The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Howard Zinn:

Protest will always be useful. Protest will always be important. Protest always looks futile at the time that it takes place, but protest mounts up. If they though protest was futile, they wouldn’t send the police out every time. There’s a demonstration. Have you noticed that you set up a picket line of somewhere of seven people and 12 policemen show up? They must worry about protest because they know that small protests lead to large ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Well, thank you all. It is such an honor to be here with y’all tonight in Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and coffee house in our great city of Baltimore. Give it up. And I am really, really honored and excited that we get to chat to the man, the myth, legendary sports writer, book author, documentary maker, political thinker, a true love warrior and a true role model for so many of us of what it means to just be a good-hearted person and to fight for good. Dave Zirin, give it up for Dave, everybody. Now, brother Dave.

Dave Zirin:

Yes. Yes, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’ve gotten to work together over at The Real News on your kick ass show, Edge of Sports TV, right?

Dave Zirin:

Yes, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so many of us know you through your sports writing and your analysis and commentary on sports, but we’re here tonight to talk about your new book, which is decidedly not about sports. And it is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. So Dave, I want to start off this way. Who was Howard Zinn? Who is he to you? Why did you write a whole book about him and why was now the time to write that book?

Dave Zirin:

Wow. So great to be here. Such a terrific question. Just the quickest of side notes, that last clip of Howard that you saw, that was his last mass meeting that he ever did before he passed away in January 2010. And it was at the convention of the campaign to end the death penalty. And I just wanted to say we have someone here tonight who is as responsible as anybody for the fact that we don’t have the death penalty in Maryland right now. And that’s Kenny Collins. And I just want to – Yes.

A hard big enough to crush injustice sitting right over there. So for me, I got to know Howard at the end of his life. I got to travel with him to different places and interview him on stage because he was sharp as a tack at age like 86, 87 years old, but standing and doing a 45 minute lecture was just something he couldn’t do any longer. I’d gotten to know him by writing a book in the People’s History series called The People’s History of Sports in the United States. And so I would sit with Howard on stage in 2008, 2009, and he was just the easiest interview in the history of the world. You would just say, “Civil rights, your thoughts.” And then 30 minutes later, he’s interrupted five times by applause. And everybody’s standing up at the end cheering for him. And afterwards, people would come up to me and say, “Yo, you did a great interview.” And I’d be like, “I said 12 words.

It was awesome.” And I got to sort of bask in the refracted glow. And the thing about Howard is that when he would speak about himself, it’s so interesting thinking back to the pronouns he would use. It was always we, it was always us, it was always they. And sometimes he would say you, but it was always, “What do you think? What are you doing?” It was never about I or me. But backstage, of course, he would tell these incredible stories and it’s like out of nowhere. Oh, that time I marched with James Baldwin in Selma. And it’s like, oh sure, as one does. And so I said to him once, “What we need is a people’s history of Howard Zinn.”

And he laughed at that. And that was actually my first proposal for the title of the book. And my publisher said, “Well, that’s too inside baseball.” Which kind of insulted me because I’m a sports writer, so they thought the only way I’d understand it is if they said it was too inside baseball. I was like, “Oh, I get it. Okay, now I understand.” And then the second title I wanted was when I was going through Howard Zinn’s FBI files and they had this sheet that was sent to J. Edgar Hoover in 1950 about Howard Zinn, where they said he was 28 years old and they said, “We are convinced he is a subversive who wants to overthrow the United States. He is a spy maybe for the Soviets. And the proof of this is that he has an alias.” And so you look closely and you’re like, “What’s the alias?” And it’s listed right there and it’s Howie.

So I wanted to call the book Codename Howie: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. And I never thought I would write a book about Howard Zinn when he passed away in 2010. I never thought I would in a million years, but something interesting started to happen during the late 2000 teens and into 2020, which is a lot of people started to get in touch with me and say, “What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the Black Lives Matter movement? What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the rise of Trumpism? What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the growth of right-wing fascist authoritarianism?” And they would ask this question kind of gingerly and even a little bit scared. Was Howard Zinn wrong that struggle is how the world changes? Because we’ve struggled and look where we are. Donald Trump is in charge.

So what if struggle just doesn’t work? And they asked this with fear as if somebody has the God failed was almost with the question, that kind of sadness. And I was thinking about some of the stories that Howard told me who threw his life and thought to myself, you know what? I’m not going to try to write anything or even say something that tries to answer that question for somebody who’s no longer with us. That’s not a job of any journalist or author to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. But he left behind so many breadcrumbs from his life about how to fight right wing tyranny, about how to maintain in difficult times, about how to ride through movements when they’re at their most perilous, that it’s just like his life is an example for us about how to survive the 2020s. And the fact that somebody born in 1922 who died 16 years ago could generate a crowd like this in Baltimore and generate crowds like this or bigger in cities that I’ve been to, it just speaks to the fact not only of his influence, but the fact that we’re all trying to wrestle with these questions right now of hope, optimism, and how change can happen in very difficult times.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, beautifully and powerfully put as always, brother. And I think one of the many things I love about this book is not just that I get to enjoy more of your writing, which is really chicken soup for my weary radical soul these days. And I know I speak for a lot of us when I say that, but there’s so much of Howie in this book. You did find so many quotes that feel so perfectly and gently and gingerly and rightly placed in the book. And I wanted to actually have you read one without giving us context up front, but the one there on page 21, read that passage from Howard Zinn and then I’ll throw a question at you about it.

Dave Zirin:

Absolutely. You want just the red part, right, that he read? Okay. This is from when Howard was – No context. No context. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Exactly at 10, banners unfurled. People started chanting. It was fantastic. So my friend and I relieved two women holding a banner and then we heard sirens. And before I knew it, cops with clubs began beating the demonstrators. I was spun around and got hit on the side of my head. I was out. I woke up in a doorway. The demonstration was being scattered and it was an absolute shocking experience because I had no idea the police would react like this to an innocent demonstration, that an innocent group of people could be perceived as that menacing. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people, but something rotten at the root.

Since then, I’ve come to understand we need not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society, cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. So first give it up for Howie on that one. Okay. Now, if you please give us the context of that story that Zinn is telling us and what it means for him to make that journey from being what he calls a liberal to being a radical.

