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[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…

[Mábel Lara]: Engineer Jorge Enrique Pizano, key witness in the Odebrecht bribery scandal in Colombia and who passed away last Thursday, left the evidence of his complaints in the hands of Noticias Uno since last August.

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: I presented the reports to the person who appointed me as controller, right? Not only the final report, but everything… the evidence of those emails exists. And here, it’s clear and concrete evidence. It’s not that I heard, that I said, no. It’s what’s in the documents and it is the documents that speak.

[David]: Noticias Uno also revealed the audio that Jorge Enrique had recorded with the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, who at the time of that recording was a lawyer for Grupo Aval.

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Look, we’re doing one hell of an investigation. I mean, you… because I see you in a state of anxiety. Of course.

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Okay. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about  something…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course.

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the way, because, damn, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: That and the tragic death of Alejandro Pizano made the scandal break. Now the key question was: why was there cyanide in the bottle? Had Jorge Enrique also taken the poison? The then director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine had opened a possibility during a press conference…

[Carlos Valdés]: However, the person who performed the clinical autopsy left samples of different tissues for histopathology studies. The investigation that the Attorney General’s Office has currently undertaken will most surely order the analysis of those samples.

[David]: So… this episode begins with a visit. 

It was a few days after Alejandro Pizano’s death and shortly after they had announced the result of the autopsy.  Burdened by confusion, anguish and the pressure from the media, the Pizano Ponce de León sisters and their mother received the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, for a private conversation. As we had mentioned, he knew Jorge Enrique from before he was Attorney General and their sons had been best friends since school, so he was not a stranger to them. And, in fact, it was Martínez’s son who arranged this visit.

The daughters remember that the Attorney General arrived visibly moved. He wanted to give them his condolences.

[Juanita Pizano]: He told us that he was very sorry, that he knew he could have done more for my dad and he cried and all. 

[Carolina Pizano]: So, like playing the grieved one, the hurt one. No, and now my position, right? Like, everyone is doubting me. He cried, but the kind of  tears that… like when a child misbehaves, cries and convinces the parents that it wasn’t their fault. And as soon as the parents forgive them they’re perfectly fine again…it’s like, but yes…like…emotional manipulation. Manipulation when we were the most vulnerable we had ever been in our lives.

[David]: He told them that he would personally take on the investigation of  what had happened, he talked about all the technology that the Attorney General’s Office had to find the truth.

[Juanita]: But immediately after saying that, he told us: but I need you to release a statement because people are going crazy. So I need you to release a statement to say that you support the Attorney General’s Office investigation.

[Carolina]: Of course, we fell completely for that manipulation. It was like yes, do what you have to do. Yes, do what you have to do. We couldn’t think straight. And it’s something that people don’t understand, and it’s how difficult it is to try to think with clarity in those moments. 

[David]: And so, following what they understood as a request from Martínez, on November 16, 2018, two days after the interview they had given to Caracol Noticias, the Pizano Ponce de León family published the statement in the media. In it they said they would not give statements on judicial matters because Jorge Enrique had already given everything to the authorities. They also asked that their painful situation not be used in political arenas. Regarding the deaths, they said they were waiting for the results of the investigations by the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Attorney General’s Office.

But that didn’t make the scandal wane.  That same day, the newspaper El Espectador revealed a new audio recorded by Jorge Enrique. In this one, which was also recorded secretly, you can hear Martínez reading a list that a criminal lawyer had given them of the possible crimes that had been committed based on Jorge Enrique’s findings. Listen carefully: Martínez mentions, literally, the word crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: Look at all the crimes that have been committed.

[David]: He says: look at all the crimes that have been committed. Crimes…not irregularities, as he said in the Caracol interview. And he makes a list:

[Néstor Humberto]: Bribes, money laundering, falsification of private documents, disloyal administration, breach of trust, fraud, aggravated theft by trust, embezzlement by appropriation.

[David]: I repeat: bribes, money laundering, falsification of private documents, disloyal administration, breach of trust, fraud, aggravated theft by trust, embezzlement by appropriation.

That same day part of the results of the investigation into the deaths were also released. Remember that Jorge Enrique’s body was cremated because, according to the autopsy, he died of natural causes, from cardiac arrhythmia. But there was an alternative to find out if he had also taken cyanide: to analyze the tissue samples we already mentioned, those that were kept after the autopsy. Carlos Valdés, the then director of the Institute of Forensic  Medicine, held a press conference to announce the results publicly. The ruling was conclusive.

[Carlos Valdés]: No cyanide was found in any of the tissues or in the solution that contained the tissues.

[David]: With that result, the initial ruling that Jorge Enrique had died of natural causes remained standing.

But that didn’t really clarify anything. Alejandro’s death had not been of natural causes and the most important question around the Pizano case was how the cyanide had gotten into that bottle. There were other doubts, yes, and more could come up, but if that fact came to be known, the case would stop being a mystery to become a tragedy for which someone was responsible.

That’s why, that weekend, six days after Alejandro’s death, the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, went to the house where both had died to do a more detailed inspection. The evidence had to be there.

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 4: The Evidence.

[David]: The last time the Pizano Ponce de León family had entered the house where it all  happened was during the first visit of an investigator from the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, when Alejandro had just died. It was a very quick examination and that day nothing was taken.

But on Saturday, November 17, almost a week later, they were summoned again, early, to begin the detailed inspection. And something important must be made clear: according to what journalist María Jimena Duzán published, from the begining, the order to do this inspection was based on the hypothesis that what had happened, at least in Jorge Enrique’s case, was a possible suicide due to economic problems. There is no mention that they were considering  other options. And nothing related to his work on Ruta del Sol II or the revelations from Noticias Uno.

The first thing the investigators did was take statements, separately, from the two people who took care of the place, a man and a woman, who were a couple. They also interviewed the housemaid and another worker. And the family, of course: the two sisters and their mother.

In that interrogation Juanita felt that the conversation was being directed toward the topic of suicide.

[Juanita]: So the lady literally asked me like: And do you think your dad wanted to commit suicide and why? And…but was he depressed? On a scale of one to ten, how depressed was he? How many times did you see him cry? And like that, very repetitive.

[David]: Even after that formal interview, another investigator approached Juanita to try to continue talking about the subject.

[Juanita]: She acted nice and asked me how I was, etc. And I was like no, well normal. I mean, surviving. And she asked me: Do you really think your dad didn’t want to commit suicide? Like that. Who was going to hurt him? Who was going to want to hurt him anyway? And I told her like: my dad had been threatened for many years and I think there were several people who wanted to hurt him, honestly.

[David]: After taking the statements, they talked to them about how they would do the inspection of the house. The plan was to examine each space in great detail, first the upper floor and then the lower one. Carolina was there when one of those officials made something clear to her.

[Carolina]: Yes, he was very diligent and told me: we’re going to do this and that, we’re not going to enter any room in your absence. We’re not going to open anything without your authorization or we’re not going to do anything without you being there.

[David]: She even remembers signing a document to authorize the inspection. Then they made them put on the same white suits, gloves and face masks worn by the investigators, who were at least ten.

[Carolina]: So we started with my parents’ room. But we spent many hours in that room. At least three hours.

[Juanita]: I sensed that  they had instructions to look for something with details not so… like broader. So they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but they were desperately looking for something and like they couldn’t find it and couldn’t find it.

[Carolina]: But they seemed… I don’t know, it’s like…Imagine like zombies, right? who are desperately looking for something  to bite, something  to eat.

[David]: In the middle of that search they found a suitcase full of Jorge Enrique’s documents. At that moment, the official who had explained the procedure to Carolina stopped them.

[Carolina]: And I remember he said: they’re not going to take anything that isn’t related to the death. But they did take the hard drives and they took the security camera recordings.

[David]: The security cameras of the house…And also Jorge Enrique’s cell phones. 

Then, in that bedroom’s bathroom, where his wife had found him dying, there was a towel…that towel was also noticed by the first investigator who went to the house when Alejandro had just died, but he had left it in the same place.

[Carolina]: I really didn’t understand the towel thing. At that moment it really didn’t seem that relevant.

[Juanita]: That was the towel my dad was wrapped in when he died. But there was something kind of red or brown on the towel.

[David]: Some stains… very visible. They looked like blood.

[Carolina]: They took it. But I…at that moment I said well a towel with blood, like it has nothing to do with my dad’s death, right, because it’s blood from where. I mean, he shaved and cut himself, was what I thought.

[David]: But that towel would be very important later. 

A lot of time had already passed in the inspection. It had gotten dark and they still hadn’t started examining the first floor. At one point, they decided to stop and resume a few minutes later. The family left the house.

Juanita went to the car with her mother. But since her cell phone battery  was dying, she went back into the house, without the white suit or the face mask or the gloves, to plug it in the living room. There, she noticed  there was commotion among the investigators.

[Juanita]: I said: I’m going to see what they’re doing, because well I’m already here. And at that moment I went up and on that kind of  mezzanine all these people were gathered there.

[David]: They were next to a bathroom that everyone had used during the long day of inspection. Many people had been going in and out all day.

[Juanita]: And the man there said: We just found something. And I said: You just found what? And he shows me a container.

[David]: A plastic container that was wrapped in -also plastic- bags. It was white, flattened, cylindrical, medium-sized. They had found it in that bathroom, in the drawer under the sink and behind a speaker from a sound system. It had a red screw-on lid and a label that said potassium cyanide, and just below the quantity: 1 kilo.

They called Carolina, who had also stepped out of the house.

[Carolina]: And that’s when they told me they found a container with cyanide and so then I went in. But then I asked myself: But how, if I had to be present, how did they continue searching? If they told me we were going to take a break. What happens next? I remember they take a photo there.

[David]: Two photos: one of the container wrapped in the bags and another of the drawer under the sink, where they found it. Both photos were uploaded the next day on the Attorney General’s Office X account.

[Carolina]: And so one says: to what extent is this private? Yes, I mean, did we authorize them to publish a photo of evidence? Well no. So, how does the Attorney General’s Office share information that way. When there’s an investigation, the evidence isn’t supposed to be shown, right? 

[David]: With the publication on social media, the media began to replicate the news.

[Journalist]: The substance was found yesterday in the house where Jorge Enrique and Alejandro Pizano died, when agents from the Attorney General’s Office were looking for elements and evidence. Two judicial prosecutors and members of the Pizano Ponce de León family were summoned there.

[Journalist]: The Attorney General’s Office has said that biological traces and fingerprints were already collected and delivered to the director of Forensic Medicine so it can be established who brought this kilo of cyanide into the Pizanos’ house.

[Carlos]: When they found it, I said here’s what we’ll do, we’ll test if Jorge Enrique Pizano touched those plastics and the container, right?, because to know if, if he had manipulated the cyanide.

[David]: He is Carlos Valdés, the director of Forensic Medicine at that time.

[Carlos]: I am a surgeon doctor specialized in forensic anthropology. I have practiced forensic medicine for 37 years. 

[David]: At that time, he had been directing the Institute for seven years. He was appointed, like all directors, by the Attorney General’s Office. And Carlos arrived with a characteristic that his predecessors didn’t have: his constant appearance in the media. For Carlos it was always very important to speak publicly about the progress of the investigations that Forensic Medicine carried out.

[Carlos]: Look, for me it wasn’t a problem. Because science wouldn’t make any sense if that scientific knowledge is not given to society, right? So, as I was entitled to do by Colombian law and international law, well I periodically announced those scientific results to the media. Right?

[David]: And this Pizano case, which was so mediatic, was not the exception.

Carlos remembers that his media appearances began two days after Alejandro’s death, that is, on November 13, when he announced, along with the Attorney General’s Office, the cyanide poisoning. In that same press conference he also mentioned the samples  from Jorge Enrique’s tissue.

[Carlos]: Those samples arrive at the Institute and arrive at the Institute in formaldehyde..

[David]: Submerged in formaldehyde to preserve them. That is a very important fact because that substance can eliminate cyanide and make its detection more difficult. But Carlos insists that they were prepared for that type of situation.

[Carlos]: The samples that always arrive at the Institute of Forensic Medicine are difficult samples. They are not the same samples that can arrive at a private laboratory or at a university laboratory. I mean that they are samples that are generally contaminated, they are samples of chemical substances that are not pure.

[David]: And for that very reason, according to Carlos, the Institute has protocols, quality criteria and specific technology to analyze those difficult samples, as he calls them.

When they received Jorge Enrique’s tissues they couldn’t examine them in the Bogotá laboratory, because the equipment to do the analyses wasn’t working at that time, so they had to send them to another city.

[Carlos]: The analysis is performed by a toxicologist chemist, with a doctorate in toxicology and was done on a large liver fragment of 11 by 12 centimeters, which, according to the toxicologist chemist’s description, when making the cross cut, in the center there was blood, the formaldehyde present in the periphery of the fragments hadn’t reached the center. And he affirms that from there he took the sample and that sample was valid for the toxicological chemical study and that the result was that it had no cyanide.

[David]: We already said Carlos announced those results,  at another press conference on November 16, five days after Alejandro’s death, and the cardiac arrhythmia remained the official cause of death. But the fact that there was no cyanide in that sample from Jorge Enrique’s liver didn’t mean the case was solved. The same question remained unresolved: how did the cyanide get into the bottle?

Let’s go back then to the house inspection that the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, the CTI, did one week after the deaths. Remember that during the process they found the cyanide container  that Carlos asked for, so that Forensic Medicine could establish if Jorge Enrique had touched it. On November 20, three days after the house inspection, Carlos announced the results at a new press conference.

[Carlos]: The conclusion that the Institute of Forensic Medicine has reached is that the DNA samples recovered from both the external bag, the internal bag and the container, on its lid and on the body, the cyanide container, belong to Mr. Jorge Pizano, with high scientific certainty. What can be said is that he touched the external bag, he touched the internal bag and he touched the container’s body and lid.

[David]: The Attorney General’s Office found the store in which that kilo of cyanide was bought, but they couldn’t establish who bought it, because they only had registered half of the buyers’ names and none of those was Jorge Enrique’s. According to the daughters, the Attorney General’s Office told them they were going to check the security cameras in the area, but then they realized they weren’t working. 

So, let’s recap: according to Forensic  Medicine, Jorge Enrique touched the cyanide container and the bags it was wrapped in. There was the possibility of suicide because of the very difficult situation he was going  through. But they didn’t find the poison in the tissue sample. So there was one last option to confirm the cause of death: to analyze the towel that was in the bathroom and the possible biological traces that were there.

A break and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.

Carlos Valdés, the then director of Forensic Medicine, received the information about the towel from the Attorney General’s Office. They told him that Jorge Enrique’s family had said that was the towel he had when they found him collapsed in the bathroom. Also that it had some brown stains.

[Carlos]: And I assumed that stain was… since it was brown, I said that’s blood, possibly it’s blood. And I assumed it was blood, because when you bleed and the blood stays on a fabric, it oxidizes and gives that brown color. My response was: bring the towel, bring it, give it to Forensic Medicine and we’ll do the test. And I told my deputy director, I said: arrange for them to do both toxicological chemistry exams, to see if that stain has cyanide and if that stain is from Jorge Enrique Pizano. And I told her please, inform me when the results come in. 

[David]: They came out on November 27, 10 days after the Attorney General’s Office CTI inspection in which they found the towel.

[Carlos]: So, as I always used to give the scientific results, I went to the media and told them:

[Archive]

[Carlos]: The results are the following: first, it’s human blood. Second, the DNA recovered from there corresponds to Mr. Jorge Pizano’s. Third, the stain does not contain cyanide.

[David]: With those results, the delegated prosecutor for Citizen Security of the Attorney General’s Office, who accompanied Carlos at that press conference, spoke about what the investigation was pointing to up to that moment.

[Luis González]: Up to that moment this is the conclusion: Jorge Enrique Pizano’s death is of natural causes and is the product of a cardiac arrest. That is, there are no criminal hands in Jorge Enrique’s death. Up to the moment the investigation shows us those conclusions.

[David]: Death by natural causes, no criminal hands…But they had already said it was clear that Jorge Enrique had touched the cyanide container… and we already know that, indeed, there was cyanide in the flavored water bottle.

As if  there wasn’t enough confusion, at that same press conference Carlos also announced the results of the analyses of that bottle.

[Carlos]: And the result is that within the diverse genetic material that was found, Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA appeared. That’s the result: Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA was there.

[David]: And he confirmed, right after a journalist’s question, that that DNA was on the body of the bottle.

So. A summary of where evidence stands  at this point. According to Forensic Medicine, yes there was Jorge Enrique’s DNA on the cyanide container and on the bags that wrapped it. Also on the towel and on the water bottle. But no traces of cyanide were found in the tissue samples or in the brown stains on the towel.

So, everything indicated that Jorge Enrique handled all the objects that had cyanide, but he didn’t consume it…and he had still died. By that time, the Attorney General’s Office already had an idea of what had happened, based on the analysis results.

[Juanita]: The Attorney General’s Office’s theory is that my dad dies from a heart attack. They rely mainly on the medical history of the cancer.

[David]: And on the fact that they didn’t find cyanide in the tissue analyses.

Also that Jorge Enrique had intentions of committing suicide and that, in fact, he planned it. He put the cyanide in the flavored water bottle, only to die before drinking it.

For Juanita and her family the suicide wasn’t unimaginable.

[Juanita]: I know that in his head the possibility of suicide could exist, because they made him lose all his dignity, his work, which was what he lived for. He was left in debt, without friends, everyone turned their backs on him. My dad felt very lonely.

[David]: But let’s remember that the hypothesis of the CTI inspection of the Attorney General’s Office was based on economic problems. They didn’t take into account everything he had discovered about the irregularities of Ruta del Sol II, nor the Attorney General’s Office investigation against him.

For the family, if there was a suicide attempt, it was induced by the pressure they subjected him to and it was absurd that the Attorney General’s Office reduced it to only economic problems. They had seen him in very bad shape for a long time and even Juanita remembers once when he spoke to them about this possibility.

[Juanita]: And I know he said like I want to die. I mean, what is this? One time, when the Attorney General’s Office was pressuring him,  at a lunch he told us like, I want to be clear, and with tears in his eyes he told us, but if they put me in jail, I’ll kill myself and that’s it, because I’m not going to put you through this. Because I’m innocent and I, I couldn’t bear it.

[David]: Around those days, Néstor Humberto Martínez, the then Attorney General, returned to visit Jorge Enrique’s wife. Juanita remembers having listened in on that conversation and assures that Martínez said something more shocking than the idea of suicide: that if the investigation continued, some congressmen opposed to the acting government would say that Alejandro had died because of Jorge Enrique. That that was the cause of his death: homicide.

[Juanita]: And the active subject of the crime, which would be, according to them, my dad, for the alleged crime of manslaughter by negligence, is dead. So the theory is that my dad put the bottle there and culpably, I mean, like unintentionally and intentionally, so to speak, killed my brother.

[David]: So, a failed suicide attempt and then a tragic accident.

[Juanita]: And in this conversation, Néstor Humberto tells my mom: it’s better to close the investigation, for us it’s better, well, if you agree.

[Carolina]: It’ll be what you say, it’ll be what you want, but see let’s do this. And in the middle of all those things he was saying things like if there’s an investigation, it’s going to come out  that Jorge Enrique was guilty of Alejandro’s death. So, of course, if they tell you that, you, in deep pain,  say no, well no, better not, because we don’t want them to say now that Jorge Enrique was guilty.

[Juanita]: Also, at that moment we only wanted to be left alone. So what are they going to investigate? I mean, the bottle, the fingerprints, the towel… I mean, that’s it. That’s when well, let’s say we give our consent for them to file the investigation or close it, I don’t know.

[Carolina]: But if you realize, that’s pure manipulation at the moment.

[Juanita]: We didn’t have a choice.  I mean, what else do you do if you have the Attorney General of the Nation in front of you telling you these things? Especially to my mom, who well first has no legal knowledge no matter how intelligent she is, and second, being as emotionally vulnerable as one is after losing one’s husband and son.

[David]: They didn’t want to suffer anymore. It wasn’t worth insisting on an investigation that was going nowhere. At the end of November, the family left the country to get away from the media circus they had been put in.

But for them, even from there and with the Attorney General’s Office hypothesis, everything that had happened to them seemed almost surreal. Beyond the pain they felt that everything that had to do with the case was very confusing.

[Juanita]: We didn’t understand that difficulty to establish. Because there was no clarity of literally anything, of what procedures were being carried out, of when they were carrying them out. If someone entered the house without us knowing, who had the bottle in their hands, who put the bottle there.

[David]: And they weren’t the only ones asking these questions.

A pause and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.

Around the already messy and confusing case of the Pizano deaths, in the corridors of Forensic Medicine rumors began to spread that something strange was happening.

[Javier Oviedo]: Well, my name is Javier Oviedo Gutiérrez.

[David]: Javier has been at Forensic Medicine for more than 20 years.

[Javier]: I am an expert in the area of anthropology, and I also serve as president of the National Union of Workers of the Institute of Forensic  Medicine.

[David]: And since he got involved with the union he has also been working for the rights of his colleagues and against possible abuses of power.

Regarding Carlos Valdés, the director of the Institute at that time, Javier remembers how mediatic he was in that position and the way he spoke publicly about cases that were being investigated. But that, according to Javier, was not the director’s responsibility, he shouldn’t communicate those procedures.

[Javier]: Our role as an Institute is technical and scientific support to the administration of justice. But that is part of the confidentiality of a process. That is, we are not, let’s say, enabled, so to speak, by the regulations to go out and do that, because we are violating confidentiality. The one who owns the information is the prosecutor.

[David]: The prosecutor who carries the case. And it’s that prosecutor who should, according to Javier, talk about the evidence during the oral trial, not the director of Forensic Medicine before the media.

That’s why the union had been following up on those announcements and collecting evidence of possible irregularities in other cases. But none of that had been made public until the Pizano case arrived.

[Javier]: Which was, let’s say…the final straw. I mean, we can’t let this pass. That already goes against the institution itself, it’s playing with the Institute’s credibility.

[David]: On December 9, 2018, a month after the deaths, Javier made public the complaints that something weird was happening.

[Journalist]: And the president of the Forensic Medicine union, Javier Oviedo, denounced alleged irregularities in the autopsy and genetic studies that were performed on engineer Jorge Enrique Pizano.

[Journalist]: Supposedly, the techniques that were used to determine what were the causes of death of the Odebrecht case witness are not validated at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

[David]: The results of the analyses were beginning to be questioned. And that meant that the questions were coming back.

In the next episode…

[Javier]: We had the feeling that they were covering something up, because what was the need to go out and lie. That empowered us more to say no, something has to be done here. So that’s when we decided to take a risk. And we decided to take that out to the media.

[Journalist]: Oviedo went further. He refuted Valdés’ statements about a towel stained with blood.

[Javier]: Do we want to ask the general director how he can say that the blood stain was Jorge Pizano’s if there’s no reference sample because the body was cremated?

[Carlos]: Ah, well I don’t know how many hands, but only Jorge Enrique’s was found on the bottle. I don’t know how many hands might have touched it. Or I don’t know how it was manipulated, yes, that I wouldn’t know.

[David]: There were three pieces of evidence that caused controversy: the autopsy, the bottle and the towel. The results of their analyses didn’t seem to convince everyone.

Credits:

[David]: La ruta del sol is a podcast from Central, Radio Ambulante Studios’ series channel, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network from IHeart Radio.

The reporting and production of this episode were done by me, David Trujillo, with production support from Desirée Yépez. The lead editor is Camila Segura, with additional editing by Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and Eliezer Budasoff. Eliezer is the project manager. Fact-checking is by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Camilo Vallejo did the legal review. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphics and art direction for the series are by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales and Samantha Proaño from the Radio Ambulante Studios audience team.

La Ruta del Sol was recorded at Fiona Records.

At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.

We’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance on security matters.

Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

You can follow us on social media as centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode we heard how Jorge Enrique Pizano had shared with some journalists the irregularities he found in the construction of Ruta del Sol II.

[Iván Serrano]: So the question was: Who did you tell this to over there? Well, I told Néstor Humberto Martínez. And do you have proof that Néstor Humberto knew? Yes, I have the recording. And he lets me listen to a part  of it.

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Because I see you in a state of anxiety. What do I do?

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Ok. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course.

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the way, because, damn, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, when you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[María Jimena Duzán]: And I said: this can’t be. Did this really happen? Is this Néstor Humberto Martínez’s voice? The Attorney General  who had said he was supposedly going to end all acts of corruption and expose  those responsible for Odebrecht. And I said no, this is a bomb. And then I thought and said: wow, if this gets published, well, Néstor Humberto Martínez would have to resign.

[David]: Today we begin in mid-2018. Jorge Enrique, as had been usual since the beginning of that year, stopped by journalist María Jimena Duzán’s house again. That day he arrived in his car.

[María Jimena]: Full! The car was full of documents, but full of documents!, and he left them with me.

[David]: They were all related to his work, during eight years, as controller of Ruta del Sol II, the unfinished project that Odebrecht and a company from Grupo Aval, one of the largest and most powerful conglomerates in the country, had begun to build. María Jimena already knew some of those documents, with them, she had been publishing her articles about corruption in the project.

Since Jorge Enrique had managed  to sell his apartment and was moving to a house a little over an hour from Bogotá, before leaving, he preferred that María Jimena keep the documents. Perhaps she could find new information to publish there.

[María Jimena]: And so, a month looking at those documents. And there I discovered, by luck, because well I had people who were helping me, a settlement agreement.

[David]: A settlement agreement is basically an agreement between two or more parties to put an end to a legal conflict and prevent new disputes. The confidential document that María Jimena found, dated March 2016, nine months before the Odebrecht corruption scandal broke in Colombia, was very clear to her:

[María Jimena]: This is a settlement agreement between Odebrecht and Grupo Aval. It was an acknowledgment of the existence of those irregular contracts that they had denied to Jorge Enrique himself so many times. Everyone there, at Grupo Aval, denied it to him. But in this contract they did acknowledge them. And they said: look, those contracts that add up to  32 billion and that were paid, Odebrecht owes them to Grupo Aval. And that, well, we’re going to work it out between the two of us to help each other out. You won’t sue me, I won’t  sue you. That’s what the contract said.

[David]: According to that, Odebrecht had to return those 32 billion pesos to the construction consortium, which was more than 10 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time, although María Jimena couldn’t confirm that that payment had actually been made. Furthermore, if one of the parties breached the contract, it had to give the other an additional payment of more than a million and a half dollars at the exchange rate of the time. And if either one broke confidentiality, the penalty was double: more than 3 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

[María Jimena]: And so I said: no, this is definitely the smoking gun, this is the smoking gun showing that those contracts are irregular, they did exist, despite the fact that all the authorities at Grupo Aval told Jorge Enrique himself that that wasn’t true, that it wasn’t real, that that was an invention of his, you know? So of course, there was already evidence that Odebrecht and Grupo Aval knew about these contracts and that they wanted, somehow, to cover it up or whitewash it so it would look like it was a transaction that had been resolved with the idea of helping each other out and that they were moving forward in their partnership.

[David]: In other words, that they had decided not to make claims against each other and leave things as they were.

Jorge Enrique insisted to María Jimena that he didn’t know about that contract between Odebrecht and Grupo Aval. He said he was just as surprised as she was, and even more so to learn that, as the document stated, the agreement had resulted from some meetings that both parties had between September and November 2015. That is, right after he recorded the company’s senior officials, including the then-lawyer Néstor Humberto Martínez, and it became very clear that he gave them proof of his findings.

But this contract that María Jimena had discovered left her feeling that Jorge Enrique had alerted the company about  the irregularities, but, instead of protecting him and putting an end to what appeared to be corruption, they rushed to cover everything up. María Jimena wanted to know how they had reached that decision. So she traveled to Brazil to speak with direct sources from Odebrecht.

[María Jimena]: And, indeed, they confirmed that the other members of Grupo Aval went all the way there to make this contract, to sign it. The one who proposed it and promoted it was Néstor Humberto Martínez, who at that time was the lawyer for Grupo Aval and who later became the Attorney General of the Nation in charge of investigating Odebrecht and the Grupo Aval scandal, please.

[David]: María Jimena published this settlement agreement in Semana magazine in July 2018. In the text she launched several questions, some directly to the Attorney General, so he would clarify what had happened. With one of those questions, which was what this document seemed to be, she titled the article: A code  of silence?

[María Jimena]: When I broke that whole story…that  really was another very complicated point and which also unleashed rage against Jorge Enrique Pizano. The threat he had was that they were going to put him in jail. And that was like a sword of Damocles for him. And he knew they were going to make him pay for the fact that he had discovered something. When that happened, Jorge Enrique himself  said you know what? It’s  time. We have to release the recordings.

[David]: The audio recordings in which it became clear that the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, knew about the irregularities in one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country before being Attorney General, and that he still didn’t report them to the authorities.

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 3: The interview.

[David]: After the publication of that settlement agreement, Jorge Enrique thought it was better to release  the recordings on a television newscast, Noticias Uno. María Jimena agreed. So he contacted Iván Serrano, the other journalist to whom he had been giving information for a few months, including the audios. He told him it was time to reveal everything. By then, he was trying to shield himself from a possible charge from the Attorney General’s Office for allegedly having received a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct. Additionally, he had already given the authorities proof of the irregularities he had found in Ruta del Sol II, including names of senior officials from Grupo Aval and businessmen involved. A year before he had given to the Attorney General’s Office  the reports he made when he was controller of the megaproject, and now they had contacted him again to testify against the only Grupo Aval official who was being investigated. Jorge Enrique asked for protection to be able to give that testimony.

So, much of the information that the authorities had was already coming out in the media, but now, with Iván Serrano, it would be the first time that his direct source was going to show his face and speak on national television. They agreed to meet in August 2018 to record an interview that they would publish later. This is Iván.

[Iván]: It’s in his apartment. I think on a day when he knows his daughters or his wife aren’t going to be there. And we do the interview.

[David]: In the video you only see Jorge Enrique in a medium shot, sitting next to a desk. He has a blue shirt and a black vest with a lapel microphone. Iván, off camera, asks him questions. This is how the interview begins…

[Iván]: I want to ask you a little about the decision you made to give us this interview. Why have you made that decision?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I believe that the facts and the truths are coming to light and we see how there really is a plot, if you can call it that, against integrity, in this case, against my integrity as a person and that my rights are being violated.

[David]: A plot, he says, because he felt they were cornering him. The reason, according to him, was having done  his job well for almost a decade, even when some of the people involved didn’t expect him to do so.

[Jorge Enrique]: I became inconvenient for many people, among them those who today are… were convicted for the irregular contracts of Ruta del Sol.

[David]: He said explicitly that he had all the proof of those irregularities.

[Jorge Enrique]: I don’t speculate. I always make my statements because I have proof of each one of my actions, which I did in accordance with what the law ordered.

[David]: Now, we must remember that Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014 and that meant that if there had been any  irregular  money transactions in the United States, that country’s authorities could investigate and, if necessary, sanction the company.

So, at that moment, Iván asked him a key question:

[Iván]: Were there transfers abroad? Were there transfers to the United States?

