Blog Archives

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.

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

Man: Wake up, Latino! Is there a Latino here? Woooow! 

Julio Vaqueiro: I’m Julio Vaqueiro. And when I first came to the US, I thought I knew the politics of the Latinos that live here. 

But…it’s a bit more complicated than we all thought. 

Woman: Here, we Hispanics work hard. Right, guys? 

Woman: We almost never vote.  

Julio Vaqueiro: No?! Why?!  

Woman: Because everyone keeps making promises they never keep.  

Man: And we believe that by voting for this president there’ll be lower prices at the pump… is that all you’re looking for in a president?

Man: Yeah, we love freedom, but only on a full stomach. When we’re hungry, no one really cares that much about freedom.

Julio Vaqueiro: 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. 

Woman: Sure, we all complain about this and that, but hey, we don’t stop enjoying ourselves and we definitely don’t stop eating.

Julio Vaqueiro: Listen to El péndulo on iHeartRadio or on your favorite podcast app. 

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: We have tried a path for 200 years and the results couldn’t have been worse.

[Silvia Viñas]: It is September 15, 2022. El Salvador is celebrating its Independence.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: For many who lost their family members, it was hell at its worst.

[Eliezer Budasoff]: Nayib Bukele is giving a speech to a room full of people in the Presidential House. It is being broadcast live on the national network.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: The only way left for El Salvador is this. We have tried it, too. It is not a campaign promise. We have tried it, and it is working for us. And we are not going to abandon it.

[Silvia]: His wife Gabriela is by his side. Behind him are four flags of El Salvador and a painting of Monsignor Óscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest murdered in 1980… known for his defense of human rights. 

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: We are not going to abandon it, no matter how many protests come from abroad.

[Eliezer]: Bukele has been speaking for more than 20 minutes when he finally says…

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: That is why, after talking with my wife Gabriela and with my family, I am announcing to the Salvadoran people that I have decided to run as candidate for the Presidency of the Republic…

[Silvia]: The applause lasts more than a minute. And then you start hearing this:

[Archive soundbite, public]: Re-election! Re-election! Re-election!

[Eliezer]: People are shouting: Re-election.

[Gabriel Labrador]: He is leveraging the fact that independence is being celebrated. It is statement—what seems to me like a statement of ownership of the country and its future.

[Silvia]: Gabriel Labrador, the Salvadoran journalist from El Faro who focuses on politics and with whom we begin this series. He is going to join us in this final episode.

[Gabriel]: And I think this is worth comparing with the announcement he made—do you remember?—when he announced that he was going to run for president; we’re talking about 2017. He makes an announcement on Facebook Live. Totally alone, in a small room in his house, a politician believing in a seemingly crazy cause, right? But he has this dream of winning the election. And that contrasts greatly with the announcement that he makes in 2022, in a rather important room with a number of high-level political guests.

[Eliezer]: There are ministers, legislators. There is his family… and also the Attorney General and the President of the Supreme Court… officials imposed by the Bukelist-controlled Assembly.

[Gabriel]: When Bukele makes the announcement, the President of the Supreme Court raises his two thumbs as if saying to Bukele, Good, good, I agree with what you are doing. Next to him the Attorney General smiles. And then, while everyone around then is clapping and cheering, the two of them shake hands. And then, that evening at the Presidential House, many officials, including the Supreme Court judges, stay to chat at a cocktail party hosted by the Presidential House. And I published that picture and well, it went a little viral because of course, I mean, we are in a country with no rule of law, with no division of powers, and I think that is demonstrated in the picture—the country’s most important judges at a cocktail party celebrating a decision as unconstitutional as the president’s re-election.

[Silvia]: You see, the Salvadoran Constitution is clear: re-election is prohibited. This is stated in six Articles. And it is something that Bukele himself explained on a television program in 2013, years before he was a presidential candidate for the first time:

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: The Constitution does not allow the same person to be president twice in a row. He can be president 80 times if he wants, but not in a row. So… That is to ensure that he does not remain in power or use his power to stay in power. If he leaves power and returns, it is because the people wanted to him back…

[Silvia]: And he said it again in March 2021 as president, in the interview he gave to Luisito Comunica, one of the ten most popular YouTubers in Spanish.

[Archive soundbite, Luisito Comunica]: Is there re-election here in El Salvador?

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: No, there is no re-election. And I would be out of the presidency at age 42.

[Eliezer]: So, how is it that a few years after saying this Bukele runs for re-election… and with the support of the people responsible for ensuring that the Constitution is enforced? That’s what we wanted to understand in closing this series. Because it is the culmination of what we have been telling you in the last 5 episodes. And the answer is important for El Salvador, yes, but also for the future of democracy far beyond its borders.

[Silvia]: This February 4 election in El Salvador is one of the first in a historic year. In 2024, more people than ever will go to the polls around the world. About 4 billion. But democracy is more than casting a vote… And this is something that has been written about quite a bit. We find reports on how crucial this year is for democracy in international media such as The Guardian, Forbes, The Economist, New Yorker, Vox, Al Jazeera. None of those I just mentioned talk about El Salvador in their articles. They mention Russia, the United States, Taiwan, India, South Africa…

[Eliezer]: But they ignore the impact that one of the smallest countries in Latin America can have. The Salvadoran elections start the electoral calendar in our region, where seven presidential elections will be held. After El Salvador comes Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela and, as we already mentioned, the United States. The result in El Salvador will be a signal to citizens and politicians who see Bukele as a role model… 

[Gabriel]: The February 4 election is going to change our idea of what we understand by democracy.

[Silvia]: This is El señor de Los sueños, a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios. I am Silvia Viñas.

[Eliezer]: And I’m Eliezer Budasoff. Episode 6: The last election. 

[Silvia]: The idea of Bukele running for re-election is not that recent. Gabriel explained that it began to be speculated about quite early in his government, when they announced they wanted to reform the Constitution. We are talking about September 2020.

[Gabriel]: And the vice president, Félix Ulloa, was tasked with reforming and finding those reforms that could improve the Constitution that dates back to ‘83, 1983. And since then, the idea of re-election began to circulate among all legal analysts because there were already certain traits of populism that permitted us to say that President Bukele might seek to remain in power. That raised alarm bells. But with the pandemic and the emergency regime, this issue remained a bit on standby.

[Héctor Lindo]: Salvador’s Constitutional history is very consistent. 

[Eliezer]: This is Héctor Lindo, historian and professor emeritus at Fordham University, in New York. We asked him in what context the Articles of the Constitution that prohibit re-election were incorporated. And he told us that it that goes back much further than 1983, the most current Constitution.

[Héctor]: After 1886, Salvadoran Constitutions have categorically rejected re-election, in order to counteract the 19^th-century tendency of Salvadoran rulers to perpetuate themselves in power. 

[Silvia]: By the way, this last statement may sound very similar to something we’ve already heard: not staying in power is something that Bukele himself mentioned in that television interview in 2013.

[Héctor]: On several occasions in the 20th century, prohibiting reelection was not so important because the presidency was not very personalistic. It was simply the instrument of economic groups that continued to hold power even when the current president changed. There is a very clear prohibition that has been enforced. But we could talk about examples of presidents who tried to be re-elected.

[Eliezer]: We can highlight dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who found a way to get around the ban.

[Héctor]: The Constitution that was written under his Administration prohibited re-election, but the Constitutional Assembly, which was totally controlled, introduced a formula that said, in essence, that on this occasion, and given the special circumstances the country is experiencing, we will allow the President to be re-elected. In other words, in principle, the Constitution prohibited re-election, but in practice, they opened a door for re-election. 

[Silvia]: And something similar happened this time. Bukele found his own formula to run for re-election. The first thing he did, Gabriel explained to us, was attack the Constitution.

[Gabriel]: That is the modus operandi of the Bukeles, of the Bukele Clan, which is to discredit something, attack it, hit it, distort its reality, the facts surrounding the matter, and then impose its own view. 

[Eliezer]: The strategy was to say that the Constitution had been designed by a right-wing politician…

[Gabriel]: That is, Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of the ARENA party, linked to the death squads, in fact, and in fact, also linked to the murder of our saint Monsignor Óscar Romero. So Bukele uses that image of D’Aubuisson to say that that Constitution, if it had passed through the hands of D’Aubuisson the murderer, then it was bad. Which is a rather simplistic, crude, somewhat ridiculous argument, it seems to me, because D’Aubuisson did participate in the drafting of that Constitution, but it wasn’t just D’Aubuisson. Besides, this Constitution reflects the spirit of the other 13 Constitutions that El Salvador has had throughout its history, ever since its founding as a Republic. The spirit of our Constitutions prohibits re-election.

[Silvia]: So attacking the origin of the Constitution came first. But in practice, that was not enough. This is when the Constitutional Court comes in, which at this point was already made up of judges who had been appointed by the representatives of the Assembly controlled by Bukele. On September 3, 2021, the Court issued a resolution that says that it is up only to the people to decide whether the president should continue.

[Gabriel]: Yes, there is a small, vague effort at argument, but it falls apart at the first opportunity. I mean. There is an Article in the Constitution that clearly says that the presidential term is five years, not one day longer.

[Silvia]: Another says that if a President stays in power one more day, that forces an insurrection.

[Gabriel]: And there are others that say, for example, there is an article that says: it is the obligation of the Legislative Assembly to disown a President who intends to remain in office. And so there are about four very specific articles and two articles that indirectly, like the last one just mentioned, support this idea that the spirit of the Constitution is that re-election is not allowed. So what the Constitutional Court does is latch on to one small word to open a door. And this little word is candidate.

[Eliezer]: Because all the articles that prohibit reelection are written in presidential code. That is, they talk about the reasons why a sitting president cannot be re-elected. But there is one article, 152, that specifically talks about the requirements to be a candidate. And it says that someone who has been president for over six months during the period immediately preceding cannot be a candidate. Nor if he held office within the last six months before the new presidential term. So, in simple terms, according to the Constitutional Court, the requirement for Bukele to be able to run for re-election is that he leave his position as President six months before the beginning of the new presidential term.

[Gabriel]: This is specifically stated in this document, this resolution from the court. And, as the main argument, the argumentative point that the Bukelism uses to say, whether all I have to do is step away, or does the man have to step aside during six months before taking possession.

[Silvia]: Now, in electoral matters, the highest judge, the highest authority, is the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. They are the ones who must ensure that all Constitutional requirements and all laws are met in an electoral process. But in this case, this Tribunal did not put any objections to the Court’s ruling. The next day they published a statement in which they indicated that they were going to comply with the ruling of the Constitutional Court. And they said that if President Bukele signed up, they would guarantee his participation.

[Gabriel]: They do not assume their role as arbitrators and as the highest authority and of complying with the Constitution. They forget all that and, on the contrary, they play into Bukele’s hands.

[Eliezer]: Here it is important to mention that the type of control Bukele has over the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is not the same as that he has over other powers, such as the Assembly, the Constitutional Court or the Prosecutor’s Office. The judges of the Tribunal were appointed for the period from 2019 to 2024 by an Assembly that was not yet controlled by Bukelism. So, in this case, four of the five judges on the Tribunal voted in favor of this resolution and three explained that they supported what the Constitutional Court said about re-election.

[Gabriel]: It is clear that the Tribunal is, in fact, divided. There are some judges who try to show some resistance to the Court’s reasoning. But the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, at least since the Bukele era, has been under a lot of pressure from President Bukele, from officials, such as the president of the Assembly, who is a close friend of Bukele. And well, even Bukele’s Legislative Assembly approved a reform so that any official who prevents the registration of a candidacy is prosecuted with prison or punished with prison if found guilty. So by what logic is an official like the Supreme Electoral Tribunal going to refuse to register the candidacy of the most popular politician if there is that article that promises you jail if you become an obstruction?

[Eliezer]: This ruling of the Constitutional Court came only months after May 1, when the Bukelism-controlled Assembly dismissed the Attorney General and the judges of this Court. It was actually the ruling of a body made up of officials close to the President. So the international community condemned the sentence as another authoritarian move by Bukele.

[Silvia]: Gabriel says the most important reaction was from the United States. At that time, it did not have an ambassador in El Salvador. Its highest representative in the country was Jean Manes, who had the title of Chargé d’Affaires of the embassy. Manes had worked as a diplomat in the country. When Bukele was mayor of San Salvador they established a close relationship.

[Gabriel]: Following the announcement from the Constitutional Court, he decided to burn the ships. And in a press conference, as rarely done by a diplomatic representative, he levels harsh criticism at the decision of the Constitutional Court.

[Archive soundbite, Jean Manes]: This ruling is the direct result of the decision on May 1 by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally remove the sitting judges from the Constitutional Court and install replacements loyal to the executive.

[Gabriel]: And he says that basically this is the path taken before by Venezuela.

[Archive soundbite, Jean Manes]: Where Chávez was democratically elected but was trying step by step to get more and more power and limit independence. And at the time, I think many Venezuelans thought they were living in a democracy. Because there were reasons for electing him. But when he is little by little removing the independence of the country’s institutions, we know where this path leads.

[Gabriel]: And comparing him to Chávez is, let’s say, one of the most explicit things the United States has done.

[Silvia]: Two months later, in November 2021, Manes announced that he was leaving El Salvador and that the United States had decided to put its relationship with the country on hold. 

[Eliezer]: A year later, in September 2022, Bukele made the announcement we heard at the beginning of the episode. And if you remember, he mentioned that they are not going to abandon the path they have tried, which he says works, no matter how many protests come from outside.

[Silvia]: But what does he use to justify being a candidate again? Because the first time he ran, as we saw, the discourse was against the traditional parties. But he can’t repeat that again, I imagine. So what does he say to justify re-election?

[Gabriel]: At that moment he focuses on selling the idea that the fight, the war against the gangs, is getting results. By then, the state of exception has been in effect for six months. Nearly 50,000 people have been detained, many of them innocent, of course, and they were proven to be innocent. There were also 73 people who died in prison without even being convicted, you know? In other words, there was a serious human rights crisis. But at the same time the state of exception was making Bukele very popular because he was giving something tangible to the people.

