Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

I’m in a wheelchair—how am I going to escape? 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

There were days when we ate animal food, bird food. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

I lost my eye. What more do you want? 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

My dreams have been shattered. 

Narrator: 

In Gaza, everyone is struggling to survive. But for people with disabilities, that struggle is multiplied. Rabab Nawfal and Suha Maqat – both wheelchair users – were champion athletes before this war. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

I’m one of those people who didn’t go to the south. I lived through famine twice. I lived it twice. No one asked after me. There were days when we didn’t eat anything. There were days when we ate animal food, bird food. We ate everything—animals, birds. Even those things were expensive, and then they were cut off. The day they were cut off, we stopped eating anything. 

Ramadan came during the famine. We didn’t eat anything. A long day passed, and we didn’t eat anything. We used to crave drinking water. We used to crave a piece of bread. We were hoping that the famine would never come back. But unfortunately, it did—and it’s still coming back. 

We’ve suffered a lot in life. I was abandoned. No one took responsibility for me. My mother and father used to take care of me, but they left. These days, my brother takes care of me—and he is injured. My life is ruined. No one is with me. No one cares. And the one person standing by me is injured. He can barely carry his own family. 

When we were displaced, he couldn’t help us. He wasn’t able. For people with disabilities like me, it’s been difficult to live through this war. Those who are not disabled can maybe manage their lives. They can move, walk long distances—but I can’t. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

The closest people to me abandoned me—they didn’t stand by me. They left me to fend for myself. I feel like I live in a forest with wolves and monsters. I can’t. I try to make things work,

but I can’t. I’m mentally exhausted. The circumstances of this war are incredibly difficult. Even the word displacement is difficult for the injured and disabled. 

When we left, my brother was injured and my sister was in a bad state. Even though he was injured, he was pushing my sister, as I pushed myself along. I got stuck in the sand, and they wanted to bomb the building next to us. It was the most difficult moment. I said to myself, now I’m going to be killed. It was the hardest moment of my life. 

I thought—how will I escape? How will I, in my wheelchair, escape? How am I going to get out? My brother was injured and couldn’t carry me. I thought, I’m done; there’s no life for me anymore. That’s it. I’m going to be killed. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

The hardest thing I’ve experienced in this war has been displacement. I woke up one day and saw the Israelis in front of us. I was all by myself. I rushed out, but I couldn’t continue. There was a lot of shelling, shooting, bombs. It was a miracle I got out alive. It happened again and again—the same scenario repeated a thousand times. 

Narrator: 

Both Suha and Rabab rely entirely on their wheelchairs to move. Without them, the most basic tasks become impossible. Israel’s blockade has meant that access to this crucial item has been cut off. 

Even with functioning wheelchairs, with 81% of roads in Gaza now damaged or destroyed, access and movement is extremely limited. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

There are no wheelchairs in Gaza. And without a wheelchair, I can’t move. The wheelchair takes me to my medicine, my food, my drink—I need it for everything. Right now, my chair is broken. I’ve lost all means of life. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

As you can see, my chair is broken. I push myself in it, I fall off all the time, I cut and bruise my legs. If someone kind is around, then I can move. Otherwise, I can’t. 

We requested wheelchairs, but it was no use. We asked and asked, and they said no. Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

My life before the war was very beautiful. I was a champion of Palestine’s disabled national team for strength games—basketball, tennis. I used to do all kinds of sports that suited my disability. I was a success story. I was a hero. These days, I feel worthless. Nothing in life. I can’t even get from here to there. I can’t move from here to there in a wheelchair. My life is 

gone. There is no life.

These days, we only dream of having the most basic things: flour, water. The simplest things—we can’t get. Drinking water—we can’t get it. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

Suha before is different from Suha today. I used to be a champion of Palestine. Today, I’m nothing. Today, just a daughter who needs her mother—who needs her mother to help her. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

Two days before the war, we were playing qualifiers to represent Palestine internationally. But we didn’t manage it. On the day of the championship, the war erupted. So our dreams are gone. All our dreams are gone. My dreams have been shattered. 

I wanted to raise my son. I wanted to raise him well and teach him. Before the war, I wanted to enroll him in karate. I wanted him to become something. I couldn’t. I wanted him to be into sports like me—to become a doctor. I wanted him to grow up and help me in the future. But my dreams were shattered. I couldn’t do any of it. I can’t do anything. 

Narrator: 

According to the UN 4,800 amputations of limbs had been documented since the beginning of the war. Ten children were losing one or both legs every day. Gaza had become home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history. Not only is Israel making the lives of existing disabled people impossible, it is also creating an entirely new generation of people with disabilities. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

Gaza has become a city of ghosts. There is no life in Gaza. As you can see—look at how people are living. On sand! How can people live on sand? How can they occupy Gaza? How? 

We want peace of mind. We don’t want to lose any more loved ones. We’ve lost enough. Is it not enough that I lost my eye? What’s left? What more do you want? I lost my eye—what more do you want? What else should I lose? Nothing’s left. There’s nothing left in this world that I can lose. My family has left. I wish I could see my mother. See my father. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

Life has become unbearable. No matter how much I talk, I can’t describe what I am feeling or the life we are living. I used to be someone. Now I am nothing.

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

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox. This is the Battle for Free Speech, and this is the third bonus episode in this series. So this one is particularly important and timely as Brazil is heading into high stakes presidential elections this October. The race is between current leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. If you have listened to episode six of this podcast series or my podcast series Brazil on Fire or the entire season two of my podcast Under the Shadow, then you know a little bit about where things are and where they’re headed. And this is another deep dive. Today, I’m bringing you my full conversation with Arturo Romeo. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director for Latin America of the International NGO Reporters Without Borders. I spoke with him specifically for my episode about Brazil of the battle for free speech, but there was so much more from our conversation that I couldn’t fit into that episode.

In this conversation, Artur mentions a couple of things and I want to give you some context. First, Alexandre Morais is the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who led the investigations into fake news and Bolsonaro’s hate cabinet. He also oversaw the electoral court in the 2022 elections, and he was the guy who had the showdown with billionaire Elon Musk over Twitter back in 2024. In fact, Morais blocked the social media platform in Brazil for roughly two months after Musk refused to suspend a series of Brazilian accounts who were disseminating fake news. Then Musk pulled Twitter’s legal representation from the country. Musk later acquiesced and Twitter went back online. But that escapade has been used by the far right and even President Donald Trump to claim that Morais and the Lula government have been censoring free speech in the country. And in fact, that was one of the top reasons for the 50% tariff on Brazilian goods that Trump imposed last year on the country.

And it has been at the heart of Trump’s campaign against Brazil and Lula in an effort to influence the outcome of Brazil’s presidential elections this year. Okay, I think you are up to speed. Here is my full conversation with Artur Romeo in its entirety. We spoke last year, 2025, but it is more relevant than ever today. I hope you like it. Arturo, thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you so much for your availability. I really, really appreciate. Super excited to talk with you about all these things.

Artur Romeu:

Thank you, Michael. I’m also excited to talk about those issues with you. I

Michael Fox:

Say the same question to everybody. For you, what does free speech mean?

Artur Romeu:

It seems like a simple question, especially for an NGO working with press freedom for 40 years at the institution that I work for, the NGO, that I work for Reporters Without Borders, we have been working defending press freedom, not exactly free speech, but they kind of free speech and press freedom drink on the same fountain or same roots of freedom of expression more broadly. So free speech is the ability to essentially being able to impart ideas, opinions, views on the world around us without being harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, attacked by governments or other groups, can be religious groups, but also economic interests. So the ability to be able to, as an individual or a collective, to express yourself and your ideas and contribute to the public debate without fear for reprisal essentially.

Michael Fox:

And Artur, what is your analysis of the state of free speech today in the world in Brazil and the United States and elsewhere? Where are we?

Artur Romeu:

I think that there is a lot of confusion. Maybe I never saw as much confusion around those issues as we are seeing today. Basically, one of the things that scares me is the fact that free speech is being weaponized against press freedom, for example. Another issue is that we are focusing too much on the individualistic aspect of free speech, and we have to have this understanding that at least coming from a freedom of expression perspective, there are an individual dimension, but also a social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. It’s not just our ability to being able to express ourselves and to impart information and ideas, but also to receive those information and ideas from others. So the way we are talking about, or at least the way that some political groups and specifically the far right nowadays everywhere in the world, not specifically in the US, has been instrumentalizing the idea of free speech for their own political purpose and abandoning a key aspect, a key dimension of freedom of expression, which is this more social and collected dimension to receive plural, reliable, diverse and free information from others.