[Jorge Enrique]: Of contracts identified, not by me, but by the contractual manager designated by Episol and the construction consortium, yes, payments of transfers abroad were detected.

[Iván]: Do you know the amount?

[Jorge Enrique]: 2 million 700 thousand dollars, if I’m not wrong.

[Iván]: With what destination as t source?

[Jorge Enrique]: To Constructores Unidos.

[David]: Iván, who had known Jorge Enrique for a decade and had taken him as a source on other topics, knew how rigorous he was. That interview and everything he said there was supported with very solid foundations.

[Iván]: He was obsessive about information and he had proof of everything he said. Jorge Enrique would say A and show the paper for A. He’d say B, he had the paper for B.

[David]: During the interview, Jorge Enrique added something even more compromising: he had handed all this well-organized information to his bosses and he had warned them that something strange was happening long before the Odebrecht international corruption scandal broke.

[Jorge Enrique]: I presented the reports to the person who appointed me  as controller, right? Not only the final report, but everything… there is evidence in those emails. And here it’s clear and concrete evidence. It’s not that I heard, that I said, no. It’s what’s in the documents and it is the documents that speak.

[David]: In the interview Iván asked Jorge Enrique about two particular characters: about the president of Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: Did Mr. Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo also have knowledge?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, yes, of course.

[David]: And also, of course, about the Attorney General of the Nation.

[Iván]: Did you inform Mr. Néstor Humberto Martínez of these facts?

[Jorge Enrique]: Néstor Humberto Martínez, well, he was the lawyer for… for Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: But did he know? Did you personally inform him about the matter?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, of course.

[David]: And he had the recordings that proved it.

[Jorge Enrique]: All the meetings are perfectly documented both with documents and with audios, because I can record my meetings for follow-up.

[David]: In that interview, Jorge Enrique also mentioned that the witness who accused him before the Attorney General’s Office  of allegedly receiving a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct knew about the recordings. He doesn’t clarify how this person got that information, but he did say he was extorting him with that.

[Jorge Enrique]: That’s why he sends me a text message telling me that, that…

[Iván]: And you have that?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I have the text. In other words, extorting me for…

[Iván]: What did he tell you in the chat?

[Jorge Enrique]: No, no, that I had to give him that information. If not, he would speak badly of me.

[David]: Although Jorge Enrique seems very sure and convinced in that interview, Iván insists that he was actually cautious.

[Iván]: I thought he was going to be much more… much more direct, like he usually was.

[David]: And yes, he said compromising things like that one of Colombia’s richest men and the Attorney General knew about those irregularities from before, or that it was possible that the money that came out of there had gone through the United States, but still, Jorge Enrique was sparing.

[Iván]: Evidently, he had some fears. It was absolutely real and as I tell you, he spoke in a low voice in his apartment. In other words, it wasn’t a thing… it wasn’t a thing from the movies. I mean, here we’ve been understanding that many of those fears were absolutely real.

[David]: This  fear led Jorge Enrique to ask Iván not to publish that interview yet… nor the audios that proved he had shown proof of those irregular contracts to the now Attorney General. Jorge Enrique had one condition:

[Iván]: Which was when he was safe in the United States or if something happened to him. Unfortunately it was the latter.

[David]: The latter: three months later, he died.

A break and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

[David]: Jorge Enrique asked the Attorney General’s Office for protection for all the sensitive information he had given them. He asked for security for himself and for his family, and even wrote a letter directly to Néstor Humberto Martínez, but they never gave him that protection.

To the economic crisis, unemployment  and the lymphatic cancer that he was still treating, was added the fear of what could happen to his family. He asked his daughters, Juanita and Carolina, to take many precautions.

[Juanita Pizano]: My dad would tell me: don’t take the same route to catch the bus at the university. He’d tell me: change routes, change paths. Not to talk on the phone about where we are and try not to send messages either about where we are or who we’re with.

[Carolina Pizano]: My dad is worried about his health, about his physical integrity, you know? And about ours. So it was like racing against time without knowing what was going to happen. It was like you’re trapped in a problem. You’re trapped there and there’s nothing you can do to get out of that problem. You can’t say okay, let’s forget about this. How can you live like that?

[David]: Both knew, without many details, about the mess their dad was in. And they also knew he had been talking to journalists, but not everything was clear to them. 

[Carolina]: Beyond the content, I didn’t know that my dad had… had said to keep certain information until he died. I didn’t know my dad was so afraid as to do that. Everything was very bad. Everything seemed… It’s like a pressure cooker, that you don’t know when it’s going to explode.

[David]: Juanita remembers very well Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Unlike her parents, she had stayed living in Bogotá, at her grandmother’s, because it was easier for her to go to the university from there. That day her dad went to the city and met her at a café to tell her something very important.

For a few months, Jorge Enrique had been talking with American authorities to offer them the information he had in exchange for asylum and protection. Remember: Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014, it was the responsibility of that country’s authorities to investigate the suspicious money movements the company had made. An investigation that, furthermore, connected with that of another bigger case: the Odebrecht corruption.

That day, Jorge Enrique told Juanita that he had already sent the proof he had.

[Juanita]: We had a coffee and he told me that  the complaint in the United States had already been made. They’re going to notify Grupo Aval or they already notified them, and he told me with a… I mean, he was about to cry. And I said: What do we do? Where do we hide? And he said: I don’t know. And silence. I mean, silence, silence. There was nothing more to say. Only for me it was very valuable to be in that moment with my dad and make him feel that I was supporting him. And that’s it, at the end we said goodbye, but yes, I remember thinking when is this going to end, how is this going to end? Because this has to end at some point, I mean, this… Something is going to happen, like it’s going to be the end point, but what’s it going to be because I feel it’s deadly.

[David]: Jorge Enrique spoke with journalist María Jimena Duzán the next day, Wednesday, November 7.

[María Jimena]: And he called me and said: Hey, how’s it going? I’m not well, the thing is… telling me that he was very sad about the cancer, he was tired, that he didn’t know what to do with his family, he was kind of  depressed. He would always get depressed, but he had many things to be depressed about. I honestly tell you that his life wasn’t easy because they made his life unlivable. And that was the last time I spoke with him.

[David]: Because the next day, Thursday, November 8, a day before his birthday, Jorge Enrique died.

The mother of the Pizano sisters, who didn’t want to speak in this story, gave the news to her two daughters by phone. Juanita was in class at the university. Carolina, who had left two months ago to study in Spain, was walking on the street.

[Carolina]: When my mom called me to tell me that my dad… She told me: Carito, Carito, your dad died. I had a panic attack in the middle of the street. No, I went into a sort of  shock… like not understanding, you know? What had happened. I still don’t understand very well.

[Juanita]: She just said poor thing, I found him lying on the floor. And she told me: poor thing, poor thing. Immediately I asked her: Who killed my dad? Who was it? Who was there? And my mom told me: nobody killed your dad. He had a heart attack.

[David]: And although the mother could barely speak from how distressed she was, she tried to explain to them what had happened early that morning. She told them they were getting ready to leave.

[Carolina]: My mom goes down to have breakfast and when she comes back up well my dad should have been getting ready, but my dad wasn’t opening the bathroom door.

[Juanita]: She knocked on the door and he didn’t answer. Nothing. She opened the door.

[Carolina]: And she finds my dad lying on the floor, but my dad was still… still alive.

[Juanita]: It seemed like he couldn’t breathe well. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t speak. He was breathing very hard and had his eyes open and was looking at her.

[Carolina]: My mom puts his underwear on him because my dad was in a towel. She puts him in the SUV to take him to the health center, but there my dad, well, dies.

[Juanita]: And once they declare my dad dead, the first thing my mom does, the first thing my mom does is two things: one, tell Néstor Humberto Martínez through a message.

[Carolina]: Your friend just died. Something like that. And with Luis Carlos Sarmiento, my mom called the secretary and told her: tell your boss that Jorge Enrique Pizano just died. And I think that her having done that, in that moment, says a lot.

[David]: The news of Jorge Enrique Pizano’s death came out immediately in the media. It also started to spread among those who knew him and his case. Journalist Iván Serrano was called by his boss, the deputy director of the newscast, to tell him. He told him that now they did have to publish the interview that had been pending for three months.

[Iván]: I was in shock and was frozen because it was a person with whom I constantly met and went to his house and talked to. It was agreed  that he would let us know: ok, now we can. That would have been ideal. That he, alive, safe, would have said: ok, let’s proceed. Not like this.

[David]: That same day, María Jimena remembers that she received a text message from Jorge Enrique. In it he complained about the same situation and said that his lawyer had told him that they had summoned him to an interrogation at the Attorney General’s Office for the investigation against him. María Jimena and he agreed to meet the following Saturday.

But three hours later, a mutual acquaintance called her.

[María Jimena]: And told me: Did you hear the news? What happened? Jorge Enrique died. What do you mean Jorge Enrique died? He was normal, as always, complaining, but he was fine.

[David]: The first thing María Jimena did was call Alejandro, Jorge Enrique’s oldest son, who lived in another country but who was going to travel to Colombia immediately. She already knew him because Jorge Enrique had gone with him to her house to have her listen to the recordings. Alejandro was aware of everything his dad was going through, including the publication that was coming, and agreed to meet with María Jimena that weekend, after Jorge Enrique’s funeral.

[María Jimena]: And then it happened that… Alejandro died.

[David]: The tragic scene at the beginning of this series: Alejandro drank the liquid from a bottle of flavored water that was on his dad’s desk and collapsed minutes later. As we already know, he died in the ambulance before reaching the hospital, but they still had to take his body there to do the autopsy and determine the cause of death. The hospital reported the case to the authorities.

[David]: Without yet knowing what had happened, Carolina and Juanita remember that in the midst of the confusion at the hospital, an official from the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit, the area of the Attorney General’s Office that supports investigations, of collecting evidence, approached them.

[Juanita]: He immediately puts my sister and me in a little room. The man asks us what happened.

[Carolina]: He started asking a lot of questions, and he’d tell me but at what time was it? And it’s like no, I didn’t, I had no notion of time.

[Juanita]: I felt that the man didn’t want to let me speak. I’d tell him, the thing is I’m over 18 years old, I’m 19, I know what happened, but I felt like the man didn’t want me to say anything, I don’t know why. I mean, it frustrated me a lot.

[David]: After the questions, the CTI investigator asked them to go to the house where everything had happened.

[Juanita]: And he starts touching doors, drawers, everything with his hands, without gloves, without any kind of precaution.

[Carolina]: He takes a bottle out of the trash and says what is this? And I said: do you want me to tell you it’s a bottle? I mean… And that’s it. He asked some questions, like with that air of superiority but with zero tact. I mean, my dad and my brother just died… Why are you asking me things this way?

[David]: The sisters don’t remember exactly how long that first informal visit lasted, but it was quick and the CTI official didn’t take anything. When it ended, the family decided not to stay there that night. They closed the house and went to Bogotá.

The next day, Monday, November 12, the shock was no longer just for the family, but also for many people who had seen  Jorge Enrique’s interview on Noticias Uno.

[Archive]

[Mábel Lara]: Pizano was convinced that he was a victim of judicial and economic power, especially of General Attorney  Néstor Humberto Martínez, and our journalist Iván Serrano was with him and received from his hands proof that he was a whistleblower and not the accused.

[David]: They also published the recording, as they had agreed…

[Archive]

[Mábel Lara]: He gave us audio recordings that prove that he told Néstor Humberto Martínez, with documents in view, all the Odebrecht irregularities in Colombia since mid-2015. Neither Martínez nor Corficolombiana, the Brazilian company’s partner in the construction of Ruta del Sol II, paid attention to him. On the contrary, he was fired two years later.

[David]: During the same broadcast of the newscast, they talked about what was known at that time about Alejandro’s death.

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Yesterday, when the family was just beginning to recover from Pizano’s demise, tragedy brought mourning to them again. Alejandro, who had arrived from Barcelona to attend his father’s burial, also died. The cause of death is still unknown.

[David]: That was confirmed the next day, Tuesday, November 13. When the little information available started to leak and the story got much more complicated, the Deputy Attorney General of the Nation and the director of the Forensic Medicine Institute, the forensic entity, held a press conference.

[Archive]

[María Paulina Riveros]: Good afternoon. Well, today I’m accompanied by Dr. Carlos Valdés, with whom we inform the country that on Sunday, November 11 in the afternoon hours, the Attorney General’s Office received the news of the death of Alejandro Pizano Ponce de León.

[David]: She said that after two days of an initial investigation, of reconstructing the facts around Alejandro’s death and analyzing the results of the autopsy…

[María Paulina]: The cause of death was poisoning by cyanide ingestion.

[David]: And that, additionally,  the investigators had in their possession the bottle where the liquid was.

[María Paulina]: To which the corresponding analyses are being performed. As a result of the previous facts, the Attorney General’s Office has also initiated a criminal investigation to determine the reasons why this substance was found in the house of the victim’s parents.

[David]: That was the big question: Why was there cyanide there? Well, that and also the cause of Jorge Enrique’s death. Could it be known if he also drank from that bottle?

[María Paulina]: We understand that Dr. Pizano’s body was cremated at the time because in the autopsy, apparently, the cause of death was established as a heart attack.

[David]: In other words, since it was supposed to have been a death from natural causes, it wasn’t necessary to preserve his remains intact and now, of course, they couldn’t do this type of analysis on the ashes.

But there seemed to be an alternative.

[María Paulina]: Dr. Valdés, I don’t know if you can explain that part of the autopsy, but I repeat, that is being investigated at this moment.

[David]: The director of the Forensic  Medicine Institute confirmed that the result of that autopsy revealed cardiac failure.

[Carlos Valdés]: However, the person who performed the clinical autopsy left samples of different tissues for histopathology studies.

[David]: Meaning that, that person decided to keep parts of tissue from Jorge Enrique’s body in the hospital to analyze them. That meant that in those samples they could look for traces of cyanide. That’s what  the director of Forensic Medicine suggested. 

[Carlos]: The investigation that at this moment the Attorney General’s Office has undertaken will very surely order the analysis of those samples.

[David]: A break and we’ll be back

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

The Pizanos’ story was very juicy and very particular even in the violent context of Colombia, a country in which there have been and continue to be many witnesses of crimes who end up dead. But this case, first of all, had to do with an enormous web of international corruption. Furthermore, the witness died after trying unsuccessfully to ask for protection for everything he had discovered, and with the additional tragedy of his son’s death under very strange circumstances. And, as if that weren’t enough, there was also the audio of the Attorney General of the Nation with a phrase that became famous.

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehehe

[Jorge Enrique]: Do you understand me?

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots…

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes. This is a bribe, dude.

[David]: On social media they wouldn’t stop talking about what was happening. Even Alejandro’s last tweet that he published on the morning of the same day of his death went viral. In it he speaks to a very well-known radio journalist who publicly accused Jorge Enrique of having given a contract to Odebrecht in exchange for a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct. Alejandro’s tweet says the following: «To you who didn’t speak the truth about my dad’s situation when you could, who judged him through your microphones, life will have to teach you to be responsible.»

In response to that tweet, people started commenting things like these:

[Tweet 1]

Strength for your whole family in such a terrible situation but it will be the truth that cleans Mr. Jorge.

[Tweet 2]

Rest in peace father and son and may justice be done and what happened be clarified. Everything that happened is too strange, this country is in the hands of a mafia. This is now undeniable.

[Tweet 3]

People who call themselves journalists but act without scruples or professionalism. All with individual interests. They cover up for some and denigrate others.

[Tweet 4]

Forensic  Medicine must determine the causes of the deaths of father and son, gruesome events.

[Tweet 5]

A supportive hug for you and your family. For that journalist, total contempt for his mediocre work.

[Tweet 6]

The corrupt people of this country, because of their greed for money and power, destroy lives and families. They will fall, sooner or later they will fall… in memory of those fallen because of corruption, double standards and violence in Colombia!

[David]: It became the most important news in the media.

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Attorney General’s Office initiated an investigation to determine the causes of Alejandro Pizano’s death.

[Journalist]: The Attorney General’s Office is investigating the strange death of Alejandro Pizano, son of Jorge Enrique Pizano, one of the main witnesses in the Odebrecht case.

[Journalist]: The question today is, who put the cyanide in that bottle. The Attorney General’s Office is investigating the strange death of Alejandro Pizano, son of Jorge Enrique Pizano, one of the main witnesses in the Odebrecht case, who arrived in Bogotá, as we’ve told you, to attend his father’s burial.

[David]: The news even reached international media…

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Colombia is investigating the death of a key witness in the Odebrecht case, after his son died poisoned with cyanide. Now it’s being investigated whether the engineer, key witness in the scandal of the Brazilian construction company that has shaken all of South America, was murdered.

[Journalist]: Those close to the former auditor dismiss that he intended to commit suicide with cyanide. The engineer left a recorded interview in case he died or obtained protection in another country. His statement implicates the Attorney General, Néstor Humberto Martínez, and raises doubts about the investigation of the plot in Colombia.

[David]: Every day they published more and more information about the scandal this story had become. If before very few people in Colombia had heard of Odebrecht, now the Pizanos’ case had turned attention to this international corruption machine.

But the family was saturated. They couldn’t stand the media chasing them to know more details.

[Carolina]: They contacted us without the slightest tact. Without the slightest empathy. So I’d tell them they were not professional at all. And obviously, you’re in  pain,they start harassing you, well what you do is shut yourself in, isolate yourself, say,  don’t talk to me about the subject. It’s like I don’t want to talk about this. And like that to everyone. But a ton of journalists, a ton of journalists.

[David]: But there was someone who did have to talk about the subject publicly:

[Archive]

[Juan Roberto Vargas]: Mr. Attorney General, thank you very much for attending Noticias Caracol.

[Néstor Humberto]: Well, thank you very much for your invitation. It seems very timely and very important to me.

[David]: This interview with Néstor Humberto Martínez came out on the night of November 14, 2018, three days after Alejandro’s death. It was on national television with journalist Juan Roberto Vargas.

[Juan Roberto]: How do you feel today, Attorney General?

[Néstor Humberto]: Well look, this position of highest responsibility has all these uncertainties and difficulties and you have to handle the situation always with composure, with poise and with a lot of serenity. That’s why, I hadn’t spoken out until today. 

[David]: Martínez started by saying that this whole debate that was being generated was political, not legal, and that’s why it was full of lies. The first thing he tried to clarify was that that meeting that Jorge Enrique recorded in 2015, three years before dying, and that Noticias Uno revealed, was personal, between two friends, not work-related.

[Néstor Humberto]: He invited me to that meeting, he asked me a favor to take some papers to Dr. Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo. I acted in that meeting as a personal friend of Jorge Enrique.

[Juan Roberto]: Of course, you act as his friend and he tells you a series of things that later become the heart of the worst corruption scandal that Colombia has had. The big question that Colombia asks today, and this isn’t political or legal, Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect, is, how did you at that moment not report that to the competent authorities?

[Néstor Humberto]: The answer is in the recordings that all Colombians learned about over the weekend.

[Juan Roberto]: What’s the answer?

[Néstor Humberto]: I ask Jorge Enrique, Jorge Enrique, tell me, are these bribes, are they kickbacks? Yes or no?

[David]: He was referring to this part of the recording that Noticias Uno revealed:

[Recording]

[Néstor Humberto]: Are these bribes? Yes or no? Tell me. How is it true? Yes or no? What?

[Interview]

[Néstor Humberto]: And he tells me man, well I don’t have certainty.

[Recording]

[Jorge Enrique]: No, man, well I don’t have certainties.

[Interview]

[Néstor Humberto]: He didn’t have certainty that that was a corruption crime. So one can’t go before the authorities to say look, investigate this that seems to be, that it could be or maybe not, no. When you go to the authorities you say this is like this.

[David]: I repeat Martínez’s argument: since Jorge Enrique, at that point in the conversation, told him that he didn’t have certainty that they were crimes, then, he had no way to report it.

[Juan Roberto]: But in other parts of the same conversations that Noticias Uno reveals, you even say: look, what  you’re showing me is very serious. It even seems like there are bribes for people in the Colombian government. Wasn’t that enough?

[David]: Juan Roberto, the journalist, refers to this part of the recording in which Martínez, as the company’s lawyer, does seem to sense that there were crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: You know what I think? That it’s for the paras, that it’s internal corruption, that it’s to pay bribes outside, that it’s to pay bribes inside. All of the above.

[David]: He says: that it’s for the paras (that is, paramilitaries), that it’s internal corruption, that it’s to pay bribes outside, that it’s to pay bribes inside. All of the above.

But there’s also this other part of the recording, which Martínez also didn’t mention in the interview, in which he seems to be sure that they were bribes.

[Recording]

[Néstor Humberto]: That one, for example, Inversiones Profesionales, it’s clear that it’s a huge bribe. 

[David]: Nor did he mention this other part of the recording, the famous phrase.

[Néstor Humberto]: Jorge Enrique: Do you understand me?

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots…

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes. This is a bribe, dude.

[David]: But going back to the interview… Martínez did confirm that Jorge Enrique discovered suspicious contracts, but insisted that they were only known to be crimes when the Attorney General’s Office, his Attorney General’s Office, investigated two years later. That’s when they realized that Jorge Enrique was indeed right.

He also assured that Jorge Enrique had been key in the investigations.

[Néstor Humberto]: For God’s sake, that can’t be forgotten. He was very important. But additionally, he gave statements here in the Odebrecht case and everything he said about the contracts we incorporated in May 2018 into the Attorney General’s Office investigations.

[David]: 2018… eight years after Jorge Enrique began reporting the irregularities to his bosses.

And, as we’ve already heard, the heads of Odebrecht never testified in Colombia. Neither did those of Grupo Aval. And the way the journalists learned about the workings of that corruption in the country was, in large part, through what the authorities in Peru and Brazil investigated.

Martínez also failed to  mention in the interview that Jorge Enrique didn’t feel safe, that he had asked the Attorney General’s Office for protection for having given such compromising information and that they never gave it to him.

Juan Roberto, the journalist, asked him next  why he didn’t report  those irregularities when they appointed him Attorney General, in August 2016.

[Juan Roberto]: Didn’t it occur to you? And forgive me, please excuse me. It’s with the greatest respect, Attorney General, didn’t it occur to you to say hey, a man told me two years ago that there were some big irregularities there?

[Néstor Humberto]: No, look. I can’t make references to conversations that have to do with my professional practice.

[David]: But remember that a few minutes before he had said it was a meeting of friends, not a professional meeting.

[Juan Roberto]: But you were friends…

[Néstor Humberto]: Just like you, journalist.

[Juan Roberto]: No, because you tell me you were friends, you weren’t a lawyer.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, but later I made a contract… No, no, no.

[Juan Roberto]: That is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Don’t create misunderstandings. Of course, the friend asks me to take some papers…

[Juan Roberto]: As a friend, not as a lawyer.

[Néstor Humberto]: … and after they reach an agreement, as a lawyer they ask me to execute a contract, which is when I learn about the irregular contracts.

[David]: Martínez was referring to the settlement agreement we mentioned at the beginning of this episode and that journalist María Jimena Duzán published.

With that, Martínez changed his argument: according to what he said in the interview, he learned about the irregular contracts as a lawyer when he made that settlement agreement and since he had a professional privilege, he didn’t report it to the authorities.

But that didn’t change the most important point…

[Juan Roberto]: That is, you acknowledge that when you arrived at the Attorney General’s Office you knew about those irregularities.

[David]: And Martínez insisted…

[Néstor Humberto]: I knew about no crime.

[David]: Even when Juan Roberto clarified it again…

[Juan Roberto]: Those aren’t irregularities. Those are crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: When it’s known where the money ended up. Nobody knew where the money had ended up. Jorge Enrique would tell me I don’t know where that money went.

[David]: Martínez also said that in May 2018, he had decided to step away from the Odebrecht investigation because of his conflict of interest.

[Néstor Humberto]: So in this we have acted with total rigor. But the most important thing is that the investigations are carried out, by independent and autonomous prosecutors, whose defense I assume absolutely for their moral integrity. They’re irreproachable people.

[David]: But Juan Roberto questioned him for precisely having that position of power.

[Juan Roberto]: But the thing is the prosecutors who are investigating are your subordinates.

[Néstor Humberto]: Excuse me, in fact… that’s false.

[Juan Roberto]: No. Pardon me, the prosecutors who are carrying the case are… the office is next to your office, Attorney General.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, excuse me. Completely false.

[Juan Roberto]: Why?

[Néstor Humberto]: In Colombia, by mandate of the Constitution and jurisprudence, prosecutors are autonomous and independent.

[Juan Roberto]: Oh no, that’s another thing. But what I’m talking about is the bad taste that’s left with people.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, the thing is public opinion can’t be confused. No, I can’t give an order to a prosecutor in a case.

[David]: But the Constitution itself gives a lot of power and autonomy to the Attorney General of the Nation to manage the State’s investigation and prosecution machine.

After more than 40 minutes of going around the same theme, that he knew about irregularities, not crimes, and not going into the subject of Jorge Enrique and Alejandro’s deaths, the interview ended.

[Juan Roberto]: Well, Mr. Attorney General, thank you very much for having attended Noticias Caracol at this difficult time.

[Néstor Humberto]: Well I thank you and above all the severity of your questions, because it allows me to show the integrity with which my prosecutors have been acting and I assume their defense because they’re men who fulfill their duty to society and the Constitution.

[Juan Roberto]: Thank you very much, Mr. Attorney General..

[David]: Two days after that interview, on November 16, several important things happened. Among them, the revelation of a new audio.

In the next episode…

[Juanita]: But he immediately said that, he told us: but I need you to put out a statement because well people are going crazy. So I need you to put out a statement to say that you support the Attorney General’s Office investigation.

[Carolina]: They were looking, but it seemed… I don’t know, it’s like… Imagine some people like zombies, right? who are desperately looking for what to bite, what to eat.

[Juanita]: We didn’t understand that difficulty in establishing… Because there was no clarity about literally anything, about what procedures were being carried out, about when they were being carried out. If someone entered the house without us knowing, who had the bottle in their hands, who put the bottle.

[David]: To know what had happened, they had to investigate the evidence that surely remained in the house where Jorge Enrique and Alejandro died.

Credits

[David]: La Ruta del Sol is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network from iHeart Radio.

The reporting and production of this episode were done by me, David Trujillo, with production support from Desirée Yépez. The lead editor is Camila Segura, with additional editing by Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff. Eliezer is the project manager. Fact-checking was by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Camilo Vallejo did the legal review. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphics and art direction of the series are by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was handled by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production was done by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales and Samantha Proaño, from the Radio Ambulante Studios audiences team.

Many thanks to Laura Isabel Niño, Daniel Patiño, Andrea García, Jacobo Patiño, Juanita Camacho and Esteban Patiño for lending us their voices for this episode.

La Ruta del Sol was recorded at Fiona Records.

At iHeart the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.

We want to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and in their advice on security matters.

Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

You can follow us on social media as central podcast RA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: This story begins on a very sad Sunday for the Pizano Ponce de León family. It was November 11, 2018, the peak of a family tragedy that had been going on for several years. The family had gathered at their house in Subachoque, a town in Colombia about an hour from Bogotá, to mourn the father, who had died in that same house three days earlier. Juanita Pizano, one of the daughters, was there. At the time, she was 19 years old.

[Juanita Pizano]: We were having a family moment, really beautiful, actually: remembering my dad and sharing stories and laughing and crying a little.

[David]: Juanita’s father, Jorge Enrique Pizano, was 57 years old and had a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer that they had managed to treat, but one day before his birthday,  according to the official report, an unexpected heart failure ended up killing him.

That November 11th, Juanita was with her mother, who lived with Jorge Enrique in that house and who found him collapsed on the bathroom floor on Thursday morning. Her older siblings, Carolina and Alejandro were also there: as soon as they received the news, they had traveled from Spain, where they lived. And Alejandro’s wife, who was pregnant at the time.

With the travels, the funeral, the cremation in Bogotá, and meetings with friends and other family members, they hadn’t been able to have an intimate moment to talk. In fact, this was the first time they all went  to the house. Finally, they had a moment to feel calmer… or at least to share their grief in peace.

[Carolina Pizano]: We arrived there. So we started looking at all of my dad’s things. And, yes, I was the first one to go upstairs.

[David]: She is Carolina Pizano, Juanita’s older sister. She’s 7 years older than her. Carolina remembers that that day, while her brother’s wife stayed in the kitchen preparing lunch, the rest of them started walking around the house.

[Carolina]: So we took my dad’s watches and other things, yes, we were each like, taking  things, or we saw them and left them there.

[David]: Then, the three children and their mother went to the main bedroom, where Jorge Enrique used to sleep.

[Juanita Pizano]: Alejandro starts saying, I should dress the way my dad tells me. And he put on some sneakers, the sneakers we gave my dad for his last Father’s Day that we gave him sneakers…

[David]: Then Alejandro approached Jorge Enrique’s desk, which was in the same room.  There were still some papers, like a to-do list. Alejandro started to take a look at  what was there.

[Carolina]: So that’s when Alejandro calls me and says Caro, look.

[David]: He showed her a photo of her that their dad had put in a picture frame.

[Carolina]: And for me it was a… it’s a very important photo because it’s like the moment where I overcame all my traumas, yes, like all my depression. That my dad had that photo there was super significant to me. And next to it was a bottle.

[David]: A small flavored-water plastic bottle with a green cap — a personal-sized one.

[Juanita]: And my mom said, ‘oh, your dad’s waters,’ because my dad was always so thirsty. She said it was because he had had cancer, but I don’t really know. He was extremely thirsty all the time, so there were always those green-caped bottles around.

[Carolina]: From what I remember –I have no idea if I’m right or wrong– it was quite full. Yes, I mean, obviously it wasn’t new, but it was at least… at least three quarters full. And my brother grabs the bottle, tastes it and says, «What is this disgusting thing?” But I thought well it tasted bad to him and that’s it. Yes, like it must be spoiled.

[David]: But the taste had to be more than bad, because Alejandro’s reaction was not exactly one of disgust. It seemed more like terror. He left the bottle on the desk and ran to the bathroom, desperate.

[Juanita]: But he was screaming. He was terrified, completely panicked. And he started trying to spit in the bathroom.

[David]: It didn’t work. Alejandro came out staggering and started going down the stairs as best he could. At that moment, Juanita grabbed the bottle. She brought it close to her mouth.

[Juanita]: I wasn’t going to be so stupid as to do exactly the same thing, to  take a sip, but I did want to at least perceive what was there. And I didn’t even have to completely turn the bottle over. Just putting my mouth there I felt the most disgusting and bitter taste I’ve ever felt in my life. I mean, I can only describe it as death.

[David]: When Alejandro reached the kitchen, he fell to the floor and started convulsing. His mother, not understanding what was happening, tried to lift him up and help him somehow.

[Carolina]: “My mom tried to make him vomit by sticking her finger in his mouth, but she used her thumb. And I said No! I pulled her back and used my index finger to make him throw up , but my brother was already rigid — so he bit me and I still have a scar here.”

[David]: They quickly got him in the car to take him to the nearest health post. Before leaving, Carolina ran upstairs and grabbed the bottle.

