NACLA Radio

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 the hemisphere. 

But in those early days, Monroe’s statements were applauded by Latin American leaders as supporting their independence struggles. They were even embraced at Simón Bolívar’s Pana...

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 installed as many as 100 military bases throughout Panama, during World War II, and it was the base of Washington’s Latin American military training apparatus.

Panama was the heart of the United Stat...

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 Rica has created around the elimination of the military and how the United States did its utmost to encourage San José to do its bidding. 

This is Episode 11.

Under the Shadow is an investigati...

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, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, was formative for many academics and activists analyzing the U.S. role in the region.

In 2012, NACLA awarded him the Latin America Peace and Justice Award for his ...

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 revolutionary film in a revolutionary context." That did not go over well in Hollywood. The movie would get him blacklisted. Even today, you still can’t find the movie streaming.

In this bonus episod...

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 country, killing tens of thousands and ravaging the economy. But an international solidarity movement stood up in response. Meanwhile, the Reagan government's hubris and drive to fuel its war 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 promised to improve the lives of all. 

But the United States, under President Ronald Reagan, feared the dominos would fall across Central America, and they unleashed assault on the country: paramilit...

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: Augusto Sandino.

Sandino would wage a six-year-long guerrilla insurgency to rid Nicaragua of the U.S. Marines. And he would win. The United States finally pulled out in 1933, the year before Sandin...

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 their sights set on taking over foreign nations, all in the name of Manifest Destiny.

In this episode, host Michael Fox retraces the footsteps of William Walker as he recounts one of ...

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 last episode of Under The Shadow, host Michael Fox looked deeply at Hernández’s time as president from 2014 to 2022, which many came to call a narco-dictatorship. He won office in a fraudulent election, consolidated unp...

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 of Episode 7, host Michael Fox looks at the fallout of the 2009 coup in Honduras, walking from 2009 into the present. He takes us to Tegucigalpa to dive into the fraudulent U.S.-backed e...

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 into the tremendous resistance to the 2009 coup. He looks at the government of ousted president Manuel Zelaya, the Latin America Pink Tide movement of the 2000s, and the push back against Ze...

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 U.S. military involvement and CIA missions in the region.

Within the country, that meant using the same strategy seen throughout the rest of the region: state repression, disappearances, tort...

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, formerly Twitter.

Host Michael Fox was on the ground for the election. He takes us there and sits down for an in-depth conversation with Dartmouth assistant professor of Latin American...

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 supporters rallied in Guatemala City. 

As we looked at in Episode 2, Bernardo Arévalo is the son of Guatemala's first democratic leader Juan José Arévalo, who ushered in ...

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, where he visits the Museum of Word and Image, the home of the archives of Radio Venceremos. He hears from former members of the radio about the revolutionary project and the U.S. and Salvadoran milita...

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, which  lasted from 1980 until 1992.

The violence and the U.S. support for the country's bloody authoritarian regimes had a deadly cost, claiming the lives of and tens of thousands of...

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 America—the Monroe Doctrine.

We look back on the history of the Monroe Doctrine and the devastating impact on the region. The list of U.S. invasions, occupations, coups and sanctions is e...

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 search of the legacy of the company today. He travels to the Guatemalan town of Tiquisate, which was built by the company. We dig into the past and the 1954 CIA coup, which overthrew the...