Dave Zirin:

Absolutely. So Howard Zinn is born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, a very different Brooklyn than the Brooklyn of 2026, to put it mildly. And his childhood was a childhood of poverty, of going from tenement to tenement of outrunning landlords as a young child with his immigrant parents and his three brothers just going from apartment to apartment. And he’d written, and I spoke to him about how he still had this fear of rats to this day because of how they would appear in the apartment and how they would cuddle up in their blankets because they were so scared of getting rat bites. And it’s one of the things about Howard Zinn that I always so respected is that he would thunder and he would rarely get mad, but he would thunder angrily about people who were poor, who became wealthier, who would romanticize their poverty.

And he would say, “We must never romanticize poverty. Poverty is violence and I will never romanticize my own upbringing.” And he became this incredible reader growing up and finding books on the street and reading them, things like Charles Dickens was his first love. And then his parents, they had very little money, but they signed him up for an encyclopedia chapter of the month club through the newspaper. So he’s just reading encyclopedias and whatever he could get his hands on. And the Brooklyn of, now we’re into the 1930s, was also just this absolute hotbed of political activism. I mean, as one person said, who I interviewed, if you weren’t some kind of communist, anarchist or socialist, we really thought you were just dead from the neck up in the 1930s of Brooklyn. And Howard Zinn was somebody who just loved arguing with people on street corners, loved talking politics.

He was very radicalized, not just by the poverty and the racism and the segregation of Brooklyn of the 1930s, but also radicalized by the anti-fascist movement in Europe at that time. I mean, imagine being a working class kid in Brooklyn in the 30s and you see a poster of somebody from your neighborhood who you knew who’s returning from Spain because they were over there with what were called the Abraham Lincoln Brigades fighting Franco’s fascism. So you’re a working class kid in Brooklyn and you’re seeing a kid just like you who’s back from Spain where he was on the anti-fascist front lines. So an incredibly sort of radicalizing experience for him, but he still wasn’t somebody with a clear kind of set of politics in terms of this system actually needs to be uprooted and changed. And that changed for him dramatically as a teenager when one of the street corner radicals invited him to that demonstration that you talked about.

And that was in Union Square, New York over on 14th Street. Again, Union Square, very different today than it was in the late 1930s. And it was there where he got knocked upside the head by the police and actually generations of radicals certainly I think share this experience is that when you come into direct contact with the state,

It changes you forever and very fundamentally.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and say a little more about what would continue to change Howard Zinn fundamentally when he entered military service during a World War.

Dave Zirin:

Well, first I got to say, how many people have seen the movie Forrest Gump, out of curiosity? Imagine if Forrest Gump was directed by John Sayles,

Like radical working class filmmaker. That’s like Howard Zinn’s life. And imagine if instead of Forrest Gump, you have this learned historian and he’s just at these incredible junctures of US history bearing witness. That’s why the subheading of the book is The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, because he wasn’t just this historian who was trying to make history. He wasn’t just somebody going to demonstrations. He’s in these cinematic landscapes. We just talked about Brooklyn, the Depression, the 1930s. Then he becomes a bombardier during World War II because he wants to fight fascism. He becomes a bombardier even though he’d never been on a plane. That’s how much he hated fascism. He’s like, “I’m going to get on a plane and fight fascism.” But he leaves World War II, committed at this time, he called himself a pacifist and somebody who was anti-war for the rest of his life.

That was one of the results of his experience after being asked and told and ordered to bomb civilians in a French resort town called Royan, a place he later visited in 1966. But then early years of the civil rights movement, he’s at Spelman College, a woman’s HBCU, teaching this incredible generation of students like Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman and many more, Bernice Johnson Regan, who was part of the SNCC Freedom Singers. And so he’s there at ground zero of the start of the civil rights movement. And then he becomes the adult advisor along with someone you might have heard of named Ella Baker of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. And then he’s at the center of the anti-war movement against the war on the people of Vietnam in the ’60s. And so he’s just at these moments where he’s able to play this role in helping make history, but also playing a role that I think we have a lot to learn from, particularly as I say in one chapter, as a white guy in the Black freedom struggle, his behaviors as a white person I think are actually a model for how white people need to approach anti-racist struggle.

And the fact that he was doing that decades before we started even having those conversations seriously is really interesting to me. Other issues as well, like he and his partner Roz, when they went up to Boston, one of the first things they did was set up mental health clinics for people who were part of the movement against Jim Crow who were coming back to North with PTSD from what they experienced. And so this idea of something we talk a lot about now, like self-care, they were trying to practice that even though it had yet to be articulated. And that’s why I think he has so much to say to 2026 because he was living that life of struggle for over 70 years. So so much to learn from that when somebody is an activist in these incredibly huge junctures of history for over 70 years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and you and I have joked about this at The Real News that I feel the same way about Mark Steiner, right? Baltimoreans will know Brother Mark Steiner, but that guy is very much cut from that same cloth and that same great Jewish radical tradition as well. But speaking of which, I wanted – The Jewish

Dave Zirin:

Part’s important, but we can talk about that later. Well,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And maybe we can weave it into this question because I wanted to circle back to that passage that I had you read, where Howie is talking about that moment when he no longer identified as a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people, but something rotten at the root. I wanted to ask you, Dave Zyran, if you had a moment like that in your life.

Dave Zirin:

Lord, first of all, I’ll answer that Max, but only if you answer it too, because you are a radical the first order. So your story demands to be heard. Is that a deal?

Howard Zinn:

Deal. All

Dave Zirin:

Right. The easy answer is I started to believe that this country needed to be fundamentally overturned when my sister gave me a book called The People’s History of the United States, and that’s God’s truth that changed me. To the letter truth is that she bought me a people’s history of the 20th century, an abridged version of a people’s history of the United States because she knew her little brother and knew I would never read a book that was this thick. It would’ve ended up a doorstop in my house or my dorm. And instead though she gave me something she knew I would read and it fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world. It changed the way I looked at sports, which was my obsession. So that’s the easy answer to say I read this book and it changed me. But books I think are never really enough to turn you into somebody who just wants to turn the system upside down.

And my answer to that where I was just like,

Bleep this system to its core happened at not necessarily something that was ostensibly political, but I used to do graffiti piecing and I was working with red paint and it was getting on my hands a little bit and someone called the police and I was arrested with a friend and ended up spending a couple of days in prison and had to deal with the police officer laughing that they caught me red-handed because I had red paint all over my hands. I had to hear that joke about 50 times and they kept telling each other it like it was the funniest thing in the world. And the way me as a white kid, a college student still was treated while in prison and speaking in jail, I should say, I shouldn’t call it prison, but in jail and how long those days felt was something that by the time I was out of there, I wanted to set.