[Carolina]: I’ve watched many medical shows. If they know what he took, they know how he can be saved. So I went and grabbed the bottle and got in the back of the car, in… in the trunk. With that door open and everything. And the door closed with the bump of going downhill at full speed. I think that’s when I passed the bottle to my sister.

[David]: After a few minutes they got to the health post. Alejandro was unconscious. The entrance to the place was empty, there was no one to receive him. They started screaming for help until someone came out and put him on a stretcher. Alejandro was losing his vital signs. Respiratory arrest was imminent and that place wasn’t equipped to save him. He had to be taken immediately to a larger hospital, which was more than 40 minutes away.

[Juanita]: They put him in an ambulance and there I handed the bottle to someone in the ambulance and told them: this is what he drank. And then my mom got in the ambulance and the rest of us were in the car behind the ambulance and we were going to the Facatativá hospital, but he lost vital signs.

[David]: They weren’t going to make it. The ambulance stopped in the middle of the road, in front of another smaller hospital, and the paramedics started trying to resuscitate him: 30 chest compressions, two mouth-to-mouth breaths… And so on, several times. From outside, the others watched how the ambulance moved up and down in dozens of resuscitation attempts. Like that for half an hour.

[Juanita]: And a crowd of people started gathering around us, and we just cried. And we screamed at Alejandro to stay with us.

[Carolina]: And there I started screaming: How can people believe in God? I mean, I couldn’t believe that my dad had died three days ago and my brother was dying now. I felt such hatred for God. I said he can’t exist if this happens.

[David]: But there was nothing else to do. He had died. Alejandro was 31 years old.

[Carolina]: And then, everything collapsed. My mom was screaming. They had to sedate her. Life breaks in two and I think it breaks into a thousand pieces. That’s why for me, death isn’t the death of the person, it’s the death of… of everyone who was around the person, because you stop being who you were. Many parts of yourself change.

[Juanita]: And I couldn’t believe it. The worst moment of our lives, what does this mean? I mean, my mom was just screaming, obviously like a madwoman. They had to give her tranquilizers. Everything was absolute and total chaos.

[David]: But in the midst of the chaos and shock they were all in, Juanita remembers seeing the bottle.

[Juanita]:They took it out of the ambulance and some nurses had it. But I don’t know. I mean, I only saw it passing by, but I don’t… I don’t know. That was the last time I saw the bottle.

[David]: Two days later the autopsy results came out: cyanide poisoning.

From Central series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

Alejandro Pizano’s death left many questions. In the days that followed, the case became increasingly tangled until it ended up turning the attention of an entire country toward a very large corrupt machinery that operated not only in Colombia, but in several countries in the region.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 1: The Bottle.

[David]: Whether a substance is toxic depends on many factors, but the amount to which the body is exposed is the most important. The famous phrase «the dose makes the poison» is true. So much so, that it’s surprising to know that, for example, consuming cyanide, the most famous poison in crime stories, is more common than you’d think. It’s found in apple and pear seeds. Also in the fleshy interior of peach, cherry, plum, and apricot pits. Spinach, almonds, soy and even yuca contain this substance. It doesn’t kill us, of course, but only because the doses are very, very low.

But you shouldn’t be too confident either. Low doses of cyanide can be lethal. Just taking orally between 150 and 200 milligrams, less than a pinch –what you can grab between two fingers–, or even breathing the gas it exudes, can cause effects to start appearing immediately: headache, nausea, tachycardia, chest pain, difficulty breathing. At that point, the substance is already leaving cells without the oxygen necessary to produce energy and that starts to cause a very rapid cascade of deadly effects.

It starts with central nervous system dysfunction, which is reflected in loss of consciousness and convulsions. Then the body goes into a coma, there’s cardiovascular failure, respiratory arrest and brain damage. All of that lasts between 10 minutes and an hour, when the person dies. After that, some signs that experts can detect in the body remain: like reddish spots on the skin, cherry-colored gastric mucosa and sometimes a smell of bitter almonds. 

In Alejandro Pizano’s case, his family had seen the immediate reaction to drinking from the bottle. That’s why his sister Carolina had grabbed it, to take it and have its contents examined. Even before the autopsy results came out, it was clear that that’s what had killed him. But, for his other sister, Juanita, that confirmation, had created new doubts rather than giving them that one certainty.

[Juanita]:The fact is that my dad’s death was no longer of natural causes. I mean, at least the question existed of what happened to dad? It couldn’t be natural causes, because who put that in there? I mean, everything started to become a bit dark.

[David]: And even more so knowing that for almost a decade, their dad had been dedicated to collecting very sensitive information.

[Juanita]: My dad knew many things that no one else knew.

[Carolina]: Yes, my dad was a very curious person and with that curiosity which was so… so positive, right? Like I want to know how this works so I go and ask.

[Juanita]: He had a great capacity to store information in his brain that we… never understood.

[David]: Juanita and Carolina’s father, as we already said, was named Jorge Enrique Pizano. He was a civil engineer recognized in his field who had worked in private companies and in Colombia’s public sector. He got along with people. Juanita describes him as someone very extroverted.

[Juanita]: My dad’s personality was totally captivating, I mean, extremely charismatic. Running an errand in Bogotá, going to the  mall or something was also… It caused me a lot of anxiety because my dad would run into 50 people per square meter and had to greet each and every one.

[David]:Very different from Juanita herself, who since childhood has always been more shy and reserved with everyone, even with Jorge Enrique.

[Juanita]: But as I was growing up my dad always sought to have a close relationship with me, even if, let’s say, I didn’t want to and not because I didn’t love him deeply, but because sometimes it was very hard for me to tell him or in general, express how I felt.

[David]: But he always found a way to show her his love without pressuring her, with small but very significant acts. Sometimes he would leave books or notes in her room.

[Juanita]: Pretty concise notes, but I think very heartfelt, that maybe only he and I understood perfectly what was behind them.

[David]: With his other daughter, Carolina, he also had a good relationship. What she remembers most about him was his sense of humor.

[Carolina]:My dad had… had a very fine humor, right? And very… he was, he was too funny. So he was always making jokes about everything.

[David]: Although sometimes they argued, especially because Jorge Enrique was very strict and pressured her to do things the way he thought was best.

[Carolina]:My dad always worked very hard, he was very methodical, very organized. It was very, very much his personality, and the thing is… My dad always said: “things should be done well or not done at all”.

[David]: And with that idea of doing things right he accepted a public position in 2008. They named him manager of Bogotá’s Aqueduct. There he would have to follow the goals of the new mayor’s office, which consisted, among other things, of expanding water service to some areas of the city and decontaminating the Bogotá river.

At that time, Carolina and Juanita didn’t understand very well what their dad did. They imagined it had something to do with pipes, water and building construction, but what became very clear to them very quickly was that it wasn’t an easy job.

[Carolina]: Because he had the whole issue of unions. Many people came to ask him for contracts. The issue of bidding. And so many people came to request positions.

[Juanita]: There, I guess I could understand that my dad’s work wasn’t so much pipes and buildings, but more management. 

[David]: And political, especially political…

That job ended up being torture for Jorge Enrique, and it didn’t take long for him to start complaining.

[Carolina]: My dad was dying of boredom, he didn’t want to be there anymore, he wanted to run away from there.

[David]: Because the situation reached the point of becoming dangerous.

[Juanita]: I remember him saying that he wanted to resign and that he wanted to resign and once I saw him tell my mom that he wanted to leave the Aqueduct because he was being threatened.

[David]: Juanita, who was between nine and ten years old, doesn’t remember very well if it was her mother or who it was, but at that age she was given a very clear order: she couldn’t answer the phone.

[Juanita]: I saw my dad quite tense and I knew there were people who had been making threatening calls to my dad. I felt panic, but well I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t do anything, especially because I wasn’t supposed to know what was happening and I wasn’t supposed to understand because I was very young, even if I did know. 

[David]: Around that time, Jorge Enrique got an opportunity to work in the private sector that really motivated him. It was with the civil engineer and banker Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, one of the richest men in Colombia and owner of Grupo Aval, one of the largest business conglomerates in the country… and in Latin America. He owns several banks. Not only in Colombia, but also in other countries in the region: Banco de Bogotá, Banco de Occidente, Banco Popular, and AV Villas, among others. He also has investments in agro-industrial and mining businesses, and owns pension funds, brokerage firms, ATM networks, energy infrastructure companies, luxury hotels, and several media outlets, including El Tiempo, one of the most important newspapers in Colombia. His conglomerate covers practically every strategic sector of the Colombian and regional economy.

Among  all the activities of Grupo Aval, there’s also investment in construction projects of different sizes, public and private, like housing complexes, bridges, highways. Some of those constructions, like a cancer research center and a building at the National University, have been donated by Sarmiento Angulo himself through his foundation. Jorge Enrique had already met him at some point while he was at the Aqueduct.

[Carolina]:For my dad he was like a great man, he was someone he deeply admired. So Sarmiento told my dad one day that he would like my dad to work with him. Yes, like he was welcome whenever he wanted. The next day my dad went with his best outfit, with his résumé and told him: Look, here is my résumé. Of course, Luis Carlos received the résumé and passed it along and said something like find a position for him. 

[David]: Within the entire conglomerate there was an open position at Corficolombiana, the company in charge of financing and investing in all kinds of businesses, including construction ones. Not long before, the consortium formed by a Corficolombiana company called Episol and two other partners had won a very important public-private contract: the construction of the second section of the so-called Ruta del Sol, a highway of more than 1,000 kilometers that would connect the center of the country with the Atlantic coast. That second section, known as Ruta del Sol II, would cover more than 500 kilometers and, according to the original contract, would cost over one billion dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

The position available for Jorge Enrique was that of controller, which is basically an auditor.

[Juanita]:Being a controller means ensuring that payments are compliant with the law in terms of contracts and in terms of money laundering.

[David]: In other words, review the consortium’s accounts and verify that payments met international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism standards. This means he would have to ensure the project’s transparency. It wasn’t the job he dreamed of– he actually wanted to be closer to Sarmiento Angulo– but it was the best option at that moment.

[Carolina]: And he accepted the position because he said ok, well, you have to start somewhere, right? This is like getting closer to that person I admire.

[David]: Jorge Enrique started his new job in August 2010. Despite everything, he was enthusiastic. His personality fit perfectly with the job he had been hired to do, and that’s why he came to review everything in great detail. Very quickly he noticed suspicious things in the documents.

[Carolina]:My dad starts to notice that there are inconsistencies, that there are things that don’t add up, that there are payments that… where does this come from.

[David]: After two weeks of being in his job, Jorge Enrique wrote a report that the media outlet Cuestión Pública later revealed. In it he warns that the consortium was making payments without signature control from whoever ordered them. Those payments were made from Corficolombiana by an executive from the other partner company in the project without authorization to sign them.

[Carolina]: But of course, my dad was initially very naive. Yes, he was very naive because he thought it’s an error, there are errors, yes, they have to be fixed.

[David]: But so many errors couldn’t be normal. Each time he found more incriminating things.

[Carolina]: Fake companies, fake signatures. Corruption, pure and simple corruption.

[David]: We’ll be right back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

So… Jorge Enrique Pizano was so methodical and obsessed with order, that during his work as controller he dedicated himself to saving every document he reviewed, every report he made and every email he sent. According to Cuestión Pública’s investigation, one of those emails had the subject «Higher payments» and he sent it in November 2013 to two consortium executives. There he denounced payments of invoices for, and I quote here, «higher and different values than those contracted without having the corresponding support.» They were big alerts, but he didn’t receive any response.

At home, Jorge Enrique didn’t talk about the details of his work, but Juanita remembers that he constantly complained about his bosses’ lack of diligence, their lack of communication.

[Juanita]: He talked a lot about how they were ignoring him. He said: I tried to talk to this person or I had this conversation with this person about these payments and… and damn they don’t do anything.

[Carolina]: He would get home visibly upset sometimes and would say that they hadn’t told him no… that yes, like they hadn’t given him the information, but initially it was like that typical annoyance of the man who, who… or the woman who arrives home loaded from work. Over time it became much more complex because my dad started to realize that this was serious and that many people already knew.

[David]: In 2014 the initial contract for the highway was modified to include a new 80-kilometer section, with an additional cost of more than 500 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time, and that construction was assigned to the same consortium. Jorge Enrique later realized, among other things, that more than 5 million dollars had been paid, at the exchange rate of the time, for land management related to that project—to a company that, just a year earlier, had been dedicated to textile manufacturing.

By 2015, alerts about irregular contracts flooded the project, but when Jorge Enrique demanded information to write his reports, they denied it to him.

[Juanita]: So he had to start going directly to the treasury to ask for the payments that had gone out from Corficolombiana. He had to start begging for this information, even searching almost in the trash cans. So he talked about all this quest for information, because they were no longer giving it to him. And that terrible angst of no longer having anything to do day to day, because they weren’t letting him do his job.

[David]: In June of that year, as Cuestión Pública also revealed, he sent an executive summary to his bosses. In it he asked them to apply internal anti-money laundering regulations urgently. He told them that they were paying invoices without, and I quote here, «respective reports or support of deliverables.» But nobody responded.

[Juanita]:Obviously he looked quite stressed. He suffered a lot from stomach aches from literal stress gastritis. I mean, the stress was getting worse and I think it was also a generalized stress for everyone, a tension that grew and grew. None of us could handle the stress. I even stopped eating. No, I mean, my mom looked sick. My mom couldn’t sleep, I think she couldn’t eat either. And that also caused me anxiety and fears.

[Carolina]: I, on the other hand, have always been quite avoidant, so I prefer to look the other way while things get settled. I never imagined that things were so serious. I lived in this privileged girl bubble, absolutely pathetic. So I said no, but my dad… obviously nothing is going to happen. Yes, like… Yes, nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to happen. That’s what I thought.

[David]: But Jorge Enrique didn’t think the same. He wasn’t going to sit and wait. He tried one last option. He then sought out people from the closest circle of Sarmiento Angulo, the owner of Grupo Aval. He wanted to tell them about all the irregularities and have them alert him directly about what was happening. Among those people he sought was the company’s legal advisor: Néstor Humberto Martínez, an economist and commercial lawyer who had been working with the multimillionaire for several years in different important businesses, like this one of Ruta del Sol II.

[Juanita]: The Sarmientos really trusted Néstor Humberto and it was already the last way my dad could say well, I did everything to give this information to these guys and now they’ll see what they do with it.

[David]: Besides being a recognized lawyer, Néstor Humberto Martínez was a quite experienced politician. At that moment when Jorge Enrique sought him out, Martínez had just left a very important political position two months earlier: Minister of the Presidency. For a year, Martínez had functioned as a liaison between the president and other ministries and other state powers… a position so powerful that some called him super minister.

Jorge Enrique sought out Martínez because of the position he had in Sarmiento Angulo’s conglomerate, yes, but also because he trusted him… he knew him from before: his son Alejandro had been best friends with Martinez’s son since they were very young in school.

Jorge Enrique met with him in August 2015. There, he told him in detail what he had already told his bosses and handed over written evidence of what he had found in those five years: copies of the documents, fake contracts, unsupported expenses, and the reports he had written.

[Juanita]: My dad gave these printed reports directly to Néstor Humberto Martínez, and Néstor Humberto Martínez personally told us that he gave that report to the Board of Directors.

[David]: After that, Jorge Enrique learnt about some meetings held by the project partners to clarify the situation, but he said he hadn’t taken part in them. What the majority partner company did was hire another firm to conduct a confidential analysis, among other things, of the public bidding process for Ruta del Sol II. The report from that analysis, dated October 2015, concluded that, based on the information provided by the company, there had been transparency and legality in those processes.

A month later, an investigative commission —also from the majority partner— wrote another report on the findings from Corficolombiana, where Jorge Enrique worked as a controller. The conclusion they reached, according to the document, was that after a detailed verification, and I quote, “no significant irregularities were found.”

And nothing was reported to state authorities. There was nothing more Jorge Enrique could do.

[Juanita]: Like he no longer had anything to complain about, and nothing happened: he would go to the concessionaire, be there for two seconds because he no longer had anything to work on, come back home, have lunch, go back to the concessionaire to see what he could do. Because little by little they were leaving him without work to do and they were, I think, waiting for him to resign, but he said I’m not going to resign. He said, well let them fire me because I’m going to keep trying to work with the little I have, at least, but I’m not going to stop working or lose my job because of this.

[David]: The option of resigning wasn’t even a topic of conversation with the family.

[Juanita]: There were many things that simply left no room for discussion and I think his work was one of them.

[Carolina]: I was also angry at my dad. Why, if he could have had a quiet life, why did he choose this?

[Juanita]: I think we knew there were things we could say to my dad and things we couldn’t, because he simply did what he thought was right and that’s it.

[David]: And for him, the right thing to do was to keep insisting: to report the irregularities he had found until the company’s top executives activated the mechanisms to stop it. But it was also a form of protection for himself.

[Carolina]: For my dad it was already too important to denounce, because if he didn’t denounce, having known that, well he ended up being an accomplice. So he couldn’t just detach himself like that.

I never imagined it was so serious. Yes, I thought work problems, well… I didn’t imagine it was everything he discovered and what it all ended up being.

[David]: Because it’s not like he talked about all the details with his family… except with one of his children.

[Juanita]: With Alejandro they had very serious conversations. Alejandro clearly knew everything that was happening, but I felt that my dad trusted Alejandro like few people.

[David]: But it wasn’t just a feeling. Indeed, Jorge Enrique confided many things to his son, and both knew these weren’t just work problems. They weren’t even just Colombia’s problems. This was much bigger. It involved very powerful people.

We’ll be right back

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

The information Jorge Enrique had wasn’t just about one project, or even about one country. Remember this—it’s very important: the consortium in charge of Ruta del Sol II was made up of three partners. Two Colombians, both minority partners. One of those was the company Episol, which belonged to Corficolombiana and was part of Grupo Aval. And the third, the majority partner, was foreign, and at that time, the largest infrastructure company on the continent. A company with megaprojects in several countries in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Except for a few politicians and businesspeople, almost no one in Colombia had heard its name. But that started to change in June 2015, when the head of that company, Marcelo Odebrecht, was arrested in Brazil.

[Journalist]: According to official sources, 59 people were arrested in the operation, including businessmen Marcelo Odebrecht and Otávio Azevedo, who preside over the companies Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.

[Journalist]: Marcelo Odebrecht represents the third generation of the family business, the largest engineering company in Latin America, also linked to infrastructure construction for the 2016 Olympic Games.

[Journalist]: Everything pointed to  the accused having known  about the movements the companies had done to have works granted to the state company. 

[David]: And the year before, Brazil’s police had raided a car wash in Curitiba where, according to investigators’ suspicions, they were laundering money.

[Periodista]: A Polícia Federal desmantelou hoje um esquema de lavagem de dinheiro em seis estados e no Distrito Federal.

[Journalist]: The Federal Police dismantled today a money laundering scheme in six states and the Federal District.

[Periodista]: Pelo menos 24 pessoas estavam envolvidas na Operação Lava Jato.

[Journalist]: At least 24 people were involved in Operation Car Wash.

[David]: That operation, which later became known as Lava Jato, ended up discovering that this was the tip of the iceberg of a huge corruption network in which Petrobras, the state oil company, managed bribes between companies and politicians at all levels and parties to secure multimillion-dollar contracts. One of the companies involved was Odebrecht.

[Journalist]: This Friday, the presidents of the construction companies were arrested after being accused of fraud in bidding and bribes to Petrobras officials.

[Journalist]: Brazil’s largest construction company, Odebrecht, expressed its indignation at the arrest order for five of its executives for allegedly being linked to the Petrobras corruption scandal.

[David]: Although at that moment they were just beginning to learn what was happening in Brazil, not the regional scandal that came later, Jorge Enrique had shared with his son the evidence that this corruption had penetrated Colombia’s largest infrastructure project.

And among many of the pieces of evidence he had, there were some audio recordings that compromised very powerful people.

In the upcoming episodes of La Ruta del Sol

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: So now we don’t know how…what we’re getting into. We don’t know if they’re giving money to paramilitaries. If, if, if there’s corruption, those sons of bitches thieves are stealing it.

[David]: We’re going to hear how Jorge Enrique made sure the evidence of the irregularities he found was thoroughly documented.

[Iván Serrano]: He called the recordings «the Christmas carols.» I have enough messages from him saying: soon you’ll be able to play the Christmas carols, but not yet. Hey, be very careful, my life and my family’s depend on this. I have huge security problems.

[María Jimena Duzán]: Everyone said there were bribes, but, but it couldn’t be proven. And the first time I saw it clearly was with these documents that Jorge Enrique Pizano gave me. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had a way to break open the scandal.

[David]: We’ll also talk about the controversy generated by the investigation into the deaths of father and son.

[Carolina]: They took it away. But I… at that moment I said well, a towel with blood, since it has nothing to do with my dad’s death, right, because it’s blood from where. I mean, he shaved and cut himself, that’s what I thought.

[Journalist]: Oviedo went further. He refuted Valdés’s statements about a blood-stained towel.

[Javier Oviedo Serrano]: Do we want to ask the director general how he can say that the bloodstain belonged to Jorge Pizano if there’s no reference sample because the body was cremated?

[David]: We’ll hear about the political scandal that this family tragedy sparked.

[Jorge Robledo]: What changed this story? What’s new? We all know: Jorge Enrique Pizano is what’s new in this story. Jorge Enrique Pizano was a controller, an auditor for the Ruta del Sol. In other words, a person who had access to the company’s internal information, the one who could know what was going on there, and he revealed so many truths that things got complicated and began to change.

[David]: And we’ll talk with some very important characters in this story who, until now, had preferred not to give many details about the case.

[Carlos Valdés]: The death of Jorge Enrique Pizano was being framed as a political event and there was one political group accusing another political group that was defending itself. In the middle of it all were the director of the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and the institution itself.

[Néstor Humberto]: A long time ago, I’d made the decision not to talk about these topics anymore, because it seems to me better to let history and justice run their course. But this seemed like a good opportunity: a different media outlet, one that knows how to make a different kind of radio and isn’t tainted by the political conflicts we’re living through in Colombia today, —they’re such a mess.

Credits

La Ruta del Sol is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network from iHeart Radio.

The reporting and production of this episode were done by me, David Trujillo, with production support from Desirée Yépez. The lead editor is Camila Segura, with additional editing by Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and Eliezer Budasoff. Eliezer is the project manager. Fact-checking is by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Legal review by Camilo Vallejo. Sound design and mixing by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. Series artwork and art direction by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales and Samantha Proaño from the Radio Ambulante Studios audience team.

La Ruta del Sol was recorded at Fiona Records.

At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.

We’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance on security matters.

Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

You can follow us on social media as centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…

[Carolina Pizano]: And there, everything collapsed. My mom was screaming. They had to sedate her. Life breaks in two and I think it breaks into a thousand pieces.

[Juanita Pizano]: And I couldn’t believe it. The worst moment of our lives, what does this mean? I mean, my mom was just screaming, obviously like a madwoman. They had to give her tranquilizers. Everything was absolute and total chaos.

[David]: Alejandro Pizano died after drinking liquid from a bottle he found on his father’s desk. The autopsy revealed he was poisoned with cyanide.

But even stranger was the fact that his father, Jorge Enrique Pizano, had died three days earlier in that same house from an alleged heart failure.

[Juanita]: The fact is that my dad’s death was no longer of natural causes. I mean, at least the question existed of what happened to dad? It couldn’t be natural causes, because who put that in there? I mean, everything started to become a bit dark.

[David]: Especially because, for several years, Jorge Enrique had been gathering evidence of the irregularities that plagued the second section of the Ruta del Sol, one of Colombia’s largest infrastructure projects… a mega-project in which the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht was involved.

This episode begins with a scene that takes place three years before those two tragic deaths. It’s a day in August 2015. We’re in an office in Bogotá. Two characters are there. We can imagine they’re sitting, that there’s a desk, that they’re facing each other. One is Jorge Enrique and the other is Néstor Humberto Martínez, the legal advisor of Grupo Aval, the business conglomerate they both work for.

Jorge Enrique has arrived at this office with many papers, documents, important evidence he needs to show Martínez. They already know each other from before: their children studied at the same school and have been best friends since childhood. Jorge Enrique wants to speak with Martínez to show him the irregularities he’s been keeping a record of for several years and for him to deliver that information to the owner of the conglomerate, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, one of Colombia’s richest men.

Martínez senses why they’re there.

The dialogue they’re about to have, the phrases they’re going to say… those you don’t have to imagine. Jorge Enrique, accustomed to dismissive attitudes from his bosses, from other high-ranking company officials, has decided this time to secretly record the conversation with his iPad to have backup of that meeting.

So, the conversation begins like this: Martínez tells Jorge Enrique that they already know something suspicious is happening, that they’ve already made decisions and right off the bat gives him an instruction. This is Martínez:

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Look, we’re doing one hell of an investigation. I mean, you… because I see you in a state of anxiety, what do I do?

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Ok. Because the thing is… 

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing. 

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something… 

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the channel…

[Jorge Enrique]: Ah, okay. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because, damn it, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: In other words, according to Martínez, Sarmiento – the owner of Grupo Aval – already knows about the irregularities, they’re investigating and basically Jorge Enrique shouldn’t do anything else. Martínez tells him that, from now on, he should deliver all information directly to him, because he knows very well that his bosses have been ignoring him for years. Martínez assures him he won’t minimize those concerns, especially because the situation had changed recently.

Indeed,  two months earlier they had captured Marcelo Odebrecht in Brazil. Although at that moment it wasn’t the international scandal it later became, Martínez confessed to Jorge Enrique that they’re already suspecting that Odebrecht’s corruption had reached Colombia… through La Ruta del Sol II, the infrastructure mega-project they were building.

This is what he says:

[Néstor Humberto]: So now we have a problem: we don’t know how… what we’re mixed up in. We don’t know if they’re giving money to paramilitaries.

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, that too.

[Néstor Humberto]: If there is, if there’s corruption, those sons of bitches are stealing it, they’re thieves. We don’t… Let me tell you all the hypotheses we’re working on: we don’t know if these sons of bitches are paying bribes from here to foreign governments and we don’t know if they’re paying bribes here to the Colombian government.

[David]: Bribes, that is, kickbacks.

Jorge Enrique continues making a comparison.

[Jorge Enrique]: Excuse me for saying it’s… Excuse the analogy, it’s like a mille-feuille.

[David]: A mille-feuille from which he’s discovering new layers. Each more shocking than the previous.

He starts, then, with a first example: a contract made with suspicious documents, with forged signatures, plus a legal representative who was investigated for having ties with paramilitaries. With that, the consortium that was building Ruta del Sol II gave more than 300 thousand dollars at the exchange rate of the time to what appears to be a shell company. 

Martínez, who doesn’t seem to know about this finding, is taken by surprise.

[Néstor Humberto]: These guys are crooks, man.

[Jorge Enrique]: So… But that’s down there. I’m talking to you… We’re talking about the mille-feuille.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, look. Everything. This company’s screwed. This company’s  screwed, brother.

[David]: Jorge Enrique tells him he’s going to give him those documents and Martínez responds that he’ll show them to his boss in the next few hours.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, that at 11 then…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course, so…

[Néstor Humberto]: … Sarmiento will be looking at them.

[David]: But the meeting doesn’t end there. Jorge Enrique has much more and shows him several papers.

[Jorge Enrique]: Here I brought you the collection I have: August 4… of all the contracts, right?

[David]: It’s a compilation of suspicious contracts he’s been collecting that add up to an extremely high sum of money.

[Jorge Enrique]: …and all the groupings that add up to 24 billion pesos.

[David]: About 8 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time… Martínez sounds baffled. He tries to confirm what he just heard.

[Néstor Humberto]: But what is this?

[Jorge Enrique]: Those are the bogus contracts.

[Néstor Humberto]: Strange ones?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, the strange ones. Right?

[David]: And, as if that weren’t enough, Jorge Enrique tells him he knows about another set  of strange contracts that add up to about 12 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

[Néstor Humberto]: Ah, but Sarmiento doesn’t have this, buddy!

[Jorge Enrique]: No, that’s what I was telling you.

[David]: And pay attention to this moment in the scene:

From that pile of documents, Jorge Enrique shows him a specific  contract that he had already reported two years earlier… and which, additionally, involves a public entity. In it, according to Jorge Enrique’s explanation, it appears that they gave money to a fake company to do lobbying and modify the original contract for Ruta del Sol II, in order to benefit the consortium of Grupo Aval and Odebrecht. 

Martínez is taken by surprise again. He wants to see that document with his own eyes.

[Néstor Humberto]: Where does it say that shit, man?

[Jorge Enrique]: Let’s see…

[David]: Jorge Enrique reads what the contract literally says, the service they paid for:

[Jorge Enrique]: Look: complementary activities required for the modification of the concession contract is summarized…

[Néstor Humberto]: Which was the one they modified… I mean.

[David]: In other words, they paid to adjust the contract. 

Martínez seems to understand. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehe yes, yes yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes, son of a bitch.

[David]: And Martínez explicitly says what that contract means.

[Néstor Humberto]: This is a bribe, man. How much is this worth?

[David]: Jorge Enrique mentions the figure: almost 448 thousand dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

So, to be clear: at that moment it would seem that the two of them sense, based on  the documents that are there, that the consortium building Ruta del Sol II paid a possible bribe so that the State would approve an additional section of the road and assign that work to them.

And then, they  both say they’ve known for years the people involved in that bribe. Martínez names them.

[Néstor Humberto]: And this is Villegas?

[Jorge Enrique]: That’s Villegas.

[Néstor Humberto]: Ah, no, he’s a thief, he’s a thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: The other one I saw…

[Néstor Humberto]: He’s a thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: …that I’ve known for 20 years, is Federico Gaviria.

[Néstor Humberto]: That’s another thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: And he was there.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, maestro. These guys fell into the hands of the lumpen. Instead, I’ve been around for this long, I’m a professional.

[Jorge Enrique]: No, it’s that I became…

[Néstor Humberto]: I know all these people.

[David]: «I know all these people,» says Martínez. 

And then he asks Jorge Enrique if anyone else knows about this:

[Néstor Humberto]: And who did you give this shit to?

[Jorge Enrique]: Nobody.

[Néstor Humberto]: And so what did you do with this?

[David]: Jorge Enrique explains again that nobody in the company has paid attention to him, that they even treat him like crazy when he arrives, just like at that moment, with the big pile of corrupt contracts. Martínez laughs.

[Néstor Humberto]: There’s… there’s a crazy guy there.

[Jorge Enrique]: There’s a guy there…

[Néstor Humberto]: A crazy son of a bitch. He’s crazy!

[Jorge Enrique]: You know what I mean?

[Néstor Humberto]: A crazy guy who walks around with a folder under his arm.

[Jorge Enrique]: So, they told me ah, ah, ah don’t come here with gossip. But what gossip? Look. Ah, ah, ah.

[David]: Jorge Enrique insists there are more things, many more… But he confesses to Martínez that he feels his bosses might retaliate for all that information he’s sharing.