And a third issue, and I think that’s behind most of this confusion as well, is the role that big tech social media platforms are having on this discussion because we have the idea that regulating this economic activity sector would be the same as censorship, but actually better regulation, good regulation, democratic supervision, improve the condition for free speech and press freedom and the integrity of information in general. So this opposition between the ability to be able to impart your ideas and the need that governments have to find a way to regulate the digital sphere arena online is they are not opposed to each other, but it’s a complex discussion because emerging technology always poses new problems. And even if we are not saying that social media platforms are necessarily new to our political landscape, AI is becoming something more popularized and we don’t know the impact that AI will have in this cacophony, this, I don’t know, some people are calling it epidemics or this crisis of reliable information.

And the key problem here is all those things together are fragmenting public conversation, public debate, and public debate is at the core of our democracies. So there is a clear link between this fragmentation of public debate due to all this and the erosion of democracies everywhere.

Michael Fox:

Arturo, you’ve just mentioned everything you said, I was like, we need to talk more about that because this is at the root of all this is why it’s so important. Before we dive into more specifics of all those things that you just mentioned, I have this idea, this hypothesis, are we in a moment where the far right folks like Trump and Bolsonaro are trying to redefine free speech in their favor instead of what you mentioned, “Oh, we need actually some regulation so that we can have a field where we’re actually getting not just random information and fake lies and everything else for everybody else, but we’re actually getting information that is what we should be receiving.” Are we in a moment right now where certain groups are trying to redefine what free speech means so that they can use it to push their agenda?

Artur Romeu:

Of course, it’s very clear. It’s been happening for a while and it’s crazy how effective it is because I think people are very concerned with society in general every day on our daily lives, every citizen is concerned with their ability to basic freedom. And I think that for a very long time, at least in other democracies, this is something that was kind of taken for granted. And even if there were some complex discussions from time to time, there was at least this frame, this common ground, this common denominator where there were international standards in terms of human rights related to free speech, very clearly defined. But sometimes there is this complex issues where you have limits to free speech, right? It’s not an absolute right as a series of human rights. They are not absolute in themselves. There is a balance between rights. And for a long time, I think it generated some stress and tension, but it was kind of relevant discussions, philosophical discussions.

People may disagree, but still we had a common ground. And what we’ve been seeing lately for the past, I don’t know, 10 years at least, is that the way those limits are defined and their political appropriation is stressing this debate. And we are seeing a relevant debate for democracies and to ensure rights and public participation in general being distorted, inverted in a sense that a specific political group is using this to play the victims and saying that they are being oppressed by those ideas. And they made a political flag out of this, and it’s being very effective in terms of how this idea has permeated society and gaining capularity. And I think our field of organizations that are defending freedom of expression is having a lot of difficulty to fight back or reframe the debate. So we are talking about those issues from a rights-based approach and not from a political biased approach.

Just to give an example, specific example, in Brazil, there was a very important milestone march protest during the Independence Day of 2021 with Bolsonaro, thousands of people in the streets supporting Bolsonaro, supporters of Bolsonaro going to flooding the streets in every major capital. And researchers were the streets trying to survey why people were, in their views, going to protest. And one question was about what was their main motivation? And the first motivation was freedom of expression. So in theory, something good. But when they asked them, “And what are you fighting against?” And the first was the Supreme Court in Brazil, which is, I won’t go into the political context in Brazil, but a key issue here in terms of how the constitutional court and Supreme Court has been limiting transgressions and abuses of the executive branch. And the second was the press. So they were fighting against the press.

So they were defending press freedom by attacking the press. And so I think it’s a kind of a paradox where you see a very individualistic perspective. People want to be able to say whatever they want and less and less are accepting that the fact that we are living in a society, there are symmetries of powers, this speech has to be balanced with other rights. So this imbalance and the way it has been appropriated by and kind of really weaponized by the far right is having a major effect in creating this imbalance and making people forget why it’s important to balance a free speech, which is kind of incoherent, at least when you see what happened with Charlie Kirk and people were expressing their views on the fact that criticizing him some very harsh level and the same group that is defending that people should be able to speak wherever they want are doing their own witch hunt.

So you see how politically biased and how this weaponization appropriation of the idea of free speech or freedom of expression is a power struggle more than a philosophical and conceptual one.

Michael Fox:

Do you think that part of how we got to this point goes back to what you were mentioning before, the splintering of society. Now with social media, I get all of my news from here, you get all of your news from there, and so we’re allowed to attack the other because they’re the other rather than having this open debate. Is that part of what led us to this moment?

Artur Romeu:

Yeah. Social media had a major impact in the information ecosystem as a whole for better or for worse, kind of changed everything, how people are receiving, how we are less dependent of a few broadcasters. And now we feel that we are in this environment where we can speak freely. But actually what happened was the privatization of a public space, and you have this impression that you are in Agora, this public arena where there is this idealized perspective of the free flow of information, the free market of ideas, the better ideas will win. And actually this is happening in a specific space controlled by specific groups, interest groups, a very profit oriented perspective. No transparency at all on how those information are being moderated and gaining more or less reach. So yeah, definitely. I think the major shifts that those technologies had on our information space are partly not necessarily too blamed by their own, because I think also when we talk about censorship, it’s easier for us to think of a more classic censorship approach in the same way that when we think about a dictatorship or a coup d’etat, we have references from our past and we kind of compare what is happening now and our collective memory of what those words mean.

And freedom of expression was kind of invented to protect citizen rights, individual citizen rights to oppose all powerful state in a very different political landscape from centuries ago. And now censorship is not only having a propaganda ministry and having censors within newsrooms and journalists being detained and killed because of what they’re saying. Of course, it still happens a lot in several parts of the words, but censorship or at least freedom of expression and free speech is also eroded when not only the state. Because the idea behind this is that the state should restrain itself from any interference in the free flow of information. So any kind of interference equals bad, equals censorship. People should be able to speak freely without government or state interference, but that’s not enough. You also need positive obligation. And positive obligation means that the governments and states have to develop, establish public policies that will help the information space, the information ecosystem to balance assymetries.

For example, pluralism, diversity, reliability of information are key aspects of this, of a healthier information space. So for this to work, you need governments to create those policies, to establish these laws, policies, how antitrust policies, for example, to fight excessive media ownership concentration in the hands of few groups to help balance market asymmetries and to ensure that the rights of their citizens is assured also in terms of access to pluralistic and reliable information. With the social media and big text, what they are saying is that any regulation is bad, they are self-regulating by themselves, and they are at the end protecting their commercial interests and creating those regulatory backups where they can operate without accountability or any kind of accountability. And if we don’t do anything about it, we will keep seeing a disintegration of this information space.

Michael Fox:

Following from that point, can you talk a little bit about what we saw over the last year? For instance, this whole battle between Brazil, Aleshande Morais, Twitter, X, Musk, because I feel like that’s a perfect example of exactly what you’re talking about. And also these two visions where Brazil has this vision of saying, no, we’re going to regulate more because you can’t have just a get out of jail free card completely. And whereas the United States is much more laissez-fraire backed by Donald Trump and particularly now, but this was even before he came to office.

Artur Romeu:

First of all, you have different traditions, different countries, you have different traditions in terms of how you interpret law. Brazil’s approach to freedom of expression is closer to the European approach where there is a focus on this balance between rights than the US one where there is a broader, I don’t know, more elasticity when you are talking about freedom of expression. You have to have in mind that our legal tradition is closer to the European one in terms of philosophical, conceptual jurisprudence expiration. Within this context, have a very specific example. When former President Bolsonaro started saying that people should not trust on electoral results because digital ballot box are not reliable when he did not and still has not any kind of proof of this. And much on the contrary, by the way, the electoral system in Brazil is widely recognized and as a very strong electoral system.

When he started doing that, for example, calling a meeting with ambassadors from a bunch of different countries to give a press conference saying that before the election, one year before the elections, that people should not trust electoral results if we kept the system as it was. It’s very, very, very serious because he has a lot of supporters and echo chambers on social media, and this kind of information erodes trusts of society, on their political institutions and their electoral institutions. So basically you cannot argue that that’s within his absolute right of print of expression because it has very serious impact for democracy and it’s not because you are the president that you can say whatever you want without any kind of accountability. But from there, what happened is that this idea was widely spread by his supporters and political groups, and the social media had a huge impact on this.

