Latin America Today

A year after the arrest of Salvadoran human rights lawyer and anti-corruption advocate Ruth Eleonora López Alfaro, WOLA's Latin America Today podcast revisits her case and the broader situation unfolding in El Salvador.

Ruth López, who worked with the human rights organization Cristosal, was arrested on May 18, 2025, when police entered her home late at night. Since then, she has been held in detention under conditions that rights groups say reflect the growing erosion of due process and civil liberties under President Nayib Bukele's government.

In this episode, WOLA's Corie Welch speaks with Luis Benavides, Ruth López's husband, and Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, about Ruth's detention, the climate of fear in El Salvador, and the increasing use of political imprisonment against critics and human rights defenders.

Luis recounts the night Ruth was arrested and the uncertainty that followed as authorities moved her between detention facilities while withholding information from her family and legal team. Noah discusses how Cristosal's investigations into corruption and human rights abuses made the organization — and Ruth herself — targets of the government's escalating repression.

The conversation also examines El Salvador's prolonged state of exception, which has led to the mass incarceration of 90,000 people since 2022. While the government has framed the emergency measures as necessary to combat gang violence, rights organizations have documented widespread abuses, including arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and severe restrictions on due process.

Together, they reflect on what Ruth's case reveals about political imprisonment in El Salvador, the growing risks facing journalists and civil society organizations, and the importance of international solidarity.

Luis Benavides is the husband of Ruth López and has become a public advocate for her release and right to a fair and public trial.

Noah Bullock is the Executive Director of Cristosal, a leading human rights organization that was forced to relocate operations from El Salvador to Guatemala amid increasing repression.

• Read more about WOLA's work on El Salvador
• Learn more about Cristosal's documentation of human rights abuses

This episode marks the 50th anniversary of Operation Condor's assassination program, codenamed "Teseo" (Theseus). Condor was the coordinated campaign of state-sponsored terror carried out by U.S.-backed military dictatorships in South America during the 1970s and early 1980s. Our guest is Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba and Chile documentation projects at the National Security Archive, who has spent decades uncovering declassified documents and accounts about this dark chapter.

Kornbluh explains that Operation Condor was a transnational collaboration among the secret police forces of Southern Cone military regimes to share intelligence, track, kidnap, and assassinate their political opponents across borders and even around the world. The operation was formally established in November 1975, with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's secret police chief Manuel Contreras serving as the principal organizer.

A particularly sinister component was Project Teseo, the assassination program established at a second meeting in Santiago in May 1976. Kornbluh describes declassified documents revealing the bureaucratic nature of this killing apparatus: monthly dues, membership fees, and detailed protocols for locating targets, carrying out assassinations, and escaping afterward.

The most notorious Condor operation occurred on September 21, 1976, when a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier, Chile's former foreign minister under Salvador Allende, and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C.'s Sheridan Circle—the worst act of foreign terrorism in Washington until September 11, 2001.

Kornbluh details the complicated U.S. role in these events. The CIA helped create and train intelligence services like Chile's DINA. However, agency officials grew concerned about Condor's blowback potential. Nonetheless, Ford administration officials, particularly Henry Kissinger, pulled back diplomatic efforts that might have prevented the Letelier-Moffitt attack.

The conversation traces how accountability eventually came—partially. The Carter administration's response was "demonstrably weak," undermined by bureaucracies protecting their relationships with Southern Cone security forces. Under Reagan, Pinochet initially served as an ally in Central American counterinsurgency, though some distancing came later.

Kornbluh reflects on how this history was uncovered through FOIA requests, congressional investigations, and special declassifications ordered under Clinton and later Obama. The Teseo documents only emerged in 2018—more than forty years after the program's creation.

The episode concludes with sobering parallels to today: Daniel Ortega's regime sending assassins to kill opponents, Venezuelan agents murdering a military officer in Chile, and the current U.S. administration's killings on the high seas. Kornbluh expresses hope that those committing current human rights atrocities will eventually face accountability, just as Contreras spent his final years in prison and Pinochet faced arrest in London and Santiago.

