Notes from the World

Juan Forero is the South America bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, he worked for both the New York Times and National Public Radio before joining the Journal, and he has been reporting on Latin America for more than 20 years. He joined us on Notes From the World today to discuss the state of Venezuela - now five months after the seizure of Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores by U.S. forces - and that of Colombia, as the presidential tenure of Gustavo Petro draws to a close and the country prepares for presidential elections at the end of this month.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, immigration policy in the United States has undergone profound changes. Masked, anonymous agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both operating under the purview of the United States Department of Homeland Security, have roamed U.S. cities and towns, shattering car windows and dragging people from their vehicles, seizing high school students, chasing terrified U.S. citizens into their homes and stalking courthouse halls where immigrants are reporting for hearings in New York, Miami and elsewhere. The past January, in Minneapolis, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross gunned down poet and mother Renée Good and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez murdered nurse Alex Pretti. As more and more people disappeared into the maw of a detention regime spanning from Florida to Louisiana to Texas, cases such as that of Emmanuel Damas became ever-more coming. Damas, a 56 year-old, had a pending asylum claim, and entered the U.S. from Haiti via the Biden-era humanitarian parole program but was taken into ICE custody in Boston in September 2025 and died this past March while in custody in Arizona due to complications from an infected tooth. He was one of at least 17 people in ICE custody, who, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle, died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical medical care that might have saved their lives. To discuss the U.S. government’s current immigration policies and the conditions those detained under them are currently living under, we are joined on Notes from the World by three guests today: Ruby Powers, a Houston-based attorney who has represented clients detained at Camp East Montana, an immigrant detention facility located on the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas; Lomi Kriel, a statewide investigative reporter for the Texas Tribune who has extensively reported on both Camp East Montana and the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Frio County in South Texas; and Abigail Philips, a Miami-based attorney who has represented clients detained at the South Florida Detention Facility, the immigration detention facility located inside Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve and better known as Alligator Alcatraz.

As large as Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi River, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a place where Africa’s greatest potential and most wrenching tragedies are frequently lived out. Its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and killed with the connivance of former colonial ruler Belgium in 1961, and for more than three decades afterwards, Congo - for a time during this period renamed Zaire - groaned under the kleptocratic rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. After Mobutu’s ousting in 1997 by an armed rebellion backed by the Rwandan government, Congo saw the rule and assasination of Mobutu’s successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the great Second Congo War from 1998 until 2003, the long presidency of Laurent Kabila’s son, Joseph Kabila, and ongoing violence and unrest, particularly in its eastern regions abutting Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The nation of Rwanda, ruled by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) since 1994, has been particularly involved in Congo’s troubles, sponsoring a series of rebel groups and sometimes intervening directly with its military in the country. Most recently, Rwanda has supported the Mouvement du 23 Mars (the March 23rd Movement or M23) rebels, who launched a rebellion from 2012 until 2013 and then again beginning in late 2021 until today, during which it has seized a wide swathe of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. Since 2019, DR Congo itself has been ruled by Felix Tshisekedi, who has hewed to an ever-more authoritarian path as he pursued his political and military goals. Tshisekedi’s predecessor as president, Joseph Kabila, was sentenced to death for his alleged conspiring with the M23 and has since resurfaced in the M23-controlled eastern city of Goma. This past December, Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame signed a peace deal in Washington, DC to end the fighting, though it still continues to this day. To discuss the complex situation in Congo today, we are joined on Notes from the World by the journalist Emmet Livingstone, who has lived in and reported from the country since 2022, and Clémentine de Montjoye, senior Great Lakes of Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Luis Moreno was born in New York City and graduated with a BA in History from Fordham University and an MA in Education at Kean College before joining the foreign service. In a long and varied career he held, among other posts, the role of refugee coordinator and the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti; the narcotics affairs director at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia from 1997 to 2001; U.S. consul general in Monterrey, Mexico; deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Israel; political-military affairs minister counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; and U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica. Today, he is a member of The Steady State, an organization of nearly 400 former national security officials who remain committed to their oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and which was formed in 2016 in response to rising authoritarian tendencies and the erosion of U.S. credibility and alliances.” On today’s Notes from the World, we spoke about his experiences and the state of U.S. diplomacy today.