[Jorge Enrique]: I don’t want… excuse me. I don’t want them to hate me at Corfi now or whatever, and I end up without a job.

[David]: «That they hate me and I end up without a job,» he says. Martínez tells him to calm down.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, no, man. But we’re doing this…

[David]: And he adds something to give him more security.

[Néstor Humberto]: Wait, I’m going to call Sarmiento and tell him he has to be in the 11 o’clock meeting. Look, call Mr. Sarmiento. Urgent. Urgent.

[David]: For the second time, he tells him Sarmiento will receive all that information that same day.

At the end of the scene, after Martínez acknowledges Jorge Enrique’s rigorous work and after both agree on having a methodology to know what to do, Jorge Enrique asks for instructions:

[Jorge Enrique]: What do I do?

[Néstor Humberto]: Let me know if anything comes up, ok? And, don’t worry because between the two of us, there’s total discretion.

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, yes, me too.

[Néstor Humberto]: But don’t worry.

[David]: They both say goodbye and Jorge Enrique leaves the office. The scene ends. 

The audio you just heard has many names, contracts, figures, the quality isn’t that good and it can even sound confusing at times. What does seem clear is that Jorge Enrique handed over to Martínez the documents of the irregularities he had found.

But it would take years to come to light…

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 2: The Recording.

[David]: Let’s go now to early 2018, a little over two years after that meeting we just heard. Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán had been investigating the Ruta del Sol for some time.

[María Jimena Duzán]: That was like the crown jewel of all the big tenders for mega-projects the country had at that moment. And with great, great excitement in the world, Colombia, everyone, all businessmen embraced that new tender because supposedly it was going to change not only the image, but it was going to be the cornerstone of a new dimension for companies because they would have very easy access to the Caribbean.

[David]: One day María Jimena received a message from Jorge Enrique Pizano. He had read her articles on the subject and wanted to give her very confidential information.

[María Jimena]: I didn’t really know him. According to what he explained to me, it was Grupo Aval’s prerogative to appoint the controller, which was him. He showed me from the beginning: look, I’m an employee of Grupo Aval. I worked there until then because there was a very complicated situation. So I said to him: what was it?

[David]: In that two-year span several things had happened. U.S. justice proved, largely through confessions from Odebrecht’s top executives, that for decades they had paid almost 800 million dollars in bribes in Latin American and African countries. In Colombia’s case, one of the projects related to that corruption was Ruta del Sol II, and by that time the State had already terminated the construction contract. After eight years, the work was incomplete and had absurd cost overruns.

According to U.S. justice, the bribes in Colombia were just over 11 million dollars, one of the lowest figures on the list. But that wasn’t the only oddity of what was related to that case in the country.

[María Jimena]: I had already written several articles about how absurd what was happening in Colombia was because the people and companies that were involved, linked to paying bribes, weren’t being mentioned because only Odebrecht was mentioned and not its partner, which was Grupo Aval.

[David]: In fact, Grupo Aval, for whom Jorge Enrique worked, rejected from the very beginning any illegal activity and declared itself a victim of Odebrecht. They also insisted that they would cooperate with the investigation transparently.

But that didn’t entirely convince María Jimena and some of her colleagues.

[María Jimena]: That situation had gotten  many journalists like me, well, looking a bit to see what was happening, because this seemed like, like non-justice.

[David]: And, as we already know, Jorge Enrique had possible evidence that there had been strange money movements in Ruta del Sol II for years and no one had reported it to the authorities. María Jimena paraphrased what Jorge Enrique told her when they spoke that first time.

[María Jimena]: Well it turns out that in recent months I started seeing that there were contracts that didn’t match to anything and I started looking, and looking and I ended up understanding they were paper contracts. Why? Well because the money did go out and the contracts were paid, but they didn’t end up going to the things they were supposed to go to, as the initial contracts said and, instead, they ended up in shell companies that were intermediaries.

[David]: María Jimena was interested in what he was telling her, but she wanted to see first what all this was about, so she arranged to meet him at her house.

[María Jimena]: I was surprised that when he arrived, I received him, he told me: Oh, it’s the first time a journalist has agreed to meet. I’ve gone to all the media outlets saying and telling everything I know and none of them listened. And I told him: well, show me what you have. He gave me an immense portfolio of evidence and I started analyzing it.

[David]: The documents were very strong. They seemed to show what up until that moment was an open secret.

[María Jimena]: Everyone said there were bribes, but, but it couldn’t be proven. And the first time I saw it clearly was with these documents that Jorge Enrique Pizano gave me. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to break the scandal. What happened was that from that highway they took the money to pay bribes with the purpose of helping political campaigns, not only the 2014 presidential campaign, but also for the 2015 gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns.

[David]: From different political parties and in various regions of the country.

Jorge Enrique told her that he was certain that because of that information he had, he had become inconvenient for the company and recently, at the end of 2017, they had terminated his contract without paying him what he considered fair. Since then he had not been able to get another job. In addition to the difficult economic situation he was going through, he had also recently been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and was just starting his treatment.

The question that remained for María Jimena was why it seemed like the Attorney Genral’s Office wasn’t using that information for their investigations. According to what Jorge Enrique told her, they had already had it for at least a year when, at the beginning of 2017, the authorities took away the computers from the consortium’s offices of Ruta del Sol II because of the Odebrecht case, along with the documents and reports he had sent.

[María Jimena]: So I got into that story that was Kafkaesque.

[David]: For her, the most absurd thing was that for almost a year, the position of Attorney General of the Nation, that person who holds the reins of the State’s investigative power, including for this huge international corruption case involving Odebrecht, had been given to Néstor Humberto Martínez, the same person whom Jorge Enrique had recorded in 2015. Martínez had not only been Minister of the Presidency and promoted by the government to head the Attorney General’sOffice…

[María Jimena]: He had also been Grupo Aval’s lawyer. I mean, there was a conflict of interest from all sides but he was still elected  Attorney General.

[David]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

In mid-2016, the Supreme Court elected Néstor Humberto Martínez as Attorney General of the Nation and he arrived at a new powerful position like the ones he was used  to. One of the goals he set from the beginning was the fight against corruption. This is what he said in his inauguration speech:

[Néstor Humberto]: The fight against corruption needs those responsible for this opprobrious crime to be subject to prison sentences.

[David]: That the corrupt have to go to jail without benefits. That the law be enforced.

[Néstor Humberto]: When that happens, without privileges or contemplations, we will see again that the pockets of public servants are like crystal.

[David]: That is, that State finances be transparent. That last phrase would be the name of his flagship program, Crystal Pockets, perhaps the most emblematic of his period as Attorney General.

Later in this series we’re going to hear Martínez talk about his role in this entire story, but all you need to know for now is that he didn’t report to the authorities what Jorge Enrique showed him. Not at that moment, in 2015, nor when he arrived at the Attorney General’s Office a year later. And although he said in an interview in December 2017 that the investigation of the Odebrecht case was going to end in less than a month, that’s not what happened. 

But let’s go back to the meeting between Jorge Enrique and journalist María Jimena Duzán. She remembers that the same day they met, he told her that the Attorney General’s Office was investigating him. But not exactly for what he had discovered in Ruta del Sol II, but rather for allegedly having received a bribe, also from Odebrecht, when he was manager of Bogotá’s Aqueduct  ten years ago. María Jimena asked him directly about that matter.

[María Jimena]: And you didn’t receive any money from Odebrecht? And he tells me, do you think that if I had received money from Odebrecht, well I would have money. I don’t have money. And really he didn’t have money and he could prove to me that he, when he entered, his predecessor had already signed that contract. And indeed he was right.

[David]: Furthermore, the person who accused him of receiving that bribe later told the Supreme Court that in that Aqueduct  case he had confessed to crimes he didn’t commit because the Attorney General’s Office had pressured him to reach an agreement. In other words, he had lied so they would give him benefits in his legal process and his lawyer recommended that he accept the condition. 

But the investigation against Jorge Enrique continued and María Jimena could see he was in bad shape. 

[María Jimena]: They set up a process to harass and intimidate him, and the  Attorney General’s Office set it up. All to prevent him from being called as a witness and to discredit him as a witness in the few processes that Néstor Humberto Martínez’s Attorney General’s Office was pursuing. They wanted to trap him and catch him and silence him and almost put a gag in his mouth so he wouldn’t keep talking. They had to destroy his honor and his mental state. And that was deeply tormenting him. So, besides not having money, besides not having a job, the problem of feeling they were going to arrest him had him feeling very upset.

[David]: Jorge Enrique’s youngest daughter, Juanita, didn’t find out what was happening because her father told her. She found out through a news story she came across on the Internet.

[Juanita]: And literally a news story came up, El Tiempo. Obviously Sarmiento’s media had to be the ones saying it, that they were going to charge my dad that week and that’s when I called my dad and told him look, I’m not a little girl and I need to know what’s happening and I’m not going to find out through these things, through social media, because it’s absurd. And I said, what’s happening? I mean, I need you to tell me.

[David]: Jorge Enrique explained to her the situation with the Attorney  General’s Office, the investigation they were conducting. He told her someone had testified against him, but that he hadn’t done anything illegal. And he also told her that they couldn’t build a case against him because there was no evidence of anything.

[Juanita]: However, the Attorney General’s Office never stopped investigating my dad and all it did was pressure him more. And it intercepted all our communications and I know because it was noticeable when we made a call, there was very clear interference and they violated my dad’s fundamental and constitutional rights and ours too. Mine also, because I was a minor and my communications were intercepted.

[David]: From then on only strange things kept happening.

Alejandro decided to go to Spain in early 2018. He was newly married and since the situation was too tense, he wanted to distance himself although always keeping close contact with his family. Juanita and Carolina, who did stay, remember their father became increasingly insistent about taking certain precautions.

[Juanita]: And I liked having the curtains open and he told me to close the curtains and I felt he was kind of paranoid.

[Carolina]: I remember I’ve always posted on Instagram and my dad kept telling me: don’t post things, don’t show our faces, don’t show anything. Like don’t use the same route, go other ways.

[Juanita]: And at night you could see like lasers, like pointing at the house. And my dad talked about the lasers, but I was like, that sounds a bit paranoid, I don’t know. And I connected all these dots literally last year because I was telling all this to my ex-boyfriend, who was a super security engineer, and he told me that’s super advanced technology to listen to conversations.

[David]: Jorge Enrique saw no other way to explain what was happening:

[Juanita]: This is persecution, he said, against people who have nothing to do with these crimes. And where are the people who committed them? Where are the executives of Corficolombiana? Where are the executives of Grupo Aval? At their homes, relaxed, in even better paid positions.

[David]: Only one person was arrested from Grupo Aval: the president of Corficolombiana, the conglomerate’s company where Jorge Enrique worked, for having ordered the payment of a bribe. Grupo Aval didn’t defend him. On the contrary, they insisted that everything had been planned by him, as president of the company, and his partner, Odebrecht.

But the heads of Odebrecht in Colombia didn’t answer to the authorities either, because they left the country even when there were arrest warrants for them and without at least having testified before the Attorney General’s Office. Shortly after, the president of the multinational in Colombia said, from Brazil, that in 2014 they had given millions of dollars to the presidential campaigns of the two main candidates, including that of President Santos’s reelection. But since these weren’t just electoral crimes, but also violations of campaign rules, a different entity than the Attorney General’s Office had to be in charge of another investigation and decide on other possible sanctions.

Jorge Enrique, on the other hand, stayed in Colombia targeted by public opinion. Even the Attorney General publicly pointed his finger at him and said he had been an Odebrecht employee for years when these corrupt money movements took place. But in reality Jorge Enrique was an employee of Grupo Aval, a company that, for him, had done nothing to at least respect his presumption of innocence. Instead, they terminated his contract. Carolina remembers her father’s disappointment with that job.

[Carolina]: Super disillusioned. And besides, Néstor Humberto Martínez was there and Sarmiento was there, two people who he thought were close, whom he admired and whom he cared about at some point. But super disappointed and scared. I mean, the emotion that started to prevail in my dad was fear… of them putting him in jail while being innocent.

[David]: And, on top of the distress of persecution, and  the emotional wear, came  the economic crisis. Nobody was going to give him a job with such a stigma following him.

[Juanita]: I think it’s one of the saddest moments of my life, because seeing a person like my dad, who was so dedicated to his work, defeated. I mean, he was totally defeated.

[Carolina]: My dad looked and looked for work, he asked for my help, so I talked to my friends who work in human resources and I sent his resume, and my dad told me, well Carito, they interview me, and everyone tells me that my experience is much broader than what’s required for the position, that I don’t fit the profile. Desperate. My dad didn’t know what to do to get work. Everyone turned their backs on him. The first ones who turned their backs on him, long before, were my maternal uncles. Then, my dad’s friends, they all disappeared.

[María Jimena]: He was in very bad shape, and since I first met him he was like that.  And on top of that,  he had cancer. He had come out, let’s say, more or less well from a recent treatment, but since things had become more critical in general, he felt very bad health-wise.

[David]: Although he felt cornered, for Jorge Enrique it was very important that what he had discovered be known because it was a strategy to clean his name… and to protect himself. So for months, he and María Jimena began organizing what they had and connecting the dots.

[María Jimena]: Throughout those months, we started meeting every week, because each time he brought me more information. And I started building a much deeper investigation and we realized it was much more money, and that there were many more contracts that led to about 55 billion pesos just in contracts.

[David]: According to María Jimena, more than 19 million dollars, at the exchange rate of the time, that would have come from  one of the country’s most important infrastructure projects in recent years.  More than what Odebrecht’s heads had confessed before U.S. justice, which was 11 million. For her, the picture was becoming increasingly clear.

[María Jimena]: Grupo Aval’s participation was really  very important and had been very key, and what was happening in Néstor Humberto’s  Attorney  General’s Office, well, was very strange.  

[David]: María Jimena published her investigation in several articles in Semana magazine, always concealing her source’s identity.

Distressed, Jorge Enrique decided to look for another journalist who would also end up playing a key role in this whole story.

We’ll be right back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

Iván Serrano was a journalist for Noticias Uno at that time. Jorge Enrique had known him for a decade and had been his source for other topics. He also gave him the evidence of corruption in Ruta del Sol II, asked him to publish the information without mentioning him and in one of their meetings explained that, since Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014, U.S. justice could investigate and sanction the company. Jorge Enrique, off the record, mentioned to Iván the gravity of the matter. This is Iván.

[Iván Serrano]: I clearly remember that Jorge Enrique spoke in a low voice in his apartment, and he told me: because of this they can extradite Sarmiento.

[David]: Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, the president of Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: Well because money from money laundering had entered the American banking system. I mean that was the size of it.  So evidently Jorge Enrique was terrified because his findings didn’t only involve the most powerful man in this country, but they showed that Marcelo Odebrecht himself lied to U.S. justice, because there he talked about, I think, 11 million dollars. And it’s obvious that the bribes they paid here exceeded 11 million dollars, they exceeded them. So what Jorge Enrique found was very important.

[David]: And he had found out about it though it was very difficult to get information.

[Iván]: The problem is they put the wrong guy because Jorge Enrique did do the work despite them not giving him information, despite him having to look through trash cans, ask around the sides, personally go to addresses to verify if a company was located at that address. I mean his work was impressive. His alone, because he was alone. He didn’t have other people, he was alone. And basically he discovers, well, the most terrible corruption network in the country’s recent history.

[David]: And he discovered that network, as Iván calls it, before the Lava Jato case broke, before they captured Marcelo Odebrecht, before US justice made the figures public, before Néstor Humberto Martínez was elected Attorney General of the Nation.

[Iván]: So the question was: Who did you tell this over there? Well, I told Néstor Humberto Martínez.

And do you have proof that Néstor Humberto knew? Yes, I have the recording. And he lets me listen to a part of it. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because I see you in a state of anxiety. What do I do?

[Jorge Enrique]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is… 

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing. 

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something… 

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the channel…

[Jorge Enrique]: Ah, okay. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because, damn it, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: Despite the fear Jorge Enrique felt, he decided to give the recordings to Iván on a thumbdrive with a password he didn’t give him. He thought the content would be in good hands, but he wasn’t yet sure enough for him to publish it.

[Iván]: He called the recordings «the Christmas carols.» I have enough messages from him saying: soon you’ll be able to play the Christmas carols, but not yet. Hey, be very careful, my life and my family’s depend on this. I have major security problems.

[David]: Iván only heard one of the recordings, the one we already heard at the beginning. But there were three others: one, also with Néstor Humberto Martínez and that was made a few days after that first meeting in 2015. And two more, which were conversations with two high-ranking Grupo Aval officials. I listened to all of them and in all of them it’s very clear that Jorge Enrique told them what he had found. It’s also clear that the people he recorded committed to doing something to sound the alarms.

María Jimena knew about those recordings from the beginning. Jorge Enrique told her.

[María Jimena]: He says he knocked on all doors at Grupo Aval and no one listened, that they treated him like a crazy guy and that that’s when the theory began that something was going to happen to him and that he had to record them because he realized along the way that with so much denying of what he had discovered, that he was onto something, he didn’t know what it was, but that because of that, all sorts of things would happen to him and so he started recording them.

[David]: But he only let María Jimena listen to those recordings some time after they started talking. One day Jorge Enrique and his son, Alejandro, arrived at her house with the iPad with which he recorded everything. They wanted her to publish them.

[María Jimena]: They sat down and showed me Néstor Humberto Martínez’s audio, which seemed to me the most compromising of all.

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehe

[Jorge Enrique]: You know what I mean??

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes, son of a bitch.

[Néstor Humberto]: This is a bribe, man. How much is this worth?

[María Jimena]: And I said: this can’t be. Did this really happen? Is this Néstor Humberto Martínez’s voice? The Attorney General who had said he was supposedly going to end all acts of corruption and discover those responsible for Odebrecht. And I said no, this is a bomb. And then I thought and said: wow, if this is published, well Néstor Humberto Martínez would have to resign.

[David]: Jorge Enrique told María Jimena that those audios were his definitive insurance, the last card he had left to protect himself. But if he published them, he was afraid that something could go wrong, that his situation could get worse. That’s why he asked María Jimena to wait this time. He wanted to feel safe.

[María Jimena]: He knew that the day he released the audio they were going to kill him. He told me that: the day I release the audio, my life is in danger. The truth is, I keep  thinking it was the opposite. I think that since he delayed releasing those audios, that was a mistake. I think he should have released those audios quickly and not delay for eight months, which is how long he took after I had heard them. 

[David]: In the next episode…

[Iván]: I want to ask you a bit about the decision you made to give us this interview. Why have you made that decision?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I believe the facts and truths are coming to light and we see how there really is a plot, if you can call it that, against integrity, in this case my integrity as a person and that my rights are being violated.

[Iván]: Evidently, he had fears. It was absolutely real and as I tell you, he spoke in a low voice in his apartment. I mean, it wasn’t a thing from the movies. I mean, here we’ve come to understand that many of those fears were absolutely real.

[Juanita]: All I said was: poor thing, I found him on the floor. And he told me: poor thing, poor thing. I immediately asked him: Who killed my dad? Who was it? Who was there?

[David]: Jorge Enrique tried to protect himself in every way he could. In the end, he agreed to publish the recordings, but only with one condition.

Credits

[David]: La ruta del sol is a podcast from Central, Radio Ambulante Studios’ series channel, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network from IHeart Radio.

The reporting and production of this episode were done by me, David Trujillo, with production support from Desirée Yépez. The lead editor is Camila Segura, with additional editing by Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and Eliezer Budasoff. Eliezer is the project manager. Fact-checking is by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Camilo Vallejo did the legal review. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphics and art direction for the series are by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales and Samantha Proaño from the Radio Ambulante Studios audience team.

La Ruta del Sol was recorded at Fiona Records.

At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.

We’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance on security matters.

Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

You can follow us on social media as centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

This is El Péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

During this series we have taken you to North Carolina –

Pastor Daniel Sostaita: I mean, I see that we build walls and not bridges.

To Pennsylvania –

Daniel Jorge: And we believe that we are going to vote for this president because he is going to lower the price of gasoline. Is that all you are looking for in a president?

We went to Nevada…

Marta Fabiola Vazquez: People are afraid to spend now. They don’t spend like they used to, they don’t go out like they used to. Prices are very high for food, for everything.

To Arizona…

Adrian Fontes: Here in Arizona, not only in the summer – it is very hot. [laughter]

And to Florida –

Julio: And now that we are in an election year, is there anything that worries you? Anything that particularly calls your attention?

Zairenna Barbosa: That the differences have been taken as a point not to solve the problems, but to create them.

Always with the same goal, to listen to you, the Latinos from different countries, who live and work and who are part of this immense, diverse country. We wanted to understand how you planned to vote… And why. Your concerns, your complaints, your dreams.

We said it in the first episode: our idea is never to give predictions, but to report on what we found, in the streets, in the markets, in the churches, in the neighborhoods. And well, now, Wednesday afternoon while we are recording, we have something that we thought we would not have so soon… A result. A winner.

Donald Trump.

Trump: This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to Make America Great again. [applause fade out]

However you look at it, his victory is historic… The last time a president won a second non-consecutive term in the United States was more than a century ago, in 1892.

So, the man who was rejected by the American people four years ago, who was found guilty of 34 criminal charges, and responsible for sexual abuse and who continues to face other charges… today is once again at the gates of the White House.

And this time, he has a clear mandate. Unlike his victory in 2016, this time he also won the popular vote. If that were not enough, his party has also won control of the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still undefined at the time of closing this episode.

Let’s say that a little more than half of the country is happy with these results, and the other half, or a little less, is distressed, or even in shock.

So, to understand everything that has happened, and what it may mean for Latinos and for the country, we have two guests… Sabrina Rodriguez, national reporter for the Washington Post, and Paola Ramos, my colleague from Noticias Telemundo and author of the book “Defectors.”

This is El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast from Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… The red tide. The return of Trump and the future of Latinos.

JULIO: Hey, Sabrina and Paola. Thank you very much for being here.

PAOLA: Thank you very much.

SABRINA: Yes, thank you for the invitation.

JULIO: Well, first of all, the polls told us that this was going to be a very close presidential campaign, that the two candidates were neck and neck with a count that could last even days without us knowing who was going to be the winner. But here we are. With Trump winning the electoral vote and also for the first time, the popular vote. What do you think happened? Sabrina, we start with you.

SABRINA: I think it’s a question that we’re going to be asking ourselves for days and weeks. Honestly, I think that for example, now we’re starting to see the exit polls and seeing. Okay. What group? I mean. What are the groups that helped Trump win the presidency? So what we’re seeing now in just the hours after the election was over is that everyone —I mean, if we’re talking about various groups of Americans: I mean Latinos, African Americans, white women— helped Trump win the presidency and I think that shows us the limits of the polls really and we focus so much in the days before the election on seeing, «ah! look at 50% in this state or look at 49% in this one». But at the end of the day it all depends on who goes out to vote.

JULIO: Mhm. You, Paola. How are you explaining it?

PAOLA: Look, I think Sabrina is absolutely right. I think that now we kind of don’t know what the whole story is, what the whole picture is. But what we do know is that we underestimated the power that Donald Trump had. I think that in the last two months we thought maybe that in the face of what Donald Trump was saying, this country was a country of immigrants that in the face of these abortion bans this country was perhaps going to choose not to be pro-abortion anymore. But I think that what we are understanding right now goes far beyond Donald Trump, it goes far beyond Kamala Harris, it has everything to do with the voters, and the voters had two very clear, very different options. Two fundamentally different stories. And they clearly chose a candidate who is promising a very different vision for this country. And that’s what we have to process. What are they telling us? Maybe it’s an electorate that does care about democracy, but in a very different way than we thought.

JULIO: Mhmm. Now, the idea that we had working on this series and seeing the numbers and listening to different reports before the vote, we have the image of a country divided within different Latino communities, even where you are in Pennsylvania and Arizona. How have the Latinos you’ve spoken to reacted? What have you heard off the top of your head, Sabrina?

SABRINA: I think that. I mean, it does show how divided we remain. I mean, it’s not something that’s going to change because Trump won. I think that the divisions that exist are only going to be reinforced. And I think that coming up to the vote in Pennsylvania, I’ve been in the Philadelphia area. A lot of the focus has been on the Puerto Rican vote and for the Democrats there was a hope that they were going to win with a lot of Puerto Ricans because of the comment that was made at one of Trump’s rallies in New York, when a comedian said that Puerto Rico was an island of garbage and in the last days before the elections that was it. I mean, they used it as a moment to really mobilize voters and there was a hope among the Democrats that it was going to help them. But then, talking to voters, I met several Puerto Ricans who voted for Trump, who were saying that yes, he offended them, I mean, they were offended by what had been said, but that at the end of the day they were more concerned about the future of the country, that they were really more concerned about the economy if it offended them, that sometimes they thought that things that Trump said were ridiculous and they didn’t like them, but that they thought that the future was safer with him. And I think that we are going to have this conversation again for weeks and months: that people see a very different vision of who could help us in the future. But I think that in Philadelphia it became clear that many Puerto Ricans did go out to vote. Yes, they were interested in the election, but they had different visions of who would be the person who would help their families.

JULIO: Yeah. What have you heard in Arizona, Paola?

PAOLA: Well, something similar, right? Look, I spent the night with many families of mixed immigration status. I think that at the beginning of the night, before understanding the results, before seeing that Trump had won, I think that the hope of many of these immigrant families —the hope was that at the end of the day the Latinos would support them, right? That Latinos, faced with the comments that Donald Trump had made, faced with those comments that were heard in New York about the island of garbage and the promise of mass deportations —I think that the hope that they had was that at the end of the day what happened in 2020, in 2016 and in other previous years would happen. And that is that the Latino community would come out in very large numbers in favor of the Democrats. But I think that just like what Sabrina says, we are seeing that two stories can exist at the same time, although there are Latinos who were afraid of those threats of mass deportations and who chose Kamala Harris, but even so there were many more Latinos than expected who were not insulted by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant comments. And that was seen here in Arizona. No, it did not affect them much, they did not feel included in those insults. I think the interesting thing that’s happening here in Arizona is that even an immigration proposal that was on the ballot, which is Proposition 1314, which is a proposition that gives, that will give more power to local police here so that they begin to act as immigration agents. That proposal here in Arizona, in a state where there are many Latinos, won. So we’re back to the same thing. We’re facing an election where many stories can exist at once.

We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL]

We’re back at El péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

Today we spoke with my colleague Paola Ramos, from Noticias Telemundo, and Sabrina Rodríguez, national reporter for the Washington Post.

JULIO: Well, one of the big stories is the margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Right? Latino voters supported Trump much more in this election, 25 percentage points more than four years ago. It’s a historic change. No other Republican had reached this percentage and you have reported a lot about these communities. How do you explain it? Paola, for example, you wrote the book Defectors —just about how Latinos have turned to the right. Did you expect this figure? 45% of Latinos voting for Trump?

PAOLA: Yes, I expected it because I think we’ve been seeing some of these signs for four years. Back in 2020 we started to see that Donald Trump, after four years in the White House, already began to increase those margins with the Latino community, increasing between eight and ten points in 2020 compared to 2016. I think that in the last four years we have begun to see signs, signs of a Latino community that did not care so much about those threats of mass deportation, signs of a Latino community that felt comfortable with some of the anti-trans comments that Donald Trump’s campaign was making. We have seen a Latino community that little by little also feels much more comfortable with the evangelical movement. We have seen a Latino community, even Afro-Latino, for example, in a state like New York, that also feels more and more comfortable with some of the anti-African American comments. I think that’s what it tells us, that there are many more divisions between us than we want to see, than we want to acknowledge. So I’ve been seeing these signs for a long time.

JULIO: And Sabrina, we saw something that you posted on social network X on Tuesday, on election day, you wrote. And I’m going to translate it here. Let’s not start with that of blaming Latino voters again. Let’s see, explain to us. What do you mean?

SABRINA: Ah, Julio [laughter] The interesting thing has been the response to that post, really.

Julio: Let’s see?

SABRINA: But I think that for me. I mean, looking at the exit polls, looking at the states that Trump has won, this goes beyond Latino voters and that’s the part that frustrates me already and is going to frustrate me with the narrative. It’s that in the next few weeks it’s going to focus a lot on the US. Why is it that Latino voters gave the presidency to Trump and it’s going to be as if Latinos were the only ones who went to vote for Trump. Or it’s going to be a focus on, that is, the 45% who voted for Donald Trump instead of the 55% who voted for Kamala Harris. And I think that’s the part that many times the debate and the conversation around voters and Latino voters in particular, lacks that level of complication of talking about the differences, the divisions, that in one area it can be different than in another. I mean, we talk and we’re probably going to talk more, but about the division between women and men. I mean, there are so many, there are so many pieces of this conversation and I think it’s irresponsible, I mean, to put all the blame on one group for what happened in this election because Trump won.

JULIO: Also, it’s interesting the approach of blaming someone for voting, no, for what they wanted.

SABRINA: Absolutely. And I think that —and look, I think that seeing what I’m seeing in X, there are many people. I mean, they voted for Kamala Harris, who are blaming Latinos. I see it in the comments on that particular post. People saying, “Well, Latinos deserve to be deported. Oh, look, they deserve what’s going to happen now, because look how they went out to vote for Trump.” And I think that because of comments like that, because of responses like that, we are in this moment of so much division. I think that also, I mean, Democrats have to take a moment now after this and well, more than a moment to really process why this has happened and what they have to do differently. Because Pablo and I have talked about it many times, but after 2020 there are many Democrats who came out saying that the exit polls were wrong, that there weren’t that many, many Latinos who went to vote Republican or they blamed themselves, I mean, the Mexicans in South Texas, in the Grand Valley River or the Cubans in Miami. But always. But it was not possible that Trump was doing better with Latinos around the country. It had to be a group here, a group there. But it is not. I mean, it is not something that is happening in the rest of the country and I think that in having that reaction. They have been very late in responding to this problem that they clearly have when we are talking about a group of people that for decades were expected to be voters, that the Democrats could depend on.

JULIO: Do you agree with this vision, Paola?

PAOLA: Totally. And look, there is also something very interesting. I mean, all the comments right now are going to be focused on the Latino community. What happened? But that is the reality. The reality remains that regardless of the fact that Kamala Harris won the Latino vote, she also won the African-American vote. And the reality also remains that white women who were supposedly going to be the Democrats’ salvation at this moment, white women continued to vote for Donald Trump. So this idea of ​​blaming groups really starts with that reality that white women continued to support Donald Trump. Despite all this narrative and despite the threat of abortion bans, I also think that what Sabrina says is very important. One of the things that is very clear here in a state like Arizona and it is what activists would tell you, what many Latinos would tell you is that here the Democratic Party failed them. They did not give them the resources they needed, they did not give them the infrastructure they needed. And I think that more than anything many Latinos on the left would tell you that they did not give them the message they needed to mobilize, to inspire a coalition that right now needed to be inspired, they did not need to have a message that would lead them to that final goal.