So this is clearly organized, this information, casebook. It’s pretty straightforward. And this information in the sense that it has a set of cogs in the machines, and it’s not just one person saying something false, it’s how this information is being spread and the structure of this information, the different levels, actors, stakeholders involved in this, financed with public money, public funds, and social media companies within their codes of conduct, you cannot just let this level of disinformation spread, including the reach they’re having without, again, any accountabilities, they could have acted to limit the reach, not necessarily censoring the presidential Twitter account or something, but at least putting contextual information, whatever those links, I don’t know. But there are several possible strategies for those social media to limit those kinds of harmful disinformation. But since we did not have a regulatory framework for this, the Supreme Court took the responsibility to act and to investigate this fake news industry or disinformation industry, how it was being structured and its impact.

And by doing that, said explicitly that, I don’t know, judges could not be threatened, basic stuff. And starting, for example, Alishanj Morais, which is at the epicenter of all this, even if he’s, and I think this is a parenthesis here, Morais was very important within all this, but he himself, I mean as an individual judge, but we have to take into account always that his decision were being systematically validated by the other judges of the Supreme Court. So even if he was the one being more visible on all this, and even though that there were tensions between and discussions between the judges, the vast majority of all those decisions went through the plenary, all the judges. So we talk a lot about him, but it’s more like the Supreme Court itself. I think he’s the image of these fights in a way, but he wasn’t alone doing that.

It’s not all powerful judge that is doing that as a rogue mode and acting on his own. We had strong institutions and it worked in the sense that we had the highest body in the judiciary power acting on this and investigating those issues, how they were spreading and taking harsh measures to prevent the impact of what everything was happening be even higher. For example, closing, requesting for the suppression of individual accounts on social media, and that’s something that led to the blockage of acts here in Brazil because what happened is that Elon Musk decided that he would not accept sovereign decision from the Brazilian highest court. He just moved his policy team away from Brazil. There was no legal representation as a way clearly to escape Brazilian jurisdiction in a clearly politically motivated move. And what the court said is that you cannot do that if you are operating You have to operate within our laws.

So if you don’t have a legal representation here in Brazil, and if you do not accept court orders related to several specific measures to mitigate the impact of this information of what was happening, you could not operate. And he was not blaffing. I think for, I don’t know, 50 days, it took a while. And there was a lot of support because you could imagine that this kind of decision, it’s very unpopular. You have tons, millions of social media users, including a lot of journalists using those tools for their daily work. But the way it was done showed that there was at least an understanding from Brazilian society that it was a fair fight, that it was something legitimate. And you can go even backwards with the pandemic. I won’t go all the way there, but the way that Bolsonaro governed during the pandemic was a big disasters for several reasons, but also in terms of access to reliable information on health issues and the way that false information was spreading for, again, politically biased moves.

And I think he had a bet in the sense that he thought that by going this way, he would show a different path than other global leaders, but it was a big disaster, no surprise. And there was a lot of discussion around this time about disinformation as well. So it’s a discussion that has been going on in Brazil on how public and democratic institutions have to respond to widespread disinformation strategy, especially those coming from the highest ranking officials. It’s gained a lot of track and legitimacy. And I would dare even to say that we have now more than other countries an awareness about those issues where, for example, there was a, I don’t know if it’s very recent survey, I have to double check the numbers, but what I know for sure is that most of Brazilian society, a survey showed is in favor of regulating social media.

So you have this support, even of course, if it’s not, if you have clearly political groups which are very strong and a lot of debate on how you do it. I think the major question is how you do it because it’s not that the fact that you have to act, I think that’s pretty clear here and from every perspective. What is more difficult is how you do it to avoid a very obvious trap where by doing this, you are creating a censorship mechanism and more control over those tools, those technologies. So this should be actually the discussion, how you do it and not if you have to do it or not, why it’s important. I think we are well over the time where those discussions should have passed and now, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I feel that we are living parallel universes sometimes.

When you see, for example, Trump’s speech on the UN and Lula’s speech in the UN, we feel that we are living in parallel universes. So different periods of time. I think it’s clear for, there is a consensus among digital rights activists, organizations, even a part of mainstream progressive groups, NGOs working with freedom of expression that you have to create mechanisms to improve democratic supervisions of how those emerging technologies, especially social media, are creating those rifts in our democratic systems.

Michael Fox:

Artu, thank you so much. I just have two more really quick questions. And this is so important, this last point that you touched on, because particularly in the United States, even amongst folks on the left, because historically, obviously censorship has been used against usually marginalized communities, minority communities. And so the discourse is always, well, once you start to say, well, you can’t say this and these people can’t say that, well then that’s going to be used against always, eventually it’s going to be used against and particularly against minority communities and marginalized communities. The people with the least amount of voice are the ones that are going to have their voice taken away completely. And yet this question no one meant, I feel like this huge elephant in the room is always this question of fake news. I can believe what I want to believe, you can believe what you want to believe.

More or less we can talk, but you still can’t be spreading just complete disinformation and lies and yet that’s what we’re seeing. And unless you actually take that on and say, okay, well this is here and how do we try and roll this back? But I feel like so many people or organizations or individuals, it’s just kind of give it, well, no, we don’t want to do that because then that’s stopping people. But no, there are lies. There are people trying to manipulate this. And so it’s a huge, it’s a complicated debate to ask that question of even how do we do this? But I think that is the question of saying, no, we absolutely have to. We can’t even be discussing if we are going to or not. We need to be talking about how we do it in the most democratic way possible or else we’re just going to see more and more of our rights willed away and more and more of our ability to communicate as a people whittled away.

So it’s crazy.

Artur Romeu:

Yeah. Talking about more on journalism and how specifically on journalism, the way things are told nowadays, I mean in terms of how all this has been appropriated by this fear of censorship or by saying that any kind of regulation is censorship is creating this environment of a crisis of trust and polluting democratic public debate, but also it’s creating something that science and journalism are put in the same level as any other opinion. So this is my opinion. So I can say it because it’s my opinion. And if you have 30 pages special dossier done by one of the journalists working that biggest newsroom in the country and you take this and you say, “Well, they can say wherever they want, that’s my opinion and I’m against this.” Same thing with, I don’t know, climate denialism just to keep one specific issue related to science. So when you put everything, conspiracy theories, opinions, ideas at the same level of other kinds of expressions, they should not be able to say to disagree, of course, or to question, this is healthy for democratic debate, but you cannot dismiss investigative journalistic piece on a very key issue and that had multiple sources done in journalistic processes.

You have a process to doing journalism. It’s not ChatGPT, it’s those investigations in the same way that science has its processes of verification, experimentation, peer review, et cetera. Journalism has its own. And if this is not recognized as a positive incentive, a society to receive this information and to criticize or to discuss what is being said in a different way than just someone saying what they think, journalism have foundations in terms of what is being said. And ideas can have more or less, opinions can have more or less depending from if it’s coming from someone that has studied all his life, all her life about the specific issue and then is expressing of course an idea, a different idea or a position on this topic. But if we put everything at the same level, we won’t have a real conversation. We will be just everyone saying what they want.

And for democracies to work, we have to find commonplaces and those commonplaces have to be based on some kind of logic or some kind of method or some kind of common ground. And so this is a problem right now with journalism because it’s being treated as just another opinion.

And on our newsfeed on social media, it’s being treated as just another opinion. Even sometimes even dismissed or the reach of news articles and links are having a worse reach than other kinds of videos posted by influencers. But there’s no due prominence of journalistic content or scientific content. So the conversation

Is becoming more and more based on the rule of the stronger. If you appear to be stronger than others, your position can overlap all the others because you say so. That’s extremely dangerous for the kind of democracy we have been building. So this is a specific issue with journalism. And the other issue is media sustainability and news deserts and how those new technologies have shifted completely the business model of the media industry in just a few years. And it’s creating more fusions, less pluralism. You have this illusion of pluralism because you feel that there’s more people speaking than before where you have the gatekeepers and all this, but it’s noise. So there’s a lot of noise happening and noise is not necessarily pluralism because pluralism needs some kind of framework to be effective for a democratic debate. If it’s just a bunch of people in a room saying what they think about the problem, not necessarily the best idea or the idea that has the stronger chance to work will win.

So also this idea of a free market of ideas, we don’t live in a political vacuum. So a free market of ideas is completely dependent on the correlations of force between the different stakeholders in the ecosystem, the political landscape. You have a lot of social and economic inequalities. So talking about a free market of ideas with no kinds of balancing this just don’t work because ideas will step on others anyway. When we talk about AI regulation or digital service acts to regulate the social media and the whole industry behind it, you need to have some kind of how you can create mechanisms to create financial compensation for media. And there are a lot of taxating profits from big tech revenue, advertisement revenue of big tax, for example, and creating a fund and this fund being. I don’t know. There are several ideas going on, bargaining codes.