(Cover Image: Footage of an 8 January 2026 protest in Bandar-e Anzali, northern Iran, shared via Telegram.) On 28 February of this year, the United States and Israel launched attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a military operation that has been ongoing for three weeks at the time of this broadcast. The assault has brought a large swathe of the Middle East into conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory attacks on Israel and U.S. facilities in Iraq as well as military and civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Most shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway for global oil and gas transport that supplies roughly one-fifth of the world’s crude oil, has been halted since hostilities began. The conflict comes on the heels of what by all accounts was a mass slaughter of protesters by the Islamic Republic’s security forces inside Iran earlier this year, with the death toll being placed well into the thousands. Joining us to discuss the situation on Notes From the World today are Arash Azizi, a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University and contributing writer at the Atlantic, and Arina Moradi, a spokeswoman for Hengaw, a human rights organization that focuses on reporting and documenting human rights violations in Iran.

Today on Notes from the World, we are joined by José de Cordoba, the longtime Mexico City correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the significance of the recent killing of Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes aka El Mencho, how Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is faring a year and a half into her term and how negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) could impact Mexico’s relationship with the United States.

Carrie Gibson is the author of three works of history: Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day (2014), El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (2019) and the subject of our conversation today, The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas (2026). Prior to gaining a PhD in history at the University of Cambridge in 2011, she worked as journalist for The Guardian and Observer in London and currently lives in Seoul, South Korea.

Last month, in Florida’s Manatee County along the state’s western Gulf Coast, the Seattle-based marine terminal services company SSA Marine Inc. announced that it intended to partner with a Tampa, Florida-based holding company, Slip Knott LLC, to build an enormous new cruise port adjacent to the county’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The patch of land in question is lushly festooned with seagrass coverage and mangroves, and is home to oysters, clams, reddish, pelicans and other fauna. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan has met with fierce local opposition, the latest chapter in the long struggle between those who seek to protect Flrodia’s complex ecosystem and those who see it as a vehicle for economic benefit and personal enrichment. To get a better grasp on what is being proposed and what’s at stake, Notes from the World spoke to Max Chesnes, the Environment Reporter for the Tampa Bay Times; Maya Burke, the Assistant Director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, an intergovernmental partnership of Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco and Pinellas counties and a number of other state and federal entities that seeks to build partnerships to restore and protect Tampa Bay; and Abbey Tyrna, the Executive Director of Suncoast Waterkeeper, an organization focused on protecting and restoring the waters on Florida’s Suncoast. [Image: Terra Ceia Preserve in Manatee County, Florida with the city of Tampa in the background. Photo via Southwest Florida Water Management District.]