And what do I mean? I mean this idea that if we think about 2020, one of the reasons why Joe Biden wins in a state like Arizona is because he distanced himself in a very, very clear way from Donald Trump’s cruelty at the border. If we remember the last two weeks of that campaign, in 2020 we saw a Joe Biden who promised immigration reform, who was not afraid to insult Donald Trump very clearly and very aggressively against his immigration plans. I think that in the last two months we have seen a candidate, Kamala Harris, who is much more moderate, much more conservative with his immigration plan. And perhaps we have to ask ourselves what would have happened if the vice president had put forward a message, perhaps a little more progressive and perhaps a little more inspiring and perhaps a little braver in terms of that immigration message. I think that is something that many Latinos here are thinking about.

JULIO: It is an interesting question. What other questions are there that you think can help us understand this Trump victory? Sabrina, what other questions do you think are worth asking ourselves? Or the Democrats, specifically, asking themselves?

SABRINA: Yes, well. I think that there are several questions that we can ask ourselves about immigration, and I think that Julio, I mean, you yourself asked the vice president the question that stayed with me when you said to her: “So, has Trump won the immigration debate?” And she said absolutely not, but the reality is that in her campaign she hardly talked about immigration. It’s not just that she took a more moderate position, she didn’t talk about it much. So I wrote an article recently that I was looking for data and the Republicans spent 243 million dollars on ads about immigration, while the Democrats only spent 15 million dollars. I mean, it’s a big difference. So, if we talk about four years of, I mean, people listening, of being afraid of immigrants, of the situation at the border, I mean the image that was painted of a border in chaos, of people entering an open border, and then there is no message on the other side because it’s nothing more. I mean, again, it’s nothing more than… Ah, yes, the message was moderate. If she was talking about things like the Republicans. I mean, it was almost not being talked about. I think it’s something that, again, the Democrats have to really analyze how they are going to be. I mean, what is the message on immigration in the future? And beyond that, I think it’s also going to be how we talk, how we go, how the Democrats are going to talk about the economy, how they are going to talk to the working class? I mean, it has been seen, we see, that there are people who did not graduate from college or who are working class have moved more towards Donald Trump than the Republican Party. It is being seen more as a party that represents those people. Historically it was not like that. So there are many questions to ask about how we got to this point and how that can be changed for the Democrats in the future if it is going to stay that way.

JULIO: Well, because we already saw that Trump’s victory is based on winning the largest percentage of the Latino vote, but also a larger percentage of white women. Also more men, more whites, more young people, more African Americans. And what does this say about your campaign, Paola, about Trump’s vision of the country?

PAOLA: Well, that’s the million-dollar question, huh? I don’t know. I mean, I think it simply indicates that this is a country in which these figures who perhaps present themselves as more authoritarian are not bothered by that image. I think that what people are also telling us is that this message that Trump had, not of them against us, the others, being the immigrants. That message resonated a lot, right? So I think we have to start there. And I also think that perhaps we have to present ourselves. We have to present ourselves with a question that may make us uncomfortable. And that is this idea of ​​whether perhaps this Latino community that we thought was a united community. A community that had a lot of solidarity. Yes, perhaps we are already seeing a community that is much more fractured than we want to accept. And if perhaps we are already seeing two Latino communities, right? And we also have to ask ourselves if we are at a moment where we can unite a country that is very divided, and I have many questions because Julio, I really don’t know what the answers are less than 24 hours before these elections, I don’t really know what the country is telling us. I think we will know a lot more on January 20, when Donald Trump is in the White House, when we begin to see these massive deportations, when people begin to understand well what these deportations mean. What it means for someone in a Donald Trump administration to look at us Latinos and decide, «Ok, you look like you are an immigrant. You look like you are undocumented». Once people understand that, that is where I really want to see. If those Americans who voted for Donald Trump are going to feel comfortable in that type of United States.

JULIO: Yeah. Yes, it is still early. You’re right, it’s only been, well, not even 24 hours —I don’t know— and we’re recording this podcast.

PAOLA: Like Sabrina said before, this is like therapy for us, to understand well, to understand well and process. Of course.

JULIO: If there’s something that also needs to be explained —the Democrats, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris bet a lot on the issue of reproductive rights, which would be key to mobilizing the female vote and in states like Montana, Nevada, Missouri, amendments to protect the right to abortion passed. But at the same time, voters in each of those states elected Donald Trump. How do you explain that, Sabrina?

SABRINA: These are all difficult questions today, really. Look, I’ve spoken to many voters who don’t blame Donald Trump for what happened with Roe versus Wade. I mean, it’s the message he’s given on the issue of abortion, on the issue of reproductive rights. The first one for many months. This year it wasn’t clear what his position was. I mean, he did like sometimes he would come out and talk about how he was glad that he took, you know, the responsibility for the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And then on the other side, then he would come out and say that some of the places, you know, the bans that had been put in place, that he didn’t agree with, that it was too much. So, he kind of navigated it so that it wasn’t very clear what his position was. And then at the end, he would talk about how he promised that he was not going to pass a national ban on abortion. So I think for some voters it was like, oh, well, I can vote in my state for, you know, to protect this right or to give this right back and I vote for him, because he’s not going to do anything at the national level. And I think that there is, at the level of confusion, that is, the lack of clarity about why we got to this point on this issue of reproductive rights, why it is that in 2024 we are talking about it, we are talking about it because Donald Trump put people in the Supreme Court, judges who took away that right. But I think that many people do not, they do not understand that, they do not know that. And so it has been focused – Okay, well, if I have, that is, if I can vote this time to protect it, I will protect it. And why not?

JULIO: Yeah. Now we were listening to Paola talk a little about this, about the mass deportations that are the flagship proposal of this Trump campaign, eh? But it also requires an explanation, right? How, despite this promise starting on the first day of his administration, Trump had historic support among Latinos. How do you explain that, Sabrina?

SABRINA: I think that again, a lot of what I say is based on months of talking to Latino voters in different key states. And one of the things that I have seen is that many people, I mean, they don’t take what he has said to his face. Many people think that, well, no, he is not necessarily going to do that. And I am talking about people who were going to vote for him. Clearly there are many Latinos who voted for Kamala Harris who are truly afraid and truly believe that he is going to do what he has promised. But I say, for those Latinos who were considering voting for Trump because they already expressed that they were going to support him – talking about this issue with them, when you talked about mass deportations it was, “Well, I agree that the people who are working should stay or I agree with the people who are not taking resources from the government. What I say is that we have to send the criminals away.” So it is like, well, that is not mass deportations, those are, it is not the same thing. So I think there is also a bit of a lack of education, of understanding what exactly Trump’s proposal was, because he is already talking to voters who were going to Trump’s meetings. There are many who say that he spoke about it, that is, he spoke in very clear terms about how he feels, about undocumented immigrants and their deportation plans and the same people that I met in those meetings said what I am telling you that, “Oh, no, but not everyone. Some people do or some don’t, and they weren’t very clear about how that would work, but they wanted to see him try.” And as Paola said before, I think that the part after this is going to be what the reactions are when this becomes a reality? These are plans that have been made for years, that is, they are planned so that they can do it the moment he enters the White House.

JULIO: Paola, is it really possible to carry out mass deportations like those described by Trump?

PAOLA: We don’t know, but what we do know is that they are going to try, they are going to try and as Sabrina says, they have been planning it for years. I think one of the big things that Donald Trump regrets or one of the things that he hates is knowing that Barack Obama deported more people than he did. So I think that they have been planning for years and years what these mass deportations mean. And I think that something very interesting is that obviously these mass deportations by Donald Trump are based on the plan called Operation Wetback under the presidency of Eisenhower. What happened under Eisenhower is that they did deport a little more than 1 million, mostly Mexicans, but what was seen during those years, Julio, which is interesting, is that they also ended up deporting Mexican American citizens who ended up being deported because of the way in which they were racially discriminated. That is to say, it was an administration that looked at the public and ended up saying, well, you look like you are Mexican, so you are going to be deported too. That is history. These are statistics that are real. And what was also seen in those years was that at first the American and Mexican community was in favor of these mass deportations and what happened after three or four years is that the Mexican American community ended up being against these deportations, when they realized that it was affecting them. And now we are living in a United States in which immigrants are already Americans. That is, we live in a country where there are more than 22 million people who live in mixed-status families, more than 10 million American citizens. That is, now we are talking about mass deportations that are not only going to affect immigrants, but American families. So is it going to happen? We don’t know. Are they going to try? Absolutely.

After the break, how much did the Latino identity matter when it came to voting in these elections? We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL]

This is El Péndulo, I’m Julio Vaqueiro. We’re talking with my colleague Paola Ramos, from Noticias Telemundo, and Sabrina Rodriguez, national reporter for the Washington Post.

JULIO: Let me change the angle a little bit. Because we were talking about this gender gap. Right? The difference between men and women in this election. Clearly, men, Latinos, did vote for Trump by a majority. According to NBC News exit polls, 54%. How do you understand the difference in the term gender and the role of masculinity for Latinos, Sabrina?

SABRINA: That was a big focus of Trump’s campaign. He has focused on this idea of, I mean, the gender stereotypes. He has spoken very clearly in his speeches about how he is going to be the one to protect this country, that he is going to protect women. He has spoken. I mean, he has criticized women very directly. I mean, in ways that I don’t repeat about women or Kamala Harris, specifically Nancy Pelosi, has been talked about. I mean, she has a history of talking about women in some way and… And I think that in the strategy of this campaign we have seen that focus on men. I mean, going in those that are focused on men. I mean, we saw him in the last few weeks going on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is very well known for being popular with American men. And I think that in the Latino community in particular, he has focused on a message of… Again, protecting women that the man is who he is, that is, the leader of the family of the house. And this idea that he was a great businessman who ran his company and look how he got rich and… And he has wanted to project that image towards Latino men to show that… Look, I am a person – I mean, you can idolize me. Me? I mean, if you look at me. Look, you also want to bring your family forward. You want to be a hard worker. I was a hard worker and look where I got to. And oh, dear, with that image you attract more Latino men and it clearly worked.

JULIO: Yes. He talked about that and he talked about Trump’s campaign on two main issues, not immigration and the economy, and he based it on the premise that Latino voters and their concerns are the same as the rest of the Americans used the phrase Latino Americans. Was Paola right and in that sense did Kamala Harris’ campaign fail in something?

PAOLA: Well, let’s see, I think that economic anxiety is a real anxiety. I mean, the majority of Latino voters obviously worry most about the economy, what they worry most about is feeding their children. What they worry most about is having a roof over their houses. And I think that economic anxiety that Trump was able to talk about is… I think that worked a lot for them, but I do think that they got that key message right there, right? And that is introducing the word, as you said Julio, «Latino American.» Why? Because their campaign was based on this idea and that is an idea in which Latinos have already assimilated to such an extent in this country, that perhaps if you call them Americans, perhaps in that way you can begin to attract them more to Donald Trump’s campaign. They did not accept an idea that is very simple, and that is that now we are talking about a Latino community that has mostly changed. We were born in the United States, most of us are under 50 years old. The group that is growing the most within our community are third-generation Latinos and that word “American Latinos” – perhaps it was a very powerful word. Now, I think that Harris’ campaign also tried to do the same in some way, perhaps in a slightly more subtle way. I think so. It was a campaign that understood from the beginning that being Latino in the end does not mean that we are different from any other people, we care about the same things, we care about the economy, we care about our health, we care about our security. But I think that Trump’s game of us against them, them being the immigrants, is a strategy that is based on creating fear, creating terror, creating resentment. That strategy is based on emotions and I think that worked very, very well for them.

JULIO: But I also think that the big question is, do we now have to stop thinking about identity as a fundamental point for Latinos when it comes to voting? And if so, what does it mean for the future of the Democrats? No, Sabrina?

SABRINA: That’s the question. That’s the most key question. It’s that. I mean, I have to laugh a little because we’ve talked about it in recent years about what the Latino voter means? What is the Latino vote to me? I think that today more than ever I don’t have the answer. Today more than ever I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I mean. What? What is the answer? What unites us? What unites us as Latinos today? I really don’t have that answer, because based on what we’ve seen in the difference between Latino men and Latina women, that is, the percentages are so close. I mean, it’s historic that Trump, yes, yes, the exit polls remain at these levels of 45%. It’s historic that Trump wins with the Latino voter. So, I think there are a lot of questions about what the message to Latinos is going to be in the future. But I think one of the most important things here is, I mean, what I don’t want to see is that Democrats and Republicans now do nothing or that Democrats say, oh, well, now the Latinos have gone to the Republicans. We’re not going to try, we’re so close. I mean, almost. They’re going to win. Most of us don’t do anything. I think what it reinforces is that they have to really try with the Latino voter, that they really have to try to understand the same way they tried to get white women to vote. It didn’t work for them for one reason or another, but I guarantee you that in the next election they will still try to get the white women out. And what I don’t want to see is that there won’t be this investment, this attention, this concern about Latino voters going forward.

JULIO: Yes, in any case what it shows is that you have to work for the Latino vote and it’s not guaranteed for anyone, right? Well, the campaign is over now. The election. The two of you covered it very closely for months. What would you say you have learned about the country in this process, Paola?

PAOLA: Well, well, first I don’t know if anything is over. I think at this moment. Maybe. Maybe everything is just starting. Sabrina, I think, hasn’t been home for how long?

SABRINA: Months.

JULIO: Yes, she posts Instagram photos.

PAOLA: Yeah. Well, look, I’ve already learned that maybe my work should be much more focused on listening. I mean, I think we are journalists who are used to asking questions, maybe to having very clear stories, but I think we are at a time where we have to listen to the country. We have to understand what the voters are telling us and I think that is a very difficult job because we have to leave all these stereotypes aside. We have to leave politics behind.

One way, we have to put these countries aside and listen and do and just listen so that people are not afraid to tell us exactly what happened. So I’m not answering your question, Julio, because, like many of the questions you ask me, I don’t have a very clear answer right now, but what I do know is that to understand what I’ve learned I have to keep listening more.

JULIO: No, I love it. Sabrina, you?

SABRINA: I think that what this election has shown me is how complicated each person is. I mean, my grandmother always has an expression that each person is a world. And I think that this lesson shows us that, because I have spoken with so many people who, I mean, their opinions on how they see the country, how they see the different issues that have been or have been focused on in this lesson, the candidates see things. I mean, they see things differently. I have spoken with the person who, I mean, supports reproductive rights and who is so, so frustrated with what has happened on that issue in this country in recent years. But at the same time, they were going to vote for Donald Trump because of the immigration issue or because of the economy. And I think where we can fail here in the conversation in the months after this is to think that ah, so all Latinos are conservative and I think there may be Latinos who feel anxiety about the economy, who are also worried about climate change, who also want to see the rights of transgender people who are also supporting, that is, reproductive rights. I think that each person can see the world in so many different ways and I think that is what I have learned, is that you can never. I mean, you have the idea of ​​ah, this voter thinks like this, this one like that, but no, no, and I think that in the conversation I want us to continue talking about not just the polls. But what is behind those polls? What are the conversations that Latino families are having today and in the coming months?

JULIO: Sabrina and Paola, thank you both very much.

SABRINA: Thank you.

PAOLA: Thank you.

Sabrina Rodriguez is a national reporter for the Washington Post.

And Paola Ramos of Noticias Telemundo and author of the book “Defectors.”

[MUSIC]

El Péndulo has been a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

I am the host, Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo. This episode was produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess [bir-jess] and Jess Alvarenga. Editing is by Daniel Alarcón, with Eliezer Budasoff and Silvia Viñas.

Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. Music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the video journalism for the series.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El Péndulo is made possible with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as @ [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast dot audio.

I’m Julio Vaqueiro, and thank you for listening.

I’m Julio Vaquiero. This is El péndulo.

By now, you’ve probably heard the supposed joke from Donald Trump’s rally in New York this past Sunday that has made headlines. A comedian referred to Puerto Rico like a floating island of garbage floating in the middle of the ocean. 

The response has been forceful and fast. In key states, like Pennsylvania, with almost half a million Puerto Ricans, Latin radio stations have been flooded with calls from voters offended by the comment. Puerto Rican celebrities like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricki Martin shared Kamala Harris’ plan to support the island with their hundreds of millions of followers. In a campaign as close as this one, it is no exaggeration to say that this joke could change the results in one of those battleground states. There are 131,000 Puerto Ricans in Georgia, and 133,000 in North Carolina, which is the state that we are going to focus on today.

The reality is that the rally on Sunday was filled racist and intense rhetoric. And anyone who has observed Donald Trump’s campaign in the past couple of months has noticed it: the tone is aggressive, violent, particularly against immigrants. Trump himself says so in his speeches…Whilst he promises mass deportations, he compares undocumented migrants to parasites that are poisoning the country’s blood.  

Trump’s campaign has distanced itself from the comments on Puerto Rico, but Trump called the event in New York a day filled with love.  

Well, all of this brings us to today’s episode, to a community of Latino voters who are living in that crossroads: evangelicals. On one hand, it seems that the Republican Party promotes some of their values. But, at the same time, the violent rhetoric of the campaign offends some of them. 

We went to a rural community in Forsyth County, near the city of Winston-Salem, in North Carolina. 

Speaker1: My name is Margery Soto. I have not voted. I can now vote.

Speaker2: Amen.

Speaker1: That’s great. Yes sir. And yes, I am confident and I want to vote.

Julio: We found ourselves in a scene that I, at least, would not have expected…

Speaker1: My name is Milton Collado. This year I became a citizen and I am going to vote. [applause]

Julio: About 40 people of various nationalities and all ages gathered in the social hall of a church on a Friday afternoon… to talk about democracy.

Speaker1: Eh, yes, I have voted. And 100% confidence in the vote. The voice of the people is the voice in the vote.

Speaker2: I know that God is also going to put a good leader for America.

Julio: And that is why we are here, because when people talk about the power of Latino voters in these elections, the power of the evangelical vote is often mentioned. North Carolina, with more than 16,000 churches, is part of the so-called Bible Belt —a region in the south and midwest of the United States, where religion, and specifically evangelical Christians, have a lot of influence.

For generations, the southern states have formed a fixed, conservative block in the Republican Party. But in the 2008 elections, Barack Obama won Virginia, Florida… and North Carolina. Now, elections in some of these southern states are won by very narrow margins —Trump, for example, who four years ago won North Carolina by just 74,000 votes, or 1.3%.

What is also changing is the demographics of the state. Here, Hispanics are the group that has grown the most —they are now 11% of the population, and 4% of voters. The big question in North Carolina is whether more people will register and turn out to vote or not, since voter turnout has so far been very low.

That is why workshops like the one we saw can make a difference.

Speaker 1: Politicians here, here in the United States, they, for them democracy is when the elections come, after the elections everything changes… We are going to achieve it by making the effort like what we are doing, what the pastors, the Latino Congress and many from other counties are doing. And that is what I said, I have faith in these votes…[applause]

JULIO: And for many of the participants in this workshop, their civic duty is intertwined with their faith. They cannot be separated. And it is always assumed that the evangelical influence in politics favors the Republican party.

But what we found in North Carolina is, as it has been in every state we have visited during this series, that the reality is a little more complex than we thought.

This is El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… North Carolina.

MIDROLL

Pastor: Give the Lord a round of applause. Give God glory. Say with me, Praise. Believe it with all your heart. Glory to Jesus. Glory to God.

We are at the Sunday service of the Church without Borders —an evangelical church in Winston-Salem. Like all evangelical churches, the emphasis here is on salvation through Jesus Christ. Here they are neither Pentecostals, nor Baptists, nor Jehovah’s Witnesses… to mention some of the most well-known denominations… But that belief, of the personal relationship with God, is perhaps the most important thing among evangelicals. Well, that and taking the Bible as an infallible document, which contains no mistakes.

From the outside, the Church without Borders looks like what one would imagine a temple to be —a small hill, beautiful red brick, and a gabled roof. When you enter, the first thing you see is the shine of the red carpet. In the wooden benches there are about 60 people, all Latinos. Most of them are Mexicans, but also:

Pastor: Many Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, we have Costa Ricans, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and the pastor and the Argentine pastor’s wife.

Julio: And who leads this congregation?

He is Pastor Daniel Sostaita. When he preaches, he wears jeans and a black t-shirt.

Pastor: I like to wear casual clothes because of the tie. I feel like I’m stuck like that, all cornered… And do I wear ties for a wedding or a funeral?

And because it’s a growing community, there are many more weddings than funerals. The pastor assures that the Church Without Borders is very well known in the area.

Pastor: Well, this place is a place for the community. The street is called Catalan. Anyone from Winston, everyone knows that. Oh, the church where they help people or the church where they make IDs, the church where the clinic is. I mean. Everyone knows where this church is.

The pastor founded it 18 years ago.

Pastor: I started in the church. The church was a school and people came to the school. A very nice lady. And she told me. My English was very twisted at that time. And she said Ok. What do you need? Should I say, either the cafeteria or the gym? He made me sign a contract for free. And that’s where we started.

It only grew from there. Shortly after, Pastor Daniel’s group moved to a church that already existed, a white community. And they revitalized it.

Pastor: This church was dying. The American church.

JULIO: That is, where we are now. Before, it was a church.

Pastor: It still is, but there are 20 people. At that time, when we arrived here, there were 40. They were dying, the truth is they didn’t change and there were 20 left. So they couldn’t maintain the building.

Julio: Now, Pastor Daniel’s church has about 200 people. When he founded this church, his intention was to share the gospel. And so he did, with two services each week, Bible study groups, and baptizing new believers. But little by little, the more he got to know his congregation, he began to listen to the concerns of the members. Many were scared of the checkpoints, or roadblocks, that the police set up.

Julio: They were only in Latino communities, in Latino neighborhoods?

Pastor: Latino neighborhoods. Of course, for example, here we are surrounded by buildings where Latinos live and the Trailas neighborhood, where Latinos live. A State Trooper or a sheriff or a policeman from each end would stop on the corners, stopping whoever was coming in, or whoever was going out. Of course, people didn’t want to leave their houses.

Julio: And the pastor noticed something… He, unlike many in his congregation, is white. And he noticed that the treatment he received from the police was very different from the treatment that others received.

Pastor: Then I saw that they never stopped me. I was without a license too. And I began to see racism. Why don’t you stop me, because of my skin color? But the one coming behind me, who is brown, it doesn’t matter where he came from, you do stop him.

Julio: For the pastor, the stops were a form of racial discrimination —the police were profiling Latino people during these stops. In these raids, the police would ask for your driver’s license, and if you didn’t have one, they would fine you. And since many of them didn’t have documents, they didn’t have licenses either.

Pastor: A member of our church, who in seven months got 12 tickets. 12. None for drunk driving because he doesn’t drink. None for speeding. Just because they looked at his color.

Julio: The church, along with other community organizations and the ACLU, denounced the police for racially profiling Latino people. As a result of these efforts, the Winston-Salem police changed their policies on stops.

And since then, the church has changed as well.

Julio: It became a priority of yours, right? Social justice.

Pastor: Yes, Julio, because I don’t think so. I can’t talk to you about love or grace, about mercy, if I know that you are going through marginalization or racism or discrimination. So, where? Where does love and grace come into that context? So, I think that the Gospel is accompanied by social justice, equity and equality.

Julio: These great ideas —love, mercy, equality— are seen in the local acts of the church. A food bank. A mobile clinic two days a week. Mental health workshops. They were part of a network of community organizations that developed unofficial identity cards, called Fe-Accion ID’s, so that people without documents have some way to identify themselves.

Pastor: If I go to the hospital and they prescribe me a very strong medicine. When I go to the pharmacy and I don’t have a valid ID, they don’t give it to me anymore. So we started to make arrangements and the hospital was the first to accept it.

The Fe-Accion ID is recognized as an identification document at health centers, hospitals, schools, and pharmacies. In some counties, even local police accept it, although not in Forsyth County.

PASTOR: You read Leviticus, you read Exodus, you read Deuteronomy, and God exhorts his people to love the immigrant. Take care of the immigrant. So Jesus was a migrant, Jesus was a refugee. So that is where I… say no, as a church we have to do something. We cannot align ourselves with a false Christian nationalism, nor with the other one either because, I already told you, we are not partisan.

JULIO: What do you think the role of the churches should be in these elections? Or how do you see your role in these elections?

Pastor: When you listen to a lot of nationalist Christians, they tip the balance to one side, so why am I going to say that we cannot talk about politics in the Church if there is a very large group that does talk about and promote a candidate?

PASTOR: I have to say it honestly, it fills me with anger or rage or impotence. That if you call yourself Christian because of the values ​​that you present in your political platform, you have to show that you are Christian. There are a lot of people who go after a party because it calls itself Christian, but for me it is absolute hypocrisy, because I do not see that love reflected in others. I mean, I see that we build walls and not bridges.

Julio: For some, a progressive evangelical sounds contradictory. But when you listen to Pastor Daniel, it starts to make sense.

PASTOR: Tell me why, being an immigrant, I am going to vote for you. When your candidate tells me that I eat like a dog or a cat, or when they call me a rapist, a terrorist, for me it shows a lack of respect. You are denigrating me as a person and as an immigrant. So, how can I align myself with someone who denigrates my roots? How can I align myself with where there is respect for one’s neighbor? Where is love for one’s neighbor?

Julio: After the break, the progressive history —yes, progressive— of the evangelical church.

This is El péndulo. We’ll be right back. 

We are back in El péndulo. I am Julio Vaqueiro.

If we look at the history of North Carolina and the American South, it is perhaps not so surprising that a church is not only dedicated to God, but also to activism. For example, in the 1960s, the movement for the rights of the African-American population emerged from the churches of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.

God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.

That is the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.

Then, in 2013, the so-called Moral Mondays were protests to guarantee rights such as education and health care in North Carolina. Pastors accused the Republican Party of having a policy against the poor.

I thought it was about time that somebody stood up for Jesus. Well the time comes when someone ought to stand up for justice…

To understand the relationship of the Latino community with this ‘rebellious’ tradition, we spoke with her.

Barbara: My name is Barbara Sostaita and I am a professor here at the University of Illinois, Chicago. But I grew up in North Carolina, in a Christian community.

Barbara is an expert in religion and global migration, but she is also the daughter of Pastor Daniel. So when she talks about the church, she does it from her personal experience.

BARBARA: My family came to the United States in 1998. We came with a tourist visa, but we stayed undocumented and grew up in North Carolina. In the church there were other migrants, children of migrants, people who had also lost their family, who had lost their traditions, who felt uncomfortable here. I came from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Tobaccoville, North Carolina.

Julio: It couldn’t be more different. North Carolina than Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Barbara: No, no, I always say that if I write another book it will be From Buenos Aires to Tobacco Bill, because it was a total shock.

Julio: Years went by. Her family found understanding and solidarity in the church. And there was a moment when suddenly… a lot changed.

Barbara: In 2006 I found out that I was undocumented. In 2006 my dad started his church and in 2006 there were these marches, marches of millions and millions of immigrants in the streets, participating in a day without immigrants, striking…

Archival: CBS segment They left their jobs and took to the streets to show us what America would be like without millions of immigrant workers…

Barbara: In our church they brought lawyers to tell us about our rights. We coordinated, we called our representatives. We were undocumented, but we still participated in politics. And I always remember that in those marches they said “Today we march, tomorrow we vote”.

Audio Archive: Here we are and we are not leaving!

Barbara: And now we are 20 years after those marches. And in those 20 years I have seen how the churches have provided sanctuary. In North Carolina after Trump took office… In 2018, North Carolina was the state with more migrants living in sanctuary than any other state in the country.

File: Telemundo While this happens, more and more immigrants are seeking shelter in churches, fearing that ICE agents will knock on their door at any moment.

As we can see… The evangelical church in this part of the country has a history and a progressive legacy. But today, what we hear about evangelicals is something very different.

Scripps News City Church: in Harlingen is an evangelical church actively encouraging its flock to be militant about politics… Because God knows we need a red wave like never before.

FOX News: And now Donald Trump is making a push to get more hispanics inside his tent. And one key group is Hispanic evangelicals

CBC: Republican, Evangelical, Latino… he runs a facebook group: Latinos support Trump

Many media outlets have focused on the power of this group that has grown very quickly. And in the coverage, you hear many generalizations about what they believe or think. That they are all Republicans. That they always vote as their pastors want. That the only thing they care about is the defense of life, of the traditional family.

JULIO: How does this way of seeing or covering Latino evangelicals from the media make you feel?

BARBARA: I think it eliminates or makes invisible the activism that I have seen all my life.

BARBARA: And this community is very fetishized by the media. They are people who betray their own interests. They are people who have forgotten where they come from, their migrant backgrounds.

What that type of coverage ignores perhaps is that Latino evangelicals, like any voting group, are capable of being flexible, of thinking strategically and sophisticatedly about how to use their political power.

BARBARA: In my dad’s church I see people who, for example, before going to church felt conservative, but who listen and participate in a community that practices love for their neighbor, social justice and over time they change their minds or see themselves in a space in the middle, in a gray space, not something so black and white.

Barbara spoke to me about one of the most polarizing political issues of the moment, abortion. And the evangelical position on this… Is it clear? Or not…

BARBARA: Evangelical conservatives really do struggle with this issue. And when you sit down with my dad and you sit down with the people in his church and they start talking, people see something more complex. Maybe they change their minds and maybe they say, well, being undocumented has shown me what it is like to not have autonomy, being undocumented has shown me what it is like to not have control over my life and my body. Oh, interesting. And with abortion, you also don’t see that people have autonomy or control over their bodies and their lives?

JULIO: But would you say that it is fair to say that in general there are more evangelicals, Latinos, conservatives than progressives?

BARBARA: Maybe at this moment. Eh, maybe. But you do see, eh? The number of Latino evangelicals who vote Republican has progressively grown. That is changing. And the question is why is it changing and how are politicians failing with this community?

I asked Barbara’s question to Jonathan Calvillo, a sociologist and theologian at Emory University in Atlanta.

JONATHAN: It seemed like there was a group, a segment of the Latino population that was ready to be recruited so that the candidates could try to convince them, right?

JULIO: But how did we get to this point?

JONATHAN: Evangelicals have been part of politics in many ways for decades, but now what we are seeing is more public policies, right? And a policy perhaps trying to get closer to the axes of power where you can find more influence and more to be, to be part of the change, to be part of those structures, right?

Julio: According to Jonathan, we have to take into account that Latino evangelicals have historically been on the “margins of the community” —for being immigrants.

JONATHAN: It felt like an experience of being part of a minority and perhaps not having much of a voice. So much power, right? And now, in this last decade, we have seen the growth and, we could even say, the visibility of Latino evangelicals. There is a feeling that now perhaps one can have more impact, perhaps one can have more influence. Perhaps an approach to the more conservative movement could offer more opportunities towards the American dream.

Julio: And what we are seeing now, according to Jonathan, is a rapprochement between evangelicals and political and institutional power. If they were isolated before, now they are a community that both parties seek to attract.

Julio: But Jonathan told me that any explanation for a conservative trend would have to take into account the diversity of the evangelical community.

JONATHAN: The evangelical movement is a very diverse movement in terms of race and racial background. There are many Latinos who no longer speak Spanish and in fact the preference is for English… and many of them are found in multi-ethnic churches and mostly Anglo-Saxon churches… The evangelical movement arises from Protestantism and is not a centralized organization, but rather a network of organizations and denominations.