But the point is if we do nothing, what we are seeing is that the economic pressure on journalism, on public interest journalism is becoming asphyxiating. And what we will see soon is an environment, a media landscape with a lot of concentration of power and local news markets disappearing and being replaced by, we don’t really know, but what we’ve been seeing is that when a local news media disappear, there’s no empty space. This space is immediately occupied by propaganda, by this information, by other interests. So preserving journalism, especially local journalism, is a democratic imperative. And we have to understand how we can do this when discussing democratic regulations for social media and AI.

Michael Fox:

Artur, so great. My last really quick question is you mentioned toward the beginning something I thought was really important, you want to forget it, free speech being weaponized against press freedoms. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Where are we seeing that? What does that look like?

Artur Romeu:

We are seeing that in a daily basis in the US for sure. And I have very specific example. When Trump wrote a letter to President Lula to justify the tariffs, the letter mentioned Bolsonaro, the prosecution of Bolsonaro in Brazil, mentioned big tax and the fact that the rights of American citizens was being violated and companies was being violated by the judiciary in Brazil. And just after the letter itself, there was some kind of, I don’t know the name of it, but an order where there were more explanations of the reasons. It was like a one and a half page document and the expression like freedom of speech or free speech or freedom of expression or censorship was repeated at least 10 times in a letter basically saying that the US was imposing tariffs on Brazil because Brazil was promoting censorship. So when I say that free speech is being weaponized against freedom of expression, in parts it connects to this example where you make yourself look like as a free press paladin, but actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the idea, the different ideas behind what freedom of expression really is, and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression.

You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. If that’s the case, you are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information. When we see these kinds of marches that I’ve talked about in Brazil as well where you say you are there to defend freedom of expression, but actually your enemy is press freedom, you are again weaponizing this idea because what you are really interested in is being able to express your ideas without any kind of repercussions, any kind of accountability, because it’s a very empowering feeling. So I think what those leaders, Bolsonaro, Trump, Edogan, Obam, and others, Milei have been doing the media bashing and fueling general hostility towards journalism and not just journalists, but journalism, like the ideal of journalism, again, not just against the press, but the idea really of journalism is at the core of their political strategy.

It’s not isolated. It’s not something that’s part of their personality. It’s really something that has the ability to keep their electoral basis very mobilized. It’s a very effective way to polarize public debate. And those leaders, they are dependent on polarizations. They cannot leave, have a political career without these kinds of systematic polarization and attacking the press systematically. The press, the media institutions, journalism in general is very effective for your strategy and that’s why they keep doing. In Argentina, for example, recently Mile said, “The problem is we don’t hate journalists enough.” So these kind of ideas, Bukele in El Salvador, it’s really at the core of the political strategy. So again, instrumentalizing, weaponizing free speech to erode press freedom, to have more control over the public debate and less scrutiny in society. It’s much easier to kill the messenger than have to deal with whatever the report or the news article is discussing.

Michael Fox:

Artur, incredible. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate your time. I know we went over a little bit, but I really appreciate it.

Artur Romeu:

Thank you, Michael.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the third bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Mark Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s www.patreon.com/mfox. As always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

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.

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

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and this is The Battle for Free Speech. So as promised, this is the first of a number of bonus episodes we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Today, I speak with Fara Dabhoiwala. He’s a professor of history at Princeton University, and he’s the author of the book, What Is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea. That book was published last year by Penguin Random House and Harvard University Press. And if you’ve listened to this podcast series, you have heard his voice before because I go to him for analysis and insight in numerous episodes. That’s because he’s a wealth of knowledge on this subject, but also because his book in many ways challenges the status quo about our understanding of free speech. In this podcast series, I feel like I was able to only just barely scratch the surface on so many questions, particularly about the beginnings of what we understand as free speech in the United States and elsewhere, and also the difference between free speech in the United States and abroad.

So today I’m bringing you my conversation with him in its entirety. I know you will appreciate it.

Well, Fara, I just want to start off. Thank you so much, so much for your time and for being here.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

A pleasure to talk to you, Mike.

Michael Fox:

Fara, can you start with by just introducing yourself and tell me a little bit about why this became such an interest for you, why you wrote this book?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England. And more than 10 years ago now, I published a different book on the history of Western attitudes to sex and what I call the sexual revolution of the 18th century. And that was a very popular book and I went around the world talking about it. And in the course of that, almost immediately, I was censored in various ways. I was deplatformed, I got into trouble for saying things on the radio, and then it all culminated in my book being translated into Chinese. And when it was translated into Chinese, it was censored. And then I went to China and traveled around talking about it. And at that point, my interest shifted from my own experience of being silenced to the extraordinary things that were happening in China already 10 years ago, which was, as a historian, I realized every single apparatus of censorship ever invented in the history of the world was now simultaneously being deployed to muzzle free speech in China, as well as some totally new ones that the Communist Party had developed to deal with the internet.

And of course, 10 years ago, everyone still generally believed the internet was a technology of freedom that would set people free. And before long, surely the Chinese would also experience it that way. And my experience traveling around taught me that actually that was a very naive idea and the opposite was happening. So I came back from that trip really shocked by the way in which a modern dictatorship like China can operate to muzzle free speech and silence dissent at every level, believing myself in free speech and starting to think, well, why do we have such different views about this? Where does first of all, this Western belief in free speech come from? And given that we all believe in it, and I do very strongly myself, why can we never agree on what it means? I mean, within our cultures, we’re fighting about that all the time and across cultures now, this is a really important political transnational problem in the world, but it’s not just a political series of questions and problems.

It’s also a historical problem because people didn’t always believe in free speech. Anyway, so that’s where I started. I though in 2015, oh my goodness, it’s peak free speech time now. I should hurry up and write this book before the moment passes. And sadly, the moment has not passed. It’s just got worse and worse. But I can explain why that is, which is part of the interest of the subject.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How did we get into this mess? And obviously through reading your book, I’m just fascinated by the Cato letters and all this, but if you could give me a little bit of how do we get to this point?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, it’s taken us 300 years to get to this point because the modern idea of free speech really is invented about 300 years ago. But the reason it’s such a hot topic right now, let me just deal with that. The reason it’s such a hot topic right now is because we’re living through a giant communications revolution. I mean, the internet has completely transformed how humans communicate at every level about every subject. And every time that’s happened in the past, in the 18th century with print, in the 19th century and the 20th century with new forms of print and the telegraph and broadcasting and all the rest of it, every time there’s been a new communications revolution, people have needed to think about free speech harder and in different ways. And so that’s part of what’s happening right now. Do you want to come back to me about the history?

Michael Fox:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Let’s dive all the way back in the history and we’ll bring it up to the present. Talk to me about those beginnings of what free speech meant in those days.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So really the first thing you need to understand about free speech is it’s on the one hand, a very old idea. There are various forms of freedom of expression that go right back to the classical period. On the other hand, our current sense of it is really quite recent because older ideas of free speech are always very restricted. They had to do with speech in an emergency, the idea of scholars communicating peacefully amongst themselves. But what’s always lacking in all those earlier notions is a notion of political free speech, that everyone has the right to speak out on matters of public concern. That’s really the core of our modern idea. One reason that’s lacking before the 18th century is that people have a very sophisticated understanding of what words really are. That’s to say words are not different from actions. Words are a type of action in the world.

Everyone in the past knew this. They also know that words, although often trivial and harmless and fleeting, sometimes can have really potent consequences in the world. And thirdly, they know that sometimes those potent consequences can be dangerous and harmful. And they’re particularly focused on the harm to individuals from lies and slanders and defamation, which is something that everyone sees is a real problem. And people all the time in the pre-modern world are going to court to defend themselves against the bad words, the slanders, the lies of others. And the second way in which they are focused on this is the dangers, the problems of untruth and misinformation and conspiracy theories. Everyone knows in the past, and it’s a documented fact, that first of all, lies and misinformation spread very quickly, much more quickly than the truth, and that they can, if left unchecked, cause riots and political disorder and pogroms and massacres and bloodshed on a horrible scale.