A constitutional lawyer by training, Filip Reyntjens first set foot in Rwanda in July 1976 to help run a project at the Law School at the National University in Butare. Over the last 50 years, he has provided observers of the Great Lakes Region of Africa with thought-provoking observations and analysis of the region and especially of Rwanda itself, one of its most significant countries. The author of a number of well-regarded books, including Rwanda: trois jours qui ont fait basculer l’histoire, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda.and Le génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, he is an Emeritus Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Antwerp. We spoke about the 1973 to 1994 rule of Juvénal Habyarimana, Rwanda as it has existed for three decades under the rule of Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and Rwanda's involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the early morning hours, of 3 January, a United States military operation spirited Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores out of Caracas following an assault that left dozens dead, including at least 32 Cubans that the Cuban government later said were members of the Cuban armed forces and intelligence agencies. According to the Venezuelan government’s own tally sheets and conclusions of nongovernmental organizations such as the Carter Center, Maduro lost the July 2024 presidential election to former diplomat Edmundo González, who served as Venezuela’s ambassador to Argentina under the presidency of Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, at which point Maduro assumed the presidency. Rather than admit defeat, Maduro’s government simply declared victory and unleashed savage violence against those who dared oppose it. The United Nations Human Rights Council released a report in the aftermath of the elections that concluded that “violence used against opponents of the Venezuelan authorities has reached unprecedented levels [including] arrests, sexual abuse and torture.” Last July, Amnesty International released another report where it characterized the Maduro government’s “enforced disappearances” of critics “as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, particularly those they consider dissidents, which amount to crimes against humanity.” For years, Maduro had sat atop a Mafia-like octopus of organized crime as a kind of capo di tutti i capi of a narco-kleptocracy that consisted of not only Maduro himself but also Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello, the Rodriguez siblings, Delcy Rodríguez, who assumed the presidency after Maduro’s ouster and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly.In April 2023, testimony submitted to the International Criminal Court about the Venezuelan government’s atrocities outlined "Crimes of murder, imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, other inhumane acts, rape and/or other forms of sexual violence, enforced disappearance, forced displacement [and] persecution on political grounds [with the victims including] human rights defenders; social and environmental activists; humanitarian workers and volunteers; health professionals; judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and other civil servants in the judiciary; university students, professors and supporting staff...Former police and military personnel…a large variety of civil servants; workers in both the public and private sector; retirees; journalists, media outlets, bloggers and social media users; land, farm and business owners." Donald Trump - who recently freed the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández from a 45 year prison sentence in the U.S. thanks to his role as one of the hemisphere’s most prolific drug traffickers - didn’t even attempt to conceal the mercenary and non-humanitarian nature of his seizure of Maduro, claiming the United States would “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” took place, claiming the U.S. “built Venezuela’s oil industry” and “the socialist regime stole it from us.” Trump was also brutally dismissive of both Edmundo González and opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado, claiming the latter “she doesn’t have the respect within the country.” Thus, despite Maduro’s capture, Venezuela’s hydra-headed dictatorship continues in place. Videos from Venezuela confirm that colectivos - as the pro-government militia that have comprised one of the regime’s most fearsome tools of repression are known - have fanned out into the streets. To discuss the aftermath of Maduro’s capture and what might possible be in store for Venezuela in the future, today we will speak with Juan Luis Rodríguez, a Venezuelan anthropologist and Associate Professor at Queens College in New York and Venezuelan-American journalist Germania Rodriguez Poleo.

Michaël Brun is a Haitian DJ and record producer known for blending electronic music with traditional Haitian styles of song. His debut EP, Gravity, was released in 2013. Since then he has released two full length albums, Lokal on the Kid Coconut label and Fami Vol. 1 with Astralwerks. He became the first Haitian to play Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2014, and created, along with J Balvin, the single “Positivo” w which became Telemundo’s theme song for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. In recent years, he has put on an annual Haitian block party-style tour called Bayo. For our last episode of 2025, he stopped by Notes from the World today to discuss his music, Haiti and its culture.

Philippe Pujol is a French journalist and writer based in Marseille. After starting out in science journalism, he eventually covered crime for the daily newspaper La Marseillaise. In 2014, he won the Albert Londres Prize for his series of articles “Quartiers Shit,” about the northern districts of Marseille. He is the author of several books, including French deconnection : au cœur des trafics, La fabrique du monstre : 10 ans d’immersion dans les quartiers nord de Marseille, Mon cousin, le fasciste (about his cousin, the far-right activist Yvan Benedetti) et Cramés : Les enfants du Monstre. We sat down for a conversation about for a conversation about Marseille, its charms, it violence, its challenges and its possible future.

Since 2020, the Sahel region of Africa has been buffeted by a series of coups that upended the democratically-elected governments of the region and replaced them with military rulers. First in Mali, which saw the presidency of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta overthrown in August 2020, and which then witnessed a subsequent May 2021 coup that saw General Assimi Goïta seize power; then in Burkina Faso in January 2022, which saw the overthrow of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré and then in September of that same year, which saw Captain Ibrahim Traoré seize the reigns of state there; and finally in Niger, where a July 2023 coup d’état overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum and saw General Abdourahamane Tchiani seize power. Subsequently, the French military, which had participated in a series of counterinsurgency operations against Islamic insurgents, including the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), and Islamic State – Sahel Province (ISSP) and elements of Boko Haram, was ordered to leave the three countries. The French were replaced to a large extent by the Russian government proxy force the Wagner Group and now Africa Corps. Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso subsequently withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and formed the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES). This past September, the three nations also announced that they no longer recognized the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction and said they want to create “indigenous mechanisms” to replace it. Recently, Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin engaged in a show a force around the Malian capital of Bamako, effectively blocking fuel deliveries to the city of 4 million. To discuss the complex situation in the Sahel, today on Notes from the World we will speak to two experts on the region, Heni Nsaibia, the West Africa analyst for Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) and Yvan Guichaoua, senior research at the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies.