I don’t know if I should say this too. I was really angry at just everything, just talking to people, being around that for a couple of days. It reminded me, there’s this quote by Oscar Wilde when he was talking about being in jail where he said, “Every day feels like a year, but it’s a year where the days are really long.”

And it’s just that idea. And I don’t for one second want to make it in any way sound. I mean, it was two days for goodness sakes, but you’re asking me what was a pivot moment where you just start thinking this system is just beyond wrong and that really was it for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s an experience that so many people don’t have but have such strong opinions about. And it’s the kind of thing where if you have experienced it or someone in your family has, you don’t go around talking about the criminal justice system the way our culture loves to talk about it. I mean, I work with Mansamusa who was locked up for 48 years, you know him

Howard Zinn:

Well,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Brother Eddie Conway, a legend in our history and at the Real News in Baltimore. He was in there for 44 years. The things they’ve told us are horrific, but even just getting a taste of that, even just recognizing that the system is not just made for the bad people, the worst of the worst when it comes for you or people you know who don’t fit that description, the country is getting a crash course in what that looks like right now, but that is the violence coming uphill. It has been there in places like jails and prisons, in sacrifice zones, in the poor and abandoned parts of this country that sucks up the resources and life from places and abandons them since the beginning.

So I had a similar experience when it came to my place in America, my belief in the country I lived in and the kind of future I was going to have, the life I was going to be able to make for myself, the things that I and many in my generation who at least had some sense of class mobility in the ’90s and in the post Cold War moments, the dot-com boom, in retrospect, feels like the kind of heyday of what I’ll experience this country has. But so many things that felt possible then don’t anymore. And what really made me and my family learn that was the crash

Howard Zinn:

In

Maximillian Alvarez:

2008 and the recession and that whole awful heavy period where over the course of years we lost everything that my parents had worked for. We were the American dream. We were a mixed immigrant family, middle class, Orange County. It was great. And then it all went away. We lost the house I grew up in. We lost so much of ourselves and the family we were before that. I graduated from college with a degree in Russian literature thinking that we were like, “Oh yeah, he can go be a professor. They make good money, they’re respected.” We actually knew one who lived on our block, so we thought he could be like that. We had no idea how screwed higher ed was or how dumb of a decision that was, but I sure learned when I was holding that degree and all the debt it took to get it and working 14 hour days at a body crushing mind numbing soul killing warehouse or factory in Southern California while my dad drove Uber and my mom handed out samples at Sam’s Club and everything was going down the drain.

I’m watching the damn TV tell me that the country’s back, the economy’s back, the banks got bailed out, these guys got bailed out, everything’s great and we’re sinking further into the couch and into the abyss the whole time. And that period taught me a lot. I wasn’t radical by any means. I was conservative. I grew up very conservative. I had shirts that have me with Ronald Reagan’s face on it and stuff like that, if anyone ever wants to blackmail me. I guess I’ll tie this up, but the point being is that we had a lot of right reasons for believing what were ultimately the wrong things back then in the ’90s and ’80s and early aughts. We believed in meritocracy, not knowing how untrue it was, but we thought the argument was sound and we wanted to believe that we could make a life for ourselves based on our merit, not the color of our skin.

That’s why that spoke to us. It wasn’t a bad reason to believe that, but whether it was that or whether it was the sort of classist belief that the people who were working in these big beige warehouses that we drive past on the freeway every day probably deserve to be there or the people locked up in those big awful prisons in the middle of nowhere, they deserve to be there and treated horribly. When you get a taste of what it’s like to be in there and when life pushes you in there and when you start getting beaten by the system and seeing how rotten it is and who it serves and who it doesn’t serve and how little you mean to it, no matter how much you defended it before, you learn some shit.

Dave Zirin:

Changes you. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Now I want to shut up and go back to you because this is your book top.

Dave Zirin:

So true though. No, well said, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, so I want to talk about the radical Zinn and how he was treated in his day. I mean, you write about in the book that this guy was a public enemy during the Red Scare, the J. Edgar Hoover hated him. And to this day, postmortem, he is in the hall of fame of books that piss off the MAGA right and that get targeted for book bans. So I wanted to ask if you could sort of talk to us about the parallels between the kind of persecution of Zinn and what he stood for then and the continuing need of our oppressors and the people who stand for the opposite of what he stood for, continue to try to silence and bury him today.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. Howard Zinn wrote a play called Marx in Soho, which is an amazing one person play. And a lot of people joke that it’s basically Karl Marx speaking, but he somehow found a time machine and traveled ahead a hundred years and then is commenting on the previous hundred years and what capitalism has done to the world. And it’s very funny, much funnier than I think Karl Marx ever was. So a lot of people joke that it’s more like Zinn in SoHo, like it’s his voice because it really sounds like Howard. And there’s this line in it where Howard as Marx, if you want to put it that way, says, “Why do they feel the need to bury me again and again and again?” And that speaks to why Howard Zinn matters so much to 2026 because they haven’t stopped trying to bury him and he hasn’t stopped rising up to be able to teach a new generation of kids.

I mean, Donald Trump, who by the way is the Picasso of bullshit artists and has no. I guarantee you, he has no idea who Howard Zinn is. Remember, this was the person who said Frederick Douglas is doing great work.

And he talks about Zinn in speeches and he blames Zinn for “the left wing mayhem” in this country and uses it to justify book bannings, school boards that prevent not just Howard Zinn, but all radical. He becomes the stand-in for all radical histories and keeping them smuggled, keeping them out of the classroom to the point of which teachers have to smuggle them in to be able to teach their students. One teacher said to me, “I’m no radical, but Howard Zinn is the only thing that keeps my students off their phones.” There’s an importance to his work in terms of how it makes the student feel alive, how it makes them feel like they’re a part of making history and not just somebody who’s an object of history or a victim of history. I can be somebody who fights back. I can be someone who makes history.