Everyone in the European past knew this. Happens time and again. And so because of these insights into the power of words, they are very keen to control technologies of print when those are invented and they’re keen to regulate speech in all sorts of ways. Okay, so that’s the background. Then what happens in the early 18th century, and it happens first in England, is that for contingent religious and political reasons there the government cannot anymore agree on exactly how to regulate the printing press. There’s been a political and religious revolution. And so the normal forms of prior censorship whereby you go to the church with anything controversial on a spiritual subject and ask them to sign off on it before you print it, that doesn’t work anymore. Anyway, I won’t go into the reasons, but what you get is this explosion of new kinds of printing because now for the first time people are allowed to just put it out there.

You can still be punished and prosecuted if you publish something that is beyond the pale, but still it’s a different form of regulation. And so in London, which is the epicenter of this, you get an explosion of political pamphlets, newspapers, a much more fast-paced, a different kind of media world than has ever existed before. And the reason for this is partly also that this is the first age of permanent political parties. In England, the Wigs and the Tories are constantly, they’re popular parties. They’re appealing to the people. And so they use this new technology right from the outset to start to attack each other. And as part of that, they are constantly shouting back and forth across the partisan landscape that the other side is lying and abusing words and misinforming the public. They on the other hand are trying to tell the truth. Anyway, it’s a situation very analogous, very evocative of our own age.

And in this new landscape, people get addicted to fast-paced news and newspapers and so on. They like it and they celebrate that this has come about because of the liberty of the press. So the liberty of the press comes this new slogan that everyone loves to be in favor of, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. On the other hand, they can also see actually very sharply, acutely, that this new technology has also made worse all the problems of mass communication that have always existed. I mean, the first law against false news in the English speaking world dates back to 1275. These are not new problems at all. So in the 18th century, people see that, for example, print has only made worse the problem of lies. There’s a great quote by Jonathan Swift, the great writer of the early 18th century, which is basically that truth is slow and lies are false.

It goes like this, falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who’s though of a good repartee long after the party’s over. It’s still true. And Daniel Defoe, his co-journalist and writer, brilliant novelist as well, complains that newspapers have created an explosion of “false news, forgery, infamy, and absurdity, masquerading as fact.” So everyone who looks into this and understands how the world works knows that this has just made things worse. And the final aspect of that, that all people in the know are aware of is that this new media world is hugely corrupt. It’s not about spreading truth so much about making money. Everyone is trying to make money out of the print revolution. It’s hard to do, many newspapers go under, but everyone wants to make it big. They’re always primarily concerned with selling advertising, getting sales, and above all, getting sponsorship by a politician.

And so the world of journalism is hugely corrupt. People are writing for money. Newspapers are being bought and sold all the time, and this is not a neutral marketplace of ideas at all on the contrary. So in this world, liberty speech, everyone agrees is great, but because of all these problems, they also agree that liberty speech is easily abused and they call that licentiousness. Licentience is bad, liberty is good. But the problem with this balancing model of saying liberty speech is good as far as it goes, but you shouldn’t abuse it, is that everyone can also see this lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It’s a subjective judgment. And that’s why no one is able to put forward a really cogent theory of free speech. Everyone can see that, for example, opposition politicians are always banging on about freedom of speech and all for it and maximally for it.

And then the moment they get into power, they start censoring their opponents as heavily as they can. So there’s no worked out theory of free speech. And into this moment come these two journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who put forward the first much more hard-edged theory of free speech in which they describe what we might call the origins of the absolutist view of free speech. And their argument, which they put forward in an anonymous newspaper column called Cato’s Letters, which is immensely successful and has a very long afterlife, is that liberty of speech is the foundation of all liberty and that governors are always trying to abuse power and aggregate more power to themselves. Governors are in fact always trying to turn into tyrants. On the other hand, the people are always noble and virtuous and able to see that. And so you should allow the people maximum freedom of expression in order that they can keep a check on their tyrants, their governors, and call them to account.

And so they claim this, they claim that liberty’s speech is the foundation of all liberty because the moment you see it being reduced even a tiny bit, then you know you’re on a slippery slide to tyranny because that’s the first thing that tyrannical governors try to do. Now, everyone has always known that Cater’s letters is a tremendously influential text in the history of free speech. Cater’s letters is this not just about free speech, it’s a series of essays putting forward simple understandings of important Republican thinkers like Locke and Machiavelli. And in the Americas, in North America, it becomes the most important political text for the Patriot movement in the middle and later 18th century. So the founders of the United States take this as gospel truth and they import these slogans from Katie’s letters into the Declarations of Rights about free speech in 1776 and then into the First Amendment.

So it has a very long afterlife. It’s very powerful. Everyone’s always known about this, but when I started reading it, two things revealed themselves to me that no one had ever really noticed before, and they’re really quite astonishing. The first is this is a theory full of holes. This is not a coherent, sincere doctrine of free speech. It’s in fact an attempt to justify the practices of these two hack journalists themselves in attacking the government and calling for the lynching of stock market profiteers and the overthrow of the current administration. They are justifying themselves by saying, “Well, of course, freedom of speech can never be abridged and there’s no such thing as liable.” That’s another thing they try and claim that if you attack someone and you spread lies about them, then the people will just see that they’re lies and that will just have no effect at all.

On the other hand, if you criticize someone and it’s true, then it’ll stick. And so really there’s no such thing as liable. It’s a very dodgy argument, but they make it with great passion. So the first thing is they don’t pay attention to any of those things that everyone else around them notices, that this is a deeply corrupt media world, that the newspapers themselves are writing and the journalists are writing for money, that the people don’t always agree on everything, that truth is difficult to establish, and that lies can spread dangerously if you allow them to. None of those things are there at all. So it’s full of holes. The second thing, even more remarkably, that I discovered is that they themselves are not writing in good faith. They’re not just writing to defend themselves. They are deeply, deeply complicit in this corruption and political partisanship of the age.

They are writing basically to be noticed by the government and then to be paid off by the government. And the lead author, Thomas Gordon, he does exactly that. He writes Cater’s letters about the people are always right, the people should never be suppressed. And then the government reaches out to him and say, “Hey, you are quite a good writer, but why are you wasting your time with this muckraking rabble-rousing stuff? Why don’t you come work for us?” And he says, “Oh yes, that sounds quite interesting. Thank you so much.” And he starts writing simultaneously for the government press, exactly the opposite. The governors know what they’re doing. People are often being misled by dangerous hack journalists. Misinformation is rife. And then finally he jumps ship and they shut down Cater’s letters and he makes a deal with the government and he becomes the prime minister’s chief propagandist.

He goes rich and famous over the next 20 years as a spin doctor on the establishment side. So anyway, these were remarkable discoveries and they really also I think are important, not just historically, but in showing up that from the outset, theories of free speech are very difficult to make watertight. They often are concocted in bad faith, and yet what lasts is powerful rhetoric. And so over time, no one knows about Thomas Gordon’s own corruption, but his text lives on and it’s very powerfully still read as an epitome of wisdom and truth and foundation for why we should think of free speech in a particular way.

Michael Fox:

Why has this concept, this absolutist concept and these concepts of free speech at all costs, particularly in the United States, why has this remained so powerful over the centuries up until today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, one of the revelations of my book is that actually Americans didn’t always think exactly as they do now about free speech, that for most of American history, actually from 1789 all the way to the 1960s, Americans had views that were quite similar to those in the rest of the world, a more balanced understanding of free speech as a matter of both of rights and of responsibilities as something that required attending to the public good, something that required looking at the role of the mass media, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s only because of the Cold War really that they diverged into a more hard line libertarian outlook, the results of which we’re living through today. But more fundamentally, I think the reason that these slogans are so attractive is that everyone wants simplicity and everyone likes the idea that the rules of free speech should be simple and straightforward.

And everyone can also see that if you take a balancing approach that on the one hand talks about this as a right and on the other hand talks about the possible harms and thinks about the public good and gives powers to regulate and so on, that this can lead to all sorts of serious problems of subjective interpretation, of censorship on grounds that we don’t agree with. That creates all sorts of problems that you can see playing out in countries around the world that take that approach. If you look at Britain, for example, right now, it’s a mess.

So that’s not a good solution. It’s not a perfect solution either. I happen to think that that approach is more intellectually justified, but I don’t think that it is problem free at all. And so the alternative of just saying, “Well, this is a simple matter. We just need to make the rules as simple and as hard edged as possible has an obvious intellectual appeal.” I think there’s also a really interesting psychology here, which I experienced myself when I was censored in trivial ways at the start of this project, which is no one likes to be told that they can’t say something. No one likes to be told to shut up. So the reverse psychology here, again, makes this a wonderful slogan to appeal to. If you feel censored, you feel aggrieved in a way that other rights maybe don’t quite have that immediate emotional purchase.

