wasn’t US and Latin America; it was the division between republics and monarchies.
Michael Fox: That’s Marixa Lasso. She’s a Panamanian historian whose research has focused on the Panama Canal and South American liberator Simón Bolívar.
Marixa Lasso: This is what people understood at the time, and this is really important because we take it so much for granted — The idea of being a republic — That we forget how radical it was in the early 19th century, how fragile it felt for protagonists like Simón Bolívar, how new it was. Think about it. Only the US was a republic, and then all of these Spanish-American new republics. France was not a republic anymore by then. And then you had, also, Haiti. So it was new, it was fragile.
Michael Fox: In 1826, Simón Bolívar convened an international congress in Panama, which, at the time, was still part of Colombia.
Representatives came from most of the newly independent Spanish nations. One of the items on the agenda was, ironically, the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine as a guiding framework against threats of reconquest from Europe — And, in particular, Spain.
For this podcast, I visited the location where the conference was held in Panama City. The convent where it took place is gone, but a large statue of Simón Bolívar stands in its place, in a little square down by the waterfront, and across the street from Panama’s Ministry of Foreign Relations. Bolívar’s dream was to unite the countries in some sort of federation. It failed, for far too many reasons to discuss here.
Just three years later, Bolívar is quoted to have said “The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Prophetic words.
The US grew, expanded west, killing and removing Indigenous peoples from their lands. The United States invaded Mexico, captured Mexico City, and took more than half of the country’s land — What is now today most of the Western United States. It was only the beginning.
Greg Grandin: As time goes on, the Monroe Doctrine becomes more of a doctrine of, as I mentioned, informal empire, mandatory power. And this is explicit with Theodore Roosevelt and his corollary, which says the Monroe Doctrine basically gives the United States the right to police the hemisphere.
Theodore Roosevelt: The great fundamental issue now before our people can be stated quickly…
Michael Fox: That is the voice of President Theodore Roosevelt. Unfortunately, there are no recordings of him delivering his 1904 State of the Union address when he made this addendum to the Monroe Doctrine, or what’s called the Roosevelt Corollary. The full text, however, is pretty shocking.
We asked a voice actor to read an excerpt:
Voice Actor: Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation. And in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
Michael Fox: In other words…
Marixa Lasso: Certain circumstances may force the United States to exercise an international police power to protect the world from the general loosening of the ties of civilized society. Those are his words.
Michael Fox: Professor Marixa Lasso says that 1904 speech is a justification, in many ways…
Marixa Lasso: …Of what happened in Panama, which is that he supported the separation of Panama from Colombia, and then taking control of an area of the isthmus.
Michael Fox: That was just the tip of the iceberg.
[Gunshots] US interventions ramped up across the region. The list of US invasions, occupations, coups, and sanctions is endless. Hundreds. From Mexico to Panama, the Caribbean, Colombia, to the tip of Chile and Argentina. No country in Latin America has remained free from the shadow hanging over them. The shadow of the United States. The shadow of the Monroe Doctrine.
In this season of the podcast Under the Shadow, we will look particularly at the United States in Central America: The outsized role of major US corporations like United Fruit, the US support for bloody dictators and authoritarian regimes, the overt and covert steps taken by the United States to overthrow democratic or popular governments. And the impact on local communities.
The legacy of Monroe and US intervention in the region runs deep. And it hits much closer to home than you might think.
In 2023, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! ran a show on the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. She asked her co-host, longtime journalist Juan Gonzalez, to connect the dots between Monroe and the exodus of people from Latin America to the United States.
Juan Gonzalez: Yes, Amy. Well, it’s precisely the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine and the creation of what essentially became the birthplace of the American empire in Latin America that resulted in so many people from Latin America coming to the United States, especially in the late 20th century and the beginning of this century.
And a lot of people don’t understand that relationship. In fact, it’s precisely those countries in Latin America that the United States once intervened in, occupied, and executed regime changes in that have produced the most migrants to the United States. So there’s a direct relationship between the empire the United States built in Latin America and the migration crisis that we continue to face here in this country.
Michael Fox: This issue is really important, because it is constantly ignored, sidelined, and omitted. That’s why we need to underline it, highlight it, and star it with a red pen.
In the second half of this episode, I’m going to take you to meet migrants walking north toward the United States on the edge of Central America. A very real manifestation, right now, of the never-ending impact of the United States in Latin America.