Late last month, the city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State in western Sudan, fell to the legions of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the two competing sides in the civil war that has torn Sudan apart since April 2023. During and after the capture of the city, reports proliferated of gross human rights abuses and mass summary executions by RSF forces, a number of which the fighters recorded and broadcast on social media themselves. According to the United Nations, nearly 70,000 people have fled since the city’s fall. To decode the current situation in El Fasher and Sudan more broadly, on this special broadcast of Notes from the World, we speak to three guests about the situation in El Fasher: Hala al-Karib, a Sudanese human rights activist and the regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa; Nathaniel Raymond, the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health; and Mukesh Kapila, an author, doctor, professor, and humanitarian who served as the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator and the UN Development Program Resident Representative in Sudan from 2003 to 2004.

For this special Halloween edition of Notes from the World, we are joined by David J. Goodwin, a historian, writer, past Frederick Lewis Allen Room scholar at the New York Public Library and the author of Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, a biography of the horror writer’s New York years. His first book, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, received the J. Owen Grundy History Award in 2018 and he has written for a variety of publications including Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, The Metropole, The Providence Journal, Strand Magazine, Urban Archive and Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. [Image: Frank Belknap Long, H.P. Lovecraft, and James F. Morton at the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, Bronx, New York, April 1922, via H.P. Lovecraft Photo Gallery)

Howard W. French is a Professor at Columbia Journalism School who spent the bulk of his reporting career as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times working in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He is the author of several books, including A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World and his new book and the subject of our discussion today, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.

Linas Koyala is CEO of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Associate Professor of Partnership at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science. He is also a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Non-Resident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He joined us to discuss the current situation in the Baltics, the war in Ukraine and its possible implications for wider Europe.

ldefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas who has reported on Mexican drug cartels and public corruption along the U.S.-Mexico border and in Mexico itself for over 15 years. He is a regular guest on radio and television newscasts including on Telemundo, Univision, CNN and the BBC. He joined us to discuss the situation in the Rio Grande Valley and Mexico's Tamaulipas and the history and current state of drug trafficking and organized crime in the region. [Note: There were a few issues with the audio on my end which I fixed as best I could, but hopefully they will not detract too much from the discussion.]

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942, and in his youth worked as a writer and editor for Ramparts magazine and became a co-founder of the magazine Mother Jones. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other publications. He is the author of numerous books, most of which are united by dual themes of a granular examination of authoritarianism and despotism, and also of the unquenchable desire, even when facing great odds, of humankind to be free. Those books include The Mirror at Midnight, A South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost, Russians Remember Stalin, King Leopold's Ghost, A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves and Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. We spoke about his body of work, some of the memorable characters he uncovered, and his thoughts about the current political climate in the United States.

Kettly Mars is a Haitian novelist and poet who was born in Port-au-Prince in 1958, one year after the ascent to power of François Duvalier, who would rule the country for the next 14 years. Her work confronts some of the most difficult issues present in Haitian society, from the complicated dynamics that exist between a dictatorship’s adherents and its victims, the gulf between rural and urban society and the exploitation of the most vulnerable in the wake of catastrophes, both natural and man-made. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Senghor and the Prince Claus Award. We spoke on Notes from the World about her writing, Haiti’s political and artistic travails and the role that the country’s literary tradition has played and continues to play in its history.

Murhaf Jouejati is the founder of Syria Consult and emeritus Distinguished Visiting Professor of Middle East Studies and Global Affairs at the United States Naval Academy. He previously taught at the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies and George Washington University, where he served as the director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He served as a member of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the first Istanbul-based opposition coalition that was formed in 2011 in response to the uprising against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. He joins us on Notes from he World to discuss developments in the new Syria, ranging from its enigmatic President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to the recent violence in the coastal regions of Tartus and Latakia and the southern region of Suwayda, the actions of the government of Israel towards the new administration and increasing calls for decentralization.

Amy Booth is managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language online newspaper, and co-founder of the Pirate Wire newsletter. She has been working in Argentina since 2018 and her work on politics, social affairs and human rights has also appeared in the BBC, the Guardian, VICE, and many other outlets. She joins us today on Notes from the World to discuss the presidency of Argentina’s Javier Milei as the country prepares for legislative elections in October and Milei himself prepares to mark two years in power.