Michael Fox:

I thought one of the themes, the essential themes of your book, which I found fascinating, is that freedom of expression, freedom of speech isn’t just about the words that are used, the individuals that are speaking, but it’s also about power, the different groups and structures and systems that exist in order for some people to be able to speak and others not to speak. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

So another problem with laws about free speech is that if you think about communication and free speech in a sophisticated way, you need to acknowledge that speech is always exquisitely contextual. It’s never just about the words, the action in the world. Voltaire once said, “I write in order to act.” Let me just remind people, this is an action in the world, but the outcome of that action, the impact in the world is different, not just according to the words, but according to who is speaking, who is the audience, what is the context, what is the intention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Me saying something to you in a bar in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is a completely different speech act, even if I use the same words as the president of the United States standing up and broadcasting this around the world repeatedly over and over again.

Just to take a trivial example, and that’s a problem, this exquisite contextual understanding of what’s happening when someone says something. We can navigate that in real life. We can navigate that face-to-face pretty well. We know when someone’s joking or when they’re saying something seriously, we know if we’re aligned in our understanding of what this conversation is about. When we’re not, that’s when miscommunication occurs. Online miscommunication is much easier than face-to-face. The larger the setting number of people involved, the greater the problems of miscommunication. But basically we know this is a matter of judgment on all sorts of levels. And the problem is laws are predicated pretty much on the opposite set of principles. That is to say consistency, transparency, everyone has the right to be treated the same. And if you think that for the same action, and if you think that the action is basically saying X, Y, Z, then it doesn’t seem right that people should be treated differently or that these other contextual elements should be brought into the frame.

And again, then you come into the problem that it becomes very subjective to judge exactly what’s happening, what the effects are. Anyway, so that’s the problem with laws, but it also points to the complication of the real issues, right? Free speech is a great noble ideal, but communication is really quite a complicated thing. And if we don’t attend to that, if we just push it all aside as American free speech jurisprudence increasingly does for the sake of simplicity, then we’re throwing out with the bath water, we’re throwing out also the baby, which is the fact that speech is an action and it’s an action that can cause harm. Now we need to take a minimalist approach to making laws. We need to take a maximalist approach to rights, but still there is something called truth. Sometimes the truth is very important. There are ways in which communication can cause harm.

We’ve known this throughout history, see it time and again. If we just ignore that completely, we’re opening up a whole set of different problems, which is where the absolutist doctrine leads us.

Michael Fox:

This is the thing for me that I find shocking, surprising, is that every time we’re talking about free speech or people are speaking about free speech, it’s as if this question of hate speech, truth, fake news, disinformation, intentional disinformation, particularly in the United States, it’s like this huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It’s just there and then people go, “Oh yeah, well there’s a…” And then we end up in this same cycle where then obviously, as you’ve mentioned, that’s the stuff that goes viral, right? It’s the lies, disinformation. This is why Brazil has really cracked down hard on that, particularly around the election time and why the United States is of course calling Supreme Court justice censorship judges and things like that. Where does fake news fit into this question of free speech or where should it fit into this question of free speech or how are some countries handling this vis-a-vis how the United States is handling in a different way?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So one of the problems with free speech and one of the reasons why we’re in such a mess today is that our approach to it is really way too simplistic. There’s a reason why, because everyone wants the rules to be simple and just to be about individual rights, but it’s not enough. And so one thing we might start by acknowledging is that free speech can be many different things. There are many different forms of free speech. For example, free speech for writers of fiction or artists or comedians is one thing, and free speech in the political sphere is another thing because for artists and comedians, the aim of their freedom of expression is to amuse people, to make them laugh or to enlighten them, to spin worlds that will blow their minds. But in doing so, the literal truth is actually not really that important.

The literal truth is something that you play with in art and comedy, and rightly so. So we need to think about what the free speech is for. Now, in the case of democratic discourse of citizens trying to deliberate around the public good and about politics more generally, truth is actually very important. And the foundation of our democratic discourse has always been that we deliberate in good faith and that we don’t spread lies and misinformation because that way we are going to end up with a corrupted public sphere. So there, if we’re talking about freedom of speech, we do need to have truth somewhere in our sights as part of the aim and the purpose of the speech. Now, already in the 19th century, people started to see, here’s another way in which our notions of free speech are too simplistic. They started to see that thinking about free speech just in terms of the rights of the individual on the one hand and the powers of the state and the government on the other hand was not sufficient.

Why is it not sufficient? Because if you’re thinking about the sphere of political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, if you like, then what also is very important and shapes that whole sphere is the power of the media, the power of the mass media, the power of the private media. And already in the 19th century and into the 20th century, people who thought about this in sophisticated ways, including in the United States, focused on that as a real problem because from early on, people could see that the incentives, the motives, the aims of the mass media, not primarily to educate the public or to advance truth, they are on the contrary to sell advertising and to increase the power and the wealth of their owners. So out of that comes a very powerful socialist and communist critique, but also conservative and across the political spectrum, people can see this as a problem.

And so if you fast forward to the 1930s and 40s, this is something that Roosevelt and the administrations and indeed the Supreme Court of that era are very highly focused on. If you read First Amendment jurisprudence of that era, it’s full of people saying, “Well, it’s completely insufficient to think of this in simplistic way of just about individuals versus government. The real problem of our age is how to tackle the power of the mass media.” And out of that comes an attempt to reconsider free speech as also a matter of the public good, and indeed as people conceptualize it at the time of the right to truthful information on the part of citizens. This is also, of course, a time where people everywhere are thinking about this against the backdrop of The 1930s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and they can see how powerful propaganda is and that vehicles of mass communication are not neutral.

They are instruments of power. Anyway, so out of that comes a jurisprudence, which feeds into, for example, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which after all an American document drawn up under Eleanor Roosevelt. If you look at that document’s definition of freedom of expression, it channels what is then the mainstream American and European view, which is on the one hand, freedom of expression is a right. On the other hand, it can never be abused to harm the rights of others. So it’s a balance between rights and responsibilities, and it includes the right to truthful information. And out of that also came a huge effort to impose on or remind the mass media of the age of their responsibilities. So out of that come ways of rethinking what mass media could be, public broadcasting, subscription models, all sorts of ways in which we might have a better alignment between the incentives of the media and the incentives and the needs of the public, but also journalism school, the professionalization, especially in America, and the taken seriously by news organizations of their responsibilities, fact checking, making sure that you’re not telling lies to the public and correcting things as necessary.

It’s hard. It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of effort, but people generally in what we now disdainfully call the legacy media were very heavily invested in that project because they saw what the stakes were. The stakes were a healthy public sphere with truthful information. I’m afraid what’s happened in the internet revolution and the communications revolution of our own time is that model has been destroyed by a new ecosystem where these things are simply not attended to at all. And we as a public have lost sight of the fact that we used always, including in the United States, to regulate mass media in the public interest for the public good for precisely this reason. That happened to broadcasting, it happened to television, the FCC was set up for that purpose. All markets, even in the United States are regulated. Again, this doesn’t mean by the government, precisely regulated at arm’s length by non-governmental organizations that are supposed to be nonpartisan or at the very least bipartisan, the FTC, the FCC.

All that is now under assault by right-wing authoritarians whose project is made easier by the fact that our public discourse is now being overwhelmed by greedy social media companies that take no account at all of the public good insofar as it contravenes their profits.

Michael Fox:

You mentioned as well this weaponization of the discourse of free speech. Everyone should have it, but then how it’s used over time is usually the powerful and eliminating free speech from folks that are marginalized or minorities. And I think we’re at this even hyper moment because social media has this image of appearing as though anyone can say whatever you want to, but you still have the algorithms. It’s controlled by some people and not by others. So how dangerous is this moment? And if you could just speak for a moment about this use, this weaponization of the discourse of free speech, either in the past or currently still.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, sadly, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan. It was a weaponized slogan at the outset in the early 18th century and that has never gone away. We see that today. I mean, the worst senses are often the people shouting most loudly that they ask for free speech. Trump is a great example of that. The moment that we’re in is really very dangerous political moment because of the ways in which social media. Social media is really an old-fashioned anachronistic term for the mass media of our age. It’s not social, it’s political discourse and every other kind of discourse.