That in a minute.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hey, everyone, Maximillian Alvarez here, editor-in-chief of The Real News Network. We’re going to get you right back to the program in a sec, I promise, but really quick, I just wanted to remind y’all that The Real News is an independent, viewer- and listener-supported, grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never, ever put our reporting behind paywalls.
But we cannot continue to do this work without your support. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money to produce powerful, unique, and journalistically rigorous shows like Under the Shadow. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference.
Also, if you’re enjoying Under the Shadow, then you will definitely want to follow NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA’s reporting and analysis goes beyond the headlines to help you understand what’s happening in Latin America and the Caribbean from a progressive perspective. Visit nacla.org to learn more.
Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.
Michael Fox: I don’t know if I’ve ever been so overwhelmed by a story I’m working on? Just the complex mixture of so many different cultures here in Tapachula. The people leaving their homes looking for a better life? Hope? Hope, hope, hope, hope. And at the same time, so much pain and despair because there is such a long way to go. And even at the end of that road, it’s not even clear if they’re going to be able to achieve or get what they’re fighting for, what they’ve been traveling so long for.
A Venezuelan woman with two kids walking for two months to arrive here at the border. And then people waiting, sometimes months, particularly in the case of the Haitians, to get the visa to travel through the country. And they might even be turned around once they get up the road. Haitians, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, everyone with their own culture just trying to get by. It’s really intense.
[Engine running] This is a place I was reporting from recently: Tapachula. It’s a town in Southeastern Mexico, just across the border from Guatemala. It’s complicated and tumultuous. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have passed through here just in the last year alone on their journey north in search of the American Dream.
[Crowd chatting] Tapachula is at the crossroads between Central America and Mexico and the United States, but it is also at the intersection between the past and the present. It is perhaps the best location in the Americas to understand how US intervention in both the recent and distant past is directly impacting the lives of countless people up and down the hemisphere in real-time today.
I’m in front of the main Mercado in downtown Tapachula, and there’s just a mass of people. Haitians are out in the streets. People cutting people’s hair, selling water, selling cigarettes, changing money. It’s just a huge multitude of cultures. Mexican and Guatemalan, Salvadoran. Everyone fighting to get by and fighting to start the road north.
Arturo J. Viscarra: Tapachula is really important in understanding this phenomenon as a migrant both transit point and a sort of open-air prison.
Michael Fox: That’s Arturo J. Viscarra.
Arturo J. Viscarra: I am an immigration attorney — Actually, I say asylum attorney, licensed in the US, and I’ve been working in Mexico for the last five years with migrants from Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, and other parts of the world.
Michael Fox: He says of that time in Mexico, he’s spent almost half of it in Tapachula.
Arturo J. Viscarra: It’s very hot and humid, right? Which I think contributes to this sense of desperation in the air. I read somewhere that it was the most popular or the most transited point in the globe for migrants, or at least one of them.
Michael Fox: The lines at the migratory agencies are out the door. People are waiting for visas and papers to travel so they don’t just get sent back here to Tapachula or deported back to their home countries. It’s a vicious cycle. And it’s playing out across the city as countless migrants try to navigate what Arturo Viscarra calls “bureaucratic barriers”.
Arturo J. Viscarra: It becomes a way station, a place to rest and make your next move. Now you’ve you’ve made it to Mexico, It’s the last country you have to go through, but it’s still a huge and dangerous journey before you, or expensive, right? And the Mexican government, along with the US government, have also made it an open-air prison where they bog people down in Tapachula.
Michael Fox: In front of one of the city’s few migrant shelters, tents cover the front yard and side streets. A small group of migrants are camped out under a gazebo on the edge of a park, alongside a river, and across the street from a major supermarket.
María has been here for weeks. We’re going to use her first name here, as well as that of the other migrants in this story, in order to protect their identities. Maria’s Honduran. Thirty-three years old. Intense, dark brown eyes. She wears tiny earrings in the shape of the cross. Her long, curly hair is pulled up over the top of her head. She looks both beautiful and exhausted. Her two young boys scramble over her. One of them holds a pink plastic toy gun.
Maria: [Fox translating from Spanish] My life is in danger. I have denounced it with the police, but they are waiting to kill me. My children are in danger, and that’s why I’ve left Honduras.