Julio: Pentecostals, Assemblies of God, Baptists, even some non-denominational churches.

Surely you are familiar with the most well-known denominations. What they all share is an emphasis on personal connection with God and finding salvation through Jesus Christ. And the importance of evangelizing. Of seeking new believers.

JONATHAN: In a certain sense, that is why they are called evangelicals. In other words, the emphasis on each person going out and sharing that message of Jesus Christ.

In recent years, the evangelical population has matured and gained a greater space in the public sphere. Like other Latino groups, there is great diversity within the congregations, and the motivations behind their vote vary.

Jonathan: I believe from my observations that there is more diversity in the churches than in the leadership of the churches. So the leaders, those who have a voice, those who are representing the congregations, tend to be more conservative.

Julio: But as we saw in the first segment, with Pastor Daniel, it is not always like that.

Pastor: Jesus’ first sermon is to give freedom to the captive, to the oppressed, sight to the blind, that is, the Church, the first Church, shared everything. There was no needy person among them, they shared bread, they sold their property. So it is a Church of social justice, of love, of coexistence.

The latest surveys of evangelicals at the national level say that Latino evangelicals are divided in half. 27% are Republicans, 25% are Democrats, and 30% are independents. It is difficult to predict how they will actually vote.

It is true that, at this moment, many are leaning more to the right if we compare it to any other time in their history here in the United States. But it is not possible to pigeonhole an entire population by a few, because the pendulum always swings from one side to the other.

It is always in motion.

In the next episode of El péndulo… at last, we will count the votes and study the results. We will hear from you next week.

Jess: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo is the host. This episode was produced by me, Jess Alvarenga, with José Osuna and Desirée Yépez. The editing is by Daniel Alarcón, with special help from Eliezer Budasoff and Daniela Cruzat.

Alana Casanova-Burgess is the executive producer. Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the data verification. The music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. The graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is the senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the video journalism of the series.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El péndulo is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast punto audio.

I’m Jess Alvarenga, thanks for listening.

JULIO: Of all the surprises of 2020, perhaps the most unexpected was Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona. A Democratic presidential candidate had not won there in 24 years.

Some media outlets declared the state for Biden that same night of the election. Almost immediately, many attributed the victory to the state’s demographic changes.

CNN Archive: What pro-immigrant organizations and unions have said is that Latinos have finally made a change here in the state. Women went out to vote, young people and also people who have recently moved from other states have been voting for the Democratic Party here in Arizona.

JULIO: What is the root of that Democratic victory in 2020? And how likely will it be to be repeated in a state where a quarter of the electorate is Latina?

Well, let’s take it one step at a time. Biden got 63% of the Latino vote in this border state. This was due, in large part, to a new generation of Latino voters: adults who experienced one of the most repressive, anti-immigrant and harshest policies in the entire country as teenagers.

Audio file Noticias Telemundo: Journalist: It is because young Latinos, children of undocumented immigrants, experienced firsthand the cruelty of policies like SB1070 and now that they can speak out, they are doing so for immigration reform.

JULIO: SB1070 allowed police to demand immigration documents from any detained person based on, so to speak, “reasonable doubt.” In English, it is colloquially called the “show me your papers” law.

Yara: I am so proud that we were able to turn Arizona into a blue state.

JULIO: By the 2020 elections, the young activists who had mobilized against that law were already grown up, were interested in politics, and became the protagonists of that Democratic wave that turned the state for Biden.

Journalist: Yara has been working since she was 15 years old and her father was deported due to the policies of former Sheriff Arpaio.

Yara: All these victories that I have had in my life sometimes do not feel like victories because my dad is not here to share them with me.

JULIO: Joe Biden had won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, or 0.3%. It was one of the closest victories of the election —only the state of Georgia saw a narrower margin. And when Trump began making false accusations of fraud, many Republicans believed that the election in Arizona was stolen.

Telemundo News Archive: Host: Many Trump supporters refuse to believe in a possible defeat. For the second consecutive night, dozens of them protested in front of the electoral authority. The tension at the site increased when it was learned that some of the protesters were armed.

JULIO: After the protests, several lawsuits challenged the count. All of these false accusations of fraud were withdrawn or dismissed in the courts, but they left an important legacy in Arizona.

It became, like Georgia, part of a key narrative of the so-called MAGA movement, for the slogan in English Make America Great Again. As we will see in today’s episode, sowing doubts about the security of the vote has been and continues to be a political strategy.

Trump: We won, we won, we did win. It was a rigged election.

JULIO: The so-called ‘big lie’ of the 2020 fraud could affect not only the presidential race —which remains hotly contested in Arizona— but also a race that could define the balance of power in the United States Senate.

This is El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… Arizona.

MIDROLL

JULIO: We are back on El péndulo. I am Julio Vaqueiro.

What happened in Arizona four years ago —that change from red to blue— was surprising to many. But perhaps it was not so surprising to those who had paid attention to the Senate elections in recent years.

Rafael Carranza: In the last three Senate elections, in each of those three electoral contests, the Democrats won.

JULIO: This is Rafael Carranza, immigration reporter for the Arizona Republic, where he also has a podcast about state politics.

Rafael Carranza: In Arizona, unlike many other more Republican states, I think, there is more of a sense of independence here in the way that they resist pressure at the national level a little more. They are a little more libertarian in that sense.

JULIO: Rafael told us that it is more common among Arizona Republicans to do what is called “split ticket voting”. That is, to vote perhaps for Trump for president, but for a Democrat for other positions, such as senator. That tendency makes any prediction difficult.

Be careful, whoever ends up in the White House will need the support of the Senate to implement their policies and ratify their appointments. There are one hundred senators, two per state, and right now, the Democrats control the Senate by just one vote. No one can say for sure whether they will maintain that control or lose it, but it is clear that the race for Arizona Senator is crucial for both parties.

Rafael Carranza: And we know that Arizona has always played a key role in the Senate. Senators have always taken an important leadership role, especially on immigration issues.

File:

“Arizona Senator Jeff Flake”

“Arizona senator Mark Kelly”

“Arizona senator Kyrsten Cinema”

“Arizona Senator John McCain”

JULIO: Throughout this series, in each state we have visited, we have found that this issue, immigration, is on the minds of many voters, whether they are Latino or not. In Arizona, a border state, the debate about the impact of migration is not theoretical. The economy of cities like Nogales depends on a constant exchange with Mexico. At the same time, of all the regions patrolled by the authorities, the Tucson sector in Arizona saw the highest number of migrant arrests in the first months of this year.

And the Senate candidates here have very different views on this.

Rafael Carranza: We have on the Democratic side Rubén Gallego, who is a Latino congressman who represents the southern part of Phoenix, which is where most Latinos live, and we also have on the Republican side Kari Lake, who was a news anchor.

Audio file, Kari Lake: Hi I’m Karry Kale with Fox 10 News and my five…

JULIO: So, who are the candidates?

First: Kari Lake, known as a star of the MAGA movement.

Rafael Carranza: Towards the end of her career, despite being a news anchor, she got into trouble, for example, by promoting, uh, fake news or repeating things that weren’t true, especially during the pandemic. Misinformation about the pandemic and well, that did distance her a bit from the public.

JULIO: She ran for governor in the 2022 elections, in an extremely close race against a Democrat. When she lost, she made accusations of fraud, very similar, by the way, to the type of accusations that former President Trump made when he lost the state in 2020. Since then, trial after trial has found that there were no irregularities.

Rafael Carranza: So, despite having lost the election, it was something that she never acknowledged, she has never admitted it.

Julio Vaqueiro: Now Kari Lake has also had differences with members of her own party, right? She has fought with some Republicans. Why?

Rafael Carranza: She is someone who says whatever comes to mind regardless of the consequences. We saw that during the race for governor, where she essentially asked Republicans who are more moderate or who have more moderate positions not to vote for her.

JULIO: Although it sounds far-fetched, it is true. A little context is needed here. For decades, Arizona was known as the state of the legendary senator John McCain, who passed away in 2018, and represented the state for 35 years. His style of politics was considered very moderate —a “McCain Republican” is a Republican very willing to negotiate with Democrats. It is clear that Kari Lake does not come from the same mold. And she does not want those votes either.

File: Kari Lake: “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here do we?

Crowd: BOOOOOOO

Alright, get the hell out!”

Rafael Carranza: So that has created a lot of problems for her, especially when it comes to… attracting more votes, because we know that they are going to be necessary and more so to make a close race. And that has not been said so far. Kari Lake is behind Rubén Gallego in the polls and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that she has not opened her platform to all Republicans, but rather has focused more on Trump supporters and people who have slightly more extreme views.

JULIO: So, according to Rafael, we have a candidate who explicitly breaks with voters from her own party and with the legacy of Senator John McCain, one of the most important politicians in the history of Arizona. But that’s not all. She has also fought with officials of the current Republican Party.

Julio Vaqueiro: The friction also happened in front of the cameras, as well as behind them. According to several reports, she has a tendency to record any kind of conversations she has with other politicians, including if they are members of her own party and it was something that she used to gain advantage and to make Jeff DeWitt —who at that time was the head of the Republican Party here in Arizona— look bad.

File:

Jeff DeWitt: Is there a number at which?

Kari Lake: I can be bought? This is not about money, this is about our country.

JULIO: In the recording, Jeff DeWitt, the head of the Arizona Republican Party by that time, is heard asking Lake if there is a number that would convince her not to run for the Senate. The recording was released in January. According to Lake, DeWitt was offering her a bribe.

For his part, DeWitt said that he was offering her advice as a friend and that the recording was selectively edited. But anyway, in the wake of this scandal, Jeff DeWitt had to resign from his position.

Rafael Carranza: And then someone else came along. Uh, yes, uh, that was like, more in agreement with Kerry Lake’s positions and so they could essentially continue with their strategy of being 100% in favor of MAGA, of President Donald Trump and essentially silencing any other type of opinions that are different within the party.

Kari Lake Archive: Oh man, President Trump, we’re going to blow your mind today, this is amazing.

Rafael Carranza: Kari Lake has taken a lot of the same positions as former President Donald Trump. And so she describes many of the migrants as criminals. People who come here to harm those who live in the United States.

Kari Lake Archive: It is an invasion. We are going to stop people from coming across. We’ll finish President Trump’s wall.

Rafael Carranza: She has taken a position saying that the children of immigrants who are born here in the United States are not natural citizens. Obviously, this goes against the Constitution, which says that anyone born here in the United States is automatically a citizen.

JULIO: So, that’s Kari Lake, with an anti-immigrant platform and rhetoric that is increasingly incendiary. 

And, as Rafael told us, that may be the reason why she is losing the race by double digits, according to the latest polls.

But now let’s look at the Democratic candidate, Rubén Gallego.

Rafael Carranza: He’s a war veteran. He was part of the Marines. He was deployed to Iraq, where he was in a combat zone. And when he returned, he moved here, to Arizona, where he began his career.

JULIO: He ran for Congress to represent one of the most Latino districts in Arizona, in southern Phoenix, and won easily.

Unlike Lake, he has changed his discourse on migration and migrants. Before, he was quite progressive… In 2017, he described Trump’s wall as stupid and dumb.

Archive Ruben Gallegos: It’s abundantly clear that Mexico won’t vote for Trump’s stupid dumb border wall.

JULIO: But this year, he said that walls are necessary in some parts of the border…

Archive Ruben Gallegos: I think border walls are necessary in certain areas.

JULIO: Here at Noticias Telemundo we have invited the two candidates to interview them during this campaign. Kari Lake declined our invitation, but when I spoke with Rubén Gallegos in August I asked him a question about his change of tone.

Noticias Telemundo Archive

Julio: There are those who say that you have been moderating in this campaign. That you, you called yourself the progressive voice in Congress but, now you have taken more moderate positions. Why are you campaigning?

Rubén Gallegos: No, because when you are running for a state… because when you are a congressman it is a very small district. But when you are running for a state the problems are bigger and the solutions have to be bigger too. And you have to work with many more people.

Julio: Is there an immigration crisis in the United States? A crisis at the border?

Gallego: We have to reform that system. We have to have more Border Patrol, more security at the border, more technology to stop fentanyl at the doors.

Julio: But, for example, those policies and that speech do sound much more moderate and conservative than what you sounded like as a progressive…

Gallego: You can have both. We can have a secure border and at the same time we have to do something with those families who are here.

Rafael Carranza: I think that his evolution has been quite similar to what we have seen with the Democrats at the national level. Because initially, well, I think that a large part of the Democrats focused on the humanity of the migrants and on immigration reform, on being able to change the system itself, which everyone knows does not work, that there are many problems, that it can take a long time to get a visa or to go through some legal process. However, what we have seen this year is that the Democrats have changed their position a little and have become a little more to the right. Their positions have become a little more conservative.

JULIO: There is no better example of this trend than immigration reform, proposed by outgoing Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. The legislation —initially supported by Republicans and also by President Biden— was an agreement to impose stricter limits on asylum applications and expel those who do not qualify. It promised $20 million for border security. It was a much more aggressive proposal than Democrats had supported before —even the border patrol union said it supported it.

For a moment, it looked like it was going to pass with Republican support as well. Until Trump asked Republican senators not to approve it.

A reflection of how much the Democratic position on migration has changed was when Kamala Harris mentioned this agreement at the Democratic Party convention, delegates applauded it.

Archive Kamala Harris: Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. Here is my pledge to you. As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed. And I will sign it into law.

Rafael Carranza: And that is something that we had not necessarily seen before within the party’s position itself. But this year, being one of the main issues in this presidential race, it has been seen that this issue has become a little more conservative and I think Rubén Gallego is proof of that.

JULIO: Kamala Harris, for her part, said something very similar to what Gallego told me —she rejects an absolute binary between border security and a humanitarian immigration system. We can and we must create both, she declared during a visit to Arizona last month:

File: Kamala Harris

I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane. We can and we must do both.

JULIO: At the moment we do not know if this more nuanced speech on migration will connect with voters in a border state. It is an open question for both Rubén Gallego and Kamala Harris.

After the break, we go to the polls. We’ll be back.

MIDROLL 2

JULIO: We are back at El Péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

In Arizona, they say there is no election day… It’s more like a whole month. Early voting started on October 9.

Adrián Fontes: The atmosphere here in Arizona is always —not just in the summer— very hot.

JULIO: Adrián Fontes is the Secretary of State.

Adrián Fontes: I’m the Chief of Elections for the state of Arizona.

JULIO: He’s a Democrat, he was elected in 2022. It’s an important position in a place where voting is under the microscope of conspiracy theories and myths about fraud. Just like in other states, election workers in the state already face threats of violence, mainly from voters who support Trump and who believe that the last election was stolen. But unlike the rest of the country, Arizona has a very particular law.

Fontes: Well, in the United States, in any other state of the 50 and the territories of this country, a person can register to vote. They just need to sign under oath and under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.

JULIO: In Arizona, you have to show proof of citizenship. It can be a birth certificate, a passport, a naturalization certificate —but they have to show documentation. If not, they can only vote in federal elections, like for president or Senate, but no local or state elections. They can’t vote for mayor, for example.

Fontes: It’s a higher standard of proof than anyone in this country outside of the state of Arizona. And it’s not reasonable. It’s not necessary. It’s not a thing that we should do. But we have those rules here. We’re going to go ahead with that until our people change it.

JULIO: The Secretary of State agrees with what other experts say: that the proof requirement is not necessary because it’s already a crime to vote if you’re not a citizen. And research shows that there are very few cases of fraud —a handful that wouldn’t affect any outcome.

Fontes: Let’s be honest, if there is a person who is not in this country legally or for any other reason, they should not be voting. Do you think that person is going to submit all their data, their information, their date of birth, their email address and all that to an officer who is going to check all that information and then under oath indicate that they are a citizen, putting at risk the possibility that they will be able to be a citizen in the future. Are these accusations not realistic? No, they don’t really happen, but the liars are going to continue with their lies. And the rest of us are going to move on with our lives.

JULIO: Donald Trump has repeated this accusation without evidence over and over again: that his opponents are pushing undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, to steal the election from him.

NBC Archive:

Donald Trump: A lot of these illegal immigrants are coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.

JULIO: You would think that Arizona, with this law requiring proof of citizenship, they would be immune from this accusation. But… In recent weeks, Secretary Fontes’ office announced… a rather large hole in the system.

Telemundo News Archive:

Authorities discovered an error in the database that for two decades wrongly designated voters as having access to the ballot.

JULIO: There are 218,000 people who —by accident— ​​have been able to vote the full ballot for twenty years even though they never showed their proof of citizenship. And look out, these people voted without a problem, under Republican and Democratic secretaries of state.

Fontes: These people were not at fault because it was the state and the motor vehicle division that were not taking care of or ensuring these certifications of citizenship.

JULIO: Initially, the Republican Party argued that these people should only vote in federal elections, since they did not comply with state law.

Fontes: Well, when we saw the list, the majority of those voters on the list were Republicans. That’s why when we petitioned the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Senate president and the speaker of the House of Representatives here in the Arizona Statehouse, all Republicans petitioned on behalf of my legal position, stating that all of those voters should vote the entire ballot. It was a political issue, it was not a question of law.

JULIO: There is no evidence that these people are not citizens —they just didn’t have proof when they registered, because when they registered that law didn’t exist. It’s a complicated case but, at the end of the day, the Arizona Supreme Court decided that it’s too close to the election and no changes could be made.

But that’s not all. A conservative group affiliated with the Trump campaign says they want to investigate the threat of non-citizen voters in Arizona. And they’re demanding that the list of these 218,000 voters be released. Adrian Fontes says that would be intimidation for those on the list, and he won’t do it until after the election.

FONTES: We have an example on video where they tried to do it and one is too many. Someone knocked on the door demanding that they have certificates or papers. That is not the kind of society we want to live in, where other people are investigating their neighbors. It is not a necessary thing at this time, so I am going to try with everything I can, to preserve peace, preserve the dignity of our voters and prevent those people motivated by who knows what, who do not have that capacity from going to confront our voters.

NATALIA CONTRERAS: Now, with all this, what I am going to be monitoring is whether perhaps Texas is going to want to do what Arizona does, which is require proof of citizenship to register, to vote. Or perhaps put more restrictions on who can register to vote.

JULIO: Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat based in Texas. Votebeat is an election-focused coverage outlet.

NATALIA: Too much is happening right now. It’s ours —like our Super Bowl, right?

JULIO: She says that this accusation —without evidence— that non-citizens are voting, is now seen in several states across the country. Including Texas, a border state, just like Arizona.

NATALIA: In fact, we just published an investigation focusing on this announcement that the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, made in August. And he said in a press release that in Texas, the registrations of more than 1 million voters had been canceled. That number included more than 6,000 who are supposedly non-citizens.

JULIO: One million voters, and more than six thousand supposedly non-citizens.

NATALIA: It’s too much. When I saw that number, knowing that Texas has very strict laws for one to be able to vote, it seemed too much to me. So we started to investigate.

JULIO: First, they found that this number includes all voters removed from the rolls since 2021. It’s nothing new.

Now… It’s quite common for officials to do maintenance on the voter rolls, removing people who have died, for example, or who have moved. Sometimes election administrators send a letter to verify your address, or correct an error, so that you can be removed from a suspension list.

NATALIA: I don’t know about you, but sometimes I ignore the mail for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and it stays there, on the dining room table. I mean, a lot of people don’t open their mail if they don’t respond to that letter, so what happens is that their registration is canceled.

JULIO: All these changes are so common that there is even a federal law that dictates a quiet period for the 90 days before an election.

NATALIA: It’s to prevent someone who is eligible to vote from having their registration canceled.

JULY: The Department of Justice is suing the states of Virginia and Alabama right now, for example, for allegedly violating this period.

Both governors announced that they had found thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls, though in reality those cases are of eligible voters. People who may have ignored the mail on the dinner table. If there are non-citizens on the list, there are very few.

And that is what Natalia and her colleagues found when they investigated Governor Greg Abbott’s announcement in Texas. Of this huge number —1.1 million people— only 6,500 were identified as possible non-citizens… And of those, it was actually 581 people, many who had simply not responded to a letter from the state. The Votebeat team found that citizens —legitimate voters— have definitely been removed from the voter rolls.

A mistake, sure, but not a purge of 1.1 million people, and not a defense against a threat without evidence of voter fraud.

NATALIA: All of this is maintenance that is necessary and good, but the way it is being used, knowing that most people do not understand this process can be very damaging, it can be very damaging to that trust that we can have in this process, right? What I hope your listeners understand is that every time we see these announcements we have to remember that these are routine maintenance. Okay? So we have to question what the motive really is behind these, these announcements that we are removing so many people. When this is done on a daily basis.

JULIO: Natalia’s team found that the press release creates the impression that authorities are preventing attempts at massive fraud. Experts who are monitoring this election say that Republican authorities in several states are using the accusation without evidence to sow doubt about the election results. For example, Trump said this month that the Justice Department wanted to add illegal voters to the rolls in Virginia —something that is false.

Juan Proaño: They are making these announcements to send the message that they are removing all those people. And that is a way to intimidate, intimidation, and our community is paying close attention to that.

JULIO: Juan Proaño is the CEO of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the United States.

Juan: What they are doing now is putting all that information ahead of the election, because if or when they lose, they are going to say, well, we lost because Latinos who are not citizens voted and we announced that this was happening, that it was going to happen and it is a lie, because now there are many organizations that have done the analysis.

JULIO: They are preparing the ground, let’s say, to later say that there was fraud. Is that what Lulac is saying?

Juan: Yes, and to contest the election.

JULIO: And according to Juan, this strategy serves to intimidate potential Latino voters, sowing fear.

Juan: We are receiving calls. Can they vote? Is it against the law? If they are going to vote, are they going to go to jail? If they vote, for example. Those questions when you put it out there in the community, it’s going to be that Latinos are not going to vote, they are not going to participate in that election.

JULIO: As candidates, Harris and Trump have very different views regarding the right to vote. Harris proposes expanding access to mail-in voting, for example, and a minimum period for early voting. Trump wants a law like the one in Arizona —with proof of citizenship at the federal level.

Adrián Fontes: Oh, my God!

JULIO: Adrián Fontes, secretary of state of Arizona, says that for many people it would be very difficult to obtain citizenship certificates.

FONTES: Well, let’s say that there are municipal halls in various parts of Florida, in Louisiana, in Texas, where a hurricane has destroyed all the documents.

JULIO: Many Americans do not have proof of citizenship such as a passport, for example.

FONTES: And if they wanted to impose those rules on the whole country, in the United States, it’s going to be incredibly difficult for us to first obtain those documents from all people. And it’s not fair. It’s not necessary because we already know that it’s very, very, very rare for someone not to be eligible to vote or to try to register to vote, it’s not necessary, but some people have a different opinion. That’s one of the things in this country. Everyone can have their own opinion.

JULIO: Next week on El péndulo: love, mercy, equality, democracy. We’re going to an evangelical church in North Carolina.

Interviewee: I haven’t voted. I can vote now. Amen.

Great. Yes, sir. And yes, I have confidence and I want to vote.

JULIO: We’ll hear from you next week.

Daniel Alarcón: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

Julio Vaqueiro, from Noticias Telemundo, is the host.

This episode was produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Mariana Zúñiga, and Jess Alvarenga. Editing is mine, with special help from Daniela Cruzat.

Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact-checking. Music, mixing, and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El péndulo is produced with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as @central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast punto audio.

I’m Daniel Alarcón, and thank you for listening.

Julio: Last week, Hurricane Milton made landfall in central Florida. It brought tornadoes, floods, storm surges… And left more than 20 dead and hundreds of buildings destroyed. Authorities say that the total reconstruction of this part of Florida will take a very long time. From El Péndulo, we want to send all our solidarity to the people affected by this catastrophe.

We know that Milton hit hard… And, for that reason, we did not want to overlook a mention of what happened. But our story does not focus here, in central Florida. It begins somewhere else. A very particular place.

Zairenna: South Florida is like purgatory.

Julio: This is Zairenna Barboza, director of programming and content for Actualidad Radio. A local station that broadcasts on AM-FM and online.

Zairenna compares South Florida to purgatory because she says that everyone comes here to pay a penalty. Or they are in search of something.

Zairenna: In some way, most of all the communities that are in South Florida come here driven by an emotion.

So, we come running away from something and we come from being super passionate and we say that here we are extremists. I wouldn’t say extremist, I would say that we are all passionate with our points.

Julio: Well, now you talk about South Florida. But how is South Florida different from the rest of the state?

Zairenna: Because we feel that this is Latin America, still.

Julio: I have lived in South Florida for seven years. And the truth is that in some points I agree with Zairenna…

I think it is a desired area, right? It is a point that most people decided to arrive at voluntarily. They come from many parts of the world, but mainly from different places in Latin America. Some flee poverty. They seek work and progress. Others escaped totalitarian regimes. And a few came to invest the great fortunes of the continent. It is a place where Spanish is widely spoken and where political positions are largely defined by the origin of the people who live here. It is cosmopolitan, but also conservative —if we compare it with other large metropolises in the United States, of course.

All this makes South Florida a particular, complex place, different from the rest of the state… And above all, a very, very, very Latino place.

Julio: In these elections, there are two million Latino voters in Florida. That is, one in five voters. And the polls say that the state is still in play. Vice President Kamala Harris undoubtedly has a better chance of winning here than President Biden did. But former President Trump won Florida in 2016 and in 2020. In other words, everything is yet to be decided.

This is El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast from Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… Florida.

Julio: One of the unique features of South Florida is its influential Spanish-language radio stations. If you are in Miami, get in your car and start changing stations, you will hear something like this:

Archive: Host: Friends, today is Friday and the body knows it.

Voice: But if we keep this attitude, we will not be heard by God.

Host: Listen, this controversy of the Castro dictatorship…

Host: A grandmother is not restlessly thinking about the abortion law.

July: A little bit of reggaeton. One or two Christian stations. A debate about abortion. News from Latin America and the world… etc.

The radio is the media per excellence for Latinos here in the United States. There are more than a thousand Spanish-language radio stations throughout the country. And the programming varies: sports, music, religion… A few also broadcast news and opinion.

And while some Spanish-language radio stations have been accused of spreading disinformation, for many, listening to the radio is almost a tradition. It connects them to the music they grew up with and informs them in their own language.

And this is especially true in South Florida.

Zairenna: Here, talk radio has a different power.

Julio: That is, they are the space in which political narratives take shape.

Zairenna: In this case, at least here at Actualidad Radio, we are a radio that entertains with information and our main characteristic is that.

Julio: In Miami, there are more than ten Spanish-language radio stations. Their audience is the Latin diaspora.

There is Radio Mambí. Radio Caracol. La Poderosa… a radio station created by Cuban exiles and recently bought by a Christian media company.

And of course, there is also Actualidad Radio.

Audio file jingle: Noticias Actualidad Radio…

Julio: A group of Cubans and Venezuelans founded the station 18 years ago. The headquarters are in a small building in the city of Doral, in Miami-Dade county. This is the most populated county in Florida. And almost 70% of the people who live there are Latino.

Zairenna: The radio’s slogan is one language, all the accents, one signal and that’s what we are.

Audio file, different hosts:

Host: Good morning, good morning, good morning

Host: Good morning, welcome at this time…

Host: Gentlemen, it’s 4:12 in the afternoon and we continue

Host: Good afternoon, thank you for joining us.

Zairenna: We have a program with diverse talents: Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Argentines. There are Nicaraguan guests, there are guests of all kinds.

Julio: And the political visions are also different from one program to another?

Zairenna: Yes, all people have different political visions. For us, that’s normal.

Julio: That is, there is a host, a conductor…

Zairenna: There are some who are more liberal. There are others who are conservative. We don’t like extremes.

Julio: The dynamic works more or less like this: the most liberal hosts go on air in the morning. And the conservatives take the microphone in the afternoon. During the first hours of the day you hear topics like this:

Audio archive, AM programming

Host: Political analysts gave Kamala Harris the victory in the debate. And I think that, I think that’s how it was.

Host: What Chávez said became dogma and in Cuba it was the same.

Host: The UN woke up today saying that they are worried that Lebanon will become a second Gaza.

Host: The tariffs will have an impact on the American consumer. Even though in the statements made by the former president he says the opposite.

Julio: And the later it gets, you can hear things like this:

Audio file, PM programming

Host: Mrs. Harris could be a nice-smelling perfume. But after five minutes…

Host: Eau de cologne, I told you.

Host: After five minutes, she fades away. Behind this lady, there is no coherent proposal.

Host: Iran is on the verge of obtaining the uranium needed for a first atomic bomb.

Host: Trump could have told her, look, do you know how many people have been killed by criminal immigrants that you have let in?

Julio: Now, here in the hallways, when a program ends, do the hosts not fight? Do they not have disagreements over their political views, or does everything flow very well?

Zairenna: They meet and greet each other. And, for example, our morning talents, who at some point coincide with the afternoon talents, hey, how is Venezuela? Hey, how do you see this? And we look for the points that are coincidental and can unite us and not what separates us.

Julio: It is as if on this radio each show functions as an independent republic, where each host runs his territory in his own way and the programs are not connected to each other. But not everyone likes to hear such a variety of opinions.

At El péndulo, we read several comments from listeners on social networks. One of the ones that caught our attention was directed at the hosts of the morning show. Here I quote it: “During your time my radio does not turn on because for me you have no credibility whatsoever.”

Zairenna: When people call us, or write to us, or write to me, they say that you are communists, and I say: Ok. Or you are extremists, super hyper-right-wing and I… I mean, for some people we are one extreme or for others we are the other. It means that I am representing both things.

Julio: But, let’s see, how that looks in reality. Now inside the booth…

Zairenna: For example, this is something that was done for the debate, right? People have been invited from one side and the other, both in the morning and in the afternoon. And there have been debates with a Republican and a Democrat and different ideas are presented. And on the air, how do you hear it? Each one defends their position.

Julio: Does the debate get heated?

Zairenna: Oh, yes. But, South Florida is passionate.

Julio: Don’t the microphones get blown up?

Zairenna: Always. And people, many people call to say you are crazy, I don’t agree with you. How nice, welcome to the democracy club. And this is America, welcome here where thinking differently is the norm.

Julio: And this happens often. A couple of weeks ago, Zairenna was at the studio controls when a call came in from a listener.

Zairenna: And the listener disqualified the journalist who was on the air and told him, “Look, I’m going to have to take you off the air. Not because you’re saying that you disagree with me, but because you’re disqualifying me.”

Zairenna: We will never allow messages of racism, discrimination and violence. And if we make a mistake and have an inappropriate mention, it is corrected and let’s go.

Julio: And now that we are in an election year, is there anything that worries you? Anything that particularly calls your attention?

Zairenna: That the differences have been taken as a point not to solve the problems, but to create them.

Julio: After visiting the radio station, I was left with the impression that this newsroom is, in some way, a miniature version of South Florida. Where different accents, nationalities and political visions coexist. Some radical and others not so much.

But, despite having lived and worked in this state for years, it is impossible for me to analyze all the Latino communities that make life here.