[Amparo Marroquín]: He has a communication team skilled enough to find the opportunity in each narrative. I think no one imagined that this big push that begins in 2022 with the state of exception, was really going to make the population feel calm. 

[Silvia]: This is Amparo Marroquín, professor of Communications and Culture at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University of El Salvador. Amparo is part of an international group of academics studying far-right movements in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, India, the Philippines, and, of course, El Salvador.

[Amparo]: I think what happens there is that we have a communication campaign that is effective in people’s daily lives, right? I mean, when Nayib Bukele says we have the largest hospital in Latin America, people do not feel in daily life that their health improves. When Nayib Bukele says we have a bitcoin policy that will give us much more financial power, people do not feel this in everyday life. But when Nayib Bukele says we are fighting the gangs, people feel that this is documented in their daily life.

[Gabriel]: And that is why his re-election announcement focuses on freedom, because Bukele says that without the gangs, Salvadorans—mainly ordinary Salvadorans—are enjoying unprecedented freedom as never before; that they can now go out, get to know the country safely, without feeling threatened, and that is not debatable. I mean, it’s a fact. The streets look different and there is a different atmosphere.

Amparo: Daily life has changed, and that is the best bitcoin you can have for re-election.

[Eliezer]: We’ll be back after a break.

[FLIP/Article 19]: In the presidential elections in Guatemala, it became evident that the stigmatization and harassment of journalistic work are forms of censorship aimed at discrediting journalists. These practices often intensify during electoral coverage, a concerning situation for the upcoming elections in countries like Mexico and El Salvador.

For the Foundation for Press Freedom in Colombia and Article 19 in Mexico and Central America, defending journalists during the electoral process is crucial to ensuring citizens’ access to information.

[Daniel Alarcón]: The production company behind «Bukele, el señor de los sueños» is Radio Ambulante Estudios. And we have two other podcasts you should listen to. Every Tuesday, we release Radio Ambulante. Stories of families, migration, adventure, and love. And every Friday, we release El hilo, where we cover and thoroughly explain an impactful news story from Latin America. Look for Radio Ambulante and El hilo on your preferred podcast app.

[Silvia]: We are back. When we talked in this series about the first time Bukele ran as a candidate for the 2019 presidential elections, we saw that it was quite a bureaucratic and long process. And of course, the scenario was completely different. Bukele wanted to run with a new party but couldn’t because of deadlines, but now he has his party already, Nuevas Ideas. He is already in power. But this time, he still had to go through several steps in order to submit his candidacy, and we’re going to go over them quickly, because the way Bukele approached each step reflects that he wanted to take advantage of the communication potential of each situation.

[Eliezer]: First, he had to register as a candidate for the internal elections of Nuevas Ideas. A step that sounds quite basic, simple. But he did it on the last day, at the last minute. It was at the end of June 2023. The following month he won those internal elections, without opponents.

[Gabriel]: That left one of the last steps remaining, which is to present that candidacy, after a supposedly democratic party election, to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The official election calendar gave a deadline of October 26. All the candidates who emerged from the internal party elections had until midnight to submit their paperwork, etc. He says, well, I’m going to register with the SET, I think on October 24. It seemed strange to me that he would say that date, because the deadline was the 26^th, not the 24th. And what this caused was a big media operation from the 24th, even from the 23rd, in front of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, as if waiting for Bukele’s registration. Then you saw you tubers…

[Archive soundbite, youtuber]: We are still here, look at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

[Gabriel]: Stationed permanently, almost from dawn to dusk. 

[Archive soundbite, youtuber]: There are certain rumors among the people who are waiting here that the president might not come today, because if he comes tomorrow, this will be too crowded with people and they will not be able to control it.

[Gabriel]: During the 24th, 25th, waiting for Bukele’s arrival. Of course, we journalists knew, from various sources, that Bukele was not going to arrive on those days, that he was going to wait until the last minute. But it caused this whole wave of expectation. As a good publicity guy, he knows that hype campaigns work very well.

[Silvia]: And the day of the registration deadline, October 26, was… dramatic.

[Eliezer]: It was night, and Bukele had not arrived yet. And messages began to circulate from the people closest to him, such as Ernesto Castro, the president of the Assembly and a long-time friend of Bukele… who tweeted, quote, «Our prayers with you, Mr. President.» This sparked rumors about Bukele’s health and that of his wife Gabriela, who was pregnant. It created a lot of expectation, even more than before because of all that time some followers had been waiting outside the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

[Gabriel]: And well, everyone starts to doubt if he is going to arrive on time, etc.

[Silvia]: Gabriel says that it was never confirmed what happened, and no official explained the reason for those messages of support.

[Gabriel]: But by around 20 minutes before midnight, a big commotion breaks out, the presidential motorcade leaves for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and he arrives with his brothers…

[Silvia]: What you hear is the people outside, welcoming him.

[Gabriel]: He looks a little tired, his face a little pale, nothing that is too compromising, but he manages to register that night.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: We have gone from being the most unsafe country in the world to being the safest country on the continent, but there is still a long way to go…

[Silvia]: That night he spoke through a megaphone to his followers outside the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: And we are going to do all that in the next five years.

[Amparo]: Nayib Bukele has turned politics into a show that, many, is worth seeing, a show that is enjoyable. What Bukele achieves is a show that is much more melodramatic, much more serialized—this is no longer a soap opera, it’s an American series. So this first season is where we have seen him. It has all the elements, in other words, the next day you can discuss with people where we left off in yesterday’s episode. We are in a country that doesn’t have Televisa, that doesn’t have Rede Globo, that doesn’t have Caracol, that doesn’t have… So the production of melodrama in this country has always been from politics, and now we have a president who is a showman, who has a PhD in melodrama production.

[Eliezer]: Lawyers and other political parties had submitted requests for Bukele’s candidacy to be canceled, both before and after October 26th. Before he was registered, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal argued that they could not decide on something that had not yet happened. And once registered, they also gave him the green light. On November 3, 2023, they made Bukele’s registration official as a candidate for the 2024 elections.

[Silvia]: That was not the only support Bukele received for his re-election. The United States changed its discourse. Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Brian Nichols visited Bukele at the Presidential House in those days. It was an official visit. And then he said this about his re-election on a television show:

[Archive soundbite, Brian Nichols]: I believe the decision to allow re-election and who will be the candidate preferred by Salvadorans, is an issue for Salvadorans. There must be a broad debate about the legality and legitimacy of the election, but it is a debate for Salvadorans.

[Eliezer]: According to a survey by the Central American University, seven out of ten Salvadorans agree that Bukele should be a candidate for re-election.

[Silvia]: Now, with Bukele officially registered, the question still remained of what he was going to do. Would leave office before the end of his presidential term or not. Remember the Constitutional Court had said that to be a candidate, he had to leave the presidency six months before the beginning of the next period. That was before December 1, 2023.

[Gabriel]: So by November 30 he sends a request to the Legislative Assembly. He’s supposed to hand in a resignation. But in the wording of the text —and we saw it that same evening— he talks about distancing himself, but that he will maintain his position as President and will have all the prerogatives he has maintained until now. What happens, according to what he writes, is that he will not perform his functions […] He asks the Assembly to maintain his security detail, the use of the presidential battalion, his transportation personnel, the use of presidential residences, and “any prerogative aimed at his legal security.” And this speaks specifically to Bukele’s need to continue being protected by law and continue enjoying all the benefits of being President. So it is not a resignation as called for in the Constitution; it’s like a pantomime in which he stops governing.

[Eliezer]: That request that he sends to the Assembly puts the name of his private secretary, Claudia Rodríguez, as the Acting President. Rodríguez in her position managed the budget of the Presidential House and has accompanied Bukele and her brothers for over ten years. She worked in his companies. She is trustworthy. But in the documents she signs, she does not show up as interim president or presidential appointee. Her title is: “chargé d’affairs.”

[Silvia]: And in this very particular scenario, how has the campaign been heading into these presidential elections?

[Gabriel]: Well, the presidential campaign in El Salvador has been unprecedented, it seems to me. One, because as political scientist Álvaro Artiga says, there is a notion, for the first time, that there is already a winner. Previously there was at least nominal competition. That is to say, there were probabilities—not possibilities—probabilities that any party would win, mainly the two big ones, ARENA or FMLN. The presidential elections were always very close. In the Legislative Assembly there was always a correlation in which the winning party always needed satellite parties to carry its agenda. But we do not foresee this happening in 2024. Plus the fact that there have been a whole series of legal reforms to the electoral map: the number of representatives was reduced, the number of mayoral municipalities was reduced drastically. And this not only shatters the opposition’s chances at winning, it also helps Bukele continue on this path of concentration of power.

[Eliezer]: Gabriel finds it striking that this electoral campaign is not evident in the streets… There is a collective notion that Nuevas Ideas is going to win.

[Gabriel]: Even in the opposition there is a current of thought that says that the opposition should not have competed in the presidential election because it is known beforehand that Bukele was going to win. So efforts had to be focused on the Legislative Assembly, where the Executive Branch could be counterbalanced. So on the street you don’t see this electoral hype, the banners or the ads on TV. What you see is a path towards a hegemonic party where the ads you see the most are those of the Presidency of the Republic and those of the official party.

[Silvia]: Let’s talk for a moment about voting abroad. What has Bukele done to increase voting abroad?

[Gabriel]: Look, historically, voting abroad in El Salvador has not been so relevant in numerical terms. Although the possibility of voting was enabled for the diaspora, electoral among the many people who are outside—and there are millions—, participation has been very low.

[Eliezer]: In the last election, in 2019, less than 4,000 people voted. Since it was enabled in 2013, it has been difficult to vote from abroad. You had to register and send the ballot by mail.

[Gabriel]: And this year the feature has been that Bukele has supported a number of decisions that are kind of stoking the possibility that the vote abroad may increase significantly for the first time. And I think it is a way that Bukelism found to compensate for the votes lost here in the local territory, in Salvadoran territory. Maybe it is a little complicated to understand, but we have to understand something here: El Salvador has 3 million people abroad, we have 6 million inhabitants but 3 million are abroad, the vast majority of them in the United States. Bukele—and I think the audience knows it—is a phenomenon not only continentally, but even globally. And I do not think this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it is like a very effective media operation that President Bukele has implemented. And one way to do it is precisely that—it’s broadcasting a lot of messages outwards and especially to the community of Salvadorans abroad. 

[Silvia]: Like this one posted recently on TikTok by the official media outlet, La Nota… The music is theirs, by the way.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: The new Legislative Assembly approved voting abroad, which had been promised to our entire diaspora, so that after so many years they can participate in our country’s decisions. This is a historical moment, when Salvadorans have begun to be truly free and sovereign.

[Eliezer]: In fact, as we already saw, voting abroad was approved years ago. What the Assembly did is enable electronic voting for the diaspora. This has raised doubts in the opposition about how secure it will be if there is no voter registry abroad, if no one is observing the vote, like when it is in person, for example. The concern is that there could be fraud… But this vote has already started. It has been available since January 6 for Salvadorans abroad. Two election officials confirmed to The Associated Press that more than 50,000 people voted in the first three days. Twelve times more than in 2019.

[Gabriel]: The propaganda messages sent out to the United States are many and constant, and not only from the presidency. A lot of YouTubers are actually living in the United States. And they are propagators of the President’s narrative. 

[Archive soundbite, youtuber]: The story is not that Nayib Bukele seeks re-election. The story is going to be that Nayib Bukele is re-elected by all of you. That’s what we’re waiting for, right?

[Archive soundbite, youtuber]: These people from the opposition who say that security doesn’t feed anyone, of course it does, because if there weren’t so much security right now in El Salvador, all those people wouldn’t be visiting from abroad.

[Gabriel]: In fact, the official news program of El Salvador, the State Canal Diez newscast, changed its programming so it could broadcast here in Salvadoran time at 04:00. Which coincides with the early hours, let’s say 06:00 on the east coast of the United States—New York, where there are many Salvadorans. So there is a very obvious effort, a great effort by the government to communicate with those people who are abroad.

[Silvia]: Because the diaspora has a lot of influence in the country. It is fundamental for the economy. Remember that remittances represent at least a quarter of El Salvador’s Gross Domestic Product.

[Gabriel]: In other words, the day remittances are cut off, if that were to suddenly happen, I don’t know, but if they are ever cut off, the Salvadoran economy implodes, it would collapse immediately. We depend greatly on people who send remittances. And I think that relationship is like a son or daughter who depends on his father, who sends him money. If the father or mother who sends money tells their dependent to vote and that the best option is Bukele, they will do it. 

[Silvia]: And what can we expect on February 4?

[Gabriel]: I think at that point the door to dictatorship will officially open, with the support of the majorities. 

[Amparo]: I think what the outcome of an election like this does is confirm two things. First, Bukele’s political communication strategy is the most successful in the region. The narrative he sets up allows democracy to be dismantled and everyone agrees that democracy is not the best system, so the antidemocratic narrative wins and it is shown that it has won. And the second thing is, I think that in Central America as a region there is a lesson that is important to remember, and that is the lesson that Juan Orlando Hernández and Daniel Ortega left us, which is: Never give up power, so you can die peacefully in your bed. 

[Silvia]: Juan Orlando Hernández, of Honduras, was the first President of that country to seek re-election since the return of democracy. And he achieved it. But when he left power, he was extradited and charged in the United States for drug trafficking. On the other hand, Ortega, in Nicaragua…

[Amparo]: Everything indicates that he is going to die peacefully in his bed, without ever being judged, without ever being held accountable to Nicaraguan society or to the Central American region for what he has done. So, I think that what Bukelism also understands is that if you have opted for power without checks and balances, that power has to be maintained in a region like ours, because the moment you lose power you are in trouble. Therefore, we have to defend that power like a cat that’s belly-up, as my grandmother would say, to the extent that political communication allows you and to the extent that the coercive arm of the State allows you.