Michael Fox: In 2022, she made it all the way to the US border before she was caught by US border patrol guards. She was detained for a week. She says they told her they weren’t accepting Hondurans, and she was deported back home. There, she collected her kids, and now she’s trying again.
Maria: [Fox translating from Spanish] There’s no future in Honduras. There are too many gangs. Too many crises. I did what I could to survive there. Some days I ate. Some days I didn’t. I cried. So did my kids, because I didn’t even have the money to buy a small bag of salt. So, I’m looking for a better life for my children. And with God’s help, I’ll make it.
Michael Fox: Maria says she’s waiting to receive her humanitarian visa in Mexico. Once she has her papers, then she and her kids will continue the long journey north to the US border. There, she says she wants to do everything right to request legal asylum in the United States. But it’s all a really slow process, and there’s no promise that she’ll even get it.
Maria: [Fox translating from Spanish] This is really stressful. Sometimes I cry because I don’t want to be here in Mexico. I would love to be on the road, but I can’t go without papers, because I know that without papers, they’ll just grab me and deport me back to Honduras.
Michael Fox: Everyone is desperate and tired of waiting. Tapachula has a way of sucking you in, migrants say, grinding you down. The wait can be long and tedious, and many just want to make a run for it.
Caravans are leaving like once every couple of days with hundreds of people as they work their way down the highway and work their way north. It’s the constant stream of these caravans, and the question is how far they’ll actually get.
Caravans like this…
[Travelers chatting] The bulk of travelers on this road today are Venezuelan. But there are people from countries across Latin America and the globe. They’re still in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas, but about a day or two hike up the highway from Tapachula.
Alexis: [Fox translating from Spanish] We’ve been walking from Colombia [cars driving by].
Michael Fox: Venezuelan migrant Alexis tells me without breaking pace.
Alexis: [Fox translating from Spanish] Walking. Asking for rides. Praying to God that we arrive alright.
Michael Fox: Up the road, twenty-something Xon and two friends are ahead of the pack and making good time.
Xon: [Fox translating from Spanish] The dream is the US border, with God’s will, for us and those who are behind us.
Michael Fox: The phenomenon of the caravans started about five years ago..
Reporter: Through the rain, scorching heat, and humidity, thousands of migrants make the perilous journey through southern Mexico, hoping to reach the United States. It’s been called the largest Central American migrant caravan in decades, and thousands more migrants are joining, fleeing dire conditions in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala…
Michael Fox: That was 2018, when migrant caravans traveling through Mexico became headline news and an endless source of political hysteria throughout the US midterm elections.
But those weren’t the first caravans, and they certainly weren’t the last. We barely hear about them in the media today, but countless caravans of people are still traveling from Tapachula and marching through Mexico.
Professor Adrienne Pine is the author of the 2020 book Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry.
Adrienne Pine: The vast majority of migration, especially if we’re talking about migratory flows north in the Americas toward the United States is a result of US foreign policy.
And which US foreign policy we’re talking about differs depending on the state. But regardless, it’s all harmful, it’s all displacing people, and it’s all rooted in US imperialist capitalism. It’s the US using its military occupation of many countries in Latin America, and its military, and other war threats.
Michael Fox: As we’ll look at in the coming episodes, Central America has been ground zero. Whether it was US support for genocide in Guatemala, or for the authoritarian regimes in El Salvador in the 1980s, or the 2009 Honduran coup.
Adrienne Pine: Each of these events, some of them short-term, some of them long-term, were followed by massive waves of people fleeing the violence, the US-led violence in their countries, fleeing and going to the most obvious place, which is the United States. Which of course, ironically, caused that violence in the first place.
So you have, in some cases, this direct US military intervention. Or in other cases you have instances where the United States is very friendly with a government, but that’s only because the government is bowing down to the US’s demands.
“The main reason I left my country was because of the violence,” says a young Honduran migrant from this mini-doc on the caravans from a few years ago. His words echo those of Maria, and so, so many others. “You can’t go out. I graduated, but there was no work.”
Arturo J. Viscarro: Actually, in 2018, you had just had fraudulent elections in Honduras, at the very end of 2017. And some of those migrants were actually very politicized, very much saw themselves as fleeing the Honduran regime, which was just a continuation of the 2009 coup regime, even though this is eight years later.
Michael Fox: Quick refresher course.
Reporter: Angry protesters at the doorsteps of Honduras’s presidential palace want president Manuel Zelaya back.