Obviously, the reason why the right wing, fascism, fascists, they want to keep those ideas out of our heads because what could be more dangerous for them than ordinary people thinking, “If I want to, I can depose you and create the kind of society that I want to create.” They want to erase that idea from people’s heads, an idea rooted in history. I had the utter privilege recently of being able to sit with Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner in Pennsylvania for several hours. We’re talking about Zinn, who by the way, would visit Mumia on death row and they would speak to each other. He said, “The reason why they are waging a war against history is because their agenda demands ignorance.” Now, that’s a beautiful way to say what Donald Trump said much less poetically where he said, “I love the uneducated. They’re my favorite people.” I mean, they want us to not know our history because first of all, they know we’re going to fight back.

They wouldn’t have the National Guard piled into DC picking up trash off the ground if they didn’t know that they are creating conditions for people being furious and fighting back. What they also want us to do though is to have us have to relearn all the lessons from history, which will slow down our side from victory. They don’t want us to know our history. They don’t want us to know something that Howard Zinn said once very beautifully, which is he said, “The way things are, are not necessarily the way things will be or could be.” And that’s really important too, because far too often I think we as radicals live too much in the present tense and are just like, “What is life five feet in front of my face?” And that’s what politics are. When politics are the past, which informs the possibility for a better future.

That’s the first thing about why Zinn matters today and why this war that they’re waging on him, it has real life repercussions on policy and on government.

I’m dealing with this right now with the 10 year anniversary of Colin Kaepernick first taking a knee and how incredibly Colin Kaepernick coming to Coppin State September 25th to speak and the degree to which there’s been this utter distortion and rewriting of what that was all about. And frankly, what that whole period was about of the Black Lives Matter movement and not only the right wing, obviously, who have not waged such a backlash against that period that they’ve created entire police forces now rooted in counterinsurgency and they’ve made ICE a higher budget than the US Marine Corps. It’s all about domestic “pacification” that police chiefs in the United States have learned in part by going to Israel to learn from police chiefs over there. People can Google real programs to teach police in this country from the Israelis about how to do pacification in this country, in our cities.

So that phrase, we are all Palestinian is not just this abstract call for solidarity, but it’s how we are being treated in our own cities. And so that’s very real. I’m sorry to go off on that tangent, but it’s just – Brother,

Maximillian Alvarez:

It ain’t no tangent. We all came out to hear you

Dave Zirin:

Talk about this.

So you’ve got the backlash on the right. The Black Lives Matter movement scared the holy shit out of them. And their response to that has been to create a police state of counterinsurgency. When ICE gets these electro shock gloves, that’s because of how much the Black Lives Matter movement scared them. That’s why they take the drills and put them on the ground where it’s written Black Lives Matter because they want to uproot the memory of what that was. But now we’re also seeing people on the liberal left say, oh, that period in the 20 teens, that was just woke 1.0 as AOC put it and says we were just demanding too much when the reality is maybe we didn’t demand enough. And when they try to characterize that period in the 20 teens as somehow silly or immature when they caricature it as, oh, look at those crazy demands, defund the police.

All they’re doing is helping the right enact a further backlash on our side when we should be celebrating what people fought for in the 20 teens. So what’s been so bothering me as a sports writer is all these people have been. There’s several writers have been like Colin Kaepernick. It was quite a moment, but I guess it wasn’t a movement. And it wasn’t a movement. It was a movement that in the modern sense, first of all, it goes back hundreds of years if we’re talking about the struggle for black liberation, but in the more recent sense, it started the day George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in 2012. It extended through Ferguson, Missouri. Colin Kaepernick became a sports amplifier of that movement because of the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And then that grew out into hundreds of high school athletes around the country taking a knee when that anthem would play.

That is a movement. Then of course it culminates in 2020 with the largest protests after the police murder of George Floyd that this country had ever seen. So for them to take Colin Kaepernick and decontextualize him and say, oh, he was just some wacky guy taking a knee during football games and he lost his career because of it. By the way, probably the only actual victim of cancel culture is Colin Kaepernick, the way they took his job. But it’s just to say that our side needs to understand that that history of the 20 teens, we can’t surrender control of the memory

Of that decade because in a bipartisan sense, they are trying to rewrite. Oh my God, saying this in Baltimore is so poignant because it was in Baltimore after the police murder of Freddie Gray, that the bravery of people on the ground in this city, in the face of so much state oppression as the Real News Network documented assiduously is one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever borne witness to, for goodness sakes. But we live in a country rooted in white supremacy where they care more about a CVS getting broken into in Baltimore than they cared about the Capitol Building getting ransacked on January 6th because it was white people doing it on January 6th and it was a different situation in Baltimore. So it says something about they cared more. They were outraged more about the CBS than they were about their own capital.

But it’s just to say, if I could, I’m sorry to go on. No, go on. So long with this stuff. I’m sorry. Go on

Maximillian Alvarez:

Baby.

Dave Zirin:

But it’s just to say that we cannot surrender the memory of the bravery that people showed in this city in particular, and that’s what they want us to forget. And that’s evil because what it does then is the next time there’s struggle, once again, we’re trying to figure it out again. We’re not carrying the lessons forward. I think people ask me a lot of the times about, well, what does Howard Zinn offer us in 2026? Because optimism, whatever, pie in the sky is fine. He was an optimist, but he wasn’t just an optimist. He was somebody who dealt with facts and dealt with history. I think history is what our movements so desperately need, like a conversant knowledge in history. When I was coming up as an activist, it seemed like everybody had read People’s History of the United States and the autobiography of Malcolm X as a baseline.

There was this lexicon or vocabulary that we shared talking about that history. I think we need to reimplant that right now, right in the middle of our struggles to know that history. That what Howard Zinn brings to the table today in 2026.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know we got to bring this around the final turn here, but I wanted to just push you to keep going a little more because those who want to silence in and erase this history, what version of history do they want us and future generations to believe?

Dave Zirin:

They want us to believe one of two things. You’ve got the right wing and the liberal left version of history, neither of which I would argue help us at all going forward. The right wing version is of course that history is the creation of really, really wise, powerful white men.

Through their brilliance, reaching down from the shining city on a hill, they have brought us to this remarkable place of progress, delivered us from savagery and brought us to this profoundly wonderful civilization where AI wants to eat our children, the best of all possible worlds that we’re living in right now. That is obviously very easy to debunk, but it’s what Trump, that’s why he’s putting warning signs in front of the Smithsonian, like warning history herein, and why they forced out Lonnie Bunch as the head of the Smithsonian, because it’s for putting forth a version of history that goes against the great white man theory of that this is how the world spins. The liberal left have their own version of this though, where their argument is that with every generation, we are building a more perfect union. Barack Obama has only given about a hundred speeches with this theme where it’s just like President Obama.