[Gabriel]: To pursue an agenda, I think, that is more intolerant and more repressive.

[Eliezer]: Because Gabriel says that, by winning re-election, Bukele will be able to say that the people voted for him and that means they are on the right path… It gives him permission to continue.

[Amparo]: I don’t know which way the script-writers are going to lean, but let’s say I have a feeling like when you say well, how do you think the second season will be? Is it going to be the same or not? I think the second season can continue the same if Bukele’s popularity continues, it will remain basically the same. I am afraid that if Bukele’s popularity declines, Bukele will get the Army out.

[Silvia]: Deploying the army, for many societies in Latin America, is a very simple way to evoke life under a dictatorship. In 2021, Bukele promised to double the number of military personnel in the country from 20,000 to 40,000 within five years. By 2022, the year for which we have the most updated data, it had already increased to 24,500, making it the largest army in Central America. But he hasn’t just sent them to the streets; he has strengthened their image and resources and prioritized their role in internal security over the civilian police.

[Eliezer]: When we were reporting for the episode on the state of exception, we asked lawyer Zaira Navas, who researches the rule of law, what it meant in practice for this measure to become a form of governance. Zaira told us that, after the civil war, El Salvador had managed to build democratic institutions, a series of organisms and controls aimed at preventing the abuse of force and the return of dictatorships. She mentioned that this government had adopted a war security approach, with an added element: a tremendous advertising campaign.

[Zaira Navas]: Now the Armed Forces take center stage in security matters, openly speaking about national security. They openly talk about internal and external enemies. The amount of weaponry purchased for the Armed Forces does not correspond to the situation in the country.

[Eliezer]: Bukele, as Gabriel says, often uses a numerical argument to laugh off those who call him a dictator: he was democratically elected by the majority. «There are the polls,» he says. The people support him.

[Silvia]: We asked historian Héctor Lindo if he thought the word «dictatorship» was too strong to describe Nayib Bukele’s government in El Salvador. Because, for many of us who have lived or know the recent history of the region, it is more associated with seizing power by force, with the military overthrowing a democratic government, not supporting a very popular president. Héctor told us that popularity did not define whether it was a dictatorship or not.

[Héctor]: I believe that dictatorship also refers to governments that function without the limits that come with the system of checks and balances by three independent powers of the State. It is a form of government that does not have those limits that the Constitution normally imposes. 

[Silvia]: And he told us that, to him, this was clear in the direction that Nayib Bukele’s Government had taken:

[Héctor]: I see an accelerated dismantling of all the limits that a healthy political system has in place to avoid the excesses of power; and this has a long-term effect, especially for the most vulnerable groups of the population that depend on the rule of law for some, some legal security.

[Eliezer]: Neither violating the Constitution, nor clinging to power, nor governing under a state of exception are new in the history of El Salvador, Héctor told us, despite Bukele’s obsession with presenting everything as a historic revolution. He explained to us that in the past, for example, the relationship between the degree of authoritarianism and advertising spending had also been very direct. What seems extraordinary to him is the degree and skill with which Bukele has done it. And there something else that does seem new to him: 

[Héctor]: He has internationalized his speech. Part of his efforts on social media is not directed only at Salvador, it is also directed at the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Argentina. This is something very bold and very innovative, that helps him gain legitimacy within the country. That is to say, this idea that the Dominicans want a Bukele, that the Argentines want a Bukele helps him to integrate internally, and that is something very new in his strategy.

[Silvia]: For months, we asked again and again about this: What had Bukele done to become the exemplary model for Latin American politicians who seek popularity by attacking democracy in Latin America. One answer: Convince a society plagued by inequality and violence that empathy is incompatible with efficiency. That to have security, rights must be waived. That there wasn’t room for everyone. 

[Amparo]: What Bukele is proving to everyone is that there should be no human rights, there should only be rights for good people. And who decides who are the good people? He does. To me, that’s the big problem. We spent the entire 20th century insisting that we all had human rights, that we all had the presumption of innocence. What Bukele is pointing out is that this has been the problem and that is why crime grows in the shadow of human rights.

[Eliezer]: Nayib Bukele built his power on the cracks in democracy. In 2018, when he ran for president, El Salvador had the lowest belief in democracy in Latin America, according to the Latinobarómetro survey: only 28% of respondents supported it. And what Bukele did during his presidency, as we have seen in this series, was not to repair those cracks but to exploit them.

[Silvia]: Now, for Salvadorans, the concentration of power is a minor issue, according to a January 2024 survey. It did not reach 2%. The same survey conducted a mock vote for February 4th. They asked respondents to mark the ballot as they would on that day. Almost 82% of those who agreed to participate in the simulation chose Bukele.

[Eliezer]: Throughout this series, we contacted former collaborators of Bukele, former campaign advisers, former justices of the Constitutional Chamber, current allies of the president in the Legislative Assembly, and other actors in Salvadoran politics who did not respond. They either could not or did not want to give their testimony. We also contacted the international press coordinator of President Nayib Bukele for an interview, but we did not receive a response.

Of course, why would he speak?

He has already won.

[Silvia]: This series was made possible thanks to the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Free Press Unlimited, Article 19 Mexico and Central America, the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), and Dejusticia. Additionally, we thank FLIP for their advice and legal review, and Riesgo Cruzado for their valuable support in protection and security matters.

The producers and reporters of «Bukele: el señor de Los sueños» are Eliezer Budasoff and me. Gabriel Labrador is our reporter and on-site producer. Desireé Yépez is our digital producer. Daniel Alarcón and Camila Segura are our editors. Carlos Dada is our editorial consultant. The fact-checkers are Bruno Scelza and Desireé Yépez. Selene Mazón is the production assistant. The music, mixing, and sound design are by Elías González. The graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo. The web development is by Paola Ponce. Thanks to Jonathan Blitzer for his support.

«Bukele, el señor de Los sueños» is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Estudios.

From Radio Ambulante Studios, the production co-directors are Natalia Ramírez and Laura Rojas Aponte, with the assistance of Paola Alean. The audience and digital production team is formed by Samantha Proaño, Ana Pais, Analía Llorente and Melisa Rabanales. Press and community management is handled by Juan David Naranjo.

Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Estudios.

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

I am Silvia Viñas. Thank you for listening.

Credits

Produced and reported by: Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff

Produced and reported on site by: Gabriel Labrador

Digital Production: Desireé Yepez

Edited by: Daniel Alarcón and Camila Segura

Editorial Consulting: Carlos Dada

Fact-checking: Bruno Scelza and Desirée Yépez

Production Assistant: Selene Mazón

Music and Sound Design: Elías González

Graphic Design and Art Direction: Diego Corzo

[Silvia Viñas]: At the end of 2021, Nayib Bukele was the president of Planet Bitcoin and sometimes came down to Earth in a spaceship to show the future. This is how he appeared in an animated video at the end of that year during a cryptocurrency event on the beach, where he announced the construction of the first Bitcoin city: a technological sanctuary by the sea where no one has to pay taxes on their wealth, and which was going to use geothermal energy from a volcano.

The government was trying to attract foreign investors and tourists with a utopian image of El Salvador, which until recently was known mostly for its brutal gangs. It was difficult to reconcile that image with the one Bukele offered in his speech in English: that of a promised land where the foundations were being laid for the oases of tomorrow.

Most Salvadorans didn’t seem too excited about the prospect of investing fortunes they didn’t have in Bitcoin. But the truth is the real country they inhabited had its own oases, its own corners of peace, even if they were far less glamorous than Bitcoin City. On the coast of El Salvador, for example, in a bay of the Pacific Ocean, there’s an island full of coconuts where people live off palm fruits and fishing and gather mollusks to survive; a place where children leave their bikes lying in the street and no one remembers the last time there was a murder. A community that, for decades, had been coping with deprivation without much trouble, apart from the feeling of fear pervading most of the country. Until something happened that changed everything: the government issued an announcement.

[Archive soundbite, announcement]: We need your help to continue winning the war against gangs. Call 123 to give any information that will help us capture terrorists. Your call is completely anonymous and the call center is open 24 hours a day. National Civil Police. Ministry of Justice and Public Security. National Civil Police…

[Sandra]: He wanted numbers, he wanted numbers, that’s why he gave the phone number… and everyone started calling. It was on TV: report it. Your call is confidential. In the long run it’s not confidential…

[Silvia]: This is El Señor de Los Sueños, a podcast from Radio Ambulante Studios. I’m Silvia Viñas.

[Eliezer Budasoff]: And I’m Eliezer Budasoff. Episode 5: Batman discovers the old business of violence.

[Sandra]: My childhood was very nice. Well, I was raised by my uncles and aunts, because my mom abandoned me when I was six months old, so my grandmother raised me, rest in peace, right?

[Eliezer]: The woman you are listening to, the one who spoke at the beginning, her name is Sandra. She is 42 years old and a driver: she drives a motorcycle cab through the dirt streets of El Espíritu Santo, a rural island on the coast of El Salvador, which is less than a three-hour drive from the country’s capital.

[Sandra]: Before the internet and phones arrived, every night, most of us would usually be watching cartoons at home, others playing ball in the street in the evening, others on bikes, others keeping an eye on their girlfriends.

[Eliezer]: Crickets can be heard in the background because it’s nighttime. Away from the coast, the island feels like being in the countryside. It’s a day in late November 2023 and Sandra is trying to explain how life here changed almost two years ago, when Nayib Bukele’s government imposed an emergency regime on the country.

In March 2022, when Bukele had been president for almost three years, El Salvador experienced the most violent weekend so far this century: 87 murders in three days. Amid this wave of homicides, Bukele requested the Legislative Assembly to decree an emergency regime, which includes the possibility of suspending some constitutional rights in extreme situations such as catastrophes, epidemics, or disturbance of public order. The constitution stipulates that these rights may only be suspended for 30 days, with the possibility of extension for the same period.

When I went to the island in November 2023, the regime had already been in place for almost two years without interruption. There, Sandra told me what it was like to grow up in a community where the children weren’t afraid of gangs, but of the “cadejo”: a ghostly dog dragging a chain that scares those up late, a Mesoamerican version of the boogeyman. 

[Sandra]: What time did I go home? At 10, 11 o’clock at night. My grandmother said: «Don’t come back at night, the cadejo will get you». And yes, before it was the cadejo and the so-called «duende» (goblin). That’s what we were afraid of. If there had been crime, do you think we would have stayed out playing in the streets until 10, 11, or 12 at night?

[Carlos Martínez]: Espíritu Santo Island is an extraordinary vantage point to understand the scope of the emergency regime and its consequences. Firstly, because it’s an island and therefore the population is limited. There are about 1,300 to 1,400 people. Everyone knows each other…

[Silvia]: This is Salvadoran journalist Carlos Martínez, a special investigations reporter at El Faro.

[Carlos]: So it’s very easy to have an overall idea of all the people who live there and the effects that the regime has on a micro-society like this.

[Silvia]: Carlos has researched and written about violence in El Salvador for many years. In mid-2022, he received information that dozens of people had been detained on that island under the emergency regime, which suspended basic rights such as the right to defense or the presumption of innocence. That wasn’t unusual, because people were being detained everywhere. But they told him something that caught his attention:

[Carlos]: They took people from an island where there were no gangs.

[Silvia]: That’s the second reason why Carlos says that this island is an ideal place to understand the scope of the emergency regime and its consequences: because there were never gangs here.

[Carlos]: It was surprising for me because after a decade of covering gangs, every time I thought a place didn’t have gangs, it did. And what I found on that island, after the many months I spent reporting there, has fully convinced me that there was never a criminal group operating on the island.

[Silvia]: Carlos recounts that what he found in El Espíritu Santo was something uncommon in the country. It was a community of poor farmers and fishermen who had managed to resist the two things that had shattered the collective life of Salvadorans in the last forty years: the civil war first, and then the presence of gangs.

[Carlos]: It was a place with such an intact social fabric, so difficult to find in a country as fractured as El Salvador, even the civil war hadn’t damaged it. A civil war, by definition, divides a country and the people who inhabit it. The presence of gangs meant people couldn’t trust even their neighbor’s child. And they managed to survive that. They managed to endure over time, considering that they inhabited a place where their neighbors were allies or at least known to each other.

[Eliezer]: All that began to break down with the emergency regime, when police and soldiers arrived on the island and, in different incursions, arrested more than 20 people in the name of the war against the gangs. Sandra was there, waiting for passengers with her motorcycle cab, when they took the first group: five boatmen who worked ferrying people between the island and Puerto El Triunfo, located opposite it. The locals got scared, Sandra says.

[Sandra]: If in the time of the war we didn’t experience this, why is it happening now? So people were afraid, asking: “Why? Why? What happened? Why did they take him away?” I mean, people started asking questions, well, because everyone who was taken away, we’d known them, as I said, since we were little. I’d grown up with some of them and watched others be born and grow up.

[Carlos]: The arrests that were made were unheard of. Everyone on the island knew exactly what everyone was up to, what each person did for a living, and everyone also realized the circumstances under which they were arrested.

[Eliezer]: The arrests in El Espíritu Santo began pretty much at the start of the regime. Soon, the inhabitants stopped going out at night. Other boogeymen appeared.

[Carlos]: The terror, for example, the fear of the night and the fear of the soldiers and the police, the awareness of their absolute power and, on top of everything, the abrupt rupture of the social fabric they had managed to maintain despite everything.

[Silvia]: Since it was decreed in March 2022, the emergency regime has become a form of government in El Salvador. It has already been extended to 22 months, accumulating thousands of reports of arbitrary arrests, abuse, and torture. It is possibly President Nayib Bukele’s most commended measure, one that ultimately made him one of the most popular politicians in the Americas. It was also a perfect excuse for the government, who had never been a big fan of transparency, to block access to key information such as state purchases or detailed statistics on homicides and disappearances. It placed the country in a state of war and left it in the dark, forced to believe.