This episode examines the aftermath of Peru's first-round presidential election held on April 12, 2025, recorded just five days later with results still not fully finalized. Host Adam Isacson speaks with Cynthia McClintock, a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University who has studied Peruvian politics for over four decades.

The conversation describes an extraordinarily fragmented and polarized electoral landscape. With 35 candidates on the ballot, the leading vote-getter—Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori—led the count with only about 17 percent of the vote. The race for second place remained too close to call between Roberto Sánchez, a leftist candidate running under the mantle of impeached former president Pedro Castillo, and Rafael López Aliaga, a right-wing populist who served as mayor of Lima. The runoff, between candidates who will combine for less than 30 percent of the first-round vote, is scheduled for June 7th.

McClintock traces Peru's current political dysfunction to the period following the 2016 election, during which Fujimori's party discovered the power of congressional impeachment. Peru has cycled through nine presidents in ten years, and McClintock argues that a corrupt governing coalition has consolidated power, particularly since Castillo's impeachment in December 2022.

The discussion highlights the deep geographic and cultural divisions in Peruvian society. The gap between Lima and "las provincias"—Indigenous-majority rural and mountainous regions—manifests starkly in voting patterns. This division traces back centuries and reflects ongoing perceptions of discrimination and exclusion, even as economic indicators have improved.

Organized crime and security are voters' primary concerns. While Peru's homicide rate remains low by regional standards, it has more than doubled since 2021-2022. Extortion has become particularly urgent. Yet paradoxically, Peru's economy continues to grow, buoyed by high commodity prices for copper and gold, though much mining activity is illegal and environmentally devastating.

McClintock expresses concern about the future of accountability and democratic institutions. The newly reconstituted Senate grants Fujimori's party approximately one-third of seats, with significant power over appointments. On U.S.-Peru relations, she notes the current government has stayed under Washington's radar and is proceeding with a $3.5 billion F-16 purchase, though the Chinese-built Chancay port remains a potential point of tension.

The episode concludes with McClintock explaining how the chaotic 35-candidate field happened by design: Fujimori's party had previously canceled a primary voting provision that would have winnowed the field, calculating that extreme fragmentation would allow them to win with a small plurality. Despite the grim political outlook, McClintock emphasizes the resilience of Peru and its people.

Download this podcast episode's .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA's Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

This episode examines the systematic dismantling of asylum protections in the United States under the Trump administration. Our guests are two attorney-advocates: Heather Hogan, Policy and Practice Counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), and Peter Habib, Staff Attorney at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS).

Hogan and Habib emphasize that the United States has legal obligations under the 1980 Refugee Act and international agreements stemming from World War II—commitments that other nations have historically looked to America to model.

Barriers the Trump administration has erected against asylum seekers include a January 2025 proclamation suspending asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, courthouse arrests of immigrants appearing for their hearings, expanded mandatory detention policies, and a stacked Board of Immigration Appeals issuing precedential decisions that narrow eligibility grounds. Hogan and Habib note that the administration has targeted the "particular social group" ground for asylum, which is commonly used by applicants from Latin America fleeing gang violence, domestic abuse, and cartel persecution.

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on "pretermissions"—a mechanism by which immigration judges can deny asylum claims and order removal without allowing applicants to present their cases. Judges have been terminating cases based on minor omissions in lengthy, complex applications, or citing the existence of so-called Asylum Cooperative Agreements with countries including Honduras, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Uganda. These agreements purport to allow the U.S. to send asylum seekers to third countries to apply for protection there, despite those nations having extremely limited asylum systems and significant human rights and security challenges.

The guests report that over 11,000 ACA-based removal orders were issued between November 2024 and January 2025, far exceeding any realistic capacity these countries have to process asylum claims. While the administration has paused some ACA-based pretermissions, thousands of people remain in legal limbo, facing prolonged detention, loss of work permits, or pressure to abandon their claims entirely.

Both Hogan and Habib stress that what is occurring constitutes refoulement—the prohibited practice of returning people to places where they face persecution. They outline potential reforms: routing all asylum cases through asylum officers first, expanding legal pathways for protection, restoring the refugee program, and providing legal representation to indigent asylum seekers. Habib emphasizes that the fundamental problem has been decades of bipartisan investment in punitive deterrence rather than building a fair, efficient system centered on human rights and due process.