I mean, one thing is to live in Miami and be a news anchor for Telemundo for a national audience… And another thing, very different, is to be a local reporter here. I don’t know much about the subject. But Syra Ortiz-Blanes does…

Syra: I am the immigration reporter for the Miami Herald. In these elections I am helping with the coverage. Looking at the Hispanic vote in Florida and at a national level.

Julio: After the break, Syra helps us understand how and why the diverse Latino communities in Florida vote.

We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL]

Julio: We’re back at El péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

Julio: Sometimes it is said that the good thing about Miami is that it is very close to the United States. And well, in that sense, Syra Ortiz Blanes is fully authorized to talk about the local scene. She is not originally from Florida. Like so many, she was born and raised elsewhere, in her case in Puerto Rico. She has been living and working here for almost three years now, in South Florida. She still remembers what surprised her the most when she arrived.

Syra: The diversity of the Hispanic population. Because sometimes when you think about the Hispanic population in Florida, well, you think about what they are… It’s the Cuban community, which is very established here, which has been here for many years.

Julio: A little over 60 years… And yes, in the 90s, the majority of Latinos living in Florida were Cubans. But this is no longer the case.

Syra: There is everything here. In fact, so many populations exist here. The roots of the populations are different, right? In Florida, I think, there are more than 6 million Latinos.

Julio: There are Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians, Nicaraguans and Argentines. Just to name a few.

Syra: So there is a great variety of political interests at play. Because of the number of identities that exist in this population. And also something that is important to touch on is that many Hispanics here in Florida vote with their homes, with their countries of origin in mind, right?

Julio: And the thing is that when people migrate, when they arrive in the United States, they don’t just bring with them a couple of suitcases. They also bring their personal history. Their political ideology. Their ideas about what democracy is. And all of this translates into how they vote and also into what they expect from the candidates.

I asked Syra for an example. And she gave me the example of the Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.

Syra: They are very anti-socialist, very anti-communist and they want their candidates, whom they support, to align themselves with those values ​​that they have. In other words, it is very common and I would say that it is even an expectation that politicians and candidates talk about these issues, right?

Julio: For example, during his campaign Trump has repeated the words communist and socialist over and over again. Many times linking the Democrats with regimes like that of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and saying that the United States could become a communist country if Kamala Harris wins the elections.

File:

Trump: Please, come up, thank you

Daniel: It is important that we understand that what has happened in our countries in Latin America can happen here.

Julio: This is Daniel Campos, a Venezuelan whom Trump invited to the stage during a rally in Pennsylvania. His speech focused on warning of what, according to him, can happen in the country.

File:

Daniel: Unless, we take a different step and that is why I think Trump is the best person to do it.

Julio: Since the time of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have taken a tough attitude against left-wing governments in Latin America: sanctions, denunciations and isolation… Following the strategy that Democratic President John F. Kennedy began in 1962 when he applied the trade embargo against Cuba, which remains in place to this day. These policies —although they have not managed to change regimes— have been very popular among some Latino voters. Especially among those who come from those countries.

But… let’s go back to the present.

Trump’s campaign is not the only one to use this rhetoric. The Democrats, in their own way, do it too.

Syra: For example, in 2020, there were ads that compared Trump, or positioned him as a leader, right? Which is a strongman in Latin America.

Julio: And the same thing happened this year.

Syra: A political action committee, right? What they call a PAC in English put up a billboard near Hialeah, which is mostly Cuban, and it said no to dictators, no to Trump. And on one side of the billboard was Fidel Castro, right? And on the other side was Trump and that has caused a kind of stir in the Cuban community here. Because many said this is offensive, right? Fidel was a murderer, nothing worse than Fidel. So to speak, right? And I mean, there were also real people who supported the comparison. People who are Democrats, people who are anti-Trump because they said, well, Trump is also authoritarian.

Music

Syra: But for me that’s an example of how many immigrants continue to live the stories of their countries even though they are far from them. And how that impacts the public dialogue, like what the politicians say here in South Florida.

Julio: But… what works with some voters, doesn’t work with all.

Syra: To the Puerto Rican, right? They don’t have that history with leftist governments or socialist governments in Latin America. So, I would tell you that as a member of that community who observes how people talk about these political issues, that is not on the radar.

Julio: For Puerto Ricans living in the United States, their main concerns are other things: the health system, corruption, crime… And the support they receive from the Federal Government. Especially on issues like the electricity crisis that has been going on in Puerto Rico for years.

Let us remember that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States— some would say a colony.

So, these messages that link the Democratic Party with communism or socialism in Latin America do not work for all communities. And neither for all ages. Not all young Latinos are attracted to this issue.

Syra: I see them more focused on domestic issues like the economy and inflation, right? More than what is happening in the country where their parents —or grandparents— left and moved to the United States.

Julio: An example of this is the new generation of Cuban-Americans. They are much less interested in policies directed towards Cuba. And whose focus is not on punishing the regime on the island either.

And this is not the only thing that has changed. The political dynamics throughout Florida have been transformed over the years…

Syra: Well, we have definitely seen that the state has moved towards the Republican vote in recent years. And there is no single factor that has led to these political changes.

Julio: Syra says that this is because, in Florida, the Republican political machine is better funded and organized than the Democratic party.

Syra: And that has been demonstrated, right? In voter registration efforts. For example, in mid-August, 1 million more Republican voters were registered than Democratic voters.

Julio: That is to say… In Florida there are, currently, more than five million active Republican voters. And 4.33 million Democratic voters.

And this change occurred in less than 10 years. In 2018, Florida’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, beat Democratic candidate Andrew Gillium by less than 1% of the vote. At that time, Democrats still had an advantage over Republicans in terms of registered voters.

Syra: Regarding Hispanics in particular, they have launched initiatives such as civic clinics where they helped immigrants study for their citizenship exams. So even before they become citizens, right? They are already planting the seed that it is the Republican Party that is helping them.

Julio: Syra told me that certain demographic changes also influenced this state to change color.

Syra: The population in Florida has increased over the last four years. Governor Ron DeSantis has promoted the state as a Republican stronghold and that has certainly brought in new residents.

Julio: The fact that Trump is a Florida resident also helped bring about this change.

Syra: There are also a lot of older people who retire here. Many of them are conservative. There is one community that comes to mind, which is The Villages, which is close to Orlando. And they have seen a significant increase in their population in recent years. And it is a super pro-Trump, super Republican bastion.

Julio: Despite this, the truth is that the panorama here is still unclear.

Julio: After the break… In these elections, citizens will not only choose who will occupy the presidency. In states like Florida, it will also be decided whether or not to legalize abortion. We will be back.

JULIO: We are back at El péndulo. I am Julio Vaqueiro.

Julio: We have been talking about diversity in Florida… That there is everything here. It is practically a stew of Latin American countries.

And with that comes a spectrum of policies from our native countries.

As an example, we have an urgent issue throughout the hemisphere in recent years: the right to abortion.

The green tide, named after the green scarves that symbolize support for the right to abortion, has driven change in Latin America. The result is that in several countries there is more access to reproductive rights than before.

Charo Valero: Places like Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay.

Julio: This is Charo Valero, Florida state director for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice.

In 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated constitutional protection for the right to abortion, many states —including Florida— changed their laws.

That same year, the 15-week ban was passed and the next year, the six-week ban was passed. So there have been many changes in Florida recently.

Julio: So, six weeks of gestation —when the vast majority of women do not know they are pregnant. The result, says Charo, is a contrast for many Latinas… between more access in their home countries… and more restrictions here.

You have your ideas about freedom and access and how things are going to be, how things are going to be here and you realize that we are much further ahead in our countries than we are here. In our countries, we are moving forward, we are fighting, we are struggling for reproductive justice and it feels like in this country we are going backwards.

Julio: Charo says that there are still many people who don’t know what the law is in Florida right now. Of course, it’s an understandable confusion: it has changed twice in the last two years. And it may change again in this election. Voters will be able to decide if they want to change the state Constitution to enshrine the right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability, around 23 weeks for many pregnancies. It’s called Amendment 4.

Julio: The group Charo works for is part of a coalition promoting that constitutional change, the amendment. It’s called Florida Protecting Liberty, and they want to convince Hispanic voters. They campaign in Spanish, and with a message that, according to them, is tailor-made for Latinos.

Charo: The values ​​that we focus on are respect, autonomy, and freedom. Family. Compassion and non-judgment. Privacy. Those are the five values ​​that we have seen that really connect with Latino communities in Spanish.

Julio: Our producer, Alana Casanova-Burgess, was in central Florida recently, in Osceola County, observing a group in that same coalition supporting Amendment 4. A group that is trying to convince voters face to face. Hi, Alana.

ALANA: Hi, Julio.

JULIO: Tell me. Where did you go in Osceola?

Alana: I went to a very well-kept suburb with a very beautiful name: Ponciana. This visit, of course, was before the hurricane… But let Lucy Rodriguez explain it to you.

Lucy: We are knocking on doors. That is the work that we are doing. Today we formally started the Osceola program.

Alana: Lucy is the state director of Mi Vecino, an organization that promotes voting rights. The week before, they had finished their program in Orange County, a nearby county where they knocked on many doors. That day they were in a hurry.

Lucy: We knocked on almost 60,000 doors and we hope to knock on a good few before the elections here and hoping that people get motivated to go out and vote.

JULIO: Ah, so they are canvassers – pollsters.

Alana: Yes, but at least when I think of canvassers, I think of campaign volunteers. For the Mi Vecino team, campaigning is their job all year, every year… Not just during election time. It has been that way since 2021. That is important, because they are trying to create a relationship with Latino voters that goes beyond asking for their vote every four years.

Lucy: I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made here in the United States, especially in Florida, is that the campaign is very weak. When we talk to voters, they don’t know who anyone is.

Mi Vecino leaders have raised the idea that there is something abusive in the way campaigns treat Latinos. And as evidence, they point out that in Florida there are more Latino voters not affiliated with any party than Latinos registered as Democrats or Republicans. They told me that, because of that, they try to be more conscious of how to speak to Hispanics, because they can be skeptical of what the campaigns want.

JULIO: And how are you doing, with that understanding?

Alana: Well, they have made a huge effort knocking on doors, talking to people… Many times for Democratic candidates and they have not yet won any election.

But they are planning for the long term. They have registered 40 thousand new voters in the state. Last year, Governor Ron DeSantis approved new restrictions on how voters can be registered, and some groups, like Mi Vecino, stopped doing it directly.

Lucy: In this QR code here, you can register to vote if you are not

Registered voters can update or even request their vote by mail. Okay. You? Dominican? Yes, me too. Take care of yourself.

Alana: For this year, they have focused on Amendment 4. They need 60 percent of the vote for it to be approved.

This day in Poinciana, the challenge was to connect with voters they had NOT contacted before.

Lucy: Good morning, how are you? That’s great.

When Harris replaced Joe Biden, they suddenly saw an opportunity among young voters who thought they would not go to vote because they were not enthusiastic about Biden. In other words, Harris’ entry into the race could have changed the fight for abortion rights.

They had a list of houses with registered voters, and pamphlets about the amendment. Many of the Latinos in Osceola are from Puerto Rico, where there is also more right to abortion than in Florida. I went to be a fly on the wall, if people would allow me to record the conversation.

Julio: Does Mi Vecino care about voters’ party affiliation?

Alana: No. Even Trump himself isn’t entirely clear on how he’s going to vote. In August, he said he was in favor of the amendment, because six weeks isn’t enough time for a woman to make that decision. He later said he would vote no. His wife Melania said this month that women should have autonomy over their bodies, free from government intervention. Mi Vecino has found that abortion rights are not a partisan issue, so they ring the doorbell if it’s a house with signs for Trump or Harris.

They stay away from the door, to be respectful. And…

We can’t answer the door right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, you can do it now.

Alana: And this is normal? People not answering?

Lucy: Yes.

Julio: I can already imagine it, walking for hours in full sun, in the humidity, without shade. Ringing doorbells and no one comes to the door.

Alana: Yes. It’s intense. And when someone finally opens the door, you have to handle a very delicate conversation about abortion.

Although, Lucy says it’s not abortion itself.

Lucy: Amendment Four is not just abortion, I mean, it’s not abortion itself, it’s about women’s health.

Alana: These conversations begin with a short survey. Question 1: What is the most important issue in this election for you? Economy, education, gun violence, immigration or abortion.

Lucy: What are you worried about right now?

Woman: Right now it’s education for children.

Lucy: Education. Perfect, perfect. There is an initiative for people to have the right to make their own decisions, in this case women. Do you think women should have access to abortion?

Woman: No.

Lucy: Ok, let me explain. In that flyer that you have there we are talking about Amendment Four.

Alana: The proposal is called “amendment to limit government interference in abortion”. Many of the groups that support it, like Mi Vecino, talk about freedom when they talk about women’s health.

Lucy: That government interference has nothing to do with that very important decision that is your health.

Alana: Lucy tells him that there are cases of pregnant women being denied medical attention.

Lucy: So I understand as a woman that it is not fair for us to be exposed to going through so much pain or discomfort, both emotional and physical, without any need. In other words, what is being sought with amendment four is that the Government does not interfere, that they are not the ones who make the decision, because it is not about the abortion itself, but about our health.

Julio: And? How did the lady react?

Alana: At first, with doubts.

Woman: If they accept it’s okay. Health, that is the first thing, that is the most important thing. But not everyone is going to know, so a lot of people are going to take advantage of that door to do things that I really don’t think they should do.

Lucy: I understand your part and I really agree with you. I’m a Christian and I have my point of view regarding that, but my main part here is women’s health and I also understand that we live in a free country. I mean, it can’t be that the government comes to my house to tell me what I have to do with my husband.

Alana: She ended up answering “I’m not sure.” They’ll call her for another conversation.

Julio: Does that happen a lot? People going from no to “I need more information”?

Alana: Well, Lucy tries not to debate the issue with people who are already super decided to vote no, but I saw versions of that same conversation several times when she saw an opportunity.

Alana: When you refer to health, um… Tell me a little more.

Lucy: When I say health, I mean if you end up in the hospital.

Alana: And what Mi Vecino and these other coalition groups hope is that voters think about the complications of the ban before they get to the polls. That “no” is their first response to the amendment, but not the last.

Julio: I heard Lucy share a bit of her religious perspective in her conversation. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are taking their religion into account when deciding how to vote.

Alana: Yes, many people receive messages against the amendment within the church. On the other hand, Catholics for the Right to Decide are campaigning in Florida with Mi Vecino.

Lucy: My faith is strong. I believe a lot in God. That is not negotiable. But that does not take away from me, on the contrary. I do not believe that God would do that. Let someone die. Do you understand? So, I understood the medical part. The health part that we are working for. The fourth amendment.

Alana: Lucy has changed her own perspective as well.

Lucy: I was lacking knowledge, really, yes. Because I was born in a Christian home. I had not gone deeper because like when they talk about abortion, they talk about abortion and that’s it, “I went to a party. I did not take care of myself”. People think about that. But here we are talking about something worse.

Alana: There is one case in particular that has affected her greatly. A 28-year-old mother, Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in Georgia because doctors waited 20 hours to treat her when she had an incomplete abortion.

Lucy: But by the time they made the decision, it was too late. They let her die. That was very bad.

Julio: Is the law in Georgia similar to that in Florida, right?

Alana: Yes. In Georgia and Florida, abortions are only allowed after six weeks if the pregnancy poses an immediate danger to the health of the woman and the fetus. State authorities have tried to clarify the restriction several times since May. But there are testimonies from doctors who say that the law prevents them from helping their patients. And there have been horrible cases in the state as well. In Florida, if a doctor performs an illegal abortion, he can face up to five years in prison and a fine of five thousand dollars.

Julio: Do ​​these very delicate conversations always have to do with urgent cases or medical emergencies?

Alana: Not always. Some voters didn’t rate her answer that highly.

Man: Yes. Yes, yes. A woman should have, you know, the power of what she does with her body.

Alana: But there are a lot of people who are undecided. And when Lucy and others from Mi Vecino talk to men, specifically, they talk about the man’s responsibility to protect his family from the government and they notice that that also helps convince them, at least, to consider it.

Lucy: Do you think that people should have access to abortion?

Man: No.

Alana: That’s what happened with a young father from Brazil.

Lucy: So the issue that we are working on with the fourth amendment is because we don’t want the government to interfere in the decision of your home, when it is something that has to do with your doctor and a very personal decision between you. That’s what the fourth amendment refers to.

Man: It’s very complex, isn’t it? I think it has… I have to think about it.

Julio: The vote is coming in a few weeks. Do Mi Vecino know how Latinos are going to vote yet?

Alana: The group shared the results of their surveys with me. From 11,000 conversations with voters, they found that 56 percent would vote yes. Among Latinos alone, it was 52 percent. And that wouldn’t be enough. 60 percent is needed for the amendment to pass.

They still have more doors to knock on.

Lucy: Thank you, have a nice day.

Julio: Thank you, Alana.

Credits

Desirée: El Péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo is the host. This episode was reported and produced by Mariana Zúñiga and Alana Casanova-Burgess [bir-jess]. Editing is by Eliezer Budasoff and Daniel Alarcón.

I’m Desirée Yépez, the digital producer. Jess Alvarenga is the production assistant. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. Music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El péndulo is made possible with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as @ [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast dot audio.

I’m Desirée Yépez, thanks for listening.

Man: In Las Vegas, Nevada, with…

Julio: You don’t even remember the name

Man: Wait, wait, wait.

Julio: Julio Vaqueiro.

Man: Julio Vaqueiro. You’re the one I watch the most here…

Julio: Thank you, thank you.

Man: ¡Arriba Las Vegas y arriba México!

Julio: This week we are in Las Vegas, Nevada and we came to talk about money. Not the money from the casinos, or from the hotel rooms, or the tips… But about the family economy of millions of people, in one of the most important and decisive states in this year’s elections.

It seems that everyone has it in mind.

Audio file, news

Host: House prices in Nevada have doubled.

Reporter: Seven dollars that’s what it cost me to buy this gallon of milk and these dozen eggs.

Tik Tok user: Family of four. Cost of living in Las Vegas Nevada. Rent: $1,600. Electric: $250. Grocery: $800. Gas…

Julio: According to polls, a quarter of voters in Nevada say the economy is their top concern. And it makes perfect sense. Nevada has the worst unemployment rate in the country, 5.5%. Food and gas prices are among the most expensive. And housing costs have skyrocketed.

If this were a normal year, this kind of data… would be very bad news for anyone in a position of power. Like, say, a sitting vice president. But this is not an ordinary year.

So, how much does the economy matter in 2024? And what plans do the two candidates have to address the pain and concern felt by all voters, not just Latino voters?

I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

This is El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… Nevada.

Julio: Las Vegas. You are probably thinking about the lights of the famous Strip, its reputation, deserved or not, of a certain decadence… About the city where the party seems to never end.

But behind this facade, of what the tourist perhaps sees, there is another reality. The reality of the workforce that sustains this illusion, a workforce that is mainly Latino. To understand it better, we left the tourist center of Las Vegas, and went north for half an hour…

Marta: We are here at the Swami, which many people call the flea.

Julio: This is Marta Fabiola Vazquez. Marta has worked here since 1995. At Broadacre Marketplace. This is a swap meet, or an open-air market, in the north of Las Vegas. It is in the area with the most Latinos in the city. And this is where those who work in the most touristic area of ​​Las Vegas come to shop. It is the typical market that has everything…

Marta: Tacos, seafood, Chinese food, crepes, popcorn, birria…

Julio: They sell toys, clothes, hats, jewelry… But people come to Broadacre not only to buy.

Marta: They have dancing, mariachi bands. There are people who come for fun. There are mechanical games and many things for children too.

Julio: Marta started selling clothes and accessories. But 10 years ago she changed jobs. She opened her first food stand: Mr. Papas. And she began to sell typical dishes from her hometown, Guadalajara.

Marta: At this stand I have mostly original products from where I come from. Here we sell espiropapas, salchipulpos, salchitacos…

Julio: So, you have this stand and you have other stands here in the market. How many more?

Marta: There are seven in total.

Julio: And how did you manage to have so many stands here in the market?

Marta: Well, I have a lot of children.

Julio: Hahaha, you put them all to work.

Marta: We put them all to work.

Julio: And it’s not only his children who work in the market…

Marta: Well, the whole family works. My dad, my nieces, my nephews, my cousins ​​work.

Julio: It’s the Guadalajara mafia in the Las Vegas market.

Marta: Almost, almost, yes.

Julio: Marta came to the United States more than 30 years ago with her parents. They first settled in Los Angeles, but four years later they moved to Las Vegas. Right at the time when the Latino population in Nevada began to grow. In part, thanks to the construction of hotels and casinos.

Marta: It was a city that was just starting with Latinos and there were many very interesting job offers.

Julio: Through hard work and effort, Marta became middle class, equal to 57% of Latino families in Nevada. This percentage is higher than any other state in the country.

Marta was able to buy a house, send her children to college, save and help her entire family. But not everything is as good as it seems. Over time, things have changed. The business is not what it used to be either. It all started with the pandemic. Like any business in the world, hers was affected. Normal. But, when the world reopened…

Marta: It was like never before, like never before. I could tell you that sales increased by 200% after the pandemic.

Julio: This didn’t last long. Nevada’s economy was practically suffocated during the pandemic. This state had the highest unemployment rate in the entire country, almost 31%. And more than twelve thousand people died. When everything was over, people began to get their jobs back. And some, like Marta, even did very well. But the wound remained latent. Throughout Nevada, the economy is still affected. And now, the challenge is to deal with the high cost of living.

Marta: People are already afraid to spend. They no longer spend as they used to, they no longer go out as they used to. Prices are sky-high for food, for everything.

Julio: For everything. But of course, some things more than others.

Julio: What has gone up in price for you, let’s say, what ingredient has become the most expensive?

Marta: Meat. Definitely meat. Four years ago it cost you $2.39 a pound and today it’s $4.50 a pound. In other words, we’re talking about more than double. Cheese is also sky-high. Before, a pound of cheese cost you $2, now a pound of cheese costs you almost $6. Potatoes cost me $17 a box. Now they cost $35.

Julio: Oh, but that’s a lot.

Marta: A lot.

Julio: And so we continued for a while. Comparing prices. Talking about cream, eggs, butter. We talked so much that our pockets even started to hurt. And with that in mind, I had a question for Marta.

Julio: In this presidential election, what is the most important issue for you?

Marta: The economy. The prices of all things, gas, rents. Everything that has to do with what comes out of all of our pockets.

Julio: Different versions of this conversation were repeated throughout the day, but with different people. Everyone agreed on the same thing: prices are too high. But of course, you can’t agree on everything. In general, there was no consensus in the market about which candidate has more tools to improve the economy.

Julio: Which of the two candidates do you think will solve the economy better?

Lady 1: The economy? Donald Trump has more experience in the financial and economic areas.

Julio: Listen. Which of the two candidates do you think will solve the economy better?

Lady 2: Kamala.

Julio: Kamala Harris?

Lady 2: Yes.

Julio: Which of the two presidential candidates do you think will solve the economy better?

Lady 3: Trump, definitely. Because even during the Pandemic everything was fine. Everyone had money.

Julio: Which of the two economic proposals do you like best? Trump’s or Kamala Harris’s?

Lady 4: Kamala’s.

Lady 5: I like her because she has good values ​​and knows more about the situation of us middle-class and non-middle-class migrant workers, hehe.

Julio: For her part, Marta is still not so clear about it.

Marta: In my family they are divided. In my family some believe this one is better and the other half believes that one is better.

Julio: And what do you think?

Marta: I think we already had Donald Trump. And I think that the economy was better. But afterwards it was worse, because I have felt it worse. After him. But he is bad at dividing us all. And I, as an immigrant, feel that he divides us more every day, instead of uniting us in this country and I feel that we are divided with him.

Julio: We found, well, a lot of division. We even met a young man who was afraid to tell us who he was going to vote for.

Young man: It’s just that… I don’t want to talk about politics.

Julio: Yeah

Young man: It’s a subject that I don’t want to risk. Well, if I say something it can affect things in the future. Because people, well, you know… they are all canceling.

Julio: He says he is afraid of being canceled. That is, if he says who he plans to vote for, that could affect his business here in the market.

Young man: For me, my positions are personal. But for me the most important thing is the family. Well, I am not going to fight because someone has an opinion about something else.

Julio: He says this because his parents, who have lived here for 25 years, are undocumented. His own family is divided. But this is not at all unusual in Nevada. A recent survey says that Harris has a small advantage of 0.6%. Which means that the state is practically divided in half.

Julio: Now that you tell me that the most important thing is the family, are you worried, for example, that one of the candidates, Donald Trump, talks about mass deportations?

Young man: Yes, I am worried, well, for all the people who are affected by that. My bosses are not affected by that because they are already in the process of getting residency. They have work permits and all that.

Julio: But, there were other people willing to give their opinion and openly say who they will vote for.

Lady: My corn hair. I am going to defend my corn hair. That is what Mexicans affectionately call the former president…

Julio: Is that what they call him? My corn hair?

Lady: My corn hair… they love him, they love him.

Julio: Walking through the market we came across a stand that said: Latin Americans for Trump, campaigning.

Julio: And what they are doing here is registering them?

Lady: This is for people who are not registered, right? They still have time to register.

Julio: How long have you been here?

Lady: This is our third Sunday… third Saturday.

Julio: How are you?

Bárbaro: Very well.

Julio: Very well, what is your name?

Bárbaro: Bárbaro Álvarez.

Julio: What are you doing here?

Bárbaro: Well, we walk around and find little places like these to come and support Trump. That man is the one who is going to free my country.

Julio: Are you sure that you are going to vote for Trump?

Bárbaro: I am completely sure. I even dream about him.

Julio: The polls say that the electoral race will be extremely close in Nevada. In 2016 and 2020 Trump lost in this state by a very small margin. But this time, the economic malaise could play in his favor. However, victory is something almost impossible to predict. In Nevada, a third of the voters are independents, and that makes this state unpredictable. In recent months, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have visited Nevada on several occasions. And in fact, she was here, in the Broadacres market, last March. Several months before becoming a candidate.

Audio, news archive

Journalist: The vice president came there to greet her supporters…

Adele: She came here to the swap meet one day, I took a photo of her. She came here and said: Hi! And I was very happy. I thought it was spectacular. And I didn’t know what it was… She was going to be president. Imagine, now she’s going to help more.

Julio: She’s Adele, she has a stand in the market where she sells Pokemon stuffed animals. I asked her about Harris’s economic proposals.

Julio: Do ​​you know her proposals well?

Adele: Well, look, I’m not good at watching television. I’m good at talking, but not at watching. But from what I hear from my colleagues and everything, most people at my work are with Kamala.

Julio: Many other people in the market also didn’t know what each candidate’s proposals were. So, we called an economist.

After the break: The answer.

Julio: We’re back at El Péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

Sara Avila: Well, the thing is that Nevada is a state that has a very large Latino population.

Julio: This is Sara Avila, economist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Colorado and Nevada are almost neighbors. And they are part of the mountain states.

Sara: 28% of the population is Latino. And therefore, they have suffered the impact of inflation and rising interest rates.

Julio: And the fact is that, although inflation hits the pockets of all Americans, not everyone experiences it in the same way. According to the Federal Reserve of New York, in recent years inflation has affected Latino and African-American households more. For example, in 2021, when transportation prices began to rise, the inflation rate for Latinos exceeded the national average by more than 1.5%.

Sara: Well, I don’t want to generalize. There are very successful Latinos, right? Very rich. But most Latinos are from the working class and therefore inflation hits us much harder, right? For the poor, who are wage earners, inflation hits you particularly hard. And in Nevada, gasoline has gone up 55% in the last four years. Food, 20%. Housing, let’s say rent payments, went up almost 20%. And so, that’s why there is a lot of concern about the economy in states like Nevada. But, in fact, in the whole country.

Julio: You know, we went to Las Vegas, we talked to some Latinos, Latino voters, and yes, in general, they all tell us that they feel that life is more expensive.

Lady: You can’t go to a market, you go with $200. A family with four or five children with $200 can’t get what they need.

Julio: But, inflation right now is at 2.5%, which is low. Why do we still feel that life is so expensive?

Sara: Look, there are things that have increased in price a lot in recent times and it was gradual. Housing, education, health… and these things are very expensive, but one doesn’t use them too much. When it comes to increasing daily expenses in the last four years, it hit hard.

Julio: The thing is, although the data show that inflation has gone down, it’s not just about numbers anymore, but about perception. And voters feel that life in the United States has become unaffordable.

Julio: So, on one hand it was that, the price of things. And on the other hand, also in this market that we went to visit, they talked a lot about how they feel that people are spending less.

Lady 1: Everything is going up and sales are going down.

Lady 2: People are also afraid to spend because they hear so many things. It is heard that there is going to be a depression.

Lady 3: They buy less materials, like the ones we sell, yes.

Julio: Is that feeling true?

Sara: That is totally true. When you know that you are in a precarious situation, well, you hold back buying shoes, you hold back buying vehicles, you hold back… And yes, it does affect precisely in that you stop buying and therefore the economy slows down even more.

Julio: But do you think that we are like there in a recession or entering into some kind of recession?

Sara: The thing is that it is not a recession, I mean, there is quite a serious consensus that it is not a recession, because a recession would be like our Latin American countries, when prices rose terribly and we no longer had enough to eat. The thing is that we have had an increase in salaries. The thing is that it is still very painful to have the price of gasoline and the price of groceries go up, but the salary also continues to go up. So we are dragging along, but we still reach a level that allows us to eat, right?

Julio: If you had to say in a sentence or in an idea… How has the life of Latinos changed in the last four years in economic terms?

Sara: You know what Julio, the thing is that Latinos are not a homogeneous group. Everyone says it, but it would be better to explain how the economy has affected different sectors of Latinos, that is, poor Latinos, rich Latinos. And there is also a very important difference by gender. Women and men have suffered differently from this crisis. It turns out that in recent years women have had more job opportunities, for example, than men.

Julio: And that gender gap could be reflected when it comes to voting. According to some surveys, Latina women tend to vote more for Democrats than men.

Sara: Since the pandemic, Latino income has increased considerably. No, net, no. Other groups have always been richer, right? But we have grown faster and surprisingly, the sector that has grown the fastest is that of young Latina women who have just graduated from college and who, with great sacrifice, their parents put them in schools with good education and who now have a professional job and have grown. Latina women have grown at a higher rate than the state of Florida in the last three years. Imagine the size of the economy. And this means that anything that affects the economy affects Latinas and their families.

Julio: Now let’s talk about the candidates’ proposals. First we start with Trump. Mass deportations, which is one of the great proposals of former President Donald Trump, he wants to deport millions of immigrants as a solution to improve the country’s economy.

Audio file, Donald Trump: 

I will send them all back to their countries where they belong. Prices will come down, and come down dramatically.

Julio: But can this work?

Sara: Donald Trump’s idea is that by deporting these people, they will leave their homes, their jobs, and someone else will use them. But we must remember that all immigrants are in a society interwoven with each other. So, most likely there are also citizen people in the families who would stay here living in the house, right? So the houses would not be unfit.