[Carlos]: Right now, as we are talking, the number of people detained under the emergency regime has already exceeded 75,000. The emergency regime has also been characterized by absolute opacity. All the trials involving those detained under the emergency regime have been subject to absolute secrecy. No one can talk about what happens inside those courtrooms, and neither the press nor anyone else can attend those trials. We also lack, for example, information on how many individuals have been arrested and from which gang, nor do we have a breakdown of data on where they are from, their age, or their gender. We don’t even know when the trials are underway, or what these people are accused of.

[Eliezer]: The emergency regime and the images of the war against gangs have been so heavily publicized, and are so inseparable from Bukele’s image today, that it’s hard to remember this: during the first years of his presidency, he used a very different strategy to lower the number of homicides. One that previous governments had already used: negotiating with criminal groups. It’s difficult to know now if the idea of putting the country under a police and military state, of removing any limits on the use of state force, and conducting mass arrests was something that Bukele and his advisors came up with as they went along when the pact with the gangs backfired on them. Or, if they already had a file saved with a plan B, with the regime as an alternative plan.

[Carlos]: There’s no doubt about its effects in terms of popularity. And to understand this, it’s necessary to grasp, even though it’s complex, the level of damage and the level of humiliation that these criminal organizations caused to most Salvadorans. It’s very difficult for a person who isn’t from El Salvador to understand what it meant to live in the communities controlled by these gangs, which were the majority. The level of violence, the level of brazenness, the level of cruelty with which they subjected a huge number of people, is difficult to put into words. They committed unspeakable atrocities.

[Silvia]: Of all the promises and achievements that President Nayib Bukele claims credit for, there’s one that almost no one disputes, even with his opacity, his barrage of propaganda and his questionable accounts. It was in his plans from the beginning:

[Archive soundbite, EuroNews]: It has taken Nayib Bukele two months since the start of his term as President of El Salvador to achieve something that seemed impossible: to drastically reduce the number of murders in one of the most violent countries in the world.

[Archive soundbite, Telemundo]: The figures are backed by the Attorney General. 

[Archive soundbite, Raúl Melara]: There has been a drop in extortions, and homicides have decreased.

[Archive soundbite, Telemundo]: For Bukele, it is thanks to his security plan, about which not much is known because the government says it is classified.

[Eliezer]: El Salvador closed 2018 with a rate of 52 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants, more than triple the average for the Americas. By the beginning of 2020, before Nayib Bukele completed one year in office, the homicide rate in El Salvador had halved. So, let’s start with a fact: Bukele’s government lowered El Salvador’s violence figures drastically. The problem lies in explaining how he did it.

[Carlos]: There’s the official version, which is that due to the extraordinary result of the plan known as the Territorial Control Plan, the gangs’ possibilities for action had been reduced. The president told us one thing about the plan: that it was classified, and that 90% of it couldn’t be disclosed for the sake of its success.

[Eliezer]: The name, the Territorial Control Plan, appears again and again as a wild card in his government, and is often mentioned as the key to the Salvadoran miracle. No one has any idea what it’s about. Bukele announced it shortly after becoming president, but never provided a document describing it. It was confidential. Officially, the government limited itself to saying that the plan consisted of seven phases, with names like Incursion or Extraction. Every now and then, the president appears and says that he has begun phase 3, 5, or 6.

[Silvia]: For some organizations, this plan is nothing more than a publicity strategy to push for high amounts of funding and to attack the division of powers. As we told you in previous episodes, when Bukele entered the Assembly with the military, he demanded that the legislators allow him to negotiate a loan of more than $100 million for the Territorial Control Plan. What they were asking for precisely was that he give details on how the money was going to be spent.

[Zaira Navas]: We can’t say that the Territorial Control Plan is a public policy, nor, strictly speaking, can it even be considered a security plan.

[Eliezer]: This is attorney Zaira Navas,  Head of the Rule of Law and Security department at the El Salvador Cristosal Foundation,  and former Police Inspector General. Zaira leads a group that has systematically investigated allegations of human rights violations, arbitrary detentions, and deaths under the emergency regime.

[Zaira]: What is certain, and what has already been proven by media investigations, is that Bukele had already planned to negotiate with the gangs.

[Silvia]: Zaira is referring to a series of official documents obtained and published by the newspaper El Faro in various reports. They revealed that the Bukele government had made a deal with the gangs to reduce homicides and for electoral support in exchange for improvements in prison conditions and other concessions.

[Eliezer]: Those documents, which were part of an investigation by the Attorney General of El Salvador and also support an accusation by the United States Attorney General, revealed that the government had a system:

[Carlos]: They had appointed an official intermediary with these criminal organizations, Carlos Marroquín, the director of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit, who functioned as a spokesperson, let’s say for the President or for the Government with these criminal organizations. They had invented a complex system so that the gangs could even give orders to their leaders on the outside, allowing the leaders from outside to enter the prisons without going through any security checks, and without any record being kept. However, a record was kept, which we later obtained, and that is how we made this information public.

[Silvia]: The system worked for a while. Homicide numbers were decreasing and Bukele maintained a public narrative as the people’s avenger against the gangs. When there was a spike in murders, he would retaliate. I’m sure you remember the photos that went around the world in 2020, which we mentioned in other episodes, with hundreds of prisoners in their underwear on the floor, packed in rows. That was when he decided to put rival gang members together in the same cells. And he also announced on Twitter that he was authorizing the use of lethal force.

[Eliezer]: Bukele accused previous administrations or politicians from other parties of having illegally negotiated with the gangs, but Zaira Navas says that he had seen in practice how it worked for the government of Mauricio Funes, who was president for the FMLN when Bukele was mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán for the same party.

[Zaira]: He had a clear route: negotiating with these groups and that has been proven. Bukele’s security policy has been based on negotiating with these groups. When it got out of hand and these groups began to gain strength, to charge more money, to demand more, he turned to the emergency regime.

[Silvia]: That is, the measure we already mentioned: a suspension of rights that started in March 2022 and has been in place for almost two years. Carlos says that it was born as a reactive measure. It was a breaking point, where the parallel realities in which Bukele moved collided. The wave of homicides began on Friday, March 25, 2022, and lasted until Sunday, March 27.

[Carlos]: That weekend, I would say, everyone was in the dark, because we were all baffled by what was going on.

[Eliezer]: On Saturday, Carlos was reporting with two colleagues from El Faro in a community controlled by gangs, but they were ordered to leave and return to the newsroom until they knew what was going on. The death toll was rising steadily. There was no official data, and the only information they had was what was shared with them by the police union.

[Carlos]: The information that the police had, and had leaked through the union, made it clear to us that the people who were dying didn’t have a gang profile, nor were they soldiers or police officers; they weren’t registered or listed as gang members by the police. And in the initial inspections that look for tattoos or clues in their clothing, they also didn’t identify the presence of gangs…

[Silvia]: Because of the locations where the bodies appeared, they thought it was the Mara Salvatrucha, says Carlos, but the deaths didn’t match the gang’s usual violent activities, which generally focused on their rivals or state agents. They seemed to be killing people at random.

[Carlos]: So we were all in the dark; that is, we didn’t know exactly what the hell was going on there and nobody was giving us an explanation.

[Eliezer]: That Saturday night, Bukele asked the Assembly to decree the emergency regime. That day ended with 62 deaths, the largest death toll in 20 years. Among them was a body thrown at the side of the road leading to Surf City, the tourism and bitcoin paradise the president was trying to sell.

[Silvia]: It seemed clear that it was a message to the government, and a clear clue that homicides had been kept down by some kind of deal that, at that point, had been broken. There was no official explanation. Bukele shared a message on Twitter about an alleged US-led conspiracy to bring him down. A few months later, a journalist from France Press asked exactly that to El Salvador’s Vice President, Félix Ulloa.

[Sounbite archive, journalist]: And how then do you explain the fact that at the start of Nayib Bukele’s term homicides went down and then they suddenly went up again? Some say it was because those agreements with the gangs were broken and it was like a chain reaction.

[Archive soundbite, Félix Ulloa]: The people who say that do not understand El Salvador, nor do they understand how this government is run…

[Eliezer]: The Vice President began with a classic response: he said that the drop in homicides had been achieved thanks to the Territorial Control Plan. But then he told the journalist something surprising: that the sudden wave of homicides had nothing to do with a broken pact, but with El Salvador’s global success.

[Archive soundbite, Félix Ulloa]: The spike in gang activity was because in El Salvador we have been at the forefront of many economic measures that have established the country as a world leader, such as Bitcoin.

[Silvia]: Because major investors were coming in, Ulloa explained, the criminal groups saw an opportunity, and they also had support: 

[Archive soundbite, Félix Ulloa]: …Supported by the de facto powers and politicians of the past, who were ousted in the last elections, they launched an attack to discredit the government’s image.

[Eliezer]: In other words, the Vice President is basically saying that the gangs, with the help of opposition politicians, saw that the country was attracting large investments due to its pioneering economic measures, and they went out to kill people to tarnish Bukele’s success. 

[Carlos]: To this day, the government of President Bukele vehemently denies, with increasingly diminishing credibility, its agreements with these criminal organizations. The problem is that reality has caught up with him.

[Eliezer]: Carlos says this because, some time later, the Mara Salvatrucha not only confirmed to El Faro that they had killed 87 people when they felt the government had betrayed them, but they also shared quite telling recordings about that weekend.

[Silvia]: In those audio files you can hear how the official who was acting as an interlocutor between the government and the criminal groups tries to keep the agreement going while on the street they are killing people.  There he recognizes, among other things, that the Bukele government released one of the gang’s founding leaders, known as Hollywood Crook, who was in a maximum security prison in El Salvador, where he was to serve 40 years. He also had a formal extradition request from the United States for terrorism.

[Carlos Martínez]: To continue to maintain dialogue with the Mara Salvatrucha, he reminds them:

[Archive soundbite, Carlos Marroquín]: And I took the old man out from inside, brother, in a way to help everyone and to show you my loyalty and that you can trust me.

[Carlos]: He took this person out of the country and drove him personally, he insists personally, to Guatemala.

[Archive soundbite, Carlos Marroquín]: I personally went to bring him there and I personally went to leave him in Guatemala.

[Silvia]: Marroquín is trying to show that the government has indeed fulfilled its part of the pact. And it was important to convince them because the Mara Salvatrucha had given the government a 72-hour ultimatum to meet their demands and resume negotiations. In this audio, Marroquín says that he told Bukele…

[Archive soundbite, Carlos Marroquín]: I already told Batman that he has 72 hours to give an answer.

[Silvia]: But in that conversation it’s understood that there is no going back…

[Archive soundbite, Carlos Marroquín]: He didn’t take it well, he took it badly, like “don’t go around threatening me” and so on.

[Eliezer]: Batman, as they called Bukele in those negotiations, apparently wanted nothing to do with it anymore. He had met with his security cabinet and was about to discover the benefits of another strategy used by previous governments: the iron fist. But in this case, with superpowers.

[Zaira]: Just as they extorted the Salvadoran population, the gangs also extorted Bukele and his government. And we’ve seen how Bukele complied with them, right? He took several gang members out of prison, he moved them to different places to receive medical care, like private hospitals. He moved them from maximum security prisons to lower security prisons, etc. But this pressure kept rising and rising, until it eventually reached breaking point, and the gang tried to pressure Bukele by showing their strength. What they hadn’t realized is that during this time Bukele had taken over the institutions of state control.

[Silvia]: Zaira explains that Bukele didn’t have any new ideas, but rather recycled what the traditional parties in her country had already done. Almost 20 years earlier, for example, President Francisco Flores, of the ARENA party, launched the «iron fist plan” to combat gangs. 

[Archive soundbite, Francisco Flores]: I want to tell our people clearly that I am not concerned about the welfare of criminals. I am concerned about the welfare of honest Salvadorans…

[Eliezer]: Then came President Antonio Saca, also from ARENA. This time, he announced the «super iron fist» plan to combat gangs. 

[Archive soundbite, Antonio Saca]: To the criminals and thugs, with great certainty and determination, I say that time is up. Tonight, fulfilling the presidential promise for a safe country, we are launching the super iron fist plan…

[Silvia]: Carlos tells us that, every time, it was pretty much the same: overdramatic advertising campaigns that had no real impact. Or, if anything, they made the situation worse. But Bukele had something they didn’t have.

[Carlos Martínez]: This iron fist was characterized by the absolute control of the State, including the Judiciary, the Attorney General, the Police, the Army, the Legislative Assembly, and the Supreme Court of Justice, which should have exercised constitutional control over the emergency regime.

[Eliezer]: But, in addition, he says that the government had managed to co-opt gang leaders, with whom he had made a deal.

[Carlos]: So, when the Mara Salvatrucha decided to carry out that horrible massacre of civilians in the street, and the government went after them, it found a gang without leaders, without leadership, and it had all the resources to act. Without rights, without guarantees, without press, without anything, it could do whatever it pleased. And indeed. I mean. That’s another characteristic of this iron fist approach that the previous ones didn’t have; they dismantled the gangs.

[Eliezer]: This is key because it substantially changed the lives of communities controlled by gangs. Carlos uses this phrase to describe the effect it had on the population: the majority of people, he says, felt like «a hand was taken off their throat.» At least momentarily, the government had achieved something that seemed impossible: dismantling the gangs, and that explains the enormous popularity this measure had. Many people experienced for the first time what it was like to live without fear, and the price to pay for that didn’t matter. When the scorched earth policy worked, the Bukele government understood that it had a weapon of enormous effectiveness, which justified everything.

[Carlos]: They quickly realized that this was an extremely powerful tool in terms of popularity, due to the real effects it had produced in relieving people’s suffering. There were also the infinite possibilities it had for propagandizing and marketing this measure, until it converted anyone who questioned the emergency regime for its human rights track record, legality, rule of law, or presumption of innocence among gang allies.

[Silvia]: To the government, anyone who asked uncomfortable questions about its war policy was a traitor. This is what the Vice President of El Salvador, Félix Ulloa, said when a journalist asked him what happened to the detainees of the regime who had died in prison without any charges being proved against them.