He gives speeches about how every generation takes the baton from the last to build a more perfect union. We keep improving. Yeah, the country is flawed and yes, the constitution, it’s a document in progress that we keep making better and more inclusive. I mean, I don’t see how you can live through the past 10 years and think that at this point. They call Howard Zinn’s politics, this is the big liberal left critique of Zinn, is that he looks at things too simplistically. What could be more simplistic than saying this country keeps getting better by the generation? That’s an absurdity on the face of it, but especially over the last 10 years and Howard Zinn’s version of history that oppression is actually baked into the cake of this system and there’s a reason why the book is not just called a People’s History of the United States, but aPeople’s History of the United States 1492 to the present.

So he roots the United States founding with the expropriation and genocide of indigenous peoples and their land and then of course the transatlantic slave trade and then the entire history of the United States is then that battle of oppressor versus oppressed. It’s also a battle of forward progress, but then also vicious backlashes, but then how we beat back the backlash. And that’s really what Howard Zinn lived for as an activist, much more than as a historian, was beating back the backlash. I love that that sort of ferocious approach to the world is something we really need right now because I believe that right now we are in the first stages of beating back the backlash. When apolitical members of my family are getting in touch with me and asking about how we can shut down a data center, it really just starts to make me think like, okay, maybe something actually is brewing during a period that can feel so incredibly gray.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and to really kind of end on that note of family, I love this book and all the ways you’ve helped me and us understand the many people and things and experiences that made Howard Zinn who he was. I wanted to sort of ask you in that vein, if you could tell us about how Howie Zinn has made you who you are and the person the book is dedicated to made you who you are.

Dave Zirin:

Oh Lord. Let’s just keep the. All right. My mom passed away during the writing of the book. It took six years to write and about year three she passed. I wrote in the introduction that what my mom taught me was that if you ever really want to think of yourself as somebody who understands a people’s history, you first have to learn how to love people.

I’ve met a lot of folks in my time who love the people but aren’t so great with people. It was what my mom taught me to the core of my being. Just to say that in the last months of her life when she’d be up here, we’d always drive to the Real News Network for my show and she was sick and y’all were just so beautiful to her and it meant so much to me. I really want to thank you for that, Max, so much. Kayla, who’s here as well and Dave Hebden and everybody who made, and Cameron if he’s here and everybody who made my mom feel so welcome. She just loved y’all.

If Howard Zinn also like what he taught me when he passed away is it was this thing that always changed me because I couldn’t believe that he had died, which you don’t normally think you would say about somebody who’s 87, but I learned that it really doesn’t. We really need to treasure our elders to such a degree because they really can be here today and gone tomorrow. I also interviewed several. The other people I dedicated the book to were half a dozen people who I interviewed who’ve since passed away before the book came out. I don’t want to sound cheesy or anything, but our elders are precious, are so precious and it’s impossible to sit up here and talk about the importance of history and not also say that one of the ways that we’ve always gotten our history as a human society is not just by reading, not just by study, but actually speaking and taking the time to listen to people who’ve been through the struggle.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Dave’s Zirin, everybody.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Fernando Cerimedo, a name that unless you follow Latin America closely, you likely have never heard. He’s been called MAGA’s man in Latin America, and he’s at the heart of a shocking scandal that includes election rigging, fake news, disinformation, and powerful political ties to far right presidents across Latin America, and even the White House under Donald Trump. It’s big news in Latin America, even though it’s been largely under the radar in the United States until now. The scandal has dire implications for the legitimacy of elections up and down the Americas, including elections where US President Donald Trump has been throwing his weight around over the last year. Elections where right-wingers have won close but shocking victories. Like Lawyer Abelardo de la Estrella’s right-wing defeat of the leftist candidate Ivan Cepeda in Columbia in June, he won by less than 1% of the vote.

Donald Trump:

He called me at 8:30 in the evening just to thank me very much. And I said, “You ran a great campaign?” He’s LT Gray, right?

Journalist:

And what do you anticipate for the relation with Colombia? Good,

Donald Trump:

Much better. It’ll be better. He’s going to be a great president.

Michael Fox:

And big elections are coming up in Brazil and elsewhere. We begin here. That’s him, Fernando Cerimedo, walking down a hallway lined with people ahead of Chile’s new far right president, Antonio Cast. Cerimedo puts a hand on his back and ushers him into a side room to meet with a group of men in suits. Cerimedo is a 45-year-old strategist and publicist from Argentina. He’s a co-founder of the right-wing Argentine outlet, La Dereche Diario. And in recent years, he’s become perhaps the most prominent political consultant for the far right in Latin America. But as we will see in this episode, he’s much more than a consultant. I think you could call him an election fixer and not in a democratic way.

Jake Johnston:

So you’ve had this sort of network of far right leaders who’ve shown a lot of affinity for one another, traveling to each other’s countries, supporting each other, this sort of broad network. And behind that, there’s been this sort of digital infrastructure that is built out to support this sort of new wave of far right leaders in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

I asked Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research to set the scene here.

Jake Johnston:

I mean, if you’ve spent any time on social media, you have seen the bots, you’ve potentially been attacked by the bots. You see this happening every day and you’ve seen it in all of these elections, many of which it should be noted were extraordinarily close elections. I mean, less than one percentage point separating the winner from the loser. And throughout this last year, year and a half, there has been one very prominent person sort of parading around the hemisphere and claiming credit for a lot of these electoral wins. And it’s just this guy, an Argentine political consultant that apparently used to drive a taxi in Argentina and has sort of risen to the top of the food chain in Latin American politics is Fernando Serimedo.

Michael Fox:

Here is the reason why we’re all talking about him right now.

Last month on August 18th, 2026, Cerimedo was arrested at Bolivia’s Viru Vero Airport after attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was accused of ordering a hit on his pregnant girlfriend. Her name is Nadia Bayer. She’s a Bolivian lawyer and a political analyst. She’s a former supporter of leftist president Eva Morales, turned staunch critic. She was shot three times by two armed gunmen the day before outside of a hotel in the Bolivian lowland capital city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. That’s the heart of Bolivia’s agricultural heartland and one of the most conservative regions in the country. She survived. From her hospital room, she asked to speak to press.