Michael Fox: In 2009, the Honduran military removed the country’s democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya from power. The United States adamantly backed the coup. I’ll dig into all this and the aftermath in depth in episode six, but for now, let me just say that the US-backed coup unleashed a series of repercussions including political repression, spiraling violence, cuts to the social safety net, government corruption, and rising inequality.
Honduran migration increased only a few years later. In the wake of the 2017 elections, repression against protesters was reminiscent of the crackdown after the coup, fueling a new exodus.
Arturo J. Viscarro: Hondurans are still usually the number one Central American population that is going through. So apart from the political stuff, there’s obviously the violence of the state, the violence of criminal organization, in this case of the gangs, and of course economic violence and inequality that has been prevalent for a very long time in the region.
Michael Fox: It was not the first time that US foreign policy or intervention deteriorated the situation inside a country resulting in increased migration toward the United States
In fact, although this is barely ever talked about, the United States itself is at the root of much of the so-called migration crisis the US has seen in recent decades, and which former president Donald Trump, among many other prominent public figures, continues to use as political fodder.
Donald Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at ’em. They just come in. The crime is gonna be tremendous…
Michael Fox: That was him in December 2023.
Arturo J. Viscarra: Then there’s actually looking at the actual policies. The military intervention, the propping up of dictatorships, the violence people were fleeing. But then there’s the economic policies that have continued to be mostly dictated by the US. You should come to the realization that the US bears a ton of the responsibility for why people leave these countries.
And yet, we can’t really have an honest conversation about that yet. The vulnerable people that are migrating are the ones that are blamed for it, and it’s absurd, and it’s cruel, and it’s lazy.
Michael Fox: Of course, the vast majority of those I met in Tapachula or walking northward today are Venezuelan. They’re fleeing very real, disastrous conditions and financial hard times. The United States and most of those migrants blame the Venezuelan government. But, Adrienne Pine says, if you look at the actual figures, the reality is quite different.
Adrienne Pine: It’s only following Obama’s sanctions that Venezuela goes from being a migrant-receiving country to being a net-emmigrant country.
Michael Fox: Those sanctions began in 2015 and were ramped up under Trump.
Adrienne Pine: There was a study by CEPR, by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, that found that, in just a few years, they found I think it was 40,000 excess deaths that were directly attributable to US-imposed unilateral coercive measures or sanctions.
So sanctions are war, they are killing people, and people are fleeing those. And you can see that very directly in the statistics.
Michael Fox: I traveled to Venezuela in 2019 to report on the impact of the sanctions. I was there during the attempted coup. The reality was devastating: Shortages on medicine, HIV drugs, food, car parts, countless products, all, in large part, because of the sweeping US sanctions.
Adrienne Pine: So it’s a direct result of the sanctions that you see Venezuelans leaving. And of course, right now the phenomenon that we’re seeing of Venezuelans coming north is primarily Venezuelans who had already spent many years in other South American countries and had experienced tremendous xenophobia, violence, racism.
Michael Fox: Of course, this podcast is about US intervention in Central America, not South America. But I really wanted to highlight this connection.
In 2022, 2.76 million people tried to cross the US border. In 2023, more than half a million crossed through the treacherous Darién Gap. That’s more than double the previous year. The Darién is a jungle no man’s land between Colombia and Panama, the gateway to Central America. A week or more on the trail, through dense, hot, and wet forest alongside hundreds more, all fighting to survive.
Many don’t. Travelers face violence, extortion, robbery, and kidnappings. Migrants told me it is hell on Earth. Living hell.
Genesis: [Fox translating from Spanish] You pass dead bodies.
Michael Fox: Venezuelan migrant Genesis walked through the jungle with her seven-year-old daughter.
Genesis: [Fox translating from Spanish] It’s traumatic. There are people begging for help and you can’t stop to help them. I never would have done it if I had known.
Michael Fox: Thousands are risking their lives every day. Braving it all, fleeing violence, threats to their lives and crises often unleashed by the United States. All for a shot at the American dream.
The United States has done its best to close the door.
Vice President Kamala Harris: I want to be clear to folks in this region thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico Border. Do not come. Do not come.
Michael Fox: The United States is increasingly criminalizing the very migration that it helped create in the first place. Even as Washington pushes rhetoric of addressing “root causes” of migration in Central America, it’s really just rehashing the same stories that have caused so much harm over and over again [helicopter starting].