Resources mentioned in the conversation include AILA's "Better Way on Immigration" series of policy briefs, with a recent brief focused on reforming the asylum system. The "Third Country Deportation Watch" website is managed by Human Rights First and Refugees International.

Por el Mes de la Mujer, estamos lanzando un episodio especial de Latin America Today con una conversación con Collette Spinetti — activista trans uruguaya, profesora de literatura y la primera mujer trans en ocupar un puesto de secretaria de Estado en Uruguay.

En este episodio, Collette conversa con Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, Presidenta de WOLA, sobre lo que significa romper barreras históricas como mujer trans en un cargo público, el avance global de los movimientos antiderechos y su trabajo en Uruguay para avanzar en la igualdad en un mundo cada vez más desigual.

Sobre Colette Spinetti

Collette Spinetti es activista trans uruguaya, profesora de literatura y una figura pionera en la vida pública de América Latina. Fue la primera profesora trans del Uruguay y actualmente es la primera mujer trans en ocupar un cargo de Secretaría de Estado, como Secretaria de Derechos Humanos bajo la presidencia de Yamandú Orsi. Defensora de larga trayectoria de los derechos LGBTQ+, de las mujeres y de las personas privadas de libertad, en su carrera ha liderado organizaciones trans en Uruguay, incluidas la Unión Trans del Uruguay y el Colectivo Trans del Uruguay, y fue electa presidenta del Comité Directivo Trans de ILGA Mundo. También es secretaria general de Corpora en Libertad, una red internacional de organizaciones que trabajan con personas LGBTI+ privadas de su libertad.

En este episodio:

• El avance de los movimientos antiderechos en América Latina y el mundo — y por qué Colette considera que el miedo del patriarcado a perder su poder está en la raíz de este fenómeno

• La importancia de unir los movimientos sociales — feminista, trans, afrodescendiente y sindical — en torno a objetivos comunes sin perder su especificidad

• El trabajo en la Secretaría de Derechos Humanos y la lucha dentro de Uruguay por continuar invirtiendo en programas y políticas que promuevan la igualdad, desde la educación hasta los derechos laborales.

• Lo que significa gobernar desde un enfoque de derechos humanos — y la discriminación que Colette sigue enfrentando, incluso desde un alto cargo

For Women's Month, we're releasing a special episode of Latin America Today featuring a conversation with Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez — a Mexican human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience working on enforced disappearances, femicides, migrants' rights, and women's rights across Mexico and Central America.

In this episode, Ana Lorena speaks with WOLA's Corie Welch about what the crisis of enforced disappearances looks like today, the outsized role women have played in confronting it, and what enforced disappearances in the context of U.S. immigration enforcement tells us about the state of democracy and rule of law.

About Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez

Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez is a Mexican human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience working on enforced disappearances, femicides, and the rights of women and migrants across Mexico and Central America. She is the founder and former Executive Director of the Foundation for Justice and Democratic Rule of Law, a regional NGO working in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where she has helped shape landmark legislation and build forensic and search mechanisms for disappeared migrants. She has litigated historic cases before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, including serving as an expert witness in the Cotton Field case — one of the most significant rulings on femicide in the hemisphere. She currently serves as a member of the United Nations Expert Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

In this episode:

• The context of enforced disappearances in the region — who is disappearing, who is responsible, and what impunity looks like on the ground

• How women across borders are supporting each other in the search for their loved ones

• The link between femicide and disappearances, and lessons from the landmark Cotton Field case

• Enforced disappearances in the context of U.S. immigration enforcement

This episode assesses the "transition"—if that is the correct word—in Venezuela nine weeks after the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted Nicolás Maduro. This conversation with Laura Dib, director of WOLA's Venezuela program, and Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, focus particularly on the role of oil, the country's largest source of foreign exchange by far.

Dr. Monaldi acknowledges that oil revenues have increased significantly. However, these revenues now flow into a U.S.-controlled account. The lack of transparency around this fund—including unknown balances and unclear disbursement rules—is deeply concerning.