This is the video. You can find it online. She’s laying in a hospital bed, the back slightly raised, so she’s kind of sitting up. She wears a white and gray striped hospital gown. She has several bandages and she’s attached to some machines. She sounds exhausted. “I’ve requested the presence of DTV to make a live statement because they tried to silence me,” she says. “And I’m absolutely sure that if I don’t speak out to the Bolivian people, they’re going to finish what they tried to do today. They’re going to end my life.” She speaks for 15 minutes about her relationship with Fernando Cerimedo, about his physical abuse, his cheating on her and others, and then she reveals dirt on Cerimedo and his underhanded political dealings across the region, including in high, high places.

She discusses Cerimedo’s ties to Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascali, referring to Parscale as a member of the CIA. She describes her personal knowledge of corruption committed by Cerimedo and Bolivia’s new right-wing president, Rodrigo Pas and his family. Pas is the eldest son of the former Bolivian president, Jaime Pasamora. He was born in Spain, went to college in the United States, and Fernando Cerimedo helped to lift him into the presidency last year. “The government is the main one interested in silencing me,” she says. Rodrigo Pas, his wife, his family, they make the biggest deals with the brokers, with all of the insurance companies of all the state companies. They are the ones who negotiate the broker’s commission. “Do you have proof of all that?” Asked the man interviewing her behind the camera. “I have proof of many extremes,” she says. She also details Cerimedo’s power in Bolivia and abroad.

“Rodrigo Pas does not govern here,” she says. Fernando Cerimedo governs and they will absolutely cover it. He manages a group of the police that supposedly operates around the hotel where he made me go. That was the hotel where she was shot. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg about Cerimedo, the disinformation campaign he concocted, and the right-wing election wins he had a large hand in securing across the region.

Jake Johnston:

This is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. I think that’s the interesting part about this. It’s what does this tell us about the broader infrastructure that exists in the region and likely elsewhere across the globe that is using digital sort of shock troops, bots, disinformation, media polarization to try and skew electoral outcomes, even at the margins where it might have a tremendously large impact, even if the operation itself seems sort of small.

Michael Fox:

All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very 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: Stories of Resistance, and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 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. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 14, Fernando Cerimedo.

It’s February 10th this year. A passionate man is speaking in Spanish on a stage in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This is Trump’s Hispanic prosperity gala. The back wall of the stage is plastered with a logo of a bull’s head and the words Latino Wall Street, Spanish language financial website. The name of the man on stage is Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, and brother of the current far right presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro. Eduardo resigned as a member of Congress in 2025 and moved to the United States after he came under investigation for trying to pressure the Supreme Court in defense of his father, who is now on house arrest for couplotting. The Bolsonaro family are close allies of President Trump, and Eduardo Bolsonaro has close ties with Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon. On stage, Eduardo Bolsonaro is praising Fernando Cerimedo. They’ve reportedly known each other for years, since 2010 when they met in the United States.

Eduardo invites Cerimedo to the podium. So I have the great pleasure, a great honor, he says, to call here on the stage Fernando Cerimedo, a brave Argentine who had the courage to denounce the bad things that happen in the world.

Eduardo Bolsonaro presents Fernando Cerimedo with the award for Best Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year. Cerimedo is wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He has a bald head. Fernando and Eduardo embrace, and then they pose for the cameras with a tiny statue. Then Cerimedo walks to the podium. 2025 was a very good year for us. Together with our team, we won two elections, he says, Bolivia and Honduras. Serimedo also gives a shout out to the Bolivian First Lady and her daughter who he says are in the audience. Serimedo then turns and thanks his connection with the Trump administration.

Fernando Cerimedo:

I want to say something in English. Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing me all the time and give me your technology and Tim Dunn for do the fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.

Michael Fox:

Tim Dunn is a Trump allied businessman from Texas. He’s in oil and gas, and he’s a big financial supporter of conservative causes. As for Brad Parscale, if you remember, Serimedo’s girlfriend mentioned him in her hospital interview. She said he was tied to US intelligence. He is a digital consultant with deep ties to the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He ran digital media for both Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Since 2025, he’s been the chief strategy officer at the right-wing Christian Conservative Media Corporation, Salem Media Group. In May, The Intercept reported that he had been hired by the Israeli government to push pro-Israeli views over conservative media. Serimedo closes his acceptance speech.

“The message I want to give you is that it’s not about winning elections,” he told the audience. “That can even seem easy. If we don’t help our candidates govern so that the left never returns to those governments, our work will never be finished. So let’s keep fighting the cultural battle. That’s not just winning elections and taking positions. It’s battling every day to be able to regain freedom in Latin America. Thank you all very much and goodnight, “he said. Fernando Cerimedo. This guy is no ordinary political consultant. The things he has done that helped him win that award presented by Trump allies and Mar-a-Lago have included using underhanded, dirty, and other illegal means to help his candidates win elections, candidates who are all right-wing or far-right Trump allies. And look, he allegedly even tried to kill his own girlfriend to silence her. Cerimedo is just one man, but he’s part of a much broader network.

And for them, pushing their agenda is not politics as usual within democratic systems. As Cerimedo mentioned at that award ceremony, this is a culture war and they are fighting to win by any means necessary. It all calls into question many of these victories that the right has been winning across Latin America in recent years. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

But of course he’s not operating alone and his business partner in his company, Neumann Advisors, which was actually first registered in Florida, is Brad Parscale, who is Trump’s former campaign manager. And the way that it has been described, and Saramedo has given some interviews on this in the past, is that Parscale provides a sort of digital infrastructure that was implemented in the United States during Trump’s election and is sort of exporting that to the region. And the connection to all of these far right Latin American leaders in these networks between Parscale and them is Fernando Ceramedo.

Michael Fox:

Jake says that a key mouthpiece of this right-wing network has been La Derecho Diario, a right-wing news and opinion site founded by Serimedo and two of his colleagues around the year 2020. La Derecho Diario is now partially owned by Javier Negre, a Spanish right-wing media entrepreneur and disinformation broker.

Jake Johnston:

Now, in parallel to this, you’ve had this sort of digital media outlet, Ladarecho Diario, that has sort of risen to prominence as big promoters of the new far right in Latin America, sort of classic disinformation campaigns and things like this, but always sort of in support of these candidates and have been extremely active in a number of these electoral races and have sort of begun to expand both in Mexico and certainly are looking at Brazil, and Sarameto was also a partial owner of that operation. And of course, this is nothing new, right? I mean, this network of right-wing political operatives has been extremely active in Spain and Europe, but also in Latin America for any number of years, going back decades and following a lot of these folks’ work. What’s changed is that they now have an administration in Washington that is directly supporting the same agenda.