Fereshta Abbasi is a Researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, focusing on research and documentation of ongoing abuses in Afghanistan, where she has documented the human rights situation for a number of organizations for the last decade. She holds a Master of Laws in International law and Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen, has been recognized as a Rising Leader by Aspen UK, part of the global network of Aspen Institutes, and as a Development Fellow by the Asia Foundation. We spoke about the ongoing human rights crisis in Afghanistan, the recents indictment of Taliban officials by the International Criminal Court and the difficult situation of many Afghans abroad.

The Guyanese politician and diplomat Carl Greenidge has had a varied career in that South American nation’s political sphere over the years, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance and Secretary General of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group.  Today, he joins us in his capacity as Agent for the government of Guyana before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where he is representing Guyana regarding the situation in the Essequibo region in the west of the country, a region which the government of neighboring Venezuela has in recent years claimed for itself and threatened to take over. We discuss the long and complex history of the region and the background for the current discourse.

Julia Gaffield in an Associate Professor of History at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. Having identified the only known official copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence during her archival research in 2010, she is the author of two books, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015, and the subject of our conversation today, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom, published by Yale University Press.

Jhanisse Vaca Daza is the co-founder two organizations: Ríos de Pie, a non-violent citizen movement focused on human rights and environmental rights in Bolivia, and the Jucumari Foundation, whose goal is to contribute to humanitarian and environmental efforts across Latin America. Currently serving as the activism outreach specialist and manager of the Freedom Fellowship programme at the Human Rights Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on promoting and protecting human rights globally with an emphasis on closed societies, she spoke to Notes from the World about the environmental struggles in Bolivia, the nation’s democratic challenges and her thoughts on its forthcoming presidential election, now scheduled for this August.

Jess DiPierro Obert is a writer, photographer and filmmaker who splits her time between Brooklyn and Haiti, where she has worked since 2016. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the New Humanitarian, Buzzfeed, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, PBS Newshour and other outlets. Her new film, Kouri Pou Lapli, or Run from Rain, is a short documentary that tells the story of 16-year-old Macul Nelson, who had to flee from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, to the town of Mirebalais, in the country’s Plateau Central region.

Eduardo González Cueva is a Peruvian human rights consultant and sociologist specializing in transitional justice. He participated in Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end of its 20 year internal armed conflict and provides technical and strategic advice connected to the establishment and operations of truth and reconciliation processes in a number of countries around the world. We spoke to him on Notes from the World about the situation in Peru more than two years after the ouster of President Pedro Castillo and about the country’s tangled political and social history. [Image: Caja Negra (2001) by Alfredo Márquez and Ángel Valdez. Colección MICROMUSEO.]

For this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we had the great pleasure of speaking with the United States-born, British-based record producer Joe Boyd, who has helmed some of the most important recordings of some of the most influential musicians of the last sixty years, including Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Richard and Linda Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Toots and the Maytals and R.E.M. He is also the author of two fascinating books, 2017’s White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s and this year’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. Our conversation ranged from the great significance of the Haitian Revolution in the development of music in the United State to examining the musical bouillabaisse that is New Orleans to looking at the curious relationship between the great purveyor of Congolese rumba and soukous music Franco and the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to the missing link between the music of Nick Drake and João Gilberto.

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian author and translator who currently serves as Associate Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Uzhhorod in Western Ukraine, she is the author of, among other works, the novels Ivan and Phoebe and Love Life as well as  the poetry collections Persephone Blues and Felicity's Poems. She has been the recipient of the Taras Shevchenko National Award in Fiction and the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize and is a member of PEN Ukraine. We discussed Ukraine’s vibrant literary culture and the state of Ukraine in the shadow of Russia’s war there.

Dalia Alahmad is a writer and podcast producer from Jenin, now based in Ramallah, who works at the Palestine office of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) as an outreach coordinator, though she is speaking here in her capacity as a private citizen. Notes from the World spoke to her about daily life in the West Bank and some of what the media coverage misses about Palestinians and their lives.