[Archive soundbite, Félix Ulloa]: In a time of war, and I am going to quote the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who says that in a besieged city any dissent is treason. Those who are currently questioning, whether from the journalistic field, from the so-called institutions that supposedly defend human rights, or political analysts, who are attacking the government’s policies, be careful because they are playing into the hands of organized crime, of gangs, and it is an act of betrayal to the people.

[Eliezer]: We’ll be right back.

[Daniel Alarcón]: The production company behind «Bukele, el señor de los sueños» is Radio Ambulante Studios. And we have two other podcasts you should listen to. Every Tuesday, we release Radio Ambulante. Stories of families, migration, adventure, and love. And every Friday, we release El hilo, where we cover and thoroughly explain an impactful news story from Latin America. Look for Radio Ambulante and El hilo on your preferred podcast app.

[Carlos Martínez]: We are right now traveling along the Litoral highway, which is the one that runs along, let’s say, the whole of El Salvador’s Pacific Coast by the sea, and we are going to Puerto El Triunfo, from where we are going to embark on the trip to Espíritu Island.

[Eliezer]: It’s a Thursday in late November, and it’s only a few minutes to Puerto El Triunfo, where we have to be before noon. The crossing to Espíritu Santo is quick, 15 or 20 minutes by boat, but if it’s low tide when we get to the port, we have to wait for it to rise again before we can leave. Carlos is telling me how he first came to the island without gangs, as he described it in a text he published more than a year ago.

[Carlos]: When the emergency regime began, especially in the first few months, the number of arrests increased exponentially every day, every week. And we as a newspaper started paying attention to what was happening, I received a call from a lady who works for a charity that offered scholarships to people who normally wouldn’t have the opportunity and they had a scholarship program on the island. So, this lady calls me in shock to tell me that they had already arrested 22 people on the island at that time, and it’s a very, very, very… it’s the definition of rural. But also, as in the story I just told you, there were no gangs on the island, which made the aggression and injustice very, very obvious.

[Silvia]: Because of this, in El Espíritu Santo you could see how the different methods of arrest under the emergency regime operated openly, and the reason for the opacity of the judicial process.

[Zaira]: At the beginning they started entering houses under the excuse that they were implementing Operation Safe House. That’s how the regime started knocking on people’s doors. Yes, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Accompanied by a big publicity campaign that stated terrorists would go to jail. And if you are innocent, don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. At the beginning it was one policeman with three soldiers, and later just soldiers.

[Eliezer]: The people of the island say that this is how they captured a group of six people in El Espíritu Santo in early July 2022, about three months after the beginning of the emergency regime. Among them was a minor, Samuel, 17 years old, the only one convicted so far of those detained on the island. The boy’s mother, Mrs. Virginia, says that on the evening of July 3, soldiers arrived and asked all the men to leave the house with their IDs. She was with her husband and children. Samuel was eating. 

[Mrs. Virginia]: When he came out, they told him to show his ID and he said “No, I’m a minor.” “So give me your, your, your minor’s card…”

[Silvia]: Virginia says that they took his ID, compared his photo with one that the soldiers had on their phone, and took him away.

[Eliezer]: That’s how they went looking for people that whole night, in the same way, house by house, according to the accounts of their families. This is Mrs. Betty, mother of one of the men taken away that night.

[Betty]: It was a Sunday and they came to take them away starting at six in the evening until about eight, nine, ten o’clock at night. When they came, when they took my son from here, they took him at 7:30 at night. They made everyone go outside the house.

[Silvia]: They all say the same thing, where they were, what day it was, what time the soldiers arrived to look for them, because the official version of how they were arrested is very, very different.

[Carlos Martínez]: An Army sergeant, Sergeant Ángel Montesinos, claims that on the morning of July 4, he found a group of six individuals on the basketball court located a block and a half away from the military post on the island. They had gathered to take food and supplies to gang members who were hiding, according to him, in the mangroves…

[Silvia]: El Espíritu Santo Island is surrounded by mangroves, a forest of trees that grow where the land and marine environments meet.

[Carlos]: …and that when he intercepted them, they tried to escape, but through a flanking manoeuvre he was able to capture them and among them he recognized the only one in the group who was a minor. He claims that he had seen that boy on a previous occasion, although he can’t remember which day or month, entering the mangroves with supplies and leaving without supplies.

[Eliezer]: The grounds that the sergeant used to justify the capture of those men was absurd in any situation, but on that island, it was also obscene because the community wasn’t broken by indifference. When they held the court hearing for her son Samuel’s case, the youngest of those taken that night, Mrs. Virginia said that she couldn’t contain herself when she heard the soldier lying like that.

[Mrs. Virginia]: I began to feel distressed when Montesinos was saying that he had caught them on the court and that they were putting food there. I thought, what can I do deep down? I grabbed my husband’s hand and squeezed it, telling him that what they were saying was a lie.

[Silvia]: And so, after her son was convicted, Mrs. Virginia decided to do something unusual in light of the imbalance of power that the inhabitants of the island were experiencing: report the sergeant for false testimony. 

[Carlos Martínez]: That is, to go to a trial, to go to a judge, and to ask the Attorney General to accuse an Army sergeant on their behalf for lying in court. And because those lies led to this boy’s ten-year sentence. The boy’s mother sought solidarity from others who also had their sons in prison. And, far from fearing reprisal from the State for speaking out, for speaking to the media, for going to the Attorney General’s Office and for telling their truth, they supported her, knowing that all the possibilities I have just mentioned are more than real at this moment in El Salvador.

[Eliezer]: When we went to the island, in November 2023, Mrs. Virginia had had to sell two of the four pigs she owned in order to pay for the journey and to feed the people who accompanied her, those who hadn’t left her alone. I asked her what the soldiers had told her when they went to look for Samuel, what their excuse was for taking him away.

[Mrs. Virginia]: They just came with what was supposedly a photograph of him and they told him: “They call you ‘blade’.» “No”, he told them, “They call me ‘leftie’”, because my son’s dream was to go abroad and play to help me out. He told me, “Mom, with this left foot” — and he’d touch me with his little foot — “with this left foot you are going to eat”.

[Eliezer]: Mrs. Virginia told me that she didn’t care about the money, that she just wanted her son back. Now, even the money she had received from the government during the pandemic seemed to hurt her. 

[Mrs. Virginia]: Money can’t buy happiness. As I say to Mr. President, I thank him because he gave us $300 and those $300 have tripled what we have given. I don’t blame the President because he’s not guilty. The guilty ones are those who are out there doing things they shouldn’t be doing. I’m just telling him to examine what’s going on inside, the people who are working there. Because if he’s saying that he wants to clean up the Salvadoran people, then he should start examining those who are working on the inside.

[Silvia]: A fortnight after the start of the emergency regime, in April 2022, the police union began to report that the authorities were demanding «daily arrest quotas,» and that this was leading to misconduct. On the island, the relatives of some of those arrested told Carlos and Eliezer that the police and military were receiving money for each person captured. This was their explanation for what was happening in their community.  Because, on that island where everyone knew each other and knew what everyone was up to, they began to ask where the names of the detainees had come from, why they had gone to look for them.

[Eliezer]: Below the surface, the arrests on the island began to unravel the fabric that had held the community together for decades. Carlos says that what neither the civil war nor the gangs had been able to break became possible with a tool that the government made available to the population in the first months of the regime: the telephone number to make anonymous accusations.

[Zaira Navas]: All the countries that have lived through dictatorships or authoritarian regimes have suffered from anonymous accusations, informants, or whatever they are called in each country. Anyone, because of debts, because of bad blood, even because of inheritance disputes, or because of personal reasons, can call a telephone number that has been published and placed in any corner of the country to accuse another person and say this house or this person with this name who sells in this place is a gang member.

[Silvia]: In El Espíritu Santo, people began to suspect that those arrested had been accused by their neighbors. Out of envy, because they wanted someone else’s partner, because of a dispute, because they were competing for the same clients…

[Carlos Martínez]: Since the accusations are anonymous, people make assumptions that are in some cases more or less informed. But yes, the idea of the boogeyman of the island has been created, that is to say, that there are neighbors who are willing to stab their neighbors in the back. And I don’t know how to undo that.

[Sandra]: Now there is immense pain in families, in the families of those arrested. And the families of those arrested already know who the people are who grabbed that dagger and stabbed them mercilessly. It’s a lie to say that this community will be united again, that this community will become bearable like it was before. Before, we shared each other’s pain. Before, if someone died, everyone was there at the vigil, sharing the family’s pain. And now?

[Eliezer]: Once in San Salvador, after returning from the island, I asked Carlos what it meant to him, after so many years of covering and investigating gangs and criminal power dynamics in his country, to be covering the emergency regime today:

[Carlos Martínez]: Trying to understand, for example, a community that has been attacked in a way that seems cruel to me, well, it’s tough. Right now, this is the situation that this country is in. Somehow, reporting politics in a way that I never expected to cover, well, because we’re focusing on a word that only appeared in the sepia-toned images of my parents and their generation that led to a civil war: dictatorship. So, when I discover the horror of the testimonies of people who have been through the regime’s prisons and the unspeakable torture and horrors they have seen in those prisons. Or, when I go to a community of farmers who never had gangs, I understand that I’m covering the future of my country and that I’m covering the essence of what the power is made up of in the country and therefore I see it as political coverage.

[Eliezer]: By the end of 2023, seven civil organizations reported that reports of human rights violations they had received under the emergency rule totaled more than 5,700 cases. The grounds for the reports range from arbitrary detentions to inhumane treatment and torture, limited access to healthcare, internal displacement and enforced disappearance, among others. The organizations also recorded 189 cases of death, most of them in state custody.

[Silvia]: Zaira Navas explained to us that, according to Cristosal’s investigation, only 10% of the people who had died in the penal centers under the state of exception had ties to gangs. In the report they published one year after this measure, they provided a staggering statistic: less than 1% of the detainees up to that point had been charged with specific crimes associated with gangs, such as homicides and extortion. The vast majority of arrests, the report says, were made under ambiguous charges like Criminal Association, which allowed for discretionary and arbitrary arrests.

Shortly after the beginning of the emergency regime, a journalist asked the country’s Vice President, Félix Ulloa, what happened to those detainees who had died in the penal centers without having been formally charged. He defined it simply:

[Archive soundbite, Félix Ulloa]: Always, in a war, there will be innocent victims, there will be collateral damage, which must be corrected…

[Eliezer]: In December 2023, a court ordered the immediate release of Samuel, the son of Mrs. Virginia, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison. This court, a higher chamber than the one that convicted Samuel, considered that there was not enough evidence to sentence him and that there were inconsistencies in the sergeant’s version. With the release order in hand, Virginia has gone to the juvenile detention center where her son is three times, but the authorities refused to release him, without any explanation. When he was arrested on the island of El Espíritu Santo on June 3, 2022, Samuel was 17 years old. He is now 19 and still in prison.

[Eliezer]: In the next episode…

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: The Constitution does not allow the same person to be president twice in a row.

[Héctor Lindo]: Salvadoran constitutions have rejected reelection in a very strict manner.

[Archive soundbite, Nayib Bukele]: After talking it over with my wife Gabriela, and with my family, I am announcing to the Salvadoran people that I have decided to run as a candidate for the President of the Republic…

[Amparo Marroquín]: The result of an election like this one confirms that Bukele’s political communication strategy is the most successful in the region, isn’t it? That is to say, that the narrative he promotes allows for the dismantling of democracy, and everyone seems to agree.

[Gabriel]: Basically, it’s going to be the ticket that the President needs to launch a more intolerant and repressive agenda, I believe.

[Eliezer]: This series was made possible thanks to the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Free Press Unlimited, Article 19 Mexico and Central America, the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), and Dejusticia. Additionally, we thank FLIP for their advice and legal review, and Riesgo Cruzado for their valuable support in protection and security matters.

The producers and reporters of «Bukele: el señor de Los sueños» are Silvia Viñas and me. Gabriel Labrador is our reporter and on-site producer. Desireé Yépez is our digital producer. Daniel Alarcón and Camila Segura are our editors. Carlos Dada is our editorial consultant. The fact-checkers are Bruno Scelza and Desireé Yépez. Selene Mazón is the production assistant. The music, mixing, and sound design are by Elías González. The graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo. The web development is by Paola Ponce. Thanks to Jonathan Blitzer for his support.

«Bukele, el señor de Los sueños» is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Estudios.

From Radio Ambulante Studios, the production co-directors are Natalia Ramírez and Laura Rojas Aponte, with the assistance of Paola Alean. The audience and digital production team is formed by Samantha Proaño, Ana Pais, Analía Llorente and Melisa Rabanales. Press and community management is handled by Juan David Naranjo.

Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Estudios.

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

I am Eliezer Budasoff. Thank you for listening.

Credits

Produced and reported by: Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff

Produced and reported on site by: Carlos Martínez and Gabriel Labrador

Digital Production: Desireé Yepez

Edited by: Daniel Alarcón and Camila Segura

Editorial Consulting: Carlos Dada

Fact-checking: Bruno Scelza and Desirée Yépez

Production Assistant: Selene Mazón

Music and Sound Design: Elías González

Graphic Design and Art Direction: Diego Corzo

[Nelson Rauda]: The first time I heard the word Bitcoin, I heard it from the mouth of a young gringo named Jack Mallers, who announced to the world and to me that we, Salvadorans, were going to have a new currency.

[Eliezer Budasoff]: This is Nelson Rauda, a Salvadoran journalist. He writes for El Faro about politics, violence… But in recent years he has become a kind of correspondent for Bitcoin, this new currency he is talking about. 

[Nelson Rauda]: I’ve written over 40 Bitcoin articles in the last three years, so I never know whether to say sorry or have people thank me.

[Silvia Viñas]: That moment Nelson just mentioned, when a young American announced that El Salvador was going to adopt Bitcoin, was Saturday, June 5, 2021, at a Bitcoin conference in Miami. The young man is Jack Mallers. In his twenties he launched an application called Strike to make payments in Bitcoin. In 2021 he appeared on Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.