Donald Trump:

Found out in Chile, the person I endorsed who was not leading ended up winning quite easily, so I look forward to paying my respects to him. I hear he’s a very good person.

Jake Johnston:

And so that has sort of elevated it to a different level and certainly sort of just put a lot of money in the pockets of a lot of people who have an interest in promoting this new far right in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

The other thing is that we don’t actually know the true extent of everything. We have clues. Many are really concerning, but not all the dots connect. Just remember that as we continue. It’s been reported that Serimedo has had a role in the political victories of the right and far right in at least seven countries over the last four years, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Polivia, and Peru. That is not a bad record. The first place I want to visit though, came before all of those in Brazil in late 2022. It’s election night, October 30th, 2022. Former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva wins the vote by a slim margin, defeating Trump ally and incumbent far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in a huge victory for the left. But the next morning. Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets in protest, claiming the election was stolen. A claim Bolsonaro himself had spread ahead of the vote.

They shut down highways. They set up vigils in front of military barracks demanding the country’s armed forces rise up to overturn the results.

Amid this chaos, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who we heard from earlier, is interviewed by a right-wing Argentine media outlet where he spreads lies about Brazil’s electoral system. The interview was aired just three days before the vote. According to news reports at the time, the video had a live audience of more than 400,000 viewers. I remember this. It was a big deal because what Eduardo Bolsonaro did was actually illegal in Brazil. You can’t disparage the country’s electoral system, particularly just days before the vote. That’s why Eduardo Bolsonaro did the live in Argentina. Anyway, what most of us only realized recently is that the guy who interviewed Eduardo Bolsonaro during that live was Fernando Cerimero, and that outlet was Cerimedo’s La Derechediario. You can think of it as something akin to the bright part of Argentina. That live, I’ve been looking for it to play a clip here, but it was taken down shortly afterwards in Brazil.

It still had a wide reach though. It was shared across WhatsApp groups and far right media spheres. It reportedly played a significant role in undermining the election result and intensifying the widespread protests by Bolsonaro supporters in the wake of the 2022 elections.

All of this stoking of Bolsonaro’s base would of course culminate in the January 8th, 2023 invasion of Brazil’s capital by Bolsonaro supporters. They wreaked havoc, causing millions of dollars of property damage in Congress and the Supreme Court in a copycat performance of the January 6th US Capitol invasion in 2021. There was pushback against Laderecha Diario in Brazil.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And because of that live broadcasting and because of Cerimero’s intervention after Lula has won, actually the Brazilian electoral justice decided to suspend Laderecha Diario’s account in social media because it identified that it was a source of falsehoods and rumors that had been extensively dismissed by the Brazilian authorities.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta Bruno is a journalist at Ajin Shepublica, the largest nonprofit investigative newsroom in Brazil. That outlet did an in-depth investigation in 2023 into the so-called digital militias and the use of internet, bots, disinformation, fake news, and media manipulation to sway opinions and elections across Latin America.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And the investigation is named the digital mercenaries. And Fernando Serimero is a core figure in this ecosystem because he orbited between Brazil, Argentina, and more recently we knew that he was also participating in the electoral process in Honduras in 2025.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta actually spoke with Serimero for their report.

Maria Martha Bruno:

But Fernando Serimedo, when he talked to and to our partners at the Central Latin American he actually admitted in some of the interviews that he twisted and that he put many informations out of context just to make the case that he want to make the case. He admitted that that was sort of his strategy.

Michael Fox:

It’s a strategy that has been deployed across the region. Last month, Brazil’s Folio de Sao Paulo newspaper interviewed Nalia Bayer about Fernando Serimedo’s work fixing elections around Latin America. Remember, Bayer is Serimero’s ex-girlfriend who he allegedly tried to kill. This video was published eight days after the attempt on her life. She’s laying in bed and looking up at a cell phone through which she’s doing the interview. She spoke about the cases that she remembers where Serimedo used bots to sway public opinion online ahead of the election.

“I knew that in Honduras,” she says. “I knew that in Chile, in the constitutional assembly vote. I knew that in Brazil, in Bolivia, obviously in Argentina, in Columbia, they were going to do it, but I think they didn’t get to do it. I don’t know why. I think maybe it was because of economic agreements that weren’t closed or unless they had told me later that they had done it. But there were some negotiations with Spain as well, she says. I don’t know if you caught that, but she just said that he was even supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s digital campaign in Brazil in 2022. Maria Marta Bruno.

Maria Martha Bruno:

Fernando Serimedo, it’s a very key example of a core figure that get all those notes together, all those wires together across Latin America and help to boost this very successful digital communication ecosystem that has been helping the right and the far right in the past eight or so years.

Michael Fox:

The Brazilian outlet released the Fordham has reported that during an investigation into Serimedo’s properties, investigators discovered a mini bot farm worth more than $40,000 with a digital infrastructure to coordinate campaigns over social media. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

There’ve been a lot of allegations around. I mean, he’s even bragged around his control of hundreds of thousands of bots and things like this. And I think we do have to take a second to think like, okay, putting aside any legality or anything like this, or whether this is electoral interference or electoral fraud or anything, just put it aside. I mean, could this have had an effect on these elections? And I think you start to look at that, you say, “Well, these elections where there’s less than 1% difference between a winner and a loser, yeah, these sorts of interventions may have had a really profound effect in shaping this narrative that we have today of this rightward shift in Latin America, and how much of that narrative is really the product of a sort of digital army of folks all associated in one way or another with Serameto and with connections right back to the Trump.

Donald Trump:

When people like me, I like them. It’s very simple. It’s a very simple formula, and I like him. He said really nice things about me and the job we’ve done in the United States, and very, very powerful.

Michael Fox:

Here’s the thing, and Jake mentioned this earlier, this Cerimeto scandal has opened a window into the underhanded or dirty maneuvers one man has taken, in part on behalf of the Trump administration, to win elections for the far right in Brazil, but we don’t really know the full extent of what was done behind the scenes to sway the vote.

Jake Johnston:

It is important to note, we really don’t know much of what these people were doing, right? I mean, that is, I think, hopefully what we can learn through these investigations that are happening in Bolivia, through what I think should be far greater attention from the US media about the role of Brad Parscale and Trump connected officials with him and what they’re actually doing. What is the gangway? How have they helped these campaigns or interacted with these campaigns?