Dib emphasizes that ordinary Venezuelans have yet to feel material improvements. Over 12.4 million out of perhaps 29 million Venezuelans facing severe humanitarian needs, and "when Venezuelans go to a supermarket right now, they don't really feel a change." While more than 600 political prisoners have been released since January, over 700 remain detained, and the repressive apparatus that sustained Maduro's government remains largely intact under Delcy Rodriguez's control.

Dr. Monaldi explains that Venezuela needs approximately $100 billion in oil sector investment to restore production to levels seen twenty years ago. Yet the recent reform of Venezuela's hydrocarbons law grants the oil minister enormous discretion over tax rates and contract allocation, creating precisely the kind of uncertainty that deters serious investment.

Monaldi and Dib note that Venezuela currently lacks even a published national budget, and its ranking as the third most corrupt country on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index reflects the dismantlement of democratic institutions. Dr. Monaldi draws a parallel to post-Soviet Russia, warning that how oil contracts are allocated in the coming months could determine the country's trajectory for decades—either creating a transparent system or enriching a new class of oligarchs.

Both guests stress that sustainable economic recovery is impossible without meaningful progress toward the rule of law. "Oil companies do not care about democracy... they do focus on the rule of law. And in the case of Venezuela, I don't think we will see any stable rule of law unless we get a transition to democracy," Dr. Monaldi says.

With their current leverage, oil firms should push for democratic reforms as a condition of investment, Dib suggests. She calls on the U.S. Congress to exercise oversight and notes that the administration's stated goals—regional security and reducing migration—cannot be achieved without addressing the humanitarian emergency and rebuilding institutions.

Both guests express concern that the Trump administration appears focused narrowly on oil production rather than the broader institutional reforms necessary for Venezuela's long-term stability. " I don't see any indication that a system is being built for this to happen in the proper way," Monaldi warns. Expectations are rising in Venezuela, but they will not be met without transparency, accountability, democracy, and the rule of law.

This episode features Mark Ungar, a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. Ungar has written extensively on the rule of law, policing, and human rights in Latin America, and more recently has focused his research on environmental organized crime across the Amazon basin.

Ungar notes that environmental organized crime—illegal gold mining, logging, cattle ranching, and land grabbing—has become the third largest criminal enterprise globally and is now deeply intertwined with narcotrafficking operations. Rather than existing as separate phenomena, these activities share infrastructure, routes, and personnel.

Criminal networks carrying out environmental organized crime are deeply intertwined with state actors and the legal economy. The nexus involves governors, military officials, environmental ministry personnel, and municipal authorities at multiple levels. Even when good laws exist, implementation remains weak because investigations rarely lead to prosecutions of major figures.

The episode turns to Venezuela's Orinoco Mining Arc, a zone covering roughly 12 percent of national territory that then-president Nicolás Maduro established in 2016. Ungar describes it as a "criminal state project" in which the Maduro government effectively legalized destructive extraction in a geologically unique and biodiverse area that includes nature reserves and indigenous territories. The zone is controlled by a confluence of Venezuelan military officials, Colombian armed groups including the ELN and FARC dissidents, Brazilian garimpeiros, and local criminal organizations called sindicatos and pranes. Violence is extreme, and environmental and health consequences are devastating, with ninety percent of pregnant women and schoolchildren showing elevated mercury levels in their blood.

Ungar explains how the gold and minerals extracted from this area enter legitimate international markets. Between 2016 and 2021, the Mining Arc generated approximately $2.2 billion in gold revenue, but an estimated 86 percent was mined illegally, and roughly 70 percent was smuggled through shell companies and opaque supply chains. The zone also contains big deposits of coltan, iron, bauxite, and other sought-after minerals.

Ungar shares concern about the Trump administration's current approach to Venezuela. While the administration has focused on oil access, counternarcotics, migration, and excluding Chinese influence, there appears to be no priority given to addressing environmental organized crime. Ungar suggests that Washington's willingness to work with the current Venezuelan government—the Maduro regime minus Maduro himself—likely means business as usual for state-sponsored extraction intertwined with organized crime. Consumer countries must stop looking the other way about the origins of products that end up in legitimate commerce.