Mallers announced from the stage that El Salvador would have a new currency. He was wearing a sweatshirt with a hoodie and a cap. Under that, he would later reveal, he was wearing the jersey of the El Salvador soccer team. Mallers told a little of what went on behind the scenes…

Archive Audio, Jack Mallers: They asked me to help write a bill, and that they viewed Bitcoin as a world-class currency… and that we needed to put together a Bitcoin plan to help these people

[Eliezer]: He says that the Bukele Government, which saw Bitcoin as a world-class currency, requested his support to write a bill. They said this plan was to help Salvadorans. He continues talking, and you can sense the emotion in his voice. He says this project was to give people hope. Quality of life.

Archive Audio, Jack Mallers: To give them hope, to give them a quality of life, so that you can live where you’re born and you don’t have to leave and when you send money home they’re not going to take fucking half of it [applause].

[Silvia]: Mallers says this is so that Salvadorans can stay where they were born, and so that, when they send money, half of it won’t be taken away. He is referring to commissions for remittances. This is important, because every year the country receives millions of dollars from Salvadorans living abroad. In 2023, for example, remittances were 9 billion dollars. That is more than 20% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

Mallers says that he worked very hard on this project, that he lived in El Salvador and made friends who, he hopes, will one day come to his wedding. And then, he introduces Bukele:

Archive Audio, Jack Mallers: I’d like to invite now someone I’ve spent some time with to share a message.

[Eliezer]: A video of Bukele begins, with the volume a little low at the beginning. 

Archive Audio, Bukele: My name is Nayib Bukele and I’m the President of El Salvador…

[Eliezer]: He announces, in English, that he is going to send a bill to the Legislative Assembly for El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. As a second currency, because the main currency, since 2001, has been the dollar. The audience in Miami is so excited that they start applauding before he finishes explaining everything.

Archive Audio, Bukele: ….outside the formal economy. And in the medium and long term…

[Silvia]: Bukele had just made a historic announcement for Bitcoin fans. And in the end, it was a message for them, that’s why it was in English. The Salvadoran president was opening the doors for them so they could fulfill their crypto dreams. How it would affect Salvadorans seemed secondary. They found out that Bitcoin would be their legal tender that day as well, in this announcement that was made in Miami, in English.

[Nelson]: This is not a public policy made for us. We pay for it.  We finance it. It is done with our resources. But it is directed at other people.

[Silvia]: This is El señor de Los sueños, a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios. I’m Silvia Viñas.

[Eliezer]: And I’m Eliezer Budasoff. Episode 4: The Crypto-Evangelist President.

[Nelson]: Bitcoin is one of Bukele’s first policies that he made after democracy was dismantled. You couldn’t do this in a democracy.

[Eliezer]: Let’s remember that the month before this announcement, in May 2021, the new Legislative Assembly had begun in El Salvador, controlled by the Bukelists. And the first thing the representatives did was to dismiss the magistrates of the Constitutional Court and the Attorney General. You see, the judicial power made Bukele uncomfortable. The judges had blocked some of his policies to combat the pandemic, and the Prosecutor’s Office was investigating the Government for its negotiations with gangs and for irregular contracts during the health crisis. In their place, the representatives appointed people connected to the Government.

It was the end of the separation of powers, and a triumph for Bukele, although it came at a cost: the international community criticized these moves as authoritarian. So Bukele, as he had done at other times, found a way to distract from this negative attention. And, in true style, he did it quickly. Three days after that announcement in English that we heard a moment ago, Bukele sent the Bitcoin Bill to the Assembly.

[Nelson]: I remember I was at my father’s house. We are watching a soccer game with the Salvadoran team. The game was just starting and I was about to sit down to watch the game, when my boss calls me, and he said, look, this is happening at the Assembly, get on it. And I said, ok. 

[Eliezer]: So Nelson went to the Assembly and began to listen to the representatives, to see what this bill was about. One said that it was not going to be mandatory to adopt Bitcoin. But Nelson realized that at the same time, there was a live conversation in Spaces, on Twitter, that contradicted what was being said in the Assembly. President Bukele and his brother Karim were participating there, speaking in English…

[Nelson]: Explaining to investors and other people, gringos and Europeans: Well, yes, this is going to be mandatory. At McDonald’s they will have to accept your Bitcoin. So I… while in the Assembly, I stopped listening to what the representatives who were going to approve the bill were saying and I started listening to Space, and they were saying much more, giving more valuable information.

[Eliezer]: The committee in charge of examining the law took 85 minutes to review it.

[Nelson]: And the soccer game thing was on purpose because a soccer game lasts 90 minutes plus stoppage time, right? So the game started, it wasn’t over yet, and they had already finished discussing it, and even after they finished, El Salvador scored another goal and we were 3 to 0. I think we won, which I think was the only victory that day for the country.

[Eliezer]: The Assembly approved it in 5 hours, total.  

[Silvia]: What has been the most complex, the most difficult part of this whole process?

Nelson: Understanding it. I mean, this is a super, super complex topic. That is, cryptocurrencies do not have any inherent value; they are pieces of computer code not tied to anything in the real world. I mean, yeah, if you talk about the shares of a company like Apple, well, Apple produces iPhones and computers and I don’t know what, so those are… it’s tied to something real. What is cryptocurrency tied to? Nothing. In the case of Bitcoin, in the case of other things, right? Because there are more than 20,000 cryptocurrencies. So it was like that pressure of having to understand, and having to understand it in spite of the fact that I was looking at this with a lot of skepticism and sometimes with anger. I mean, as a Salvadoran it did make me very mad and angry that a little gringo guy at a conference in Miami, who was weeping, wearing the jersey of Salvador’s national team, would say we are going to change the world, everything is going to be wonderful, whatever. When I know what this country is, I am from here; when, when I know the situation, the inequality, when I know this government quite well.

[Eliezer]: We’ll talk more about the Bitcoin Act in a moment, but first, like Nelson when he started covering this topic, we need to understand the basics… 

[Silvia]: How do you explain what Bitcoin is in one or two sentences to someone who doesn’t know what Bitcoin is?

[Nelson]: In one or two sentences. Bitcoin is a financial alternative, let’s say. It is an alternative in which if you distrust the banks and the monetary system, you can use this alternative thing, as an experiment, you see? Let’s say that the simple way these people explain it to you is that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, you get these things and the central idea, let’s say, of its creator or creators, which is an anonymous entity that calls itself Satoshi Nakamoto, is a peer-to-peer exchange, an exchange between people without any entities as intermediaries, such as a bank or something else. That is basically the idea. 

[Eliezer]: Bitcoin is considered the first cryptocurrency. It began operating in January 2009, but was born in 2008, in the midst of widespread discontent due to the global financial crisis. Many people lost their homes, their investments and savings because of bad decisions by the people who control the financial system. And then the US government bailed out the banks, at taxpayers’ expense. So, Bitcoiners are convinced that the financial system does not work, that it is unfair.

[Nelson]: And they propose this other way that in theory is a… I mean, it has its logic, it has its appeal.

[Eliezer]: In Latin America, the countries that have adopted this cryptocurrency the most are those with the highest inflation: Argentina and Venezuela.

[Tatiana]: The roots of Bitcoin are very different from how it works now. Bitcoin does not mean that the roots have been good.

[Eliezer]: This is Tatiana Marroquín, a Salvadoran economist. She worked in the Legislative Assembly as a technician on fiscal and Treasury issues and is now an independent consultant. Tatiana explained to us that, in general, in the world, Bitcoin is now mostly used as a speculative asset, that is, an investment that involves a risk.

[Tatiana]: That’s why a friend could come up to me and say I want to invest in Bitcoin because that’s the logic, right? You don’t say I want to invest in dollars, right? At least on a day-to-day basis, that’s not the case. So, what I would say to my friend would be, well, only invest what you are willing to lose because you can win a lot, but you can also lose a lot. So if you want to invest in that, go ahead. Or here are other slightly less risky options.

[Eliezer]: The risk exists, in part, because the price of Bitcoin is very volatile. In 2023, for example, its value fluctuated between 16 thousand and 44 thousand dollars per unit. But that is not the only risk.

[Nelson]: As an alternative to the traditional financial system, well, there are some things about the financial system that I think are not superfluous. That is, all its money-laundering preventions. When you mention KYC to a Bitcoiner, which is the banks’ know-your-client policies to prevent money laundering, they make a face because that is like a way for them to control your money. Also Bitcoin has to do with a lot of libertarian ideology, Ayn Rand and this type of freedom to the end thing.

[Silvia]: So, is there an ideology behind Bitcoin? No? What is it that moves people to get into this? What are their motivations?

[Nelson]: I think they believe they are going to change the world. I have a Christian background, that is, I have been in evangelical churches all my life. So, listening to these people, I saw many similarities and then there are people who said so directly. I was beginning to hear phrases like a Guatemalan who told me that it was easier for the sun to go out than for Bitcoin’s price to reach zero. There are people who compared it directly to Christianity. They call themselves evangelists. There are apostles, that is, great gurus on this subject, who go around the world preaching the gospel of Satoshi Nakamoto. So, when I began to understand it as a cult, I said ok, I understand them.

[Eliezer]: And in his attempts to understand the philosophy behind this cryptocurrency, there is a question that Nelson asks Bitcoiners:

[Nelson]: “Bitcoin is supposed to be a way to separate the currency from the State because you don’t trust the State. That’s the philosophy. So why are Bitcoiners so quick to embrace an authoritarian government? That is, did you want the State or did you not want the State?” Bitcoiners always say— their slogan is always, «don’t trust, verify», because that is what the system is supposed to do: it doesn’t trust an intermediary, so it verifies through mathematical transactions conducted by computers. So why do they trust Bukele’s government so much? And why don’t they verify what he says? Bukele has tweeted that he buys one Bitcoin every day. Have you verified it? Do you think he is telling the truth? Why do all the governments in the world lie, but this one is suddenly honest and wonderful and sincere and God’s gift to the world? And I still haven’t found one Bitcoiner who can satisfactorily answer that for me.

[Silvia]: What is known about when or how Bukele became interested in cryptocurrency?

[Nelson]: Very little, because the Bukeles, of all the virtues that people attribute to them, transparency is not one of them. Since the Bukeles have not expressed, and the President has not explained, that origin, much of what we know in El Salvador we know from the mouths of Bitcoiners who have confessed or said, in English, how this happened. The first thing was Jack Mallers.

[Eliezer]: Mallers was in El Zonte and one of Bukele’s brothers contacted him. In an interview, Mallers said he was very scared because he didn’t know what they were going to say to him.

[Nelson]: But he went to the meeting, and from that point on he began to talk with them, and that is where the talks began that led to that announcement in 2021.

[Eliezer]: Two weeks after this announcement at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, which we heard at the beginning of the episode, Bukele gave an interview to Peter McCormack, an Englishman who has a podcast about Bitcoin. 

Archive Audio, McCormack: Hello again. Mr. President, thank you for having me here, you’ve made quite some history…

[Eliezer]: McCormack asks him what led him to make El Salvador the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Bukele says that there are two types of decisions. Some have to do with historical debts, such as fighting the gangs. And others are decisions that look forward, towards the future…

Archive Audio, podcast, Bukele: Not to foresee the future, but at least to know where the world is going and to get there first, so your people will get some benefit out of it.

[Eliezer]: Not to predict it, says Bukele, but to see where the world is moving, to be able to get there first and have the people benefit from it. Bitcoin, of course, is this second type of decision. Bitcoin is the future.

Archive Audio, podcast, Bukele: The Bitcoin system is so perfect, I think it’s going to be the future.

[Eliezer]: He says there are also practical reasons for doing this, such as being able to receive remittances immediately, with almost no fees, or reaching the 70% of people who do not have a bank account. He also says that this will bring investments in tourism, and that it will make the country, which is dollarized, less dependent on the production of new dollars and the inflation of those dollars.

[Silvia]: So, to achieve this, make it public policy, and there is the Bitcoin Act, which, as Nelson told us, was expressly approved by an Assembly controlled by Bukele. It is a brief. It has sixteen articles and they are quite general.

[Nelson]: The law essentially says that Bitcoin is legal currency and that all of us who make transactions are obliged to accept it the way we accept dollars, which is our currency, American dollars.

[Silvia]: A few weeks after the Assembly approved the law, Bukele went on a national network to explain what it was all about. 

Archive Audio, Nayib Bukele: This law was made to generate employment, to generate investment, and it will never affect anyone, as the opponents have tried to say with their dirty campaign and trying to confuse Salvadorans by making them believe that they are going to be affected by a law that has no other objective than to benefit them.

[Silvia]: It lasted almost an hour… More than once he refers to Article 7, one of articles that caused most concern, because it seemed that the law forced people to use Bitcoin.

Archive Audio, Nayib Bukele: By taking it out of context and putting only Article 7, well yes, it would seem that everyone is obliged to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment and therefore receive the Bitcoin. But it’s not like that. Economic agents, that is, businesses, are obliged to accept Bitcoin but not to receive it. 

[Silvia]: Accept, but not receive. People began to joke on social networks about what the difference would be between accepting and receiving. It made more sense when Bukele announced, on that same national network, an electronic wallet called “Chivo” or Chivo Wallet. Chivo in El Salvador means something similar to “cool.” With this wallet, which is an app that you download to your cell phone, people can send you Bitcoins and if you want, you convert them to dollars. So, Bukele was saying, don’t worry, you have no obligation to receive Bitcoins because with this app, this Chivo electronic wallet, you can convert them to dollars automatically. So, if you are a seller and someone wants to pay you in Bitcoin, you have to accept it, but since the Chivo Wallet can convert it to dollars, what you receive can be dollars, if you want, rather than in Bitcoin.

Bukele announced an incentive for people who downloaded the Chivo Wallet: everyone would receive $30 in Bitcoin.