Julio: Deporting millions of people is not only very complicated to achieve, in logistical terms, but it would also require a lot of money. In addition, it would be harmful to the economy. Experts warn that deporting just 1 million workers could generate an economic recession.

Sara: If you get rid of all these workers right now, what you will generate is an economic problem of enormous proportions, not only because of the lack of workers, but because of the lack of consumption. Immigrants also consume, eat and contribute a lot of money in terms of taxes, social security… So, it would be a real disaster for the economy.

Julio: Another of Trump’s proposals has to do with tariffs.

Audio file, Donald Trump: 

Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back after all that we have done for the world.

Julio: Trump proposes to increase taxes on all products that are imported into the United States. Especially those that come from China. In theory, this policy is not new. At the end of his first term, Trump imposed some tariffs on China. And in fact, Joe Biden maintained them.

Sara: Today, when China sells batteries, gloves, electric vehicles, masks, magnets to the United States… China pays between 7.5%, 20%, and even a little more tariff on entry.

Julio: This depends on the product, of course. For Trump, this policy would force companies to manufacture more things in the United States. And this, according to him, would create millions of jobs. Because more people would be needed to produce. But, the first time he tried to implement this measure, this did not happen.

Sara: This makes certain things go up in price. Whenever there are tariffs, the first impact is an increase in prices.

Julio: And now, Trump not only wants to increase tariffs on China. But to impose this tax on everything that comes from another country.

Sara: No economist agrees that it is a good idea to put tariffs on everyone and put such high tariffs.

Julio: We are talking about up to 20% tax on all imports.

Sara: Why the hell do you want to charge more for avocado, or guava, or pineapple and lemon, because you will never be a leading producer here. And no, you have no interest in protecting anyone. You only increase prices. For all of us who live in the United States, having to pay a million to eat your bread with avocado. And maybe that’s the least of it. Imagine the parts of cars. When your washing machine breaks down, when you want to buy a new shirt, shoes, rackets, pans, all of that goes up because we import everything. And that’s definitely a bad idea. Putting tariffs is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Julio: Trump’s third idea to improve the economy is to reduce taxes on corporations.

Audio file, Donald Trump: 

And a reduction in the Corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% solely for companies that make their products in America.

Sara: If you’re one of those very successful Latinos who earns more than $837,000 a year, well, it’s good for you, because you’re going to pay $60,000 less in taxes. If you’re one of the not-so-rich who earns less, you’re going to get a reduction in your taxes, maybe $70 in the short term. And that’s great, right? The problem is that these dollars will no longer reach the public treasury and then we will have less money for defense, less money for public health, less money for education, etc. You increase the national debt and in general terms, you weaken your institutions. So, when you see the long-term impacts, at the end of the day the average American household loses and ultimately you benefit the richest. While the rest are not affected directly, but indirectly.

Julio: Last August, during a press conference, Trump announced another of his great wishes in terms of economic policy.

Sara: He wants to lower the Federal Reserve interest rate by decree. The Federal Reserve in the United States is the Central Bank.

Audio file, Donald Trump:

I feel the president should have at least say in there, yeah. I feel that strongly. I think that in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful. And I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people who would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.

Julio: That’s not in the power of a president, is it?

Sara: Absolutely.

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

The Fed is an independent entity. And as president, I would never interfere.

Julio: And yes, the Federal Reserve is technically an independent entity. So it’s not clear if Trump would actually have the power to control it. But in the hypothetical case that he could, according to some experts, this could affect the economy.

Sara: What happens? There is uncertainty. This is what happens when you want to control the Federal Reserve, uncertainty increases and it bounces back on you. All the interest rates are going to go through the roof, because nobody believes what they say anymore. And that’s the problem.

The whole economy works only on trust. They give you a dollar bill and out of trust you believe that it’s worth a dollar. Because it’s actually a piece of paper. So, the economy really works on trusting that this is going to be respected. When the Central Bank says we are lowering interest rates, it is important that we all believe that interest rates are going down, and when interest rates are going up, it is important that we believe that they are going up.

Julio: So, if the central bank becomes politicized, that trust could be lost. In Latin America we have examples of this trend, countries where this has already happened: Venezuela and Argentina. To mention a few, and in those countries, rampant inflation was unleashed.

Julio: But anyway. So, what do you think if now we talk about Kamala Harris’ proposals to improve the economy, what does she propose?

Sara: There are at least three proposals from Kamala that are very clear, although she also does not have exactly how they would work, but at least she has said and repeated them, right?

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

As president I will take on the high cost that matters most to most Americans. Like the cost of food. And I will work to pass the first ever federal ban on price gouging on food.

July: The first proposal of his campaign is a federal decree to prohibit speculation with prices, especially for food. Which went up a lot during the pandemic.

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed. But our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high.

Sara: But eventually the production chains restart and some retailers, some sellers, continue charging a lot. So it is said: Hey, how is it possible? We are going to prohibit this abuse. The only problem is that it is very difficult to monitor the costs of companies. They have zero incentive to tell you what their costs are, right? How do we know how much Walmart costs Home Depot, Walgreens? We don’t know. So, are you charging more because it really costs you more, or are you charging more because you are abusing the consumer? The truth is that it is very difficult to know, right? It is very difficult.

Julio: Can there be any negative consequences of the government directly intervening in controlling the production distribution processes of a company and of certain products?

Sara: That is another problem. Yes, it is true that costs are very high and you artificially lower them. It is a huge problem. It could even create a black market, right? And if these alterations in the markets generate a lot of instability and losses in well-being. The product could very well have been sold, it could have been produced and it is not done because there is a limit on the price.

Julio: Well, what are Kamala Harris’s other proposals?

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

Let’s talk about the cost of housing.

Sara: One is her idea of ​​housing construction.

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

We need to lower the cost of housing. The supply is too low.

Sara: The idea of ​​housing construction comes because we have a frightening housing deficit.

Julio: There are not enough houses and that makes prices skyrocket.

Lady: Houses have risen too much. I mean everything, all the inflation.

Julio: This causes great concern among voters. In fact, 3 out of 4 Latinos say they are worried about the cost of housing.

Sara: But I’ll also tell you something, there is no housing shortage for billionaires. Builders have every incentive to continue serving this millionaire market that is willing to pay a lot for million-dollar homes. But the problem is that they have no incentive to build homes for ordinary people. These little houses with three bedrooms, one bathroom, or two. Those are the ones that have not been built and those are the ones that Kamala says she wants to promote.

Julio: Harris’ plan is basically focused on supply. She wants to build three million homes in four years, to address the shortage. In addition, she wants to give families who buy for the first time financial support: $25,000 for the down payment.

Sara: And that would also help a group that has been less privileged and that includes mostly Hispanics and African Americans. Few minorities are as attached to this desire to get ahead and fulfill the American dream and have your home, to have your future secured, as Hispanics. We have the goal set and I think that does affect the decisions we make a lot.

Julio: Not all economists seem convinced by Harris’ proposal. Some experts believe that the $25,000 check could trigger demand in the real estate sector. And that this could fuel the high prices that they are trying to combat.

Sara: And the other is her idea of ​​supporting child care.

Audio file, Kamala Harris: 

We know this works and has a direct impact on so many issues, including child poverty.

Sara: In other words, subsidizing the person to be able to leave a child in a daycare center, while the parents basically go to work. The simple fact of having someone to take care of your child while you work is a huge support.

Julio: And the thing is that this kind of service is usually very expensive. Almost prohibitive. In Nevada, for example, parents can pay almost a thousand dollars a month for daycare. In addition to this subsidy, Harris also wants to offer up to $6,000 to low-income families with newborn children.

On the other hand, she wants to raise taxes on millionaires and big companies. And although she hasn’t said so, it is assumed that this is how she will finance her economic plan.

Julio: Now, for a long time it was thought that what Latinos were most interested in was the immigration issue and that was a way to attract Latino voters. But now we have realized that Latinos, like the rest of the electorate, care most about the economy, at least in this election cycle. What does this tell you?

Sara: Yes, Latinos are definitely no longer very interested in immigration as it was once assumed. That doesn’t mean that we don’t care, but the economy is the most important thing.

or more importantly, it’s because the vast majority of Latinos are working class and anything that affects the economy affects us all.

Julio: Sara, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Sara: Likewise. Thank you very much Julio.

Julio: Next week on El Péndulo, we’re going to Florida to understand how the different Latino communities that live there vote.

Syra: Many Hispanics here in Florida vote with their homes, their countries of origin, in mind.

Julio: Thanks for listening!

Mariana: El Péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo is the host. This episode was reported and produced by Jess Alvarenga and me, Mariana Zúñiga.

Alana Casanova-Burgess is our executive producer. Editing is by Silvia Viñas, Eliezer Budasoff and Daniel Alarcón.

Desirée Yépez is our digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. The music, mixing, and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. The graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El péndulo is made possible with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as @ [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast dot audio.

I’m Mariana Zuñiga, and thank you for listening.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: This episode contains strong or violent language and may not be suitable for all listeners.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: I’m Julio Vaqueiro. Welcome to El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Let’s start with something simple, sharp: these presidential elections could be decided in the first state we want to focus on… Pennsylvania. I’m not saying it, the experts who observe and study the electoral maps are saying it. They tell us that the candidate who wins this state will almost certainly win the presidency.

For decades, Pennsylvania was one of those blue states that Democrats always counted on. Until 2016, when Donald Trump won by less than 45,000 votes. It was a key and surprising victory… No Republican had achieved it since 1988. And that victory helped take him to the White House.

Then, four years ago… things changed again. This time, Joe Biden also won by a small margin… Only 80,000 votes, just a little bit over one percent.

These two results confirm that every vote counts…

And that Pennsylvania is now one of those swing states.

In El Péndulo we are not going to predict who will win in Pennsylvania, or in the other four states we are going to visit. That is not what this podcast is about. What we want to do is understand what role we, Latinos, can play in these elections.

In the case of Pennsylvania, until relatively recently, when one spoke of “Latinos in Pennsylvania” one was referring to the voter of Puerto Rican origin who lived in Philadelphia and who almost always voted Democrat. But now it is a different picture. Now, more than half of the Latinos in Pennsylvania live in smaller cities in the east of the state, in places like Allentown, Lancaster, Hazleton, Reading and York. All towns that have been revitalized in the last twenty years by new Dominican, Puerto Rican and Mexican communities.

The change has been so significant that the area even has a new name. Before, it was the “rust belt.” And now… “the Latino belt.”

MSNBC ARCHIVE: “Both campaigns are trying to win over voters in the state’s Latino belt”.

TELEMUNDO ARCHIVE: Have you heard this expression? The Latino belt.

It is a key area. The two candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, have campaigned here during these last frenetic weeks of the contest. If Pennsylvania as a state is unpredictable, this region of the state is going to be particularly contested.

And, for that reason, we wanted to know. We sent our editor, Daniel Alarcón, with our producer Alana Casanova-Burgess to the so-called Latino belt. Hello, Daniel.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Hello, Julio.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: What did you expect to find there?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Well, we went because we didn’t know exactly what to expect. There’s a lot of talk about the power of the Latino vote in this election, but the truth is that there are several Latino votes across the country.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Sure. Each state has its own dynamics, and that’s why in this series we’re going to visit five swing states.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes, it seems like no one can define exactly what the Latino vote is or if it still exists. It’s almost incomprehensible. And that’s why we went to a place in Pennsylvania where the Latino vote has a history and a present that’s quite complicated and frankly difficult to decipher.

A city called Hazleton. A little bit more than two hours northwest of Philadelphia.

And I want you to know about the history of this place, because it’s important… So  Julio, I want to start in Hazleton, but 30 years ago. Two gentlemen we met there, Amilcar and Daniel, are going to tell us about it.

AMILCAR ARROYO: Amilcar Arroyo. I was born in Peru. I came here to pack tomatoes and I started from scratch.

DANIEL JORGE: My name is Daniel Jorge. I am Dominican. So, I am going to talk about the people I know, maybe a little bit more, which are the Dominicans.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And both of them have been in Hazleton for a long time. They remember a Hazleton that no longer exists… When there were abandoned houses. Few businesses, very little commerce.

DANIEL JORGE: When I arrived here, at five or six in the afternoon, six in the afternoon, if I arrived at six… I didn’t see anyone on the street. Nobody. Absolutely nobody. In other words, a ghost town.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In 2000, the vast majority of residents were of European descent, the largest group being Italians —and their families had arrived a century earlier to work in the coal mines. The Latino population in Hazleton was only five percent.

AMILCAR ARROYO: There were one hundred of us Latinos. You didn’t see a Latino, they were all white. And this is a city that is always known for being a city of old people.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: So the schools didn’t have many students either and, of course, the town had a very low taxpayer base.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: All very typical of what was being seen in many cities in the “rust belt”.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Exactly. And to give you a concrete example of this abandonment, Daniel Jorge mentioned a store, Lowe’s… It’s a huge hardware store.

DANIEL JORGE: And I went to Lowe’s, it looked like a museum. The store was so well organized because nobody bought anything. It’s the truth. It’s the truth.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: But after September 11, people began to arrive: some Mexicans; but, mainly, Dominicans from New York and other cities in the northeast… And, eventually, directly from Santo Domingo or San José de Ocoa, in the Dominican Republic.

AMILCAR ARROYO: It was a pyramid. I brought you, you brought your friend, your brother, your brother-in-law and this filled up. Just like that.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: They found a somewhat run-down city, yes, but with opportunity. Low rents, cheap housing, and work in factories and distribution warehouses. By 2007, a third of Hazleton was Latino —eight thousand more people in seven years—, a lot for a city of only thirty thousand.

AMILCAR ARROYO: They started opening groceries. They started buying houses. They started investing.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And for many in the white community it was a huge change. And, frankly, uncomfortable.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: In just seven years it is a very dramatic change.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes. Suddenly, there were signs in Spanish that they couldn’t read, students in school who couldn’t speak English…

DANIEL JORGE: Instead of ten or twelve students that you had before, now you’re going to have 20. They never thought that we were going to come in such numbers. So they weren’t prepared.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And in the midst of all this change in May 2006, there was a crime: a white man was murdered. The District Attorney charged two undocumented immigrants with the homicide.

The charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. But then-Mayor Lou Barletta had already cited the case as evidence that undocumented immigrants were dangerous —and that they were ruining the quality of life in Hazleton.

CBS ARCHIVE: Barletta believes what’s been going on in Hazleton, a city of about 30 thousand people, is a microcosm of what’s been going on all over the country: illegal immigrants are overwhelming his city, draining its resources, and ruining the quality of life.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And in the summer of 2006, Barletta proposed anti-immigrant ordinances in Hazleton.

AMILCAR ARROYO: Well, anyone who helps an undocumented immigrant and has a business, is shut down. Their license is taken away. The same goes for anyone who rents a room. So it became a little terrifying. It became something against a group, it ended up being against an entire Latino race.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: So the legal status of people no longer mattered.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Not anymore. Many Latinos felt like the town was rejecting them. National media, like ‘60 Minutes’, came to tell what was happening here.

60 minutes ARCHIVE: Woman: They want the people to leave town. Steve Kroft: You think they want you to leave? Woman: I’m not going to leave. This is my home. We are here 24 years, half of my life.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Hazleton became famous throughout the country for its ordinances. More than 80 cities and towns tried to copy them.

AMILCAR ARROYO: When they passed that ordinance, racism or racist people came out of the closet. So, when I walked down the street, they would say to me… in English, they would say to me, go back to your country with your banana boat. “Hey, what are you doing here?” And I was standing here to cross and a car would stop there on red, and when I was going to cross, they would say fucking Hispanic… and they would say, I’ll tell you. And Mexican ladies who were walking, they would cross and they would insult them and all those things.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: You know, I don’t remember this happening in Hazleton but it sounds horrible, Daniel.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: From what they told us, yes. And, at that time, there was violence against Latinos too. In 2008, a Mexican man was attacked by four white boys in Shenandoah, a town not far from Hazleton. The victim died from his injuries.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Hazleton —with racism “out of the closet,” as Amilcar told us— was supposed to be an inhospitable place for Latinos.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: It was supposed to be. But it didn’t happen that way. Those ordinances were declared unconstitutional. And despite the tensions in Hazleton and the reputation that the city had, Latinos kept coming.

And almost twenty years later, Hazleton has changed completely. There are Dominican botanical shops and barbershops, many businesses that refer to New York. Everywhere you go, you hear Spanish and Latin music.

When those ordinances were proposed, Hazleton was 30 percent Latino… Now that number exceeds 60 percent.

NOEL: You see all over the school, you see, that one is Dominican, that one is Dominican, that one is Dominican.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Like Noel, a young man who arrived two years ago, when he was thirteen.

NOEL: Are you not from there, from the Dominican Republic?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: No, I’m Peruvian.

NOEL: Ufff. Yah.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: What a shame to disappoint you! We don’t play basketball, we play soccer.

NOEL: Oh, yes, I like soccer. Messi!

DANIEL ALARCÓN: We met Noel at the gym of a community center, where he goes to play basketball with his friends.

It’s called the Hazleton Integration Project and, in addition to a gym, they also have a cafeteria where they cook for the community, classrooms where they teach classes in technology and Spanish and English, and a small library with books for children. Daniel Jorge, who we met at the beginning, is the athletics director of the center.

DANIEL JORGE: They come, form their own teams, and play.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: The day we went, of the thirty-something boys and girls playing there, almost all were Latinos, almost all Dominicans. Hazleton is no longer a ghost town, it is no longer a city of old people. It is a city of Latinos.

DANIEL JORGE: Whoever lost, has to leave. Whoever wins, keeps playing.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: After the break: who left and who keeps playing in Hazleton.

You are listening to El péndulo. We will be back.

[MIDROLL ]

JULIO VAQUEIRO: We are back on El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast from Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios. And today: Pennsylvania.

I am Julio Vaqueiro, here with Daniel Alarcón, our editor.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Hello, hello.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Daniel, while you were telling me about Hazleton, I couldn’t stop thinking about Springfield, that city in Ohio where, according to Trump, immigrants are eating pets. A rumor, of course, that is totally false.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes, yes. There is a certain echo. Like Hazleton, Springfield is a town with an industrial legacy that has been economically revitalized by the arrival of immigrants.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And in Springfield, like in Hazleton, there was a death that changed everything. In the case of Springfield, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus and an 11-year-old boy died.

PBS NEWS ARCHIVE: Dozens of children were injured, and 11 year old Aidan Clark died. When the driver was revealed to be a Haitian immigrant without a US license, things erupted.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and other Republicans have used the story of this child’s death in their anti-immigration speeches. And it reminds me a bit of what you told us about the former mayor of Hazleton, Lou Barletta, who spoke about the victims of undocumented immigrants…

LOU BARLETTA ARCHIVE: Everyone talks about the illegal immigrants but very seldom do we talk about the victims.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes. And after being mayor, Lou Barletta ran for congress, won, and in Congress he was very anti-immigrant. When Trump appeared on the national political scene, Barletta supported him almost immediately.

DONALD TRUMP ARCHIVE: I wanna introduce a very special man because he’s been a friend of mine since the beginning.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And now, Barletta’s speech is, in essence, the immigration platform of Donald Trump’s party.

At the Republican Party convention in July of this year, for example, we saw “mass deportation now” signs.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Amilcar Arroyo, the Peruvian we spoke to in the first part… He did notice the echo.

AMILCAR ARROYO: So, what do I feel when I see those, those signs? I am already used to it because I saw the same signs here, the same signs, I saw them here.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Today, Amilcar is 75 years old, he remembers when the Republican Party seemed attractive to him. When it was his party. Amilcar left Peru in the middle of a terrible economic crisis, in the second half of the eighties.

AMILCAR ARROYO: When I became a citizen and registered to vote, I registered as a Republican because my ideal since I was in Peru was capitalist.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Of course, we all bring our dreams to this country.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And in a certain sense, in Hazleton he achieved the American dream. He went from canning tomatoes to opening his own business: a magazine for the Latino community called ‘El Mensajero’. And he told us about a Barletta’s rally to promote restrictive ordinances against undocumented immigrants. Amilcar went with his camera to take photos for El Mensajero and saw signs there that said, “Speak only English,” or “go back, illegal immigrant”.

AMILCAR ARROYO: Then all the people started saying, coming up to me and insulting me with bad words and saying illegal immigrants go back to your banana boat.

And when I looked around, I saw people I sat with at Chamber of Commerce’s meetings. There were people I did business with. Nobody said “I know that guy, he’s not illegal. That guy is a citizen, that’s Amílcar Arroyo”.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Two police officers approached him, not to arrest him but to rescue him from threats from his own neighbors.

AMILCAR ARROYO: I will never forget that experience. So, that’s the same thing that’s happening now. Because the effervescence that Trump has created, because you have to say it by name, is too strong and there are people who believe that what he says is like that. They believe that Latinos in general are bad, that Latinos don’t belong in this country.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: In other words, the national Republican Party moved toward an anti-immigrant stance like the one seen in Hazleton. And in the process it left out people like Amilcar. So how does he vote today?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: After that incident, Amilcar changed parties. He voted for Obama in 2008 and has voted Democrat ever since. And he told us he’ll vote for Kamala Harris in November.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And how do you get along with your neighbors today?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Almost 20 years later, everything Amilcar described to us is like another world.

AMILCAR ARROYO: There are no white people here in Hazleton anymore. There are no white people anymore.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Well, he’s exaggerating a bit. There are white people, but not that many. Many have left or died. And Amilcar explained to us: it’s not that the anti-immigrant and racist people of Hazleton changed their perspective. It’s that they’re simply not there anymore.

And while the Republican Party at the national level uses very anti-immigrant language, the local party in Hazleton has a completely different tactic.

Today, Mayor Jeff Cusat, a Republican of Italian and Polish origin, is running for his third term. He is relatively young, not even 50 years old… And many told us that he has a very comfortable relationship with the Latino community and even travels a lot to the Dominican Republic.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And for the people of Hazleton, this city that became famous for tensions, for racism… Did you find that immigration is still an important issue?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes, but perhaps not in the way you imagine. That experience that Amilcar had almost two decades ago began with the fear of undocumented immigrants. And that fear still exists. But now you no longer hear it only from white people. But sometimes from Latino people.

We spoke with the owner of a beauty products store. She is Adaíris Casado and she arrived almost 14 years ago.

ADAÍRIS CASADO: You know, and it’s not that I’m against immigration, but when you open… like you open the door of your house, a lot of people are going to come in and you don’t know. There comes a, well, a bad guy, a murderer, you know. So that’s why the country lost security.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: She used to be a Democrat. But she voted for Trump in the last elections, and she will do it again in November.

ADAÍRIS CASADO: He is a person who believes in God. And, second, he offers the country the security that this government, well, took away from the country.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: It’s like the opposite trajectory to Amilcar.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: It’s exactly that. She came as part of a migratory wave. But now she feels that the city can’t absorb more people. She sees it in concrete details of the way of life in Hazleton. Above all, security.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In general, would you say that the change has been positive or negative with this migration?

ADAÍRIS CASADO: Negative. Because, and I’ll tell you why. There’s a video out there, and it’s on Carson Street, of a young man opening cars.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: I must clarify here, Julio, that data indicate that Hazleton does not have more crime than other similar cities. But there is clearly a perception of danger. Her husband had part of his car’s engine stolen a few months ago and Ada feels scared in her own store.

ADAÍRIS CASADO: I used to leave that door open. Not anymore, because one is no longer safe here. One is not safe.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In case it’s not clear, she refers to a literal door. Not a metaphor.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: But there is a metaphor here… So close the door behind me. Or not?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: That’s the idea I had. It’s a feeling that several people shared with us. Many Latino people express themselves against immigration with language that resembles the Republican speech. We are seeing this at a national level. And, in a sense, it is understandable. Julio, at the beginning, our impression was that Hazelton was a thriving city of opportunities, where Latinos could buy houses, educate their children… We felt everything was going well here. And that things were going well in Hazleton because Latinos saved it… With their labor force, their businesses, their taxes…

That was the message when we arrived at a job fair. And I owe you a little more context here: Hazleton’s growth was no accident. The local government has offered tax incentives to attract companies to the area, and that brought in plenty of migrants too, looking for work. One of the state’s largest industrial parks is here, with warehouses for Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters and even a Hershey’s plant.

HERSHEY’S WOMAN: We need at least two years of experience in mechanics, in manufacturing.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Hershey ‘s? Chocolate?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes. And there are so many Latinos, they designated the plant in this area to be bilingual. English and Spanish. And all around the fair you could hear Spanish, even at a table of two state legislators, both Republicans:

ARIELA: Any problem that people have in the state, we are there to be able to solve, solve the problem.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: But the line to enter was very long, at least two hundred people waiting. And, frankly, most of them were not going to get a job at this fair.

SCHOOL WOMAN: Right now there are no vacancies, but we do want to have, so to speak, enough staff just in case, when there are available positions, they already have a list.

UPSET WOMAN: And look how the line is here, because we are all desperately looking for work and there is nothing.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: A woman, in tears, spoke to us from the line.

UPSET WOMAN: So, how? It is a mockery for the people, here we Hispanics are the ones who work hard, we are the ones who really do the work in the company, we need employment, because here we are the ones who do the work. Isn’t it right, my people?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And that is where we realized that Hazleton is in another stage of its history.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Now I understand. In twenty-something years, it has gone from being a predominantly white city in decline, to being a city where new migration was controversial, and then a Latino city with many opportunities. To what is now.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: YES, now it is a city where there are no houses for so many people. Another Dominican woman told us what things were like when she arrived seven years ago.

WOMAN: There was a lot of work. And people came from New York, New Jersey, from all those states, since rent was expensive there, they came here and after they came, so many people here, the rent went up, the rent is very expensive and there is no work there.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Seven years ago. What were the rents like for example?

WOMAN: Very cheap. With 600 dollars you paid for an entire house. Now they charge you 1,400. 1,500 for the same house.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And is it true that there are no houses?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Seriously, they told us that this growth took all the authorities by surprise, that they did not plan, because nobody expected it. And not just in the housing issue. There is no space in the schools either, the kindergarten is full for this year.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And, Daniel, the people in line, who couldn’t find work, and have to pay these very high rents… Did they tell you if they are going to vote?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Some didn’t want to say.

MAN: But that’s… That’s confidential, right.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: … Some don’t know yet.

YOUNG WOMAN: No, I haven’t decided yet.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: And some haven’t registered to vote.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Look out, the deadline to register in Pennsylvania is October 21, for those of you listening in that state.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Sure, there’s still time. And that brings me to another thing that we hear a lot about in Hazleton, perhaps the most important: that Latinos don’t vote.

Hazleton has no Latino representation on the school board, nor on the city council. It has never had a Latino mayor, even though it is predominantly Latino.

DANIEL JORGE: This city has life thanks to Hispanics. We are the life of this city, economically, but we are nothing at the government level.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: After the break, we continue in Hazleton, a city in Pennsylvania with Latinos everywhere… except in the government. This is El Péndulo. We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL 2]

JULIO VAQUEIRO: This week on El Péndulo we are in Pennsylvania with Daniel Alarcón.

He told us that Hazleton is a predominantly Latino city, which has no representation in the government. It is a community that has been in Hazleton for almost two decades, right?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Look, Hazleton is part of the so-called “Latino belt”. But unlike Hazleton, the other cities in the Latino Belt do have Latino representation in government. Allentown and Reading even have Hispanic mayors. Places like these make the Latino vote extremely important.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: And how do you explain it?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Well, Daniel Jorge explained it like this:

DANIEL JORGE: One hundred percent our fault.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Huh!

DANIEL JORGE: You didn’t expect to hear that. Okay, changes are made through voting and we just don’t vote. Ok? We don’t vote.

We don’t care, we don’t believe that voting means absolutely anything. We don’t believe that we can change through voting.

Absolutely nothing. We are stuck in that, in that mindset.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: So, what is happening in Hazleton? People gave us several explanations…

First, and we heard it several times, Julio. The Dominican came here to solve an economic problem, not a political problem. So there is simply not much interest in the political aspect, right? That’s not why they came.

It is a very divided community. There are factions among Dominicans, depending on the partisanship in their native country, or what city they come from. And sometimes they divide their vote between several candidates.

And finally, they are two different political systems. To give you an example, in the Dominican Republic the school boards are not elected or function the same as in the United States.

Daniel ran last year for “school director” in the county. Like others in his community, he lost.

DANIEL JORGE: And I still find people who tell me “come back, run again.” That encourages me. But I am discouraged by the fact that we Hispanics are so neglected when it comes to voting. It hurts me because it holds us back. It drags us down, it sinks us and we don’t understand the potential we have here.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Now, does that apathy that you have diagnosed in the Latino community towards local politics also extend to national politics?

DANIEL JORGE: No. Look, it’s good… it’s a phenomenon… The vast majority vote in the presidential elections. The apathy is at the local level.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: This Daniel always surprises me with his answers.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes, me too, me too.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: So the Latino in Hazleton does vote… for president.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Yes, the statistics seem to confirm it. But looking at the rates in the city’s most Hispanic neighborhoods, we see that, in the 2020 election, the vote in Hazleton was split between Trump and Biden almost head-to-head. Biden won some, Trump won others, but always close, sometimes only dozens of votes separated them.

There are no state-level Latino polls in Pennsylvania, but we did see a poll done in Northampton County after the presidential debate that can give us some clues. It’s an area, like Hazleton, that has a lot of Latinos. And there, 60 percent of Latinos are voting for Harris. Only 25 for Trump. So, Hazleton, as we’ve seen, with its particular history, is, in many ways, an atypical city and vote.

And for me all this confirms that the Latino vote is even more complex than many people think.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Absolutely. Would you say that it’s also proof that there is no real “Latino vote”?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: Maybe. Those who are going to vote in Hazleton have the same concerns as in any other place. Security, jobs, prices, abortion rights… and (in general) these are the same concerns that all voters have in this election. Being Latino does not determine your vote.

But there is something else. I was thinking about something that Daniel Jorge told us. That, really, many of the issues that matter at the national level are local issues.

DANIEL JORGE: Is the economy a main issue in the elections? I know it is, but that is a process and I do not think that Harris or Trump can change that overnight.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: He cares more about his rights.

DANIEL JORGE: And we believe that we are going to vote for this president because he is going to lower the price of gasoline. Is that all you are looking for in a president?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: For Daniel, no, clearly. For others, for many, the economy is simply the main thing.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Thank you, Daniel.

DANIEL ALARCÓN: With pleasure, Julio.

JULIO VAQUEIRO: Next week on El péndulo we travel to a market in Las Vegas and ask: what can Harris and Trump really do for the economy?

ALANA CASANOVA-BURGESS: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo. Julio Vaqueiro, from Noticias Telemundo, is the host. This episode of El péndulo was reported and produced by Daniel Alarcón and myself, Alana Casanova-Burgess, with support from Jess Alvarenga and Mariana Zúñiga, with editing by Silvia Viñas, Eliezer Budasoff, and Daniel Alarcón.

Desirée Yepez is our digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is our editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. The theme song, music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodríguez is the senior producer and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of partnerships and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El péndulo is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

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