This episode is a conversation with John Walsh, WOLA's director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the ongoing U.S. military attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans. When Walsh and host Adam Isacson recorded this episode, on February 13, 2026, 35 attacks had killed at least 131 people since September 2, 2025—an average of four killings every five days—and another attack later that day killed 3 more people.

Walsh and Isacson just published a WOLA commentary, "The Boat Strikes are Still Happening: Five Things You Need to Know," warning against the dangerous normalization of extrajudicial executions carried out directly by the U.S. military.

Five months into this campaign, the strikes are fading from public attention despite their illegality. Media coverage has dwindled from the intense scrutiny of September and the revelations about "double tap" strikes on survivors in December to a trickle of stories. This normalization poses dangers: the justifications being used could extend to other victims in other contexts, and elements of the U.S. military appear to be accepting unlawful orders.

There is no congressional authorization for military force against drug traffickers. Under international law, the United States is not engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels—designating groups as foreign terrorist organizations does not confer wartime authorities.

From a drug policy perspective, Walsh argues these strikes are futile. After five months, there is no evidence of a disruption to cocaine supplies. Drug trafficking organizations are highly adaptive, with alternative routes readily available. The administration's own recognition that traditional interdiction didn't work led them to this extreme escalation, but killing traffickers at sea will not fundamentally alter market dynamics driven by constant demand and enormous profits under prohibition.

The boat strikes, if "normalized," could prepare the ground for grave future outcomes. The administration's willingness to label anonymous victims as "narcoterrorists" creates a template for applying similar labels to domestic opponents—something already visible in the characterization of ICE critics and the victims of Chicago and Minneapolis shootings as "domestic terrorists." Walsh notes that President Trump has expressed his desire to deploy military forces against "the enemy within" on U.S. streets, and the compliance of Southern Command with these illegal orders suggests obedience to the president over the Constitution. "The illegality is not a bug, it's a feature," Walsh concludes.

Walsh concludes by emphasizing the importance of litigation on behalf of victims' families, the moral voice of faith leaders, and continued media attention to prevent normalization. These strikes, he argues, are not a peripheral story but central to the administration's declared strategy of dominating the Western Hemisphere through coercion.

Following the Trump administration's January 3, 2026 military operation in Venezuela and its lethal strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs, its threats of unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexico and Colombia have taken on new urgency.

WOLA's Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli and Stephanie Brewer join Adam Isacson to examine what such actions would mean for two of Washington's most important partners in the hemisphere.

The conversation opens with a sobering parallel: days before recording, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in what appears to be another grossly unjustified use of lethal force. Both guests draw on their countries' painful experiences with security force violence to illuminate patterns now emerging in the United States: the demonization and victim-blaming, the battle over evidence and documentation, and the long struggle for accountability.

The episode then turns to the mounting threats of U.S. military intervention. Trump has floated drone strikes and Special Forces operations in Mexico since his first term; now, after Venezuela, he has spoken of "hitting cartels on land." President Claudia Sheinbaum has drawn an absolute red line on sovereignty while simultaneously making unprecedented concessions. The fear, Brewer notes, is that the threat of unilateral action could coerce Mexico into accepting operations before or after the fact.

In Colombia, the relationship has deteriorated dramatically. Once the strongest bipartisan partnership in the region, it has been battered by aid cuts that gutted programs built on decades of hard-won lessons and by counter-drug sanctiones aimed at President Gustavo Petro. A February 3, 2026 White House meeting between Trump and Petro now carries enormous stakes. Both governments need each other—on counter-drug cooperation, on managing Venezuelan migration, on regional stability—but both leaders are volatile and prone to escalation.

The guests close with a clear-eyed assessment: militarized tactics against drug trafficking have failed for 40 years. Killing kingpins, striking labs, and adding groups to terrorist lists have never ended the drug trade. What actually works is building capable civilian justice institutions, reducing impunity, addressing corruption, and investing in the social and economic conditions that make organized crime attractive in the first place. A unilateral U.S. strike wouldn't end drug trafficking—but it could destroy the cooperation that any realistic strategy requires.