In the 1980s, the US funneled millions of dollars into Central America in the so-called fight against communism. Today, it’s dressed as fighting drugs or gangs. And the security aid — Together with economic policies favoring foreign extractive industries — Only increases inequality and makes things worse.
I have one more place I’d like to take you before I go.
In front of the Tapachula town square is the City Museum. It’s in a large, three-story colonial building that overlooks the movement of people outside. Upstairs there’s an on-going exhibit on migration. It is surprisingly powerful.
[Voices from the exhibit play] As you walk in, it’s like the museum is taking you on the journey of a migrant as they travel north toward the United States. You pass images of people on the road, pictures and words. The voices of young migrants speak in the background.
You wrap around the room, and when you get to the close, there’s a large tree with drawings and written notes left behind by largely migrant children. They’re all written in Spanish. I hold my breath as I read their words.
“My name is Harol,” reads one of them. The words are written underneath a children’s pencil drawing of a pair of animals walking. “I traveled through the jungle many times and I saw robbers who took our money. I miss my people who came with us. I’m going to the United States,” he writes, “but I don’t know where.”
“I came to Mexico looking for asylum, but now I lost my family,” another note says. A sad face is drawn beside it. “I’m from El Salvador. I’m 40 years old. Now, I don’t want to go to the USA. I’m traveling through Mexico looking for my wife and two kids. It wasn’t worth it.”
Child 1: What I most miss about Venezuela are my grandparents and my uncles and aunts..
Child 2: My name is Dulce, and I’m from Mexico. It makes me sad, everything that everyone has to go through, because I was also a migrant in the USA once.
Child 3: Yes, you can. Ecuador.
Child 4: I’m from Honduras. I’m 13 years old. I like sports, like soccer and basketball. I’ve had a really long day. Really long. Really stressed. And I’m tired.
Michael Fox: Their words are a heartbreaking window into the reality of life on the migrant trail. Life upended, as we learned in the beginning of this episode, with the help of the United States.
This museum exhibit is a type of living display of historical memory. That’s a name given to the collective efforts, particularly in Latin America, to breathe life into the past. To remember the history. To visibilize it, no matter how devastating or painful. In this case, that past is only days or months old. It’s still living on in Tapachula or on the highways north.
I’m bringing this up here because, as you will see in the coming episodes, this podcast is rooted in historical memory. Throughout this journey through Central America, I look to history to understand the present, and visa versa. You could maybe even say that this podcast itself is its own memorial to the past. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.
And here’s the thing. As you probably already know, US intervention is not a thing of the past. In late November 2023, congressman Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker of the House, attended a debate of students at Oxford University in England over the pros and cons of US intervention — Past and present. He begins…
Kevin McCarthy: We all know American intervention is good. It’s not perfect. Our nation is not perfect, but we strive to be a more perfect union. The great thing is with innovation, with intervention you’re allowed to learn if you’ve done something wrong. The great thing about America is we change. We take the tradition of the past and we apply it to a changing future.
Michael Fox: I think people up and down the hemisphere would have something to say about a statement like that. The US failures at intervention have ruined countries, destroyed families, killed thousands, perhaps millions. For those on the receiving end of Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick, American intervention is definitely not good.
And some people in Washington know it.
Speaker: Military interventions kill, displace and starve civilians. Often, economic interventions do too, as we are experiencing and seeing in many of our neighborhoods across the US.
Michael Fox: On the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine there are renewed calls to bury it, even on Capitol Hill.
As we will see in the coming episodes, US intervention and the Monroe Doctrine have taken a devastating toll, and the wounds are just beneath the surface.
In the next episode, I will take you to the Guatemalan town of Tiquisate — Once the center of operations for United Fruit banana production in Guatemala. I’ll look for signs of that past in the present, and walk in the footsteps of the 1954 CIA coup that would overthrow a democratically elected government in defense of US profits abroad.
That is up next on Under the Shadow.
Before I go, I wanted to thank everyone who pitched in to make this podcast a reality. In particular, Judy Hughes and the Sawyers. Without their support, you would not be listening to this podcast right now. I will read a full list of all those who donated to Under the Shadow in the final episode of the podcast.
The theme and closing music is from my band, Monte Perdido. We’re releasing a new album in a couple of months. You can find us on Spotify or in the show notes.
Lastly, if you like what you hear, you can head over to my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There, you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox. See you next time.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
