The History Onion

Today we are re-releasing our interview with Melat Kiros, a progressive candidate for Congress in Colorado’s 1st District. Originally published in October of 2025, our interview broaches topics including how to get money out of politics and fix corruption, why Democratic resistance to Trump thus far has been largely ineffective, and how Democrats have failed on the genocide in Gaza and what to do about it.

Kiros is running to unseat the longest-serving representative of Colorado’s current congressional delegation, Democrat Diana DeGette, and she is doing so with an unabashedly progressive platform. She has centered issues of affordable housing, healthcare, and money in politics throughout her campaign, and she has been outspoken against the genocide being perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians.

Kiros’s primary election takes place at the end of this month on June 30th.

Show Notes

Melat Kiros for Colorado

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

Víctor Jara, sometimes referred to as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a Chilean folk singer who rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the nueva canción movement. His songs were often deeply political in nature, providing a voice for the Chilean working class and peasantry. In 1970, his recording of “Venceremos” (We Will Win) became the anthem of the left-wing Popular Unity coalition led by Salvador Allende. After winning the presidency, Allende made his victory speech in front of a banner that read, ‘You can’t have a revolution without songs.’

The story of Víctor Jara is a tragic one; his life was brutally cut short in the aftermath of the 1973 coup that left President Allende dead and installed General Augusto Pinochet as the head of a military junta. One among thousands of people who were arrested and detained in the succeeding days, Jara was tortured and murdered in Estadio Chile on September 16th, 1973. His legacy, however, lives on.

On today’s episode, we discuss the political and musical maturation of Víctor Jara, his influences and contemporaries in the nueva canción movement, and his murder at the hands of the nascent Pinochet dictatorship.

Show Notes

Fundación Víctor Jara

Bad Bunny tribute to Víctor Jara

Victor Jara: The folk singer murdered for his music

Britannica article on nueva canción

Britannica bio of Jara

The Life and Death of Victor Jara

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

For our 50th episode (!!), we are excited to present our January interview with Marc Cooper.

Marc Cooper is the former associate professor and director of Annenberg Digital News at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post. Currently, he is a contributing editor to The Nation.

He has also produced or reported for CBS News, PBS Frontline, NBC, Pacifica Radio, and the CBC and BBC radio services. Among his books are the best-selling Pinochet and Me, a memoir that tells the story of his time in Chile serving as a translator for Salvador Allende’s government and the subsequent coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Today, we’ll be discussing that memoir, Pinochet and Me, as well as broader topics relating to the politics and history of Chile.

Show Notes

Purchase a copy of Pinochet and Me by Marc Cooper

Read Marc Cooper’s contributions to Truthdig here

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

We are excited to share our interview with Juliana DeVaan, a PhD candidate in US history at Columbia University, where she studies 20th-century cultural and intellectual history.

Her work has been supported by the New York State Archives, New York Public Library, Getty Research Institute, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, among other institutions. You can read Juliana’s writing in Public Books, Jacobin, and The Drift.

We discuss two of her excellent pieces in Jacobin about New York City history and urban planning, linked below in the show notes. Juliana brings great insight into how to re-read the legacy of Robert Moses, one of New York’s many infamous characters, and reviews an important recent book: Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981. And we can’t discuss progressive politics in New York City without mentioning Zohran Mamdani, so be sure to listen for our perspectives on his tenure thus far.

Show Notes

“The City the Rich Built — and Broke,” Juliana DeVaan

“An Urban Legend,” Juliana DeVaan

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

We are excited today to share our interview with Ariel Dorfman, an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. Professor Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende’s Chief of Staff during the last months of Allende’s presidency, and wrote a seminal critique of US cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck, during this time. He was forced into exile, ending up in the United States in 1980 following the military coup led by General Pinochet in 1973.

Often dealing with historical and political themes, his books have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Death and the Maiden, his 1990 play written as Chile transitioned shakily from dictatorship to democracy, is a powerful political and psychological thriller dealing with the traumas of a country dealing with the aftermath of repressive authoritarian rule. His writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and more.

Professor Dorfman is considered one of Latin America’s greatest novelists, with historical novels such as Allegro and Konfidenz, and he is currently the Walter Hines Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

We are honored to have him on the show to discuss his novel The Suicide Museum.

Show Notes

Purchase a copy of The Suicide Museum here

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

We are excited to be joined on today’s show by investigative reporter and writer John Dinges.

John Dinges has decades of experience covering Latin America, including as a foreign correspondent in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. He has worked for such publications as The Washington Post and NPR. While living in Chile between 1972 and 1978, he helped create three Chilean media organizations, including one of the leading investigative news magazines exposing military abuses under General Augusto Pinochet. He is currently the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Columbia University.

On today’s episode, we discuss his most recent book, Chile in Their Hearts, which tells the story of two young Americans murdered in the aftermath of the 1973 Chilean coup. During our conversation, we unfold the murder mystery, challenge the narrative of the murders presented by the popular 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing, and discuss possibilities for truth and reconciliation within the United States.

