Pirate Wire Radio

The US Drug Enforcement Agency leaked ongoing investigations into Colombian President Gustavo Petro to the press this week alleging ties to drug trafficking in the country.

The accusations come two months before Presidential elections in Colombia, and from an administration that has routinely lied about narco-trafficking in Latin America to further its foreign policy goals.

We speak with Adriaan Alsema, executive editor of Colombia Reports about what the allegations mean moving forward, claims by Petro’s party that the leaks amount to election interference, and the context of Trump’s “War on Drugs as Foreign Policy” more broadly in the region.

In short, some elements of the accusations simply don’t add up, and others are presented without proof.

Learn more in this week’s podcast at Pirate Wire Radio!

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and huge corporations, and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media. PWS will never fear criticizing power.

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Hasta pronto, piratas!

As the United States grapples with a surge of authoritarianism under Donald Trump, much of Europe is putting up new barriers to migrants. The two issues, xenophobia and rising autocracy, are deeply related.

Our modern border system of cages and walls is deadly by design, and it empower autocrats who would crack down on civil society globally.

“Open Borders” advocates are often dismissed as idealistic, but Max Granger, a writer, translator and migration activist, argues that the current system in the US, built over decades by both political parties, led us precisely to where we are.

“It’s the people who think these power structures can be reformed who are being naive,” he told Pirate Wire Radio.

We talk about the rise of neo-fascism in the US, how we built a modern hyper militarized and securitized border system, migrants who cross continents, and what solutions might look like moving forward.

Give it a listen!

And you can check out Max’s Substack, the Writing on the Wall, here.

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and huge corporations, and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media. PWS will never fear criticizing power

You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.

And if you can’t do any of that, please do help us by sharing the piece! We don’t have billionaire PR teams either.

Hasta pronto, piratas!

With US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, saying the US will resume attacks on Venezuela if the government doesn’t cooperate with US security concerns. Chief among those concerns are Colombian armed groups who smuggle cocaine into Venezuela.

To really dig into the data about exactly how that works, and what ongoing conflict in the borderlands might look like with US involvement, we sat down with Adriaan Alsema from Colombia Reports.

It’s everything you wanted to know about every armed group on the frontier, and exactly how the cocaine trade works. We also talk about a few things you wish you’d never learned.

We understand that keeping all the armed groups straight can be confusing. Here is a handy guide to the acronyms!

* AGC: “Clan del Golfo”

* ACSN: The Conquistador Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra Nevadas: a paramilitary group that operates primary near the Atlantic coast. Also called “the Pachenkos”

* ELN: The National Liberation Army

* Frente Comunes del Sur: a former ELN group that splintered off to engage in negotiations with the Colombian government. They are in the process of disarming

* Segunda Marquetalia, EMC, and EMFB: Three distinct FARC dissident groups that all maintain a presence in the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and huge corporations, and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media. PWS will never fear criticizing power

You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.

And if you can’t do any of that, please do help us by sharing the piece! We don’t have billionaire PR teams either.

Hasta pronto, piratas!

The Pirate Wire Radio podcast series is usually for paid subscribers, but this week we’re making it available for all! Please consider taking out a paid subscription and support indie journalism. We have plans that start at just $5/month

We sat down with two old friends and Latin America experts to talk about Trump’s drug war in the Caribbean. We talk about false claims, opaque processes, the ‘War on Drugs’, and the US State Department blowing up fishermen.

With Adriaan Alselma, from Colombia Reports, and Richard McColl, from Colombia Calling. With recent US bombings of fast boats moving to the Pacific, pressure on Venezuela has dropped, at least for the moment.

But the Trump expansion of executive power under the guise of the wars on drugs and terror continues unabated. It may currently be the deadliest show on earth.

Check it out on Pirate Wire Radio!

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and huge corporations, and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media. PWS will never fear criticizing power

You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.

And if you can’t do any of that, please do help us by sharing the piece! We don’t have billionaire PR teams either.

Paid subscribers get early access to the Pirate Wire Radio podcast series! This episode will become available to all subscribers in five days.

Bolivia’s left-wing indigenous-led party, MAS, has governed Bolivia for almost two decades. However, infighting between former President Evo Morales and current President Arce, as well as mismanagement and economic crisis, have destroyed any chance of a leftist candidate winning the presidential elections on August 17.

More than just a lost office, however, MAS may well lose its ability to present candidates in future parliamentary elections. If they can’t register 5% of the vote in August, they lose party ratification under Bolivian law.

Their current candidate is averaging just slightly less than 1% in polls.

We talk with anthropologist and researcher, Jordan Cooper, about his time among Aymara communities in the country, how these fissures happened, and how Evo Morales went from one of the most respected and popular figures in the country to one of the most reviled.

You can find Jordan on Twitter, or see his work as a contributing editor at Negation Magazine.

Paid subscribers get early access to the Pirate Wire Radio podcast series! This episode will become available to all subscribers in five days.

In this episode of Pirate Wire Radio, we speak with Mat Youkee, a journalist in Panama City, and a regular contributor at the Guardian and the Economist, about massive protests in Panama.

He describes the reasons behind growing anti-U.S and anti-Trump sentiment in the country, as well as breaks down the complex and myriad reasons that have kept thousands in the streets for months in protests that have at times clashed with police.