[Nelson]: Then people used the Chivo Wallet to get their $30 and many of them never used it again. The Chivo Wallet was a spectacular failure. People gave it a chance. The app was horrible, it crashed, transactions were not recorded, people lost money. There were many people like me who couldn’t get the $30 bonus because someone used our DUI, someone used my DUI, my ID, to get those $30 and transfer them to their account. That happened to thousands of people. The government has taken prosecuted people very discreetly—this was published by Factum Magazine—people who committed fraud with the Chivo Wallet. People who, for example, one day transferred $20 from their Chivo Wallet to their bank account, but the $20 was not debited from their balance in the wallet, so they did it again and it worked again, and they kept on doing it until they got thousands of dollars from people because the app was very defective, so the prosecutor’s office went after them. So people are very patient in El Salvador and have allowed Bukele and consented to everything. When he got involved with money, they said look, we don’t have that much.

[Nelson]: The first major protest that took place on September 15, 2021 was days after the Bitcoin Law went into effect. Bitcoin was one of the reasons why people went out to protest, not the only one, but one of the reasons why they went out to protest. Then, as he realized that it was unpopular, that people didn’t like it, and that his Chivo Wallet had been a failure, he started talking less about Bitcoin. He no longer mentions Bitcoin. Not in Spanish.

[Silvia]: Bukele went almost a year and a half without tweeting about Bitcoin in Spanish. In June 2022 he tweeted, quote: “I see some people are worried or anxious about the price of Bitcoin on the market.” His advice is to stop looking at the graph and enjoy life because, if you invested in Bitcoin, your investment is safe and the value will grow… He says the key is to be patient. This, by the way, is similar to what we’ve seen him do before: he takes something negative and changes its meaning to make it seem like a victory, or at least something logical. When the price is falling, he talks about Bitcoin in Spanish as an investment. But the law he promoted does not refer to Bitcoin as an investment… The law made it legal tender. An official currency is used for daily transactions, not for investing. But if people are not using it in their daily lives, all there is left is to tweet about Bitcoin as an investment. 

The next time he tweeted in Spanish about Bitcoin was in December 2023. Again, almost a year and a half later. He shared an explanatory video—in Spanish with English subtitles—about why El Salvador does not sell its Bitcoins. This video, by the way, was posted when the price of Bitcoin was rising.

[Silvia]: Nelson told me that when Bukele talks about Bitcoin, he does so in English, like it is a more outward-looking policy. Do you see it that way too?

[Tatiana]: Yes, yes, yes. In El Salvador, to talk about Bitcoin is to remember the failure of the government. So I think where they are in Bitcoin, apart from the business that the government has with some people, which we know very little about, Bitcoin, the part of the government that has remained is the tourism attraction. So I think they have held on to that and that’s why continue to speak to this niche of people.

[Silvia]: How does the fact that this Bitcoin law exists and that on paper, it is legal tender, affect the average Salvadoran?

Tatiana: I think that at this point, the way it affects you, well, first, that there are many components of the law that can be applied and that have not been applied, such as the payment of salaries, for example.

[Tatiana]: So let’s say the law is still a risk, even if it’s not being enforced that way. But in practical terms it clearly affects the public funds.

[Silvia]: The Government says that it has been buying Bitcoin with public funds since 2021. But we do not know how much it has bought. And that is only part of the expenses, because the Chivo Wallet, the ATMs, the bonus, the propaganda—all that It costs money.

[Tatiana]: We do not know how public funds are being used. We know that they are being used, that there are new institutions, that they have created institutions related to Bitcoin, that they continue to create laws for cryptocurrencies, etc. And all that involves state offices, state personnel, etc. The same goes for what was invested in Bitcoin, we don’t know where all that money is, and it is not being used for priority issues for the Salvadoran population economically, for example. So I think that is where it’s affecting us the most.

[Silvia]: Do you by any chance accept Bitcoin here?

Seller 1: No, we haven’t implemented that yet…

Seller 2: Bitcoin? No.

[Silvia]: Really, oh ok. It’s fine.

[Silvia]: One question, do you accept Bitcoin here? If someone wanted to pay in…

Hotel employee: Yes, of course

[Silvia]: Oh okay. Got it.

[Silvia]: When I was in San Salvador, almost every time I bought something, I asked if they accepted Bitcoin. Only two places said they did. The one you just heard, which is a hotel belonging to an international chain, and a Mexican food restaurant in a mall.

[Silvia]: Out of curiosity, do you accept Bitcoin?

Restaurant employee: Yes.

[Silvia]: You do? Ok, but is it common for people to pay in Bitcoin?

Restaurant employee: No, no, it’s about one person every two weeks.

[Silvia]: It can’t be heard very clearly, but she says it is not common. That one person pays with Bitcoin every two weeks.

[Silvia]: And foreigners, I imagine?

Restaurant employee: Yes, just like you.

[Silvia]: Yes, foreigners, “just like you,” she said.

[Eliezer]: This, of course, is not a very large sample, nor scientific. But surveys and studies have been carried out on the use of Bitcoin in El Salvador. An early 2023 survey by the University Institute of Public Opinion found that 74% of Salvadorans did not use Bitcoin to buy or pay in 2022. Of those who did, a third had used it only once. And according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, only 20% of companies operating in El Salvador accept Bitcoin.

After the break. We’ll go to the beach that promises to immerse you in a Bitcoin economy, where it all began: El Zonte. We’ll be back after a pause.

[MIDROLL]

[Silvia]: Where are we, Nelson?

[Nelson]: Entering El Zonte. Well, Surf City, but on the dirt road.

[Silvia]: The road from San Salvador to El Zonte, especially as it gets closer to the beach, is modern and a very comfortable drive. That, in July 2023, changed once you entered El Zonte. I’m with Nelson in a rental car. We’re going down a dirt road with a lot holes. That explains the noise, and our trembling voices.

[Silvia]: Surf City is the name Bukele gave it. 

[Nelson]: Yes, Surf City is… He has this tendency to name things in English. 

[Silvia]: Before becoming Surf City, what was El Zonte?

[Nelson]: I think it’s still more or less the same. It’s a surf beach that has now a little more infrastructure, a little more… a few restaurants, some hotels, but essentially it is still what it is. [Because when you hear Surf City, you say, how developed, that tourist enclave. Acapulco, right? It’s not that. This is Surf City: the women carrying crates on their heads, selling mangoes or selling something else, the man gardening on that piece of land. That’s Surf City.]

[Silvia]: Surf City is actually an area of several beaches that includes El Zonte. But we are in El Zonte because, as we said, this is where the history of Bitcoin in El Salvador began. It is a very nice, small spa, where on some streets you see modest one-story houses and other modern hotels with signs saying they accept Bitcoin.

[Nelson]: I mean, here we are in front of Palo Verde, which is one of the famous hotels. “Say Zonte”, which is “The Spanish Learning Experience”, right? In other words, it is a language academy. But it sounds nicer that way. 

[Silvia]: Of course.

[Nelson]: So here it was… This is what people like to call, the… the crypto brothers like to call it Bitcoin Beach, because this was what we might call the birthplace of Bitcoin Beach.

[Silvia]: This is where an experiment began. In 2019, two years before the country adopted cryptocurrency as legal tender, there was an anonymous donation of Bitcoin in El Zonte. This person—who people few know who he is—gave the Bitcoins to Mike Peterson, a Californian surfer who has lived in El Zonte since 2005. We tried to get an interview with him, but it didn’t work out. We did speak with one of the people from the town who, together with Peterson, launched the Bitcoin Beach project.

[Román Martínez]: Bitcoin Beach showed that Bitcoin could be a tool for communities that had never had access to a financial system, to a bank account, because here in the community we saw changes. When Bitcoin started being used, people’s mentality changed.

[Silvia]: That was Román Martínez, one of the founders of Bitcoin Beach. I interviewed him the day I visited El Zonte with Nelson. Román was born in El Zonte. And he describes Bitcoin Beach as a social project.

[Román]: Where we were focused on giving tools and knowledge to the children of our community with different projects in the area of education, in recreation, in the spiritual area, in the empowerment part. And three and a half years ago we began to use Bitcoin in the project as a form of payment, where initially the students got a prize for being good students, for cleaning the river, for cleaning the beach…

[Silvia]: And then the pandemic arrived, and it hit El Zonte quite hard because many families live off tourism, and that stopped completely.

[Román]: That’s when the project changed direction and we started helping local families with a donation in Bitcoin. El Zonte has about 500 families, so all the families helped each other out for a period of time. Every month they received a donation in Bitcoin and that opened the door to what is known today as the first circular economy within a Bitcoin ecosystem.

[Silvia]: This circular economy is something I heard a lot that day at El Zonte. Román explained it to me in simple terms.

[Román]: You come to the community and you can pay, you can live with Bitcoin, you can pay for the hotel, you can pay at the restaurant, for the electricity, the water, the telephone, whatever you can think of, right?

[Silvia]: I asked Román what the connection is between Bitcoin Beach and the step the country took to convert Bitcoin into legal tender.

[Román]: I think it was just like a link, is is just… Bitcoin Beach showed that Bitcoin could be that inclusive tool to provide more opportunities, to bring more tourism, more investments.

[Eliezer]: This look at Bitcoin Beach is the most “official”, let’s say. And of course, it makes sense that this is how one of its founders describes it. The Government has pointed to Bitcoin Beach as a model, and it has worked, because Nelson says that El Zonte has become a kind of Mecca.

[Nelson]: In other words, again with the religious symbolism, we are going to go on a pilgrimage here because we have finally arrived at a place where we can find a case of real-life use of this thing. And then people started going to El Zonte to try to buy things with Bitcoin. And they did, and still do. They are delighted with the possibility of turning their codes into a beer, a coconut, a hotel stay, into whatever. 

[Tatiana]: [With Bitcoin], as long as it is in the wallets of everyone in El Zonte or on some beach, it will work for them. Which was the same thing we saw at the beginning when they said look, on this beach it works in the sun. Does it work for you? Of course, because El Zonte is a few kilometers. So if they agree to do transactions with buttons, they will manage. The issue is when it is taken to a larger economy.

[Nelson]: The idea was that this would be replicated throughout El Salvador. I invite all Bitcoiners who believe that the media lies, that journalists lie: Come to El Salvador and do not bring cash or any card, just bring your Bitcoin wallet and try to stay in this country for a week, a few days, just paying in Bitcoin. Don’t believe me. Check, and try to do that, and you will find the answer there. This did not happen and in fact does not happen in El Zonte. The Zonte is not a circular economy where there is Bitcoin. El Zonte is a beach where in some places, and where I think it is the place with the highest concentration in El Salvador where you can pay with Bitcoin, in addition to paying with dollars. Cross the street in El Zonte, you leave your hotel in El Zonte, which has the big Bitcoin logo and you cross the street and try to pay the lady in the store in Bitcoin. Then you tell me. What I’m saying is, El Zonte is not what it is said to be.

[Wilfredo]: The truth is that we knew very little about Bitcoin. Currently it can also be said that we know very little about the subject.

[Eliezer]: This is Wilfredo Urias, a community leader from El Zonte. Silvia and Nelson interviewed him at a hotel that, by the way, did not accept Bitcoin. He works there doing various things. When they spoke, he was tending the poolside bar. But Wilfredo was also the president of the local Community Development Association. Those are organizations that are in charge of managing drinking water and bringing projects to benefit the community. They can be about sports, education, infrastructure…

Wilfredo mentioned what Román said a while ago, that the people of Bitcoin Beach helped the townspeople during the pandemic. And that Bitcoin supports community projects. But he also says that the use of Bitcoin has decreased… That the situation of Salvadorans from El Zonte like him, who have lived there before Bitcoin arrived, has in part become more difficult.

[Wilfredo]: A little more difficult because of the investments, which at the moment have not been inclusive. So there are more opportunities for investors and less opportunities for the locals.

[Eliezer]: Wilfredo refers to investments in, for example, land for hotels.

[Wilfredo]: Yes, they are buying quite a bit in the community. So it is a touchy issue, because currently there are still many people who do not have their own properties, who live in State areas, in areas—land that they have taken by right. And that now, with the appraisal of properties, is a problem. 

[Silvia]: The value has gone up.

[Wilfredo]: A lot. It’s excessive. In other words, a piece of land that five years ago could cost you $20,000, today costs you $200,000.

[Silvia]: Wow.

[Eliezer]: Some Bitcoin Beach real estate agents said a property would go from $125,000 to $200,000 in one week. And in Bitcoin City, which is 200 kilometers away, there were neighbors who agreed to sell their land to the government for $8,000 but to relocate to the same area they had to pay more than $40,000.

[Nelson]: The price of housing has skyrocketed, in part because there are many people speculating in land, wanting to live in this wonderful country called El Salvador, and a lot of places are being gentrified. People are being displaced.

[Eliezer]: In El Zonte there are 25 families under threat of eviction because they live on land where a public park called Bitcoin Beach Club de Playa is going to be built. It will have a volleyball court, a commercial area, massage rooms… When he announced the project, Bukele said it was necessary to invest in that beach because it is modest, the business for people there are the tourists, because they buy things from them, he said.

Archive Audio, Bukele: It is all about maintaining the atmosphere of the area. We don’t want to modify it, but we want to maintain the place. But no, people not living in a tin house, but people with houses, always suited to the surroundings, or a nice business, always suited to the surroundings.

[Eliezer]: In November 2023, the media outlet Mala Yerba revealed that, according to audio recordings of meetings to which they had access, the Minister of Housing contradicted this promise that they would improve the houses of the people who live on the park land. The minister said that they cannot have people living there, and gave them the option of moving three kilometers away, across from a sewage treatment plant.

But these types of evictions don’t only happen in El Zonte…

[Nelson]: For example, in the area of La Unión, in Condadillo, in Flor del Mangle for the construction of the airport, an airport that appeals mainly to Bitcoin investors coming to this country, to participate in a scheme in which President Bukele has they won’t pay taxes. 