Show Notes

Purchase a copy of Chile in Their Hearts here

John Dinges’s website

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

We are excited to be joined today by Alex Williams, the principal US economist at Common Wealth, a progressive think tank operating across the US and UK, as well as a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Editor-in-Chief of the Substack newsletter Continuous Variation. Previously, Alex worked at Employ America, where he advocated for full employment policies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, we have a wide-ranging conversation about progressive economics. The first part of the episode takes us from Alex’s background as an economist to the economic record of the Biden administration, whose economic program has come to be known as Bidenomics. Alex’s recent piece for Common Wealth titled “Beyond Bidenomics” serves as the jumping-off point for this part of our conversation.

As the episode goes on, we turn to a discussion about a progressive economic program for the future, digging into the importance of active state management of the economy, whether in terms of provision of basic needs like healthcare and housing or the transition away from fossil fuels and towards a green economy.

This discussion links nicely with a new project by Common Wealth called Forces of Production, which is geared precisely towards facilitating effective state management of the economy by providing detailed analysis of economic data from a progressive perspective. More specifically, the project is a macro data newsletter that will be published monthly on Substack, with its first issue out next Monday, February 9th. We will link the newsletter’s launch post outlining what the project is all about in the show notes below, and definitely recommend you check it out.

Show Notes

Forces of Production launch post: “Atop the Forces of Production” (1/20/26)

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

Today, we are joined once again by Jack Meyer (check out our previous episode with him here: “Abundance, with Jack Meyer”). Jack is an economics masters student at Oxford, as well as an aspiring political economist and economic historian. His current areas of study include innovation, development and inequality. You can find him on Twitter/X @jackbmeyer and on Substack, where he publishes the newsletter Public Works.

On this episode, we discuss the employment impacts of artificial intelligence. This has become a hot topic of discourse over the last year or so, as AI progresses and many people’s anxiety increases about the potential for mass unemployment as a result of AI taking jobs that were once done by humans. So in this episode, we talk a bit about what AI might do to employment in the future, and we talk a lot about what it seems to be doing to the labor market right now. We take Jack’s recent Substack post “AI Might Not Be Taking Your Job Anytime Soon” as the jumping-off point for this conversation.

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was defined in large part by its brutally repressive nature. Its centralization of repression in the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) and the centrality of repressive tactics even after the junta consolidated power made Pinochet’s Chile stick out in comparison to other contemporary Latin American dictatorships.

In today’s episode, we discuss how to best define the Pinochet regime, then explain how Chile’s repression differed from that of its regional authoritarian contemporaries. We spend the bulk of the episode showing why brutal repression became synonymous with Pinochet’s government and outline the deadly existence of DINA. We conclude by drawing out important historical lessons we can glean from studying Pinochet’s authoritarianism as we are confronted with authoritarianism in the United States.

We want to provide a content warning that this episode will deal with the intense violence perpetrated by agents of the Pinochet regime, including murder, torture, sexual violence, and more. These topics are both difficult to discuss and incredibly sensitive.

Show Notes

Listen to The History Onion’s Modern Chile Series:

* Revolutionary Road (Modern Chile Ep. 1)

* Salvador Allende (Modern Chile Ep. 2)

* The Economics of the Allende Years (Modern Chile Ep. 3)

* The US in Chile: Part 1 (Modern Chile Ep. 4)

* The US in Chile: Part 2 (Modern Chile Ep. 5)

* The Pinochet Years (Modern Chile Ep. 6)

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

After a few months off, we are returning to our Modern Chile series with today’s episode. For our next episodes in this series, we will be covering the Pinochet years, defined primarily as the years between 1973 and 1990 in which General Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile as a brutal, bloody dictator. We will also investigate the efforts to bring Pinochet to justice following his ousting by a popular plebiscite in 1988 and the return to democracy in 1990.

In this episode, we start by looking at an obituary written for General Pinochet in The New York Times, which provides us with insight into how Pinochet is remembered and the impact he had on Chile. We then discuss Pinochet’s background and how he came to lead the coup that would sound the death knell for President Salvador Allende and Chilean democracy. To close the episode, we describe a framework for studying Pinochet’s government proposed by scholar Carlos Huneeus in his book, The Pinochet Regime.

There is a lot of history to dig into with this particular era in Chilean history, and we hope to shine a light on some of its most interesting and important aspects, all while drawing out the relevance of this period for our contemporary moment.

Show Notes

Listen to The History Onion’s Modern Chile Series:

* Revolutionary Road (Modern Chile Ep. 1)

* Salvador Allende (Modern Chile Ep. 2)

* The Economics of the Allende Years (Modern Chile Ep. 3)

* The US in Chile: Part 1 (Modern Chile Ep. 4)

* The US in Chile: Part 2 (Modern Chile Ep. 5)

Real Dictators podcast - first Pinochet episode.

NYT Obituary for Pinochet

Seymour Hersch NYT article linking CIA to Chilean truckers’ strike 1974

Credits

Theme music by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.