Tesla Takedown is a protest movement that grew out of the fury at the actions of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Donald Trump and Republican Party $290 million for the 2024 election cycle, thus becoming the largest individual donor during that election. Adam Sheridan is the volunteer Lead Organizer for Cooper River Indivisible, an affiliate chapter in southern New Jersey of the national Indivisible organization, which is a progressive movement and organization in the United States initiated in 2016 as a reaction to the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. He has been extensively involved in the Tesla Takedown protests in the area and joined us to talk a little bit about its activities and its goals.

Jared Olson is a writer and independent investigative journalist covering extractivism, organized crime and state violence in Honduras and Mexico. Based between Mexico City and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, his work has been published in The Baffler, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Humanitarian, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. He joined us on Notes from the World to discuss the current state of the Central American nation of Honduras under the rule of Xiomara Castro, its history and where it may be heading.

Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank and media organization that seeks to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime and citizen security in the Americas. He is the author of two books, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins, 2020) and Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). He has reported from Latin America and the Caribbean for over two decades including from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and from the subject our our conversation today, Guatemala. . Last month, InSight Crime published an in-depth report examining how Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo was faring in his fight against the deeply-entrenched and many-tentacled political-criminal monarchy that has scuttled the hopes many Guatemalans had for the country after the conclusion in 1996 of its thirty year civil war. Its assessment of where things stand was worrisome, to say the least.

Rafael Trelles was born in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan in 1957 and began studying painting at the age of eleven under the instruction of Catalan painter Julio Yort. In 1980, Trelles graduated from the Universidad de Puerto Rico with a degree in Fine Arts, magna cum laude. In 1983, he pursued graduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His work has been exhibited internationally including in New York, Florida, Mexico and in a major exhibition in 2018, Santurce, un libro mural, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. He resides and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico and I was happy to have the opportunity to speak with him regarding the trajectory of Puerto Rican art and the struggle to safeguard the island’s cultural heritage amid political and economic pressures.

Rayhan Asat was born in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, referred to by China, the political entity that governs it, as an autonomous region. Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs - a Turkic Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang - that have been documented to include mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor and violations of reproductive rights. In August 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report looking at the treatment of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim groups in China which concluded the Chinese government’s actions “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” An international human rights lawyer focusing on atrocity prevention, the rule of law, civil liberties and corporate accountability, Rayhan Asat previously advised the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is currently a senior legal and policy advisor with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.

Ewald Scharfenberg is the founder of the Venezuelan investigative website Armando.Info. For more than a decade, the site has provided readers with a unique window into the workings of Venezuela's authoritarian regime and the toll its activities and abuses have taken on the country's population. Scharfenberg, editor Roberto Deniz, and two other Armando Info journalists fled Venezuela after the government persecuted them for their reporting on corruption in a state food distribution program. I spoke with him about Venezuela’s struggle to regain its democracy, the criminal nature of the Maduro regime, the shadowy figure of Alex Saab and the difficult reality of trying to practice journalism in today’s Venezuela. [En español]

As we mark the 15th anniversary of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this week on Notes from the World we speak with Louino Robillard, a Haitian social activist who was born in Saint-Raphaël, in Haiti’s north, and raised in Cité Soleil, one of the most populous neighborhoods of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and also one of its most deprived. The driving force behind a number of organizations in Haiti including the Konbit Solèy Leve, Konbit Bibliyotèk Site Solèy and Pak Nan Ginen, he focuses on peacebuilding initiatives in urban neighborhoods and on sustainable development in the Haitian countryside, with a particular focus on reforestation. He joins us today from Cap-Haïtien.

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak with David Frum, a Canadian-American political commentator and writer for The Atlantic, about what we can expect from the impending second presidential term of Donald Trump. A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum is the author of several books, including Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy and Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic.

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Sarah Hunaidi, a Syrian writer and human rights advocate, about the fall of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and what may lie ahead for that country. Sarah's work has been published by Foreign Policy, the Independent, Chatham House, Buzzfeed, and the New Arab among other publications. She provides political analysis and commentary on refugee and gender issues in the Middle East and the diaspora, and has appeared regularly on channels like NPR, BBC, and Aljazeera. She graduated from Harvard University with a Master’s Degree in Middle Eastern Studies and is currently working on a translation of the diaries of Samira Khalil, a Syrian dissident and revolutionary activist who went missing in December 2013.