[Eliezer]: This airport Nelson is referring to is for bitcoiners to get to Bitcoin City, which we mentioned a moment ago. It is a new city, the first Bitcoin city, that the Government is building. It is on the coast, at the foot of the Conchagua volcano, where according to Bukele, the geothermal energy of the volcano will be used to power the computers that will mine Bitcoin there. In Bitcoin City, no one will pay taxes. 

[Nelson]: I mean, Bitcoin is very good in El Salvador, if you are not Salvadoran.

[Tatiana]: One of the things that the Bitcoin law included was that there would be no taxes. Now, there are very few, very few ways around the world to trace Bitcoin transactions. So El Salvador is just being even more permissive than any of the Bitcoin dynamics. So, of course, if you come to El Salvador with money that has come from who knows where, well, you can continue doing transactions in El Salvador without saying where it originates. 

[Silvia]: But then, if I am a foreigner who has $250,000 in Bitcoin and I want to buy a house in El Zonte, nobody is going to ask me where those funds come from, right? So it’s a completely different transaction than if I were to buy a house with dollars.

[Tatiana]: Of course, because first he or she would have to declare where the money they brought was coming from, if it was brought it in cash or in what way. Yes, totally.

[Nelson]: In El Salvador, houses are sold in Bitcoin, that is, you can buy land in Bitcoin, do the transaction in Bitcoin and that poses several problems for me. What kind of people have money and do not want it to be known in a system that prevents money laundering? Bitcoin is a good alternative for people who don’t want others to know where their money comes from and what they do with their money. 

[Eliezer]: In addition to allowing these types of transactions and giving tax benefits to those who use Bitcoin, the Government has created a program to attract foreign investors interested in developing a «Bitcoin country», as the official website says, which is in English. The program is called “Visionary Freedom Program,” and it offers a Salvadoran passport to investors who meet certain requirements.

But not only that, in December 2023, the Assembly reformed the migration law so that foreigners can apply for Salvadoran nationality if they participate in government programs aimed at investing with capital in “legal tender”… which in El Salvador , as we know, is dollars and Bitcoin.

Investments in El Zonte are not only affecting the prices of land and houses… Or the people who are in danger of being displaced. This development is also having an impact on the water supply, as Wilfredo explains.

[Wilfredo]: [The population is growing and so the water flow diminishes.] Improving the water supply system is one of the biggest challenges in providing for the community and, especially everything that has to do with El Zonte.

[Eliezer]: El Zonte has a self-managed water system, which was built almost 50 years ago because the national authority did not supply it. And the community, which manages this water supply, grants licenses only for domestic use, not commercial use.

[Wilfredo]: Because we take care of it. It’s gold. Having water right now is gold. It is like having gold in your hands.

[Silvia]: That’s what Wilfredo told us as we left the hotel where he works.

On the way back to the car, I asked Nelson to explain in more detail what this water supply problem is about. He told me that the Assembly, controlled by Bukele, passed a law two years ago recognizing the human right to water, and creating something called the Salvadoran Water Authority, which oversees all of the country’s supplies. The law allows anyone who has the ability to pay to exploit the water commercially, to get a permit without limits.

[Nelson]: The country has a very serious water supply problem. So people like him tell you that it is like gold because they know that in communities you can walk ten, ten kilometers here or to the communities nearby and there is no water. 

[Silvia]: Wow.

[Nelson]: And because water is not a guarantee. In other words, ANDA, which is the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewers, does not provide water to everyone, especially in the interior, far from San Salvador, so then people have a self-managed project like that, an alternative, artisanal project, because the Government never solved that problem. So now, the Salvadoran Water Authority, the law that the Assembly approved, says basically that they have authority over all bodies of water and I don’t know what else. And then what the Government wants is to generate tourism, commerce, all the environmental permits, what they call expediting. But at what cost? At the cost of local people who are running out of water so that tourists in the hotels can always have water.

[Silvia]: So now they would control this system…

[Nelson]: They would control the system…

[Silvia]: Wow.

[Nelson]: That is, yes, that is a problem and a concern people here have.

[Silvia]: That makes sense.

[Silvia]: After meeting Wilfredo, we headed out to a Bitcoin Beach “meetup.” It is a monthly event, free and open to anyone who wants to attend. The invitation promised a talk and the opportunity to ask questions to guests, a welcome drink, gifts and discounts on food and beverages… if you paid with Bitcoin.

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[Nelson]: And of course, these people are going to tell you… Right now we are going to go to this thing and they are going to sell it to you: this is the best thing that has happened, and so on, but you come to El Zonte and you don’t think about the farmers who are on the other side of the street.

[Silvia]: Sure.

[Nelson]: With all this it’s like… don’t think about those invisible people, don’t think about the people who are being affected by this. And that is, in other words, it is a pattern that I see all over the country and that we are seeing all over the country, that this type of development is prioritized and the other is like, eh.

Ambi Meet up: Testing, testing, one, two, testing… 

[Silvia]: The event is on the terrace of a hotel called Palo Verde. There are tables where you can sit and have your complimentary drink, order food… and chat with foreigners curious about Bitcoin. In fact, the vast majority of us are foreigners. The host of the event is Román Martínez, one of the founders of Bitcoin Beach and whom we heard before. He wears a black t-shirt with the Bitcoin Beach logo and walks around the tables, greeting those of us who came to see what this is all about.

While I wait for it to start, I hear that there is a group of three people speaking Spanish, so I approach. They are university students who are doing a study on Bitcoin. I sit with them, we chat, and after a while, Román stands in front of us. Behind him is a sign for Bitcoin Beach and another for a real estate consultant: “For people interested in investing or moving to El Salvador” says the sign. Everything in English. Román grabs the microphone, and the first thing he asks is if there are people there who don’t speak English.

[Román]: Aside from you, who else doesn’t speak English?

[Silvia]: We had agreed that those who did not speak English could sit with us, so that I could translate for them. But no one else comes.

[Román]: Welcome. And so we’re going to do it in English because I think it’s it’s more… it make more sense. 

[Silvia]: Román says the event is going to be in English, because it makes more sense. But first, he addresses our small group of four who speak Spanish:

[Román]: But have you ever used Bitcoin? Have you? Have you done a Bitcoin transaction yet? Have you? Okay, well even better, so we don’t have to give it to them. Thanks for being honest. Thank you for being honest. So, welcome, guys. Welcome. We have this Bitcoin event… Once every month, so feel lucky you are here tonight. 

[Silvia]: Román says that the purpose of these monthly events is for new people to meet people who are already in El Zonte, so they learn about the Bitcoin Beach projects… And what follows is more than an hour of different people taking the microphone and talking about Bitcoin… For example, one Salvadoran from Bitcoin Beach says that every Friday, they visit schools to teach students about Bitcoin. Between one guest and another, Román makes comments. He is a good presenter, he looks comfortable, not nervous at all. At one point he refers to coverage of Bitcoin by the media who claim it’s not working.

[Román]: This is a bullshit that the media is, is, is, is trying to, to say…

[Silvia]: And that is why this meeting is important, he says, because it means that more people will learn about Bitcoin and will be able to go tell their friends, back in their countries, that the media are lying.

[Román]: Our next speaker is Miss El Salvador… 

[Silvia]: After a while, Román introduces the person who at that time was Miss El Salvador.

[Alejandra Guajardo]: Hello. My name is Alejandra Guajardo, and I’m the actual Miss El Salvador. I will give my crown this Sunday, but that doesn’t mean that I will continue to spread education about Bitcoin, of course… 

[Silvia]: You may remember her. She is the contestant who dressed up as a giant Bitcoin coin in the Miss Universe 2022 pageant. Alejandra Guajardo, who by the way is Mexican-Salvadoran, was going to hand over her crown that Sunday, but she says that doesn’t mean she’s going to stop educating others about Bitcoin. She has become a Bitcoin influencer of sorts. An evangelist, or crypto-evangelist, as Nelson told us a while ago, the self-proclaimed, people, who encourage others to adopt the cryptocurrency. In fact, as the minutes pass, it becomes clearer that the purpose of this meeting is just that, evangelizing about Bitcoin.

A Canadian investor says he sees El Salvador as a unique place to do business…

Canadian investor: As someone who’s invested in early stage companies, I look at this as investing in an early stage country. It’s very kind of similar in the whole way it’s approached and so on.

[Silvia]: And as someone who has invested in companies in their initial stage, he considers that investing in El Salvador is like investing in a country in its initial stage… Then, a woman who says she has a blog, in English, which translates to: Becoming a Butterfly, says she had been looking for a place to move to for a year. She sold her house and bought a one-way ticket to El Salvador.

Blogger: So. Yeah, Yeah, I’m not leaving. It gives me a lot of hope. And I’m looking for a sense of hope. Bitcoin gives me hope. 

[Silvia]: She says, Bitcoin gives her hope.

[Silvia]: At the end of it all, while the people who had gone to the event stayed chatting among themselves, Román and I moved away from the noise and I was able to ask him some questions.

[Silvia]: You said that the media says Bitcoin didn’t work, right? That it failed. Why? Why did you mention that?

[Román]: Because that’s what the majority of the media is saying. The media. But I believe that education is key. Making radical changes in people’s mindsets takes time. It took us two years, three and a half years now, working for this community, and even in the community you find people who don’t want to, that is, they don’t understand it, they are closed-minded. We knew that it would take time for people to see a benefit, for people to learn.

[Silvia]: After saying this, Román starts asking me questions: where do I live, when was the first time I heard about Bitcoin… I didn’t remember… I think 2018, 2019…? Before the pandemic. And I tell him that I don’t have Bitcoin.

[Román]: That’s the point. You are a person who has grown up with technology. Access to a bank account, access to assets, access to being able to make transactions. And if you haven’t bought even a small portion of Bitcoin yet, since you first heard it in 2018, that means you don’t understand it. It takes time. It takes time. The only thing I do hope is that the Salvadorans don’t take too long, as you have for so long.

[Silvia]: Today I met someone who said that he is worried about investments and that prices are rising a lot and it is becoming very expensive for the locals.

[Román]: Correct. And that’s one of the things that we say can make people worry, it’s true. But… development brings good things and things that are less good, you know? And that’s the story. 

[Román]: But that is something we have to be aware of. We have to do our part, our part. Because if we just complain but do nothing, nothing is going to change. Our situation is not going to change. So, I think that what is happening is true, but it is also a time of many opportunities. 

[Eliezer]: In early December 2023, Bukele tweeted—in English—a triumphant announcement about Bitcoin. The price had risen, and he said that if El Salvador sold its Bitcoins at that time, the country would recover 100% of its investment. In addition, it would have a profit of 3 million dollars. He clarified that they do not plan to sell because that was never the objective and they know that the price will continue to change. He said this does not affect his long-term strategy.

[Silvia]: The message that Bukele sends in this tweet is for the people who he says “ridiculed” his supposed losses, for the authors of critical articles. He says the responsible thing is for them to retract, to apologize, or at least recognize that El Salvador is now making profits.

[Eliezer]: Bitcoiners celebrated the announcement, but the economists and experts cooled things down. For several reasons. Including something we have already mentioned: what it has cost to implement this policy, the public funds that have been used for the government’s electronic wallet, to create new institutions—funds that could have been used to deal with other problems of the population, such as access to water.

[Silvia]: And Nelson and Tatiana, whom I interviewed before Bukele made this announcement, pointed out several promises that have not been kept.

[Nelson]: Everything they told us Bitcoin was going to be didn’t happen. They promised us that it would make remittances cheaper; it didn’t. 

[Silvia]: When someone sends remittances in dollars to El Salvador, they have to pay a commission of almost 3%. If you use Bitcoin, you pay a 5% fee for selling Bitcoins, and the person receiving them has to pay the costs associated with withdrawing the money in dollars at ATMs. Sending remittances in cryptocurrencies has remained between 1.2 and 1.5% in 2023.

[Eliezer]: The Government also said that Bitcoin would bring foreign investment.

[Tatiana]: Well, since mid-2021 and all of 2022, El Salvador has been one of the only countries in Central America and the region that has had negative foreign investment, that is, there has been disinvestment in El Salvador; investments are being lost.

[Nelson]: They told us it was going to create jobs. I remember I went to an accountability of crypto companies and they said they had generated 400 jobs in one year, which is marginal for an economy like ours.

[Eliezer]: And, in fact, those 400 were indirect jobs. There were fewer direct jobs.

[Nelson]: So jobs weren’t created. And that it was going to generate tourism. The increase in tourism, which has happened, not as they claim, but if there has been an increase it is not attributable just to Bitcoin.

[Tatiana]: For example, Costa Rica is the country that attracts the most tourism. So there are ways to do it successfully and without all the risks and negative things that come with it.

[Nelson]: When everything they told us was going to happen didn’t happen, they changed the rules and said no, that Bitcoin has been a re-branding of El Salvador, from previously the country of gangs and homicides, to the country of Bitcoin and financial innovation. First. You are changing the rules. That’s not what you promised us. Second, it is the most expensive re-branding in history. And if it has worked, it has worked in those sectors. But it is an advertising investment and it is a lie. We are not a Bitcoin country. And I say again. Come on, try to buy using Bitcoin in this country.

[Silvia]: And Nelson says everything that has happened with Bitcoin is thanks to the fact that Bukele’s power as President has no control.

[Nelson]: This was a disaster in this country and no one has been held responsible. That can only happen in a place that is not a democracy, in a place where power is exercised without restrictions and in a place where there is authoritarianism. I mean, it wouldn’t be possible… In Finland you couldn’t do this.

Credits

Produced and reported by: Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff

Produced and reported on site by: Nelson Rauda and Gabriel Labrador

Digital Production: Desireé Yepez

Edited by: Daniel Alarcón and Camila Segura

Editorial Consulting: Carlos Dada

Fact-checking: Bruno Scelza and Desirée Yépez

Production Assistant: Selene Mazón

Music and Sound Design: Elías González

Graphic Design and Art Direction: Diego Corzo