Meanwhile, authorities have declared a state of emergency and begun crackdowns in the regions where protests have been fiercest.

We get into all the details, as well the role of U.S. fruit company Chiquita!

You can find Mat’s Substack, the Sulaco Times, here.

Paid subscribers get early access to the Pirate Wire Radio podcast series! This episode will become available to all subscribers in five days.

Mass deportation programs in the United States have dominated international media headlines, but all the while a much smaller country in the Americas has been reaching much higher numbers than the Trump administration.

The Dominican Republic, a country 30 times smaller than the U.S., deported more than a quarter of a million migrants, mostly Haitians, in 2024. And with a new quota of 10,000 deportations a week in 2025, the crackdowns are only getting more brutal.

Interestingly enough, Venezuelans remain welcome in the D.R., suggesting that racism plays a stong role in nativist dynamics. PWS spoke this week with Simón Rodriguez, a freelance journalist in the Dominican Republic about the most brutal migrant crackdown in the western hemisphere— and the rise of ultra-right anti-migrant vigilante groups who adopt neo-nazi and fascist rhetoric in the country.

Many critics describe the system as “an Apartheid system in the Caribbean.”

You can find Simón’s substack here.

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and huge corporations, and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media

You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.

The attack on Colombia’s Palace of Justice resulted in one of the country’s most famous massacres. For decades, the public largely believed government claims that it was M-19 Guerillas who killed hostages and nearly half of the Supreme Court.

But new evidence and testimony have come to light that it was actually military intelligence who murdered the majority of both, even torturing some as part of special interrogations, then placing their bodies back in the burnt palace.

As the country’s Truth Commissions uncover more details, a new witness has come forth to support the allegations. Gustavo Petro, who was once a member of M-19, has asked the US State Department to declassify its records about the iconic event.

But perhaps most troubling of all, the episode is a powerful example of the “Dirty War”, then fought across Latin America, and supported by US policy, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

PWS, with Adriann Alsema, from Colombia Reports, breaks it all down in this week’s feature story. It’s one of those pieces where the story is just too big for a written feature. It merits an entire podcast.

PWS has edited the original conversation for brevity and story-telling purposes. But if you want to hear the entire conversation, you can do so at Colombia Reports, where it will be published in the coming days.

As media is increasingly bought up by billionaires and the world veers towards authoritarianism, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support independent media

This week’s news feature is a preview of our upcoming podcast season with Adriaan Alsema from Colombia Reports.

Colombian police intelligence likely purchased Israeli software Pegasus during the country’s national strike in 2021, during which police killed over 60 protesters.

The sale was never declared in Colombia, and although the NSO Group, who created Pegasus, broke no laws in Israel, they defied Colombian law by accepting a $13 million payment from an unknown party in the country’s police ranks.

Since the news broke, a software salesman and Israeli citizen from a company associated with the NSO Group was found dead in Medellin in a presumed homicide.

Making matters worse, no one in Colombia even knows who has the weapons-grade spyware, who used it, or where it ended up.

As multiple investigations proceed, they do so in the context of worsening relations between Israel, and leftist President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, who has sharply criticized Israeli actions in their ongoing war in Gaza.

Israel and Colombia dissolved all diplomatic contact last year after Petro accused Israel of committing genocide.

We get into all those details and more in this conversation, which result from independent investigations by both PWS and Colombia Reports.

We hope you enjoy it ‘cause it’s a wild ride!

This episode is free access, but the upcoming season will be released immediately only for paid subscribers. Please consider taking out a subscription to support our work. We have plans that start at just $5/month

*An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the sum as $30 million. We regret the error*

In case you missed our breaking news coverage of Pegasus in Latin America you can catch up here.

We will be back to the normal format next week and hope to launch the new complete podcast series for paid subscribers in mid-October.

Hasta Pronto, piratas!

Protests over U.S. funding of the Israeli war in Gaza, originally organized at Columbia University in New York City, have spread to more than 40 campuses. Police crackdowns, including the deployment of the National Guard against students in Texas, have inspired outrage, and likely helped fuel support for a movement that seems for the moment to be spreading across the country.

But media bias in protest coverage, as well as rhetorical attacks by politicians on the protesters themselves got us thinking about the parallels to social movements we’ve seen here in Colombia (with an “o” not a “u”). So we reached out to Richard McColl, who runs the country's most popular English language podcast, Colombia Calling, and our piratical companion and sometimes contributor here at PWS, Adriaan Alsema of Colombia Reports, together for a dream team explainer on the phenomenon.

States often follow a playbook when delegitimizing protests they find inconvenient, and this movement has been no exception. Structural problems inherent to the legacy media model also skew coverage towards official sources, often leaving out the voice of protesters entirely.

So what does Colombia have to do with Columbia? More than you might imagine, and we break it all down in the audio version of this week’s feature story.

We’ve edited down the original 35-minute analysis to just 13 minutes, which is what we’ve published here. Both Colombia Calling and Colombia Reports will publish the full “director’s cut” later this week.

We’ll be back to a written feature next Friday for those who prefer their news in print. In the meantime, we’re still working on a new season of feature podcasts for paid subscribers. Thanks again for listening/reading, mateys.

Y hasta pronto!