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Philip Obaji Jr, a Nigerian journalist who currently serves as correspondent for The Daily Beast covering sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, his work has focused on the activities in the region of the Russian state-funded private military company the Wagner Group and its successor, the Africa Corps, whose abuses against civilian populations and links to the governments of the Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere we discuss in detail during our conversation. In 2022, he was awarded  the Jaime Brunet International Human Rights Prize and the following year he was the recipient of the One World Media International Journalist of the Year award, becoming the first Nigerian to receive both honors.

This week on Notes from the World, we discuss the current situation in Afghanistan with Roqia Samim, the Program Director for Research and Policy at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame Law School. Roqia obtained her law degree from the Law and Political Science School of Herat University and also holds an LL.M degree in international human rights law from Notre Dame Law School. Roqia served as Human Rights Advocate at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and worked as the Provincial Coordinator for the Women Leadership Development program with USAID. As an Associate Political Affairs Officer in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan Herat Field Office, she supported Sustainable Development Goals for Gender Equality and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions in the western region of Afghanistan. Today, on Notes from the World, we discuss the past, present and future of Afghanistan, and the ongoing battle by the nation's women to have their human and civil rights recognized by the Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 until 2001, and then again since August 2021.

This week on Notes from the World, we speak with Michela Wrong, a British journalist and author who has spent three decades covering Africa and who is the author of, among other books, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (about Eritrea) and Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, which focuses on the murder of Rwanda’s former head of intelligence Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2013. We spoke about the history of DR Congo, the rise of Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the pitiless, expansionist authoritarian state that Rwanda has become under his rule.

This week on Notes from the World, we speak to author Sarah Gerard about her new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco, which recounts the brief life of writer Carolyn Bush, the problematic leadership at my alma mater Bard College, the changing face of her native Florida and the geographies of grief.

For this week's episode of Notes from the World, I spoke with Michael Pierse, a Senior Lecturer at Queens University Belfast, about post-Brexit Northern Ireland, the recent far-right agitation there, the global actors helping to stir it & the possible political trajectory on both sides of the border. Go raibh maith agat, Michael. [Note: I had some challenges splicing the two dialogue streams together this time, but I did my highly-inexpert best and hope it won't distract from the discussion too much. ]

We speak to the noted historian Manisha Sinha as we tackle the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the class elements of white reaction against Reconstruction, the role of Southern elites, the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the so-called Compromise of 1877 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898. A fascinating and very relevant discussion. Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and an authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

Jasmin Muyanović is a political scientist and policy specialist focusing on southeastern Europe. Born in Sarajevo, he is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Newlines Institute, a member of the Advisory Council of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and an Advisory Board member of the Kulin Initiative, which focuses on political, economic and social policies in Bosnia & Herzegovina. He is the author of two books, Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide (Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press, 2023). He spoke to Notes from the World about the tangled history of the former Yugoslavia and what the future may hold for the region.

In this week's episode of the Notes from the World podcast, I speak to Sergio Guzmán, the director and co-founder of Colombia Risk Analysis, which provides commercial, security and political risk analysis for the Andean Region. As we approach the two year mark of his time in office, we examine the presidency of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro - its struggles with Congress, its environmental ambitions, Colombia’s security situation and the government’s negotiations with the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla insurgency, among other issues. We also look at where Colombia may be heading in the coming months. This interview was recorded on 29 May 2024.

In this week's episode of the Notes from the World podcast, I speak to El Salvador's Juan Martinez d'Aubuisson, a journalist and anthropologist who has extensively researched that country's gangs and their links to the political and economic sectors since 2008, as well as performing extensive fieldwork in Honduras. He is the author of several books, including Ver, oír y callar: Un año con la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (Pepitas de Calabaza, 2019) and El niño de Hollywood (Debate, 2018), the latter in collaboration with his brother, Óscar Martínez, and translated into English as The Hollywood Kid (Verso, 2019). His work has appeared in The Washington Post, El País, Gatopardo and El Faro, among other publications. We speak about the evolution of El Salvador’s criminal groups, the country’s political situation and the rise and consolidation of power of its controversial president, Nayib Bukele. This interview was recorded on 3 April 2024.

In this episode, I speak with Israeli journalist, social and political activist and hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin about the 7 October attacks by Hamas, Israel's war in Gaza, the results of Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous reign and what the future might hold for the people of Israel and Palestine. This interview was recorded on 1 April 2024.