The difficulty with that is really manifold. One is, as that nomenclature already indicates, we’ve now shifted to a moment where all discourse happens in the same medium, on the same level. So pictures of cats, jokes, serious political debate all happening in the same sewer, and that muddles the rules and how the audience understands what’s going on. And it makes it much easier for untruth to spread, for sloganeering to take over from fact-based, evidence-based argument. So that’s one intrinsic difficulty with the medium. But the deeper problem is that these social media companies to begin with had some sense of the public good and of moderation and of applying standards of truth, for example, and not allowing someone who’s just attempted a coup against the elected president of the United States as Trump tried to do and whipped up people on social media to attack the capital.

It seems a long time ago, but that could get you banned on de-platformed and rightly so. In the political moment that we are in now, of course, all of these companies are rolling all that back and hiding behind the slogan of free speech to moderate as little as possible because again, it’s politically inconvenient. It’s also expensive. They never put a huge amount of effort into it. They always try to get away with as little as possible. And finally, it plays into a political discourse which is increasingly dominated by populist rabble rousing. There’s an understanding that this is good politics on the part of right-wing politicians that chimes with good business model of just allowing anything to go. And at the heart of this, in terms of the technologies, as it were, of our mass communication now, first of all, these media companies, the online media companies are the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen, but they’re not treated as publishers.

No one thinks of them as publishers. Governments fail to think of them as publishers. We as citizens are no better. They are publishers. The reason that’s important is that it focuses on two things. First of all, that they are constantly censoring discourse. Their algorithms amplify certain voices and certain messages and they suppress and silence others. That’s what publishers do. They make judgements automatically or otherwise about what they want people to see. So in that sense, they are deeply influential on public discourse. They also, of course, when it suits them, don’t stand up for free speech. When they are issued with a take down notice by an unsavory overseas government, they obey the law. So what can they do? They say, “We’re just trying to obey the law.” I would feel slightly less contemptuous of them if they did sometimes stand up for what we would think of as real free speech in countries under unsavory regimes, but they don’t.

Michael Fox:

Or just the situation in the United States and students protesting at universities and university freedoms and things like that. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I wanted to touch very briefly on his marketplace of ideas because I feel like this is this mythic idea, this concept that people bring up again and again every place and how everyone uses this as the reason why free speech works in the United States. What’s your analysis of that today? What do people actually have to understand about this idea and what it means for us today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s a wonderful ideal and he’s a wonderfully readable writer of opinions, Holmes. One of the interesting things about Holmes that I discovered was that he was too high-minded to read newspapers. He didn’t really engage in the mass media of his age. And so he was able to take this Olympian view of the marketplace of ideas and how it might work. I think he also, to be fair to him, he wasn’t sure this would work out, but he was willing to let the experiment run out. It’s a noble American ideal. They’re always saying it’s an experiment. Oh, well, it’s slightly annoying to an outsider. Slavery, oh, it’s just an experiment. Oh, genocide of the unions. Oh, we’re just doing an experiment here. Anyway, back to your question, a marketplace of ideas is a fantastic ideal, but think about what it really means. It would mean that each of us is independently able to walk around a marketplace where all ideas are given equal weight and airing, that we are all equally reasonable in our approach, and that we’re equally able to judge truth against falsehood somehow intrinsically, and that we’re all doing so in good faith and that all the arguments being put to us are being put in good faith and in reasoned ways.

That’s absolutely the opposite. And we could go on. There are many other ways in which we could flesh out this as an ideal. It’s actually the opposite of the kind of shit-filled sewer of public discourse through which we have to wade every day with our very different levels of understanding of things, our very different perspectives and backgrounds and abilities to judge the truth. No one has an intrinsic ability to judge the truth. That’s a presumption that is there in many free speech doctrines, but it’s actually conclusively debunked by history and by science. What we require is attention to how as a society might create a better marketplace of ideas. And I’m afraid just throwing everything into the jumble of social media and allowing private companies basically to determine how they can best keep people hooked on their platforms is not the best way of creating, especially a political sphere of debate.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Would you say that there’s a battle today over the definition of free speech, the absolutism versus a more balanced approach or at least going back to what we understood, say free speech in the 1960s where people can get out and protest and now kind of a free for all of absolutism?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

I mean, free speech has always been about power, both in the theory and in practice. We see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power basically of American media companies.

And I think that the minimalist approach that the Europeans have taken to this is really an encouraging way forward. Again, it’s being faced by massive amounts of corporate and political opposition from the United States. It’s always in danger of being watered down. Nonetheless, what they have said and what the Brazilians are also trying to do is basically to ask these companies, it’s not censorship, it’s to ask these companies to be transparent upfront about their moderating practices. They are publishers, they’re constantly censoring. Tell us what the rules are, A, secondly, apply those rules consistently and fairly. Thirdly, show us the public that you are doing that consistently and fairly. Report back, commensurate with the power. The Europeans have this in their legislation. I don’t know if the Brazilians do, but proportionate to the power of your platform, you have a greater obligation because you have greater power, you have a greater obligation to report on how these rules are being followed.

And that’s not imposing any kind of censorship from the outside. It’s just asking them to be transparent about what they’re doing. I would go further as a citizen and require them to uphold standards of truth in political discourse and to do more about curbing misinformation and so on. But as a first step, we really do need to tackle the power in our societies. Americans are very bad at tackling corporate power of any kind. The First Amendment has always been weaponized by corporations and by people with money to claim that money equals speech and corporate power should never be limited. But even Americans, I hope, will see and try and do something about this big problem of our time.

Michael Fox:

Fara, last question is, could you just speak a little bit about what free speech meant for the abolitionist movement back in the 1800s?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Frederick Douglass once said, I think something like the Civil War would never have happened if American politicians had taken government had taken the First Amendment as seriously as it took the rights of states. And by that, he was alluding to the fact that abolitionists before the Civil War were routinely appealing to their right of freedom of expression to make their case. And they were met with violence both in the north and the south and by the presumption that what they were saying was completely beyond the pale was dangerous and harmful and couldn’t be allowed. It’s a good example of how our understanding of the First Amendment has evolved, our understanding of harm has evolved. When I say that harmful speech is something that societies should be allowed to take a view on and potentially to regulate public discourse about, I don’t mean that those things are set in stone and they’re always self-evident.

I mean that instead of shouting about censorship and free speech, we should be having a discussion about what is harmful and as a society trying to take a view on that and that view will evolve. So abolitionists are shut up violently and otherwise and out of that develop even stronger passionate view that they have a right to speak out. The same is true of early feminists who are told. Actually this comes out of the abolitionist movement. First American feminists are told when they are leading the campaign for abolition that they may not sit with men or address men on equal terms and out of that develop the view that actually there’s something wrong here. Their voices deserve to be heard. And so the early women’s movement starts not primarily as a campaign for the vote, but simply for the most basic right of all, which is to speak out and be heard by the public.

Michael Fox:

Fara, is the United States really such an outlier in the world in terms of its understanding, absolutist understanding of free speech?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s an outlier at the moment in the jurisprudence of free speech in the way that the laws are drawn up. I don’t think it’s an outlier in the sense that actually even absolutists or self-proclaimed absolutists are always drawing limits and balancing harms against rights. The Supreme Court does that all the time, even when it’s supposedly not. So in that sense, not. But I think the difficulty that United States has is that it has a very ancient constitution. It’s a bit like having a very ancient car. You can be proud of it, but it’s not necessarily roadworthy in the 21st century. And there are very few citizens’ rights in that. Indeed, even the First Amendment is not a right of citizens. It’s another big flaw that Americans tend to overlook. It’s only a prohibition on the government censoring anything. In the private sphere, people get sacked and fired all the time for expressing their views, political or otherwise.

So it’s not a right of citizens. But the fact that there are very few other rights in the Bill of Rights and in the Constitution and that this one happens to be named first, and because we all love free speech, of course, it’s given it this elevated popular kind of supremacy, which means it’s the ultimate legal Trump card. There’s nothing that can trump the First Amendment. So that’s why it’s especially been weaponized by anti-regulation corporate forces, by people who want more money in politics and all sorts of ways, because there’s no legal comeback against it. Once you can define something as free speech in an American courtroom, you’re home and dry. And that’s not necessarily the best way of balancing the right free speech, which is a great thing against other important rights and indeed the common good.

Michael Fox:

Fara, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been fantastic.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s great to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the first bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Marc Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s patreon.com/mfox. And as always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

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

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. 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’s 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 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s 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. 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 shadows of 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.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.

Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.

Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.

Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.

Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.

Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.

Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.

Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.

Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.

Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.

Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.

Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.

Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.

Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –

Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.

Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You

Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.

Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.

Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.

Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?

Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.

Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.

Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.

Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the

Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.

Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.

Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.

Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.

Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.

Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.

Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?

Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.

Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.

Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.

Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.

Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.

Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.

Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not

Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?

Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.

Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It

Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.

Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.

David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.

Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.

David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.

Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.

Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.

Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.

Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th

Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –

Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.

Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.

Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.

Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?

Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.

Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The

Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –

Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.

US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.

Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.

Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.

Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.

Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.

Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil

Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.

Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.

Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.

Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.

Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.

Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.

Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.

Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.

Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.

Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.

Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.

Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.

Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.

Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.

Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.

Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy

Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies

Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.

Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.

Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.

Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.

Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.

Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
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. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator:

Al-Shifa hospital is the largest medical complex in Gaza. Since October 7, it’s been repeatedly raided, occupied and targeted by Israeli forces. Over the course of the Genocide, hundreds were killed in and around the building and the hospital itself was completely destroyed.

In November 2023, under Israeli fire, 8 premature babies in incubators were hurriedly evacuated to Egypt. Joud was one of those babies.

Fatima Dakkeh:

I gave birth to my son, Joud, in July. Joud needed neonatal care at Al-Shifa Hospital. We placed him in the neonatal unit, but then the war started and Joud was there in the hospital. We couldn’t get in touch with Joud because of the shelling and the war.

Narrator:

Fatima Dakkeh and her son Joud have been unable to have a regular mother-son relationship. Joud was born in Gaza just a few months before October 7th 2023 and so, their story has been shaped by war, displacement and separation. Shaped that is, by Israel’s war on Gaza.

Fatima Dakkeh:

When we tried to get to the hospital to get Joud, we weren’t able to get to him and take him out, because of the situation—things had gotten really bad. There was a lot of shelling and there were airstrikes and quadcopters. We planned to go back another day to get Joud, once the situation calms down. But the situation just kept getting worse. The Israelis entered Al-Shifa Hospital and occupied it— that was the first invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, and my son was inside.

About a year later, I found out my son was in Egypt. I mean, I didn’t give up; I kept going to hospitals, I went to the Red Cross and places like that to search for news about my son, no one could help me. I went to a doctor I know. I told him my story, he said, “I’ll try to get in touch with your son and see where he is.” Thank God, he was the one who discovered my son was in Egypt. After a few days, they sent us pictures of my son, and we found out he was OK. Thank God. They knew he was our son through my name—they had my name on file. We started communicating with him more through my sister-in-law—my sister-in-law in Egypt. We told her the story, and of course she didn’t hesitate; she visited him in hospital, sent us pictures and reassured us about him, thank God.

Honestly, I was happy and upset at the same time because my son was in Egypt, if he would have been here in Gaza he would have suffered a lot. We were starved, even nappies were cut off. Most children were using scraps of cloth as nappies. And milk too, was cut off—we had no milk at all in northern Gaza. I said to myself thank God my son is in a better place than Gaza. But at the same time, I was upset that my son was far from me. I would see mothers playing with their kids, dressing them, carrying them—and I would feel these feelings. I would miss my son. I wished my son was with me. At the same time, I’d look at my situation—how we’re living, in tents, in all this difficulty. I’d say to myself, hopefully he will return to us in a better situation, there will be a ceasefire and we will make up for the days we lost.

I had lost hope that he would return. With the crossing closed and the Israelis were not letting people return. When they first told us he was returning, I was shocked. My husband and I both. We were surprised—how could he come back just like that, overnight? He’s just going to come back, all of a sudden, after we’d lost hope all these years. I was overjoyed with the news that I would see my son again, it was the best news. When we went to the hospital to collect him, it took a really long time for them to bring him to us—many hours. With each passing hour, I would get more and more excited: about seeing him and about how I would greet him. I mean it was really hard, but at the same time, the moment when I saw him was really beautiful.

Yeh, honestly, when I first saw my son, he wouldn’t come to me; he’d cry and avoid me. He would go to his dad before me. he didn’t want to come to me, so I was afraid that he’d stay that way uncomfortable around us And afraid of living with us, and afraid of the situation we’re in— that he wouldn’t accept us Thank God, little by little, he started to accept us.

Narrator:

According to estimates by the International Rescue Committee, 20,000 children are still living separated from their parents in Gaza. Fatima was reunited with Joud and though their separation which lasted 2 years and 8 months impacted both mother and child, they are now reunited. As for the thousands of other survivors in Gaza, for many there will be no reunion.

The campaigns are underway ahead of Brazil’s October elections

And U.S. President Donald Trump is doing his best to sway the vote…

“Lula, Lula!”

Thousands of supporters of leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended his campaign launch in mid August.

Karen Silva

“We came to support Lula, especially in his last election. And we believe that we are going to win. This is a fact.”

They filled May 1st Stadium in Sao Bernardo do Campo….

A place, where Lula led an iconic metal workers strike and rally in 1979.

They say Lula has changed their lives. 

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Yeah, he changed my life. He changed the life of my whole family.”

During his years in office, he promoted education, health and social programs. He helped to lift millions from poverty. They have not forgotten.

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Wow, this is the greatest joy of my life. I’m 76 years old. I’m so happy. Lula is coming to stay. He’s an incredible person. He’s helped a lot of people there in the northeast. We owe a lot to Lula.”

They want him back for a fourth and final term.

Valmir Lima, Movement of People Affected by Dams

“Lula will win with the strength of social movements, of the movements of people affected by dams, all the social movements that are helping on his campaign. And all of civil society.”

Applause

Lula has promised to continue to fight poverty, promote industry, create jobs and invest in Brazil’s future.

Lula

“What kind of a future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in education? What future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in health? What future do you want if you don’t invest in jobs?” 

Lula

“We need to win these elections. To elect our people to congress so we can do everything we need to do for this country.”

Lula’s challenger is the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. 

His name is Flavio Bolsonaro. He’s a Senator and he launched his campaign in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

Flavio Bolsonaro 

“Come with me and rescue our nation. Brazil above all. God above everyone. Brazil above all. God above everyone!”

Flavio is in the race, because his father is under house arrest. 

Former president Jair Bolsonaro was first barred from running for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, he was convicted of attempting to carry out a coup to return to power.

His son, Flavio, has attacked the left, and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States

He spoke at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

Flavio 

“Let me look you in the eyes and tell you,“we will win.”

Much of his discourse, and that of his supporters, is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.

“You are the son of hope. You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father. And now, for everything that is more sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. Honor his days on earth.”

That goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and far-right politicians in Brazil.

Glayson Araujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of São Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.

Glayson Araujo

“I believe that Flavio Bolsonaro is the only viable candidate, who can beat Lula and the Workers Party.”

Glayson Araujo

“I am a Christian here, I behave as a Christian, but I am also a political activist. Here on the streets to defend my beliefs.”

Flavio Bolsonaro also has powerful support in high places.

In particular… from Donald Trump.

The U.S. president is a longtime ally of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. 

Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, in part, because of the country’s trial against the former president. In May, Trump met with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House. In June, he reposted an article over Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. He recently imposed new tariffs on the country and revoked the U.S. visa of the Brazilian ambassador.

Igor Fuser is a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University.

Igor Fuser

“This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers Party or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States. And Brazil, being the largest country in Latin America, is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western Hemisphere.”

Over the last year, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America the likes of which the region has not seen in decades.

Boat strikes in the Caribbean. The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro. The oil blockade on Cuba.

And Trump throwing his weight around… and meddling in elections across Latin America.

It is all justified by a renewed Monroe Doctrine…

Pete Hegseth

”President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine. And the War Department is implementing it as fast as we can.”

Brazil is the latest battleground.

Igor Fuser

“So, it is clear that the United States is doing everything, and will do everything possible to prevent the re-election of Lula in the next elections.”

Fuser says that if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.

Igor Fuser

“Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony, or almost a colony, of the United States, as it already happens with Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries.”

Fuser says the U.S. stated dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968.

Igor Fuser 

“So, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all those countries were formally independent countries, with their own government, their own laws, their representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous, they did not have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed. Some of them were invaded, etc. So, we are living in Latin America a Brezhnev Doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump.”

Lula has accused Trump of trying to influence Brazil’s October election. Lula’s allies are taking action ahead of the vote…. to stand up to Trump and to push for Lula’s reelection. Brazil has denied visas to U.S. State Department officials who they feared wanted to travel to Brazil to cast doubt about the country’s electoral system. People are hitting the streets to campaign for Lula, who has long stood against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Over the next two months, Brazil will be a key battleground for Latin American sovereignty against Trump’s attack on the region. 

For The Real News, I’m Michael Fox. Sao Paulo, Brazil.