A Tariff Threat Foreshadows U.S.-Mexico Relations During the Second Trump Presidency
Release Date: 12/05/2024
"El camino duele, pero trae fortaleza": Un episodio especial por el Mes de la Mujer con Collette Spinetti, la primera secretaria de Estado trans del Uruguay
Latin America Today
Por el Mes de la Mujer, estamos lanzando un episodio especial de Latin America Today con una conversación con Collette Spinetti — activista trans uruguaya, profesora de literatura y la primera mujer trans en ocupar un puesto de secretaria de Estado en Uruguay. En este episodio, Collette conversa con Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, Presidenta de WOLA, sobre lo que significa romper barreras históricas como mujer trans en un cargo público, el avance global de los movimientos antiderechos y su trabajo en Uruguay para avanzar en la igualdad en un mundo cada vez más desigual. Sobre Colette...
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"Women, ‘las buscadoras’, have become a very strong reference for courage" | A Special Women's Month Conversation with Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez
Latin America Today
For Women's Month, we're releasing a special episode of Latin America Today featuring a conversation with Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez — a Mexican human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience working on enforced disappearances, femicides, migrants' rights, and women's rights across Mexico and Central America. In this episode, Ana Lorena speaks with WOLA's Corie Welch about what the crisis of enforced disappearances looks like today, the outsized role women have played in confronting it, and what enforced disappearances in the context of U.S. immigration...
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Oil and the Rule of Law in Venezuela
Latin America Today
This episode assesses the “transition”—if that is the correct word—in Venezuela nine weeks after the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted Nicolás Maduro. This conversation with , director of WOLA’s Venezuela program, and , director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, focus particularly on the role of oil, the country’s largest source of foreign exchange by far. Dr. Monaldi acknowledges that oil revenues have increased significantly. However, these revenues now flow into a U.S.-controlled account. The lack of...
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“It's So Seamlessly Blended into the Regular Economy That It's Hard to Pull Out”: Environmental Organized Crime, in Venezuela and Throughout the Americas
Latin America Today
This episode features , a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. Ungar has written extensively on the rule of law, policing, and human rights in Latin America, and more recently has focused his research on environmental organized crime across the Amazon basin. Ungar notes that environmental organized crime—illegal gold mining, logging, cattle ranching, and land grabbing—has become the third largest criminal enterprise globally and is now deeply intertwined with narcotrafficking operations. Rather than existing as...
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Don’t Let Boat Strikes Fade Into the Background
Latin America Today
This episode is a conversation with , WOLA's director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the ongoing U.S. military attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans. When Walsh and host recorded this episode, on February 13, 2026, 35 attacks had killed at least 131 people since September 2, 2025—an average of four killings every five days—and another attack later that day killed 3 more people. Walsh and Isacson just published a WOLA commentary, "," warning against the dangerous normalization of extrajudicial executions carried out directly by the U.S. military. Five months...
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U.S. Military Attacks Inside Colombia and Mexico: a Conversation We're Actually Having
Latin America Today
Following the Trump administration's January 3, 2026 in Venezuela and its on boats suspected of carrying drugs, its threats of unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexico and Colombia have taken on new urgency. WOLA's and join to examine what such actions would mean for two of Washington's most important partners in the hemisphere. The conversation opens with a sobering parallel: days before recording, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in what appears to be another grossly unjustified use of lethal force. Both guests draw on their countries' painful...
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A Year Into the Trump Administration, "We Are in Untested Waters"
Latin America Today
January 20, 2026 is the first anniversary of Donald Trump's second inauguration. As we pass this milestone, WOLA President Carolina Jiménez Sandoval and Vice President for Programs Maureen Meyer join Adam Isacson to take stock of a year that has fundamentally transformed U.S. policy toward Latin America—and not for the better. This episode is a companion of a that Meyer published on January 15, 2026, tracking how the past year saw U.S. policy undermining democracy and human rights promotion, interfering in elections, hitting immigrants from the region quite hard, and taking the “war on...
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A Shocking U.S. Attack and "a Transition Without a Transition" in Venezuela
Latin America Today
After midnight on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration bombed Venezuelan military sites and extracted the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump declared that the United States is now “running” Venezuela and emphasized access to its oil reserves. The rest of Maduro’s government—the key political figures, the generals, the intelligence chiefs, the colectivos—remains in place. In this episode recorded January 6, as shockwaves from this historic intervention spread across the hemisphere, host Adam Isacson speaks with WOLA President Carolina Jiménez...
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Announcing Democracy&: A New Podcast From The Washington Office on Latin America
Latin America Today
In this series from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), prominent decision-makers from across the Americas—those who have been at the heart of democratic governance—share personal reflections and insights on the meaning, challenges, and future of democracy in the region. In each episode, members of the WOLA team sit down with a current or former political figure from the Americas to explore democracy through different lenses: what it means to them, the challenges it faces, and why it remains essential today. Each conversation pairs democracy with a new dimension—transition,...
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Piercing the Propaganda Bubble in El Salvador
Latin America Today
WOLA presents a new episode about El Salvador, coinciding with our awarding of our 2025 Human Rights Award to MOVIR, El Salvador’s Movement of Victims of the Regime, which supports victims and families of arbitrary detentions carried out by President Nayib Bukele’s government. In this conversation, , assistant professor of public relations in the Department of Communications at California State University, Fullerton, explains why the current popularity of El Salvador’s authoritarian president rests on a surprisingly fragile foundation. Dr. Valencia, a former journalist in El...
info_outlineOn November 25, President-Elect Donald Trump announced via social media that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada unless migration and fentanyl trafficking ceased entirely. The announcement caused widespread alarm, spurring a flurry of responses and an unclear conversation between Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The event was instructive about what we might expect after Trump assumes the presidency in January, observe WOLA Director for Mexico Stephanie Brewer and Director for Drug Policy John Walsh.
Brewer explained the "tariff threat" incident, how it plays into the political agendas of both Trump and Sheinbaum, and the danger of doing serious damage to a multifaceted, interdependent bilateral relationship.
Host Adam Isacson, who covers border and migration policy at WOLA, joined the discussion to point out that Trump seeks to bully Mexico into carrying out a crackdown on migration that has, in fact, already been underway for some time with serious human rights implications.
Walsh observed that demands on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl threaten a reversion to supply-side, prohibitionist approaches to a complex drug problem that not only haven't worked over the past 50 years, but may in fact have ceded much control to armed and criminal groups.
The U.S.-Mexico border, and the bilateral relationship, may be marked by these episodes of threat and bluster for much of the next few years. Weathering this period will require civil society in both the United States and Mexico to play an aggressive role, demanding "steadiness, focus on facts, keeping things grounded in reality," and never losing sight of what better migration and drug policies would look like.