Michael Fox:

We do have a glimpse into actions that Serimeto took to allegedly help the right return to power in Honduras last year, and it is extremely concerning. Honduras. It’s just after the country’s election on November 30th, 2025. The race was so close the winner won’t be announced for weeks.

The conservative candidate Nazri Asfurda has faced off against leftist Rixi Muncada and Centris Salvador Nasraya. The leftist Libre Party has run the country for the previous four years. Before then, the US back right-wing national party held onto the presidency through violence, repression, and fraudulent elections. They took power after the 2009 coup. The president who ruled the country for much of that time with an iron fist was named Juan Orlando Hernandez. At that point last year, he was in a West Virginia prison serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. We looked at a bunch of this in episode 12 about Honduras Gate. If you miss that, you can go back and listen. But here’s the thing. There’s a new audio clip about Honduras that was only released last month. It’s a one-minute, 30-second voice message from political consultant Fernando Serimedo to a member of the electoral campaign of Nasri Asfura.

He’s the right-wing candidate, Trump ally, and the man who would be declared president in late December after a protracted recount. I just have to tell you, this voice message gives me the chills. In it, Serimedo says not to worry that they’ve rigged the election, stuffed ballot boxes where necessary, and removed votes elsewhere, all with the support of members of the armed forces who are stationed at polling stations. Serimedo is confident about their victory.

“Yes, from all of this, the only thing we can learn is that the area where the votes are coming in right now is where Tito wins, “says Serimedo. Tito is the nickname of Nasri Asfura, the national party candidate who is now president. “In the second place, the locations where more national party votes are going to come in, if there were votes from somebody else, those were taken out. Those are being fixed,” he says. “We already have the numbers. According to what I’m seeing, we already have people aligned in the armed forces. It seems that everything is going well, “he says. “If we have the votes and we know where we lost the election, that’s where we place more votes, and they talk to everyone at each polling station. “That’s all that matters. We don’t have to worry,” he says.

This audio was released publicly last month by Marlon Ochoa. He’s a former member of the country’s electoral court who had to flee Honduras over death threats against him. He said he handed over the audio evidence in December 2025 before the election results were finalized, but investigations didn’t move forward and election authorities rubber stamped Asfura’s win. Ochoa did not reveal how he obtained the damning audio. I’m left with so many questions. Did Seri Medo really rig the elections for Nasre Asfura? If so, did the United States know? Did Israel? Both of them are staunch allies of former right-wing president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to decades in a US prison for drug trafficking and who Trump pardoned just after last year’s vote. Most importantly, if Seri Maedo rigged the elections in Honduras, did he also do it elsewhere? In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru?

Even if he didn’t stuff ballots everywhere, it’s clear he was willing to use whatever means necessary to get his candidate elected, including spreading disinformation or fake news during the campaigns and even about the country’s electoral system. And this is “MAGA’s man in Latin America. Democracy itself is at risk.” Serimado is now in custody. He’s being investigated for attempted femicide. Many of his former staunch allies are trying to distance themselves. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

And so this has been a huge scandal and the investigation in Bolivia has expanded to move from femicide to illicit enrichment to the protection of drug traffickers. And so there’s at least three now investigations taking place in Bolivia. And one of the most shocking things is just the way in which all of the politicians who just a few months ago were working quite closely with Sarameta. Now totally wash their hands. I don’t know who this guy is. Rodrigo Paz, the new president in Bolivia says, “Oh, he was involved a little bit in the campaign, but I don’t know who he is.” There are photos of him meeting with Marco Rubio and the Bolivian president from just a couple months ago. So this is a total sort of hand wash. You saw the same thing in Argentina where Sarameto was very involved in the campaign of Javier Millet.

Now Miley said, “Oh no, he has nothing to do with us. Of course, it just came out that he visited the Casa Rosada 14 times last year.” So you see this all over the hemisphere. He was obviously very involved in Honduras and very publicly involved in Honduras and that electoral process. Again, another razor thin electoral margin there. I mean, obviously this fits into a much broader conversation around social media disinformation and what its effect is on democracy, on political processes more broadly. It’s certainly a conversation that has been quite prevalent in the United States for a long time now that is extremely relevant for the upcoming election in Brazil.

Michael Fox:

Jake says it’s not just about what Serimedo has or hasn’t done in these other elections. It’s about what underhanded tactics may still be used in future elections with or without Serimedo, and not just in Latin America, but in Spain and elsewhere where right-wing parties are gaining ground.

Jake Johnston:

There is a lot of people who are looking to make money off the political changes that are happening in Latin America, and they can sell their access to the Trump administration, their access to this legislator, this lobbyist, this business, and they play up those connections to get a contract, to get a consulting gig. And this is sort of the brave new world of the Don Roe doctrine in Latin America where it’s not just Sara Mato, it’s not just Brad Parscali and Javier Negre and Londoreche Diario. I mean, this is happening all over the place. You can see these lobbying filings that are coming in every day with different people hiring Trump connected folks. And so they’re all sort of competing for this space and to influence pedal and make money doing so in the region and take advantage of the sort of political interventionism and rightborn shift that we’re seeing.

And so this is just one piece of it.

Michael Fox:

In other words, this doesn’t begin or end with Serimado, but as Jake Johnston said in the beginning, this is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. And there is so much more we need to understand and consider about how US President Donald Trump is using his power to influence elections around the region. This is where we’re headed next time. In the lead up to high stakes elections in Brazil in October where Trump is vying to help the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro win the election. Trump has levied tariffs and revoked the visa of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and state department officials are allegedly courting journalists in order to spread the US narrative around the country’s elections. That is next time on Under the Shadow.

Folks, first off, I have big news. I’ve just launched a new website called Pan-American Dispatch. It’s a project of The Real News. We are translating daily articles from Portuguese and Spanish into English for a US audience. Over the next two months, we’re exclusively focused on the Brazilian election and Trump’s attempts to influence it. Please check it out. You can find us at panamericandispatch.org. As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. Many, many thanks to SIEPR’s Jake Johnston and Ajin Shepublica’s Maria Marta Bruno. It was a pleasure to speak with you. I’ll add links to some of the reporting from their outlets in the show notes.

As always